Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

But as the sixth century drew to a close, there were troubling signs on the horizon. The merchants, industrialists, and small landowners that made up the middle class were diminishing as wars and uprisings began to disrupt trade. Natural disasters and the seizure of their produce by passing troops made life difficult for farmers and frequently led them to borrow money they couldn’t hope to repay. Growing numbers of poor tried to flee the land to avoid their creditors, while those who remained sold themselves into serfdom to resolve their debts. Small farms began to disappear, swallowed by the ravenous hunger of the great aristocratic landowners. With a shrinking tax base and powerful landed magnates enjoying considerable tax exemptions, the central government was forced to resort to increasingly severe measures to keep its coffers full, but harsh tactics met with diminishing returns. Always chronically short of funds, the emperors who followed Justinian could spare no time for the relief of their citizens and turned a deaf ear to their complaints.

The growth of arts and sciences, which had reached such a pinnacle during Justinian’s reign, also began to slow as the empire’s fortunes declined. There was no more time or money for lavish buildings or leisurely inquiry; all resources had to be marshaled for the basic needs of survival. Even that survival, however, must have seemed to ensure only continued misery. Justinian’s wars of reconquest had obscured his diplomatic finesse, and the vain emperors who followed him saw war as the first, rather than the last, option. They thought that invincibility came with prestige and all too quickly committed the empire to ruinous conflicts it could ill afford. To the poor farmers building their lives in the countryside, it hardly mattered if the armies that tramped across their land wore Byzantine uniforms or not. The end result was always the same: Their produce was seized, their fields were plundered, and their livestock disappeared. They felt little loyalty to the distant rulers in Constantinople and were perfectly happy to throw their support behind the first pretender to promise them better lives. Revolt became endemic, and emperors found it impossible to hold onto the allegiance of such a diverse and splintering state.

Justinian had boasted that his empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, but in the wake of his glory, the empire faced a stunning collapse. The territory added by his reconquest introduced the diverse lands of North Africa, Italy, and Spain to an already volatile mix, and since these new territories were isolated with only tenuous land routes between them, they had little that bound them to the rest of the empire. The great synthesis of the Roman world cracked under the strain of plague, invasion, and religious tension, and its edges drifted steadily away from the center at Constantinople.

To hold itself together, the unwieldy state needed a visionary leader, but the emperors who sat on the Byzantine throne at the end of the fifth century were shortsighted men, neither as wise nor as forceful as Justinian, and they were completely unable to duplicate the delicate balancing act needed to maintain peace with the empire’s many enemies. All too often they compounded their problems by trading Justinian’s unpopular but necessary policies for the temporary favor of the crowd, and these shortsighted decisions brought the empire to the verge of collapse within a generation. History provides few better examples of the dangers of governing by the interests of the moment.

By the end of the sixth century, the reconquests that had cost so much blood and treasure to gain had been carelessly thrown away, and the empire was retreating on all fronts. *In Constantinople, a demented usurper without a shred of legitimacy named Phocas seized the throne, and the Balkans disappeared under a flood of Slavic invasion. Armies pushed beyond endurance were demoralized and disorganized, unwilling to fight for an uninspiring and corrupt government. Any wealth that escaped the clutches of the imperial tax collectors disappeared into the bottomless pockets of barbarian hordes that seemed to appear with depressing regularity. Refugees packed the cities, trade slowed to a crawl, and weeds and ruins choked the once-fertile fields. The empire was a spent force, a broken reed, the luster of its past a fading memory.

Virtually the only area of the empire that wasn’t collapsing was the prosperous coast of North Africa. There, under the warm sun, merchants continued to ply the waters of its harbors unmolested, and farmers harvested its fertile wheat fields. The province seemed far away from the swirling revolts and chronic unrest that had so thoroughly destroyed imperial prosperity, and some in Constantinople began to see it as the only chance of salvation. Disgusted by their bloody emperor, the Senate wrote secretly to the governor of North Africa, urging him to come at the head of an army and deliver the empire from its present nightmare.

When the letter arrived in Carthage, the governor read it with considerable interest. He was far too comfortable where he was, and, in any case, he felt himself to be too old to go gallivanting around, so he sent his son Heraclius with the African fleet to seize the throne in his stead.

The young man knew he had to act quickly. Each passing day seemed to bring the empire closer to destruction: While the government in Constantinople concentrated on purging itself of suspected dissidents in a horrifying bloodbath, the Persian king Chosroes II took advantage of the distraction to invade. Meeting only token resistance from the demoralized imperial army, the Persians quickly overran Mesopotamia and Armenia, plunging deeply into the Byzantine heartland and even probing into Egypt. Before long, Persian watch fires could be seen from the walls of Constantinople; and as panic rippled through the capital, the plague returned, bringing with it terrified prophecies of the end of the world.

It was at this moment, with the population of the capital at a fever pitch, that Heraclius arrived in the imperial harbor on board his magnificent flagship. At the sight of the vessel, a mob in Constan tinople lynched his predecessor, Phocas, dragging the mutilated corpse through the streets. Picking his way through the despoiled palace with care, Heraclius took stock of his shattered empire. It had lost nearly half of its territory, and what was left was demoralized and impoverished, but its roots were deep, and Heraclius was already starting to plan. The empire of the past was gone—of that he was confident. His task was to create something new—an empire that embraced its future. Byzantium would never be the same again.

The crowd milling about outside the imperial palace in the bright October sun of AD 610, waiting to catch a glimpse of their new emperor, didn’t quite know what to expect. He’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere like the Athena of their old pagan myths, springing fully grown out of the head of Zeus. There was an aura of success about him, and he was undeniably physically impressive. Barely thirty-six, with a full head of golden hair and impossibly burnished armor, he looked every inch an emperor, like some new Achilles appearing at Byzantium’s darkest hour. Energetic and hardworking, the emperor had the rare ability to inspire confidence in even the most desperate circumstances, and he threw himself into the task of rescuing the empire.

The challenges confronting him were enormous. The once-vaunted imperial army was scattered helplessly before its enemies, and Greece was buried beneath a Slavic flood. Refugees crowded into Constantinople, soon bringing with them news too terrible to comprehend. At first, it was only whispered in disbelief, but it spread like wildfire. Jerusalem had fallen to the Persians, and the True Cross was now in the hands of the fire worshippers of Ctesiphon. *All male citizens of Jerusalem had been killed, and the women and children had been sold into slavery.