The night sky changes every night yet never seems to change, as the seasons bring the same stars in the same constellations on the same day of the year, age after age. The sky defines the calendar, for the stars never fail. For many thousands of years, until the smoke and light of human fires and human ingenuity began to plunder the night of its glory, the order and regularity of the stars surveyed and guided civilized life below.
The anomalies of the night offered hints. The planets (the word comes from the Greek for “wanderers”) followed paths just unpredictable enough to challenge the mathematical abilities of generations, until Copernicus found a simpler model. It was easier to believe that the planets were the chariots of gods—for gods were notoriously whimsical and footloose—than to study the ancient mathematical models. Watchers below easily gave religious readings to other occasional anomalies of the night. Comets, shooting stars, the shimmer of the aurora borealis—all were safer to ascribe to divinity than to a blind material order. For us, the silence and darkness are beautiful, the stars a beautiful adornment; for the ancients, the night was terrifying and familiar and mysteriously well ordered.
Sitting beneath these stars and thinking in these ways, civilized humankind went about its business without grasping what evidence the skies bore against its habitual ways of thinking. Unable to measure the vast distances that separated the heavenly bodies patent before their eyes, they took the dimensions of this planet—or, rather, of Eurasia and northern Africa—as the measure of space. Incapable of grasping the evidence of the skies as a sign of the great age of the world and the long revolutions that bring us our flickering moment of consciousness, they measured time by the span of human memory and the stories of a few dozen generations.
Small wonder that they understood their world so poorly. Small wonder as well that even when we know better in principle and when we can grasp the age and reach of the universe, we still fail to explore and explain this world on a scale expansive enough to make it genuinely intelligible. Science measures boldly the unimaginably large and small of the cosmos, the breathtakingly fast and unspeakably slow movements of bodies. History struggles to contain those universes in its imagination while observing in minute detail as well. Historians struggle to think of human experience in a way both congruent with the experience of mortals and expansive enough to offer real explanation.
The sky of the Greeks and Romans, carrying the names of their gods and heroes in arbitrary patterns of stars, still passes over our heads at night. The Great Bear and Little Bear circle each other at the top of the sky, while Orion and his dog go hunting in the fall. They will do so long after all of us now alive are gone, long after all our descendants have destroyed themselves with nuclear fission or automotive exhausts. The ancient communities that put those names on the sky have already disappeared or altered beyond recognition, and yet they continue to shape the world in which we live.
This is a book about changes on earth below that left ancient heroes marooned in the sky, stripped of their celestial powers. If we can understand those changes—and what has not changed—we may have a better chance of avoiding calamities of our own.
We will begin with a man who thought that the world below the stars was flat.
COSMAS THE VOYAGER
The two visitors, skillful and knowledgeable merchants, found the obelisk and the throne facing west, away from the sea. They stood at the gate of the city of Adoulis, a trading town on the Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea. The land’s distinctive products were ivory from elephants, horn from rhinoceroses, and tortoiseshell. Both obelisk and throne pointed up into the mountains, toward the great city of Axum, more than 100 miles away in what was already called Ethiopia. Their inscriptions honored the Hellenistic king Ptolemy III Euergetes (“Benefactor”), by then dead for about 750 years. Ptolemy had probably never come this far south, but these lands still paid tribute—you could call it a tax, or you could call it protection money—to Egypt when they were not at war with the Egyptians.
The throne was cut from a single piece of gleaming white marble. The visitors were surprised to see this, because they knew of such stone only in the Mediterranean, from the island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople. The throne’s base was square, with four delicate columns at the corners and one more supporting the seat at the center. The obelisk was carved of basalt on a square base and stood behind the throne. Both objects were inscribed in Greek.
The manuscript illustration we have of the scene (a copy of an original from an eyewitness) makes it hard to get at their sizes, but the throne was perhaps human-size, and the obelisk not out of scale with it. In a future era, Mussolini would take another of Axum’s obelisks from Ethiopia to Italy to stand as a token of his imperial aspirations in Rome. A few years ago its fragments were disassembled and returned to Ethiopia.
Mountainous Axum was a venerable Christian city by then (the 520s CE), and if any place on the planet could ever reasonably claim to be the home of the Ark of the Covenant, Axum would be it. Ellatzbaas, king of the Axumites, was as Christian as his ancestors had been for a century at least, though his brand of Christianity was falling out of favor elsewhere and would gradually lose touch with most of the Christian worlds in the years to come. Now Ellatzbaas prepared to descend from his capital 7,000 feet above sea level and go to war across the Red Sea against the Himyarites, dwellers in what is now Yemen. Fastidious in preserving and proclaiming royal glories, he sent to Adoulis to have the inscriptions on the throne copied for him and placed at the gates of Adoulis. This required craftsmanship and intelligence and led Asbas, the governor there, to ask our two traveling merchants to do the copying for him.
They were Menas, who later became a monk in Sinai and died there; and Cosmas, who came from Alexandria. From their visit, Cosmas kept his own copy of the inscriptions, and he included them in his descriptive twelve-volume book about such places. The two travelers also found sculptured images of Heracles and Hermes on the back of the throne and disagreed over their symbolic interpretation. They represented power and wealth to the merchant who would become a monk, but Cosmas thought they stood for deeds and words instead. Merchants like Menas and Cosmas traveled to Adoulis because they knew that sellers brought incense down from the mountains there and that one could buy it at a good price to transport across and around Arabia to Roman and Persian markets. This was good business, supplementing what Yemen produced across the water.
Cosmas returned to Alexandria to write his stories, and that’s why we know of him. Christian Topography, his lavish illustrated book, is something that only a man of substance and wealth could have produced, and it survives in three medieval copies. One, made in Constantinople in the ninth century, now resides in the Vatican library; two others were made in the eleventh century. The one from Cappadocia, deep in Asia Minor, has migrated to Sinai in Egypt; the one from Mount Athos, that monastic metropolis west of Constantinople, is in Florence’s Laurentian library. What they share is an abundance of illustrations, all going back to Cosmas’s original, pictures that supplement the wonders he sought to describe in words. The Florentine manuscript bears the name Cosmas added in a later hand, so that’s what we call him, but most medieval readers knew him only as he wanted to be known: as “just a Christian,” anonymous and devout. His contemporaries, though, found anonymity to be precious and polemical, a sign of a man taking sides in the religious quarrels of the time.
Cosmas and his comrade were both sophisticated, experienced travelers, yet Adoulis still felt like the end of the earth to them. We can see instead that it was more accurately the center of the human universe; that when they were there, it was a cockfighting pit of geopolitical rivalry. The Himyarite realm lay not far away across the strait of Bab el Mandeb. At the narrowest point of the strait, just where it squeezed the passage down to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea was no more than twenty miles wide, with an island midway across. Himyar was an ancient land, variously contending for control with nearby Saba (the biblical Sheba) and with the Ethiopians across the water. From of old, the land there was fertile, its richness enhanced by the fabulous Marib dam, a third of a mile long and rising fifteen feet above water level, feeding a system of canals that ensured a regular, reliable water supply to the region. Inscriptions, not necessarily legendary, say it was built in the seventh century BCE, but the dam was undoubtedly renewed, expanded, and strengthened as time passed and craft grew. There was a serious dam break in 450 CE, and Cosmas may not have known when he wrote his story in the late 540s that another also occurred in 542. The last, and most catastrophic, occurred in 570, and with it came the end of agricultural prosperity and Himyarite domination.
At the moment of Cosmas’s visit to Axum, however, the Himyarite nation was still formidable. Its kingdom was Jewish in a world where Christianity was more and more the officially sponsored religion, even at the fringes of empire. (To be fair, however, the label “Jewish” may overstate its resemblance to other communities that venerated the books of Moses.) In 518, one skirmish between Ethiopians and Himyarites led to something like a civil war between Christians and Jews in Yemen, during which there was an anti-Christian pogrom by the leader Yusuf Ashaar, nicknamed Dhu Nuwas (“the man with a ponytail”). He concluded the conflict with a massacre of Christians in Najran in the early 520s. One account alleged that Dhu Nuwas ordered 20,000 Christians thrown into pits of boiling oil for refusing to convert to Judaism. Under this man with the ponytail, the Himyarites savored a fleeting, doomed independence.
Then Ellatzbaas launched his invasion from Ethiopia, beginning with a solemn Mass in Axum cathedral, followed by the blessing of a fleet of seventy ships from Adoulis, and ending by establishing a puppet regime in Himyar that he controlled.
Ellatzbaas didn’t act entirely on his own. Behind him lay the support and ambitions of the emperor Justin I, the monarch of Constantinople far to the north. Axum controlled Himyar for about ten years, until a Christian regime acceptable to Justin replaced it, one that lasted until 575. Then Persian forces detached Yemen from Rome once for all. Now, in the 520s, Justin saw a larger map and knew that Persian trading posts had spread from the Persian Gulf around the Omani coast and then stretched toward Yemen. To him, securing the Red Sea as a Roman lake felt like necessary strategic resistance to Persian expansionism. But when we read of Roman and Persian conflict in this period, there were always good businessmen like Cosmas who paid only as much attention to geopolitics as necessary to keep their ships moving profitably.
Their interest was piqued when they learned that every two years King Ellatzbaas sent merchants farther inland, on a six-month trek to a land of gold called Sasou, near the Blue Nile. There they traded beef, salt, and iron for gold in a cumbersome ritual of barter with customers with whom they had no language in common.
Cosmas the merchant was from Alexandria; he was a man who most likely owned his ships and directed their courses while profiting from their cargoes. His city was Greek and so was his tongue, though he may also have known some of the native Egyptian language that we now call Coptic; a merchant who ranged so far in the ancient world would surely have made himself understood in many languages and dialects.
Businessmen like Cosmas did not concern themselves with the unglamorous bulk cargoes of their world. Behind and beneath them, farmers tilled the land for grain where possible, hoping for a tenfold return on what they planted, yet often settling for fivefold or less and driven to the brink of starvation in years when the seed grain barely reproduced itself. The regular grain shipments north from Africa, whether from Carthage to Rome or from Alexandria to Constantinople, were state-managed and burdensome, risky for all. Whenever the harvest was late or shipping was disrupted by weather, fear of famine led to riots in the big cities. Instead of being subject to state-controlled prices—paltry rewards for such risk—Cosmas and others like him became cunning arbitrageurs, matching the lightest and least bulky cargoes with the greatest opportunities for increasing value over distance. Luxury goods—gems, spices, and silks—were the best business. Merchants delivered amber from the Baltic seacoast south to the Mediterranean, across many borders, for centuries. Spices were always profitable wherever they could be gotten. The wise men of the gospels may have been powerful, but their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were just the sort of thing you expected to arrive on camelback across the desert, most likely from Yemen. Elegant fabrics from the very Far East already making their way along the many paths of the silk route (and by other routes west) were another profitable line.
Neither Cosmas nor his contemporaries would have spoken of the Roman empire as a free-trade zone, or praised the blessings of a single currency usable across many lands and ports, like today’s dollar or euro, but that was part of what the Roman empire had accomplished. Ancient currency in particular was always at risk of degradation, as cheaper and cheaper metals were used and people lost faith in the value of coins in circulation, but 200 years before Cosmas’s time, the emperor Constantine had stabilized the currency to create this world, and a few years before Cosmas sailed, the emperor Anastasius I had reimposed discipline and so created fresh prosperity again. What we now call infrastructure benefited from Roman rule as well, as roads and bridges were maintained, harbors were kept up, and security in and away from cities was generally excellent.
Merchantry was in the main for Greeks, Jews, and Syrians; thus the economic benefits were primarily felt in the eastern Mediterranean. How the business world looked from farther east is harder to say, but we know about an anonymous Persian adventurer who landed on the island of Jotaba, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. For a few years in the late fifth century, he managed to expel the Roman customs officers and take over the regulation of trade himself, with grudging support from Constantinople. An empire can make life difficult for entrepreneurs, but it cannot live without them.
Then, as now, merchant life required sober judgment, decisive bargaining, and a fair amount of luck. We know enough of Cosmas’s career to see that he had all three. During more than a quarter century he sailed three challenging seas. His home waters were the Mediterranean, north and west from Alexandria, and the Red Sea, via the Nile and ancient canals, reaching down the Sinai to the opening of the Indian Ocean, beyond the straits of Bab el Mandeb. He seems also to have navigated the Persian Gulf, from the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates down to the Strait of Hormuz. By the time Cosmas entered the trade, these reaches of salt water all had a long history of commerce, supported by robust institutions of port management, banking, customs duties, and even credit. Alexandria had been doing business from its dazzling seafront for 800 years, and the Phoenicians had made the Mediterranean their own long before. There are signs that sailors made it all the way from Mesopotamia to India, beginning as early as the reign of Sargon of Akkad, the great lord of the Sumerians in the third millennium BCE, a figure who lived even farther in Cosmas’s past than Cosmas does in ours. Greek and Roman civilization remained mostly trapped inside the Mediterranean, where you could sail from anywhere to anywhere without leaving sight of land, and where you huddled ashore for the winter months.
Merchants like Cosmas also knew their way around land, since by definition the commodities that shipped best were also easy to carry ashore and sell at high prices. In addition to his voyages at sea, we have reason to think he made his way inland to the Mesopotamian cities of Nisibis, Edessa, Harran, and Dara—names that will recur in these pages—where Roman and Persian influences rubbed one another most contentiously. Nisibis, now Nusaybin in Turkish Kurdistan, between the Euphrates and Tigris in upper Mesopotamia, was the site of religious schools that Cosmas knew well. Yet it was nearby Edessa (modern Urfa in southeastern Turkey) that boasted the most famous market fairs in the region and thus provided a merchant’s greatest financial rewards. The border may have been fought over repeatedly, but it was always porous to travelers and traders. The fairs may have brought Cosmas here, but the scholars of Edessa diverted and instructed him.
In all our reference books, Cosmas’s name is a mouthful: Cosmas Indicopleustes, or “Cosmas who has sailed to the Indies.” This name wasn’t one he ever heard; someone attached it at a later date, inaccurately—his book of wonders makes it clear that he himself never crossed the Indian Ocean or saw south Asia. But like many sailors before and since, he didn’t mind leaving an exaggerated impression of his exploits. The giveaway is his story of how one day in the sixth century, sailing down the Red Sea, he and his men saw a flight of unfamiliar birds, including an albatross, twice the size of any hawk they had ever seen, and they were all afraid, for they sensed that this meant the open ocean was near. Here, as at Gibraltar, the ocean beyond the sheltered sea they knew terrified Mediterranean sailors because the technologies of sailing and navigation that preserved life in enclosed bodies of water fell short of what it took to sail beyond sight of land. Another 1,000 years would pass before Mediterranean sailors could venture successfully out on the Atlantic, though others who lived in sight of the oceans had been bolder. The Irish and Scandinavians anticipated them in the north, and other traders plied flourishing routes from Arabia to the East Indies to China.
Some brave souls made it from Cosmas’s world to Sri Lanka, coming back with tales about the lands that lay beyond. We know this partly because Roman goods appear in India in appreciable quantities, and scattered finds have been made in Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Vietnam. Sri Lanka was then called Taprobane, and Romans knew there was a church of Persian Christians there, whose priest had been ordained in Persia itself, and the churchgoers could participate in the whole of the Christian liturgy. Most natives there were not much taken with this imported religion and preferred their own cults. One native temple housed a giant hyacinth plant the size of a towering pine tree that shone in the sun from afar. Sri Lanka itself was a trading post for sailors from Rome, Arabia, and Persia to the west; from southeast Asia to the east; and from the Indian subcontinent to the north, gathering silk, aloe, sandalwood, and the like from the lands to the east and north and passing them on to buyers from the west.
Cosmas tells a story from that end of the world going back to his own early days, around 515 CE, when Sopatros the Roman, traveling with Ethiopians, arrived in Sri Lanka the same day as a Persian ship. The merchants from the two ships held a contest before the local king, each seeking to prove that his monarch, the imperator Romanorum or the shah of shahs, was the greatest. In this merchant realm, money was decisive: the Roman gold was heavier and better crafted to appeal to the eye. The king gave Sopatros the honors on the spot and his people made Sopatros the centerpiece of a great feast. They took him out and seated him on an elephant and had him paraded about the palace grounds with music and dancing on all sides. Sopatros probably did good business on that trip.
How did Cosmas know that story? He heard it from Sopatros 2,500 miles from Sri Lanka, there at Adoulis, perhaps on the same trip during which he and Menas came upon the obelisk and throne. He heard more stories from Sopatros then, about elephants in droves, and even used as cavalry mounts in battle. Cosmas’s bestiary offers many word pictures of creatures from the ends of the earth, and illustrates most of them: rhinoceros, buffalo, camelopard (giraffe), yak, monokeros (“one-horn,” in Latin unicornis—in all probability the rhinoceros, slimmed down and glamorized in the retelling), boar, hippopotamus (“river horse,” which he makes look just like a horse, and admits he hasn’t seen), seal, dolphin, and tortoise. Cosmas doesn’t mention the tigers that others saw north of the Caspian Sea. He lived too soon to tell us the story of Xuan Zang, the Buddhist monk from the court of China who explored deep into India in the sixth or early seventh century, looking for the roots of his own enlightenment. Xuan Zang came west out of China on the silk roads, then south through the mountains of the Hindu Kush, almost far enough to meet men like our Alexandrian merchant’s friends.
Cosmas the Christian lets us know that he wrote several books. The one we’d really like to have is his volume on geography, in which he provided the most detailed observations of the worlds he traveled through. He also wrote on astronomy—the course of the stars in the unchanging sky—before turning to the book we have read, in twelve volumes. Its theme is not quite geography, not quite theology, but something in between,1 for Cosmas has a particular point to make. He remains the only authentic, sincere, and argumentative flat-earther from his era of whom we have a record. We moderns used to be taught that flat-earthers were critics of Christopher Columbus, but that’s not quite accurate. Columbus’s opponents were, more accurately, “big-earthers,” who argued that if he sailed from Spain to Japan westbound, he would die of thirst and exposure before he ever reached his goal. A true flat-earth theory is quite rare. Few people were so obtuse as to believe such a thing, especially in Alexandria, the capital of ancient natural science. In this context, Cosmas seems to us unusually misguided, with a flat-earth doctrine springing from religious obsession.
Cosmas illustrates a flat earth, resembling the tabernacle of the ancient Hebrews. Note the sun scooting behind the Alps.
He, “just a Christian,” as he described himself, was shocked by the existence of “false Christians” who did not understand how the world is constructed, and who preached false doctrine. He tells us he wrote in Alexandria, addressing himself to a friend who had come from Jerusalem and encouraged him to write. Cosmas complains to us of his weak eyesight and poor digestion, and laments that he has not the fine education that others have, yet he plunges into his theories. His topic is the tabernacle the Jews built in the desert at their God’s command.
Cosmas learned all that is true on this subject from the “most holy Patrikios,” who came from the land of the Chaldeans. Now this Patrikios, son of Abbas, was (at the time Cosmas wrote) the katholikos—something between pope and patriarch—of the Christian church in Persia, though Cosmas may have met him in Alexandria or closer to the frontier. In the Christian church of the time, Patrikios led the faction usually called Nestorian, named after a patriarch of Constantinople who never actually preached the doctrines attributed to him. This is oddly appropriate, for the Nestorians never preached them either, but were nonetheless separated from other branches of Christianity. Patrikios did at one point travel to Alexandria, accompanied by a disciple—a visit mentioned by Cosmas because it lets him make the point that just as Abraham came from the land of the Chaldees to bring the true faith to the Egyptians, so too did Patrikios.
The lesson Cosmas ascribes to this master is that the Jewish tabernacle, rather in the shape of an old, round-topped New England barn, was constructed as a model of the whole universe. The tabernacle floor is the flat earth, and the visible sky arches above. The sun, if you must know, rises in the east, sets in the west, and then scoots around to the north, behind the Alps, to return to the east for the next day’s rise. Cosmas even has the pictures to prove just how intelligently designed this world is.
What is striking about his flat-earth doctrine is the way it uses the authority of a book to stand truth on its head. Cosmas sounds deferential and humble. He praises a book that teaches a true and unchanging fact about the world, and then applies his modest interpretative skills to reveal that fact, even though we now know the truth is the reverse. The authoritative book lets him remake his world in whatever image he chooses.
We have a good idea what Cosmas was attacking—that is, what drove him to say such ridiculous things. The leading philosopher in Alexandria was a man we call John Philoponos. Philoponos is a nickname—“lover of toil,” literally—given to people marked for their zeal for Christianity. In both Beirut and Alexandria, the two great university cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the philoponoi were, in the words of one scholar, “rather officious and pious intellectuals, bent on sniffing out the remains of paganism”2. In John Philoponos’s case, intellect and zeal took him to the heights of academe, where his reputation was assailed from several directions. All philosophy of this time was at least nominally Platonic, though the follower of Socrates might have had difficulty recognizing his ideas in their “modern” or what we later termed “neo-Platonic” form, and Philoponos was quite modern. He was also, as many Alexandria philosophers before him had been, going back to Clement of Alexandria over 300 years earlier, Christian.
When Cosmas expresses outrage over this combination of new religion and old philosophy, he is the crank and Philoponos the establishment figure. Philoponos, a man of substance whose work we have come to appreciate more and more with each generation of scholarship,3 taught that the world was a sphere, an idea descending from the best traditions of Alexandrine science. This earned him criticism from Cosmas the flat-earther, and also the more thoughtful rebuke of Simplicius of Athens, a traditionalist philosopher not much taken with Christianity. Simplicius attacked Philoponos for refusing to accept that the world was eternal—for insisting that it had a created beginning and would also have an end. No matter that for the wrong reasons Philoponos was closer to correct about the world than either of his main critics: being right is rarely enough to win the day for philosophers.
We now must leave Philoponos and Cosmas at their loggerheads, for we have no other texts that allow us to overhear them wrangling, though at some remove they must have continued to do so. Philoponos moved increasingly from philosophy to pure theology after writing his books on the (non-) eternity of the world in the 530s. At just about the time Cosmas crafted his Christian Topography at the end of the 540s, Philoponos wrote an extensive commentary “on the creation of the world.” He lived and worked another twenty years, producing a book on the trinity in about 567, before he disappears from view. Cosmas vanishes as well, but we can allow his afterimage to linger in the pages that follow, a man of broad horizons if narrow mind. We will meet others like him.
The Alexandria that Cosmas and Philoponos knew as a home of merchants, philosophers, monks, and more had been a place of civilization, contention, and shortsightedness for more than 800 years, and arguably the most civilized place in the Greco-Roman world for most of that time. Within a century, neither the intellectual descendants of Cosmas nor those of Philoponos would have much standing in the community in which they worked. We can take that as a measure of what would soon be lost, but we should also see how prosperous and untroubled the city still was in the sixth century.
THE VIEW FROM ALEXANDRIA
The great lighthouse called the Pharos stood on a narrow spit of land a mile or so from the coastline. The same engineers who built this mighty tower had also stretched a seawall back to the shore and created two harbors side by side, thus making possible the wealth of the port city that flourished after Alexander’s conquests. If we walked out along that wall with Cosmas and looked to the horizons, how would we see the world that seemed to him so stable and assured? It was a world of two empires, Roman and Persian; and of long-reigning and proud rulers, Justinian and Khusro. But the doings of emperors were of little direct consequence for their peoples, who generally stayed out of their way. When one emperor died or was overthrown, every citizen of Alexandria knew that he would have precisely nothing to do with the succession and exactly no control over the workings of imperial government. Such a monster was best treated as Odysseus did the Cyclops—by trying not to provoke him, and, should the emperor notice you, relying on wit rather than force to escape his clutches. But the world was too big for emperors to control, and a traveler like Cosmas knew that world better than most emperors did. What did he see?
At farthest remove, Cosmas knew about the land he called “Tzinista” and we call China. Silks and other precious goods came from there, but he could imagine his world untouched by their prosperity and prospects. In the late sixth century and the early seventh century, the short-lived Sui dynasty and the more promising Tang that followed may be said to have inaugurated classical Chinese civilization. The first construction of the canal connecting the Yellow and Yangtze rivers was just then coming to completion, linking the agricultural prosperity of the south to the cultural and political centers in the north. In the same period, Roman religion passed along the silk route and into China, and so the Nestorians consecrated a church in the Tang capital of Changan in 638. Many Nestorian manuscripts have been found at Turfan and Dunhuang, on the edges of the Taklamakan desert at the heart of the Silk Road. Meanwhile, the once fashionable Roman new-age cult of Manicheism slid in quietly. China sent no similar cultural products or practices to the Mediterranean.
Eurasia.
Closer at hand, the Gupta empire in India was deteriorating, but the states that succeeded it were, if less coherently gathered together, doubtless more prosperous and attractive in the reports carried of them to the west by traders and adventurers. From India at this time comes the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph, which we have in a Greek version from the early seventh century.4 Ostensibly a story of a Christian holy man and his princely convert, it is really a thinly veiled Christian version of the story of the Buddha. Latins venerated the piety of the Buddhist saints on November 27, Greeks August 26, and Barlaam and Ioasaph’s story circulated widely in Christendom, eventually taking shape in the 1870s as the tale of Kundry and the title character in Wagner’s Parsifal. Cosmas’s vague awareness—as other westerners had been vaguely aware for centuries—of the Brach-manes (Brahmin) of India is one sign of the cultural bridge over which that story would travel.
Cosmas’s wider world he measured thus: to go from China through the land of the Huns to Bactria, you would travel for 150 days, following the silk route through the desert of Taklamakan and the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Merchantry and religion traveled together, so monks began to decorate the great caves of Dunhuang and fill them with books, making that desert an improbable cultural home between societies for more than 500 years. From there another eighty days (each day a thirty-mile march) would take you across Persia to the frontier and Nisibis. From there you continued to Seleucia on the Mediterranean, and then another 150 days would take you around the sea. Cosmas’s reckoning adds up to about 12,000 miles for those 400 days. In fact, such a route would take you only about 7,000 miles, but a full year might well elapse, given the conditions of road and weather over such diverse territory.
If you stretched a string from China to Rome, it would run through Persia. Persia is the true middle kingdom; and the center of the world in more ways than one was and still is Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The first humans to leave Africa and colonize the Eurasian landmass are now thought to have crossed the strait of Bab el Mandeb, back where we first met Cosmas. In the Karacadag Mountains of southeastern Turkey, some of their descendants cultivated for the first time the grass that became standard wheat, which today feeds the cultures of Europe and western Asia.
Mesopotamia is the heart of modern Iraq. The lands to its east over the Zagros Mountains—the highlands of classical Persia and modern Iran—are its natural partners. The lower Tigris valley in particular remains in social and religious contact with Persia, particularly with the minority Shiite sect of Islam, a connection so ancient that only American politicians could possibly be surprised to learn of it. The agricultural prosperity and trading links of Mesopotamia well supplement the highland farming of Persia, and since the first millennium BCE, with the domestication of the camel and the Arabian breeding of the durable one-hump species, the caravan routes that stretched across the desert from the Euphrates to Syria created and strengthened a link that offered profit and possibility on all sides. The defenses that Persian warriors could offer against steppe marauders from beyond had the effect of assuring Mesopotamia a long and comfortable history.
But Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean are too close for comfort, too far apart for ease, and the fault line between their lands and peoples is ancient and unhealed. Two such prosperous and commercially minded worlds so close together had to interact—but long stretches of desert made a permanent bond untenable. Creating a civil society or polity to link the two has perplexed visionaries for millennia. From Alexander the Great to Crassus to Julian the Apostate, nothing was so certain in the ancient world as that the boundary between the dominions of the Mediterranean and of Persia was contested, unsettled, and unsettling.
For Cosmas, planning his merchant ventures from the comfort and prosperity of Alexandria, the borderland between Rome’s realms and Persia was what mattered. A chain of important frontier cities, changing hands from time to time and marked by a distinctive border culture, grew up and prospered—even when they changed hands. These cities spoke neither Greek nor Persian, but a Semitic variant of Aramaic. Today we call that language Syriac, but we must be careful not to overspecify. That language, long spoken along the Mediterranean coast from Palestine up along both sides of Mount Lebanon and out through the heartlands around Heliopolis (modern Baalbek) in the Bekaa valley, Apamea (Homs), and Damascus, spread naturally north and east as well. Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey) to the north was its big-city home in the Roman world, and the busy countryside of prosperous towns and villages between Antioch and Aleppo spoke it as well, as did the forts and market towns east to and beyond the Persian frontier. The people who spoke Syriac formed a society nominally subject to Rome, but by the sixth century it was increasingly independent in matters of culture and community.
In Cosmas’s day, the prosperity of that world was enough to make a businessman’s mouth water. Gaza on the Mediterranean coast was already a trading post, and Caesarea (destroyed by a Mamluk sultan in the thirteenth century) and Berytus (Beirut) farther north combined commerce and culture. Beirut had flourished since at least the fourteenth century BCE, with a handsome harbor halfway between Antioch and Gaza (about a week’s travel in either direction for those with the best pack animals), a city sure that Poseidon would look after it. Caesarea was the home of the finest library of early Christianity, and Berytus was the center of Roman legal education for the eastern Mediterranean.
In Palestine, Jerusalem was a religious zealot’s amusement park, but other cities mixed populations and people. The “ten cities” of Palestine were famous for their prosperity and civic pride. Neapolis became modern Nablus and was the home of the Samaritans, while Scythopolis (Beat Shean) was a monastic center that thrived in its border world.
Scythopolis exemplified provincial success. At its height around 500 CE it was a local capital with perhaps 30,000 inhabitants.5 Thirty springs made it a well-watered oasis on the way inland from the coast to the Jordan valley, and even when it later housed mainly monks, they harvested date palms and produced linen to make themselves independent and comfortable. Archaeology shows us a sixth-century monastery there with church and meeting hall on either side of a central courtyard and cells and kitchens around it. A floor mosaic depicts traditional scenes of farm and animal life. By then long settled, it had been hellenized enough to feature a marketplace (agora) and a theater at the foot of the hill on whose summit the first settlers had taken refuge. Conventional Mediterranean buildings surrounded the agora; the temple of Zeus was destroyed in the fourth century, and one of the baths went out of use in the early sixth century. Two Samaritan brothers, Silvanos and Sallustios, replaced this bath with a large hall. One of the brothers was lynched in 529 by Christians in the murderous suppression of a Samaritan rebellion of which we will hear more.
Constantinople’s East.
By the end of the sixth century, there were at least four new churches in Scythopolis, and the city was losing its rectilinear Roman shape as shops and workshops filled in what had once been grander public spaces. Meanwhile, public bathing was abandoned at the same time as private housing crept into the city center. By the 720s, that great hall of the Samaritan brothers was rebuilt as a crowded souk by the caliph Hisham, and though it was destroyed a few years later, it completed in its time the transition from the old Mediterranean city style to the new Muslim model. Scholars will continue to disagree whether this remaking of the city is change or decline, but the medieval Islamic world prospered while doing its buying and selling in a souk rather than in an agora or a forum.
North and east of Palestine the businessman-traveler came to Edessa, a very old city (thought by Muslims to be the birthplace of Abraham) refounded under the successors of Alexander and one of the oldest sites of Christianity. Everyone believed Edessa’s King Abgar had received a letter from Jesus himself, preserved and eagerly read into the sixth century. Even Justinian’s skeptical historian Procopius gives credit to the story. Edessa was also home to the widely regarded Bardesanes, a widely influential teacher of Christian doctrine around 200 CE. East again, and one came to the borderlands proper and another old city, Nisibis. In the sixth century it was usually on the Persian side of the frontier, and the place to which Roman citizens seeking refuge from religious oppression (Christians out of favor with Constantinople or traditionalists not able to toe the Christian line) would flee. At Nisibis there flourished the largest Christian school of the Nestorians—whom their enemies sometimes called, confusingly, Jews—led by Mar Aba, who is probably the same man known in Greek as Patrikios, who taught Cosmas his doctrine of the tabernacle. These Nestorians had taken up business there when the intolerant emperor Zeno closed the predecessor school at Edessa in 489 and left them no choice but to do business in a more tolerant empire.6 Not far from Nisibis was Daraa, a defensive city that the Roman emperor Anastasius I built around 500, much to the distress of the Persians. That anxiety cast a shadow forward through the next century.
South of the frontier zone was Arabia, if we can see it as Cosmas and his contemporaries would see it. In antiquity they inhabited the perimeter of Arabia, but the center of the peninsula, then and now, was not entirely barren; for centuries, Mediterranean and Persian culture sent out shoots into the interior, traces of which can still be found. Arabia survived in antiquity at the fringe of Roman and Persian worlds on its wits, on commerce, and on rumors of the world beyond. The Romans had created their own province, inland from Palestine: it consisted mainly of a Roman road running north and south more or less as did the Hejaz railway built by the Ottomans and plagued by Lawrence of Arabia, from Damascus to Medina. Long before Lawrence, this was the path of the camel caravan that annually ran down from Damascus to Mecca for the hajj, or pilgrimage. The Nabateans once ruled there from their curious fortress of Petra, a city hidden in a valley approached by narrow defiles, until the Romans made their power unshakable in the second century and the Nabateans’ economic influence faded. As late as the sixth century a substantial Christian church (not rediscovered until 1990) dazzled the eye in that remote fastness with its mosaics and marbles, adjoined by a huge baptistery. The terrain turned the Roman road into the natural boundary between cultivated lands and desert. Rome’s soldiers moved easily up and down the highway and fanned out eastward to terrify and control the desert dwellers, thus ensuring settled agriculture and consistent tax paying to the west.
Within the Arab community, there were more settled and prosperous tribes, reaching out into the more intractable desert, marginal desert dwellers—forerunners of the modern bedouin. Along the western line of Arabia from the Roman frontier south toward Mecca, the Ghassanid family had the power, monopolizing all dealing with the Romans. They so prospered that other Arabs thought of them as Romans. The Lakhmids were the first family of the frontier between the Persians and Arabia and played a similar role, reaching to the city of Hira almost within sight of the Euphrates, near where Syria and Iraq come together today. If you were a Roman used to cities and government, you thought of these Arabs as dubious folk, and when you chose to honor al-Harith, the prince of the Ghassanids, and tried to use him as your cat’s-paw in controlling the lands beyond the borders, you knew you were taking a risk. Eventually you would find him and his son, al-Mundhir, too inclined to go their own way and you would call them traitors.
If you were bedouin of the desert, however, you saw the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids as people who knew how to navigate the world of empires and armies and how to maintain their strength and identity. They were good protectors, partners, and employers—a source of stability.
Cosmas’s Alexandria was the mother city of Egypt. An ancient and unbroken line of civilization—of agriculture, of urban life, and of temples—continued into the sixth century. In cities and among elites, Greek all but supplanted the native language (Coptic), and Greek-branded Christianity had made broad inroads. Coptic (its name derived from the name of the land, “Aegyptos”) appeared first in written texts in the fifth century CE, by then fully Christianized itself. The survival of Coptic from that day until now has gone hand in hand with the survival of Christianity under many forms of Islamic rule.
Christian temple busters had been effective enough, particularly in Alexandria (Cairo would not become powerful until the Islamic period), but from the Nile delta south a line of pyramids great and small served as reminders of a very old past, standing watch on the ridge where the cultivated land of the valley, watered by the Nile’s annual floods, gave way to the desert upland. One fourth-or fifth-century Egyptian, Horapollon, wrote plays, commentaries on the ancient poets, and a work on temples. Then he (or possibly a son or grandson of the same name) wrote an extensive book explaining the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphic language and its religious symbolism. He occasionally got things right, but only occasionally. Horapollon’s father, Asclepiades, had traveled widely, writing, apparently, a synoptic treatise on all the religious ideas of the Greek world. He had lingered particularly at Heliopolis (Baalbek), studying its faceless idols, remnants of an ancient Semitic religion. His brother, Heraiscus, was said to have a more practical religious talent: the ability to tell at a glance which sacred statues were actually inhabited by divine spirits. He would sniff them and then either walk away or fall, on the spot, into a religious trance in the presence of the divine.
A sober contemporary of that family, the businessman Dioscoros from the modest city of Aphrodito (Aphrodite’s town, back when the landscape was given Greek names), left a trove of documents that reveal prosperous provinciality far up the Nile. From him we have leases and loans, receipts and wills, petitions and depositions—a whole range of documentation that once pervaded the Roman empire but that has all but disappeared, leaving us with only a fragmentary sense of the way this meticulous, businesslike world worked. Thanks to Dioscoros, we know that a donkey sold for a little more than half a year’s earnings for a farmer, making it the ideal capital investment (and much cheaper than a boat). It would eat about two percent of its load of wheat in a day and carry that wheat twenty-five miles or more. This is the scale at which a camel was an expensive purchase, reserved only for long-haul shipments by the rich, and horses and mules were for government officials and soldiers. Most of the Mediterranean world lived among donkeys.
Dioscoros’s modern biographer compares him to a Japanese minor court poet or a Chinese official. But that runs the risk of encouraging us to look down on him. To see a man like Dioscoros whole, you need to see him from below, from the village perspective in which he appeared as a great man. Dioscoros dazzled that audience by combining a good head for business and book learning (from a good education in Alexandria) and also by writing poems:
I always want to dance. I always want to play the lyre.
I strike up my lyre to praise the solemn festival with my words.
The Bacchae have cast a spell on me.7
That traditionalist Dioscoros who wrote of the Bacchae surely attended Christian services regularly. When he was in Alexandria he could have attended the church of the Evangelists, later dedicated to saints Cyrus and John. This was originally the temple of Isis and Manetho, hastily converted for Christian use in 391 when sacrifice was banned. (Curiously enough, the cures that occurred thanks to the protection of the old gods continued under the new management.)
Now, Dioscoros was a minor figure compared with the members of the Apion family. Based in Oxyrhynchus (“sharp-nosed,” from a fish found there) on the middle Nile 100 miles south of Cairo, the Apiones were local landlords and—during the sixth century—grandees of imperial stature. The wealthy daughter of the murdered philosopher Boethius went into exile at Constantinople and found it advantageous to marry one of her own daughters into the Apion dynasty. One Apion was the praetorian prefect (roughly equivalent to a prime minister) for the east under the emperor Anastasius, but it was Flavius Apion II who dominated his part of Egypt as few others had done since the time of the pharaohs. He served Justinian at court and as a general, before spending most of his career from the 550s to the 570s doing what ancient gentlemen did best: controlling his home turf. His family owned 75,000 acres of precious, river-watered land in his home district and maintained an extensive private staff that practically amounted to a government. The people who lived under this dominion were sharecroppers at best, and might have been forgiven for thinking they were virtual slaves on their own land.
The emergence of this kind of superrich family subtly undermined imperial authority. They were no longer one of several dividing up the power in a region and sharing a sense of rivalry and patriotism, but were now far more dominant as a family unit and growing unconcerned with matters beyond their personal ken. Like Dioscoros, the Apiones also left a huge trove of documents unearthed in modern times, where we can read memos from a senior estate steward to a junior colleague, resolving a quarrel over the use of a cistern or ordering a boat repair for a trip downriver to Alexandria.8
Much as the cities of Ireland had to wait for the Vikings to come by sea and “discover” the virtues of the ports of Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick, so Alexandria was brought to glory by conquering Alexander and his successors from far away. For them, linking Egypt with the Mediterranean world was an obvious step and building the city and port of Alexandria the obvious way to do it, after the many generations of Egyptian rulers who had been content with their riverine world and the tribute that came overland from the east.
Alexandria and Egypt were natural magnets for Jews, some of whom settled there before Romans were even heard of, at Elephantine far south on the Nile at the first cataract. They were probably planted there as a military garrison in the pay of the Persians, when the great kings dominated Egypt long before the time of Augustus, and they kept up their rituals in astonishing isolation from Jerusalem. And where there were Jews, from very early times there were usually Christians. While Athens remained doggedly faithful to its traditions and its irreligion until the threat of brute force intervened, Alexandria was more cosmopolitan and diverse at every period. There were ugly moments, as in the early 400s when a Christian mob murdered Hypatia, an intellectual prodigy who refused to accept or acknowledge the new creed. But prevailing powers usually forget the violence they had used to clear their paths, and so by the sixth century it was possible to think of Alexandria as a place that had naturally and uncomplicatedly endured in its role as the great city of the Mediterranean world. Rome and Constantinople had imperial pomp, but Alexandria had urban flair—think of staid Berlin or Washington compared with cosmopolitan Paris or New York. The ships still came and went, while caravans brought Mesopotamian and Syrian trade over land. The Nile also brought men and commerce, some of it from the Red Sea voyages of Cosmas and his kind.
Alexandria never forgot that across the Mediterranean and up through the Aegean lay the path to Constantinople—a city we will visit in later pages. On the hierarchy of Greek cities headed by Alexandria, with Ephesus, Smyrna, and Antioch proudly following, and then the only somewhat lesser but still noble communities of Byblos, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Caesarea, and Gaza (all recalling long histories), that ancient city of Byzantion had long dwelled in an obscurity from which it was finally rousted by the devastating generosity of emperors.
Constantine gave one hostage to fortune in founding his city. He chose the location in part to keep closer watch on military affairs along the lower Danube. Underdeveloped in classical antiquity, broken up into small regions and communities, with few cities, the world south of the Danube was easy to destabilize, but the hinterland of an immensely wealthy capital should be secure and impregnable. Suddenly the Balkans and their politics were both an opportunity and a menace for the empire. The region became and would remain a central recruiting area for soldiers and even emperors, but it was also a regular source of threat to imperial safety. The long-term development of the Slavic Balkans is unimaginable without the tempting sight of fat Constantinople to the southeast, positively begging to be blackmailed or plundered.
But Alexandria and Antioch were the real capital cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the former with Egyptian (that is to say, Coptic) hinterlands, the latter surrounded by Syriac-speakers. Had Constantine not intervened by creating his new capital, a post-Roman Mediterranean no longer in touch with Latin-speaking Italy would have seen Greek culture and language in the east diminish. Had Alexandria and Antioch been left to grow and dominate their regions unchecked, Islam might never have taken the form or achieved the strength it did. Or at least it probably would have allied itself with one of the two eastern cities in a contest against the other that would have shaped a far different world.
From Rome to Constantinople.
Constantinople, while drawing wealth away from Alexandria and Antioch, ensured survival for speakers of Greek, and gave them opportunities for prosperity and comfort.9 Even after Constantine’s city fell to the Turks in 1453, the Greek language flourished in and around the Aegean basin for the 400 years modern nationalism took to rediscover it. Today’s Greek language is an extraordinary mix of ethnic, cultural, and social influences: the ancient high-prestige language of Plato and Demosthenes, the continuing vernacular used in Christian scripture and liturgy, all amalgamated long after antiquity’s end.
In matters of government and religion, Alexandria did what it needed to do to remain on good terms with Constantinople, if always with reservations. And so the city thrived as the sort of place where a merchant with religious ideas could fancy himself a writer and produce a large book, lavishly illustrated, to promote what he had to say. As ever with ancient sources, we need to remember how much has been lost, to think of how many other merchants were writing books of their own, and to consider what the philosophers and monks were doing to fertilize the pool of ideas ever in circulation. Athens in the fifth or early sixth century may have boasted traditionalist intellectuals of great acuity, but for the real action, it was Alexandria or nowhere.
Nothing suggests that Cosmas ever traveled west from Alexandria; nor did he have reason to. If you lived anywhere east and south of Constantinople, around the eastern Mediterranean to Alexandria, you had little cause to think of the people who lived west of your world: the people who spoke Latin. They were stuck in an earlier time, in a world of stunted development by comparison with the sophistication and prosperity of the east. The cities of the western provinces were still in the hands of a small elite, drawing their power from agricultural holdings, and populated with tradesmen, craftsmen, slaves, and those who might have been better off if they were slaves. No western city had ever achieved the kind of economic independence that was commonplace among even modest communities in the eastern Mediterranean, and thus none developed the robust bourgeoisie of professionals, local merchants, and aspirants to higher things that marks a true city. The only upwardly mobile people in western cities of late antiquity were the clergy. Outside the cities, mere county seats for their surrounding agricultural communities, the countryside operated far too much like a plantation society for its own good, and it advanced astonishingly little in economic and social terms during the five centuries from Augustus to Justinian. Out in the wild, brigands, derelicts, marauders, and holy men proliferated—dispossessed people with no natural economy in which to find a fresh home.
Cosmas, like all ancients, was certain that the Pillars of Hercules stood at the westernmost end of the known world. Nothing in his milieu would make him think westward travel might be worthwhile. For him, the west might as well have not existed. We, however, will make our own visit that way soon enough.
LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD
In some future age, people will say history began with the twentieth century, for it will be the earliest period from which they’ll have sound and motion recordings to capture the flavor of life. To apprehend comparable flavor for the late antique world requires imagination and attention to often scant scraps of detail preserved in surviving sources.
Let’s start with flavor itself. What did men and women eat in this late antique Mediterranean world?10 Bread, of course, with a little olive oil. Olives themselves could be cured and saved with salt, with vinegar or honey vinegar, and with brine. Milk was more for those in northern climes, where it didn’t spoil as quickly, but cheese was common everywhere. Meat and fish were luxuries, but if you were in a great city near the water, seafood was at least somewhat familiar. Strabo the geographer tells us that every year there was a run of bonito, a type of mackerel, in great shoals descending the Bosporus toward the Mediterranean, driven by currents close to the shore of what would become Constantinople. And when did people eat? Custom in late antiquity shifted away from the midday main meal of traditional Rome toward an evening main meal, at least at Constantinople.
And in a great city, there were luxuries unimaginable elsewhere. Those luxuries were for the rich, of course, and if you were a ruler, you would rate even scarcer rarities. In Italy, that meant salmon fished from the Rhine and carp from the Danube, but still Italian wine—at one point Verona’s vintage was the most fashionable.11 If you were regal, rich, or both, you could season what you ate with spices. They were also useful to balance the humors in the blood; for example, the game birds and roast meats of a luxurious table in January were to be seasoned with the hottest spices, such as pepper, cinnamon, and mustard, so that their warming properties would counterbalance the cold, moist phlegm of the body. Herbs provided the flavorings of choice, with every corner of the garden scoured for everything with a distinctive taste. Our herb and spice racks are full of parsley, mint, basil, coriander, and more because our ancestors could not find or afford stronger stuff. Rarer spices commanded high prices for their negligible weight, and they were often formed into enticing shapes to lure buyers. To this day, if you travel to the souk of Aleppo and find the stands full of spices sculptured into elegant castles for sale, you are only inches away from the premodern world. Cinnamon and its cousin cassia traveled all the way from Sri Lanka and China. With ginger they were the best-known most abundantly sold spices. Pepper came from southern India.12 Exotic fruit would not become fashionable and available until Islamic times; the Greco-Roman Mediterranean settled for apples, pears, cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, and of course grapes. Honey was the sweetener of choice, because sugar was known only in Persia and northern India, and would not become universal and addictive until modern times.
Slightly less elegant and also less expensive was the Spanish fish sauce called garum, made by steeping fish eggs and entrails in brine. Garum increased in popularity through late antiquity, and we know that an Italian traveler, Liutprand of Cremona, saw it as late as the tenth century in Constantinople.
The meats of preference included buffalo, oxen, goat, sheep, and pig (our beef cattle were unknown), and the lower classes could sometimes afford sausages made from the butchered leavings. The taste for wild game was more catholic: deer, gazelle, wild goat, wild boar, bear, and more commonly hare. Medical writers liked to recommend chicken, but there was not an abundant supply. The list of game birds seems endless: ancient Romans knew duck, goose, quail, pigeon, partridge, peahen, and crane, and enjoyed many of their eggs.
The choice of a beverage was simple: either water or wine. The rich at Constantinople could afford to sneer at the aqueduct water that came from many miles away, and a western visitor agreed that it tasted salty and bad. Better to drink wine. Sweet wines were preferred to dry, and retsina, or resinated wine, was practical and popular from an early date. Retsina was named for the pine resin that waterproofed the earthen wine vats and also helped stabilize it and prevent spoilage. Wines like these were generally “cut” at least fifty-fifty with water—so they lasted longer and addled the drinker less.
The people of late antiquity drank, ate, and sometimes did not eat. Some people who read this book know what it is like to go to bed hungry, but few will know what it is like to spend your whole life without the assurance that you will not face grinding, incessant hunger next month or next year. Poverty and famine tormented many people in ancient times. The great moral risk for the student of ancient history is that we too easily inure ourselves to its brutalities and miseries because we admire what the rich and powerful were able to accomplish.
So the chronicle of Joshua the Stylite tells us of one famine around the frontier city of Edessa in the years 499–501.13 Two harvests failed in 499. First a swarm of locusts savaged the wheat, and then a few weeks later the millet did not get the weather it needed. The price of bread rose immediately, and people began to sell their possessions just to buy it. Many fled the region, while others flocked into the city and became beggars. Disease was rampant and—the story goes—some people were reduced to eating the flesh of the dead. Desperate farm people tried eating lees, the sediment remaining after grapes were pressed for wine, while city folk tried roots and leaves. They all knew the dread of looking at emptied larders while knowing that months remained until the next growing season could possibly bring relief.
The other perils of the body were scarcely less threatening. Disease could take even the strong in a matter of hours or days. Yet we will meet a few nonagenarians in this book, for if you survived childhood robustly and had adequate nourishment, your chances of long life were decent, although old age was thought to begin in your forties.
Being a woman or child could win you either sympathy or abuse, but few advantages. Children whose parents could not afford their support were left outside to die or, less often, for generous passersby to rescue and raise. Exposure was condemned by pious Christian emperors in the fourth century, but the practice continued widely until well into the sixth century. Justinian ruled—in an unenforceable law—that foundlings could not be enslaved. The kindest treatment we see was the growing habit of presenting unwanted infants to monasteries to be brought up in religion.
Chastity, under the lightly Christianized Roman ideal, was a woman’s task, and failure to defend against sexual assault was a mild disgrace at best and too often a source of lasting shame. The convent provided little in the way of refuge. Although Saint Augustine remonstrated in his City of God that rape victims had not sinned, four decades later Pope Leo I still refused to allow religious women who had been sexually assaulted to reside with and be counted entirely among the “virgins of God.” Instead, they were assigned a separate, middle place somewhere between the “real” virgins and the women who turned to religion in widowhood. Childbearing was still a deadly risk for mother and infant, a sad fact that demographers today can calculate from too many tombstones bearing names of young matrons and babies. Marriage in such a world was terrifying to many women, and the alternative of religious chastity, when offered, must have seemed literally a godsend to some.
You probably lived where you were born, and you rarely traveled. You spoke the dialect of your village or town and expected outsiders to be difficult to understand, but visitors were so interesting that you and they would find a way to communicate. Not all travel was desirable, for some led to warfare and some to slavery. If you lived inside the boundaries of the Roman empire or its successor states, you were reasonably safe, though slave raiders were seen on the fringes of Roman Africa from time to time. Rome also regularly went shopping for slaves across the lower Danube, while never quite comprehending that this buccaneering attitude might arouse deep resentment. Romans captured other slaves in the war on the Persian front, but some of their own were lost that way as well.
Clothing varied by climate. The Roman toga was long gone except as a form of fancy dress for a very few. Tunic and cloak were the usual combination, with the brooch as a standard form of ostentatious jewelry for both sexes. Women were covered down to the ground, while men wore shorter tunics, for the Gaulish fashion for trousers had been thought effeminate and never caught on. Women covered their hair for ceremony but not for every day. People who wore the coarser fabrics of the western Mediterranean and Europe envied easterners their linens and finer wools. The wealthy were avid for silk but sometimes settled for cotton imported from India.
The rich were different, of course. They lived in stone more often than mud and wood, and in finer stone or even marble more often than rough granite. They used leather, wool, fur, and fabric coverings and hangings to make their upscale stone less cold and hard. The elegant Sidonius describes a dining couch covered with fabric depicting hunted beasts with their dripping blood picked out in scarlet thread.14 At the same dinner, snowy linen draped the table, and bouquets and garlands of flowers flooded the room with color and fragrance.
The rich could be surrounded by glittering mosaics, in which glass-work of remarkable quality supplemented genuine cut stones. Gold and silver were treasures of choice, with silver also serving for tableware. Jewelry and tableware made excellent repositories of wealth because they were so easily hidden or sold in emergencies. So about twenty-five years ago a dazzling treasure dating from around 400 was discovered, perhaps in Hungary. It consists of exquisite silver tableware—cups, bowls, spoons, plates, all in a copper kettle that had protected them, evidence of a lavishness that few rival even today.15 Ivory was easier to come by than the precious metals, and from about 400 to 700 we have remarkable examples of decorative objects in ivory of every kind. Remains of ambitious ivory workshops have been discovered on the Palatine hill in Rome and outside Alexandria in Egypt.
If you were rich, your hands were smooth, most likely manicured, and you perspired only when you chose to exert yourself in some fasionable way. Public bathing was fading from fashion, however, and the old bath complexes fell into disuse in the fifth and sixth centuries. (Ancient public bathing, a custom that survives in the hammams of Near Eastern souks today, was thought decadent and too likely to tempt bathers from the sexual straight and narrow, and so Christians turned away from the practice.) Thus people generally smelled a little riper than they do nowadays.
For one rich man who died in the mid-sixth century, we have an inventory of his household property taken before it was knocked down on the auction block. He had clothing, tapestries, a particularly valuable shirt of silk and cotton colored red and green, and a trunk to put such things in, with a lock on it. He had cooking equipment, a small amount of furniture (chairs and a table), a saddle—and a slave named Proiectus. The goods of a freedman in his household—perhaps also recently deceased—were being sold at the same time. The freedman had fewer clothes but more utensils: tools and implements for the kitchen in particular.16
It was just as well if you didn’t travel much, unless you were rich enough to be taken in by other rich people, for roads were dangerous and inns were usually associated with lowlifes and criminals and specialized in pandering and prostitution. A typical inn excavated in Syria had stables on its ground level and a floor or two of cubicles above for guests. Prosperous merchants might have enjoyed a slightly higher grade of guesthouse. Gradually the practice of charging travelers began to be acceptable even among the noncriminal class, squeezing out the more hospitable but dangerous impulses of earlier, more welcoming times.17
The peace and prosperity of the Roman world had to do with what we would now call economies of scale. The government could tax a vast and prosperous empire to support an idle professional army on its frontiers and a government that sat in one or two capital cities. Augustus had declared at the outset that Rome should expand its borders no farther and had undertaken the demilitarization of the Roman heartlands away from the frontiers, a prudent step designed to avoid civil war. As long as the outer shell held firm, this was a fine strategy, but if it cracked, then the settled and prosperous countryside was at risk. The rich grew richer while soldiers got only uniforms, bonuses, and small allotments of land at retirement—if they were lucky. Generals might become wealthy on retirement, but the aristocracy of the Roman world had always been civilian. When the great civilians were dispossessed or disappeared, leaving only military men wealthy enough to own land, as began to happen in Italy after the awful wars of the mid-sixth century, we can see the beginnings of feudalism.
Wherever you went, new forms of old religion were part of the air you breathed. One Christian hermit found himself in a town without much Christianity, so he set himself up in trade buying and selling walnuts. Not long after, a tax collector came to town and demanded payments that would have strained many purses. The hermit wisely arranged a loan from friends in a bigger town not far away to help out his new neighbors, and so from that time forward, he made more of his religious authority and was given new respect. In another town (the same church historian reports), little children played monks and demons, and one little girl exorcised her playmates among shrieks and giggles.18
The urban landscape of the Greco-Roman world had traditionally emphasized the public and the monumental. By the sixth century, cities in the west were shrinking dramatically—they would eventually recover their commercial legs only when merchants set up shop outside the walls of the tiny communities that survived or replaced those cities. Old monumentality at the city center was threatened everywhere. At Rome in the 530s, in its most ancient heart along the Via Sacra, a few yards from the house where the vestal virgins had lived and tended the eternal flame, two bronze elephants were tottering to ruin. A short-lived ruler signed a letter about the elephants’ peril, dilating on the poignancy of how animals thought to live 1,000 years should be nearing ruination in the urban jungle.19 He offered advice on bolting them together and propping them up, cautioning that even live elephants often need help standing again when they have fallen. No sign remains of those elephants; most likely they were destroyed in the two decades of terrible warfare that were about to pound the ancient capital to a pulp.
The poor lived in huts, the rich in great houses: no surprise there. The old traditional Roman house had featured the atrium in front, and you walked through that to a courtyard. Now it was the courtyard that welcomed you first; the reception and living rooms stretched beyond in no uniform pattern. In the secure city, you slept and dined on the ground floor, but out of town you more often chose to stay on the floor above, perhaps keeping your workshop or the like down below, with strong gates at the entrance.
When the sun went down, you went home and stayed there, mainly in the dark, unless you were rich enough to afford oil to burn. Carthage and Antioch were probably the best cities for nocturnal lighting, because they were close to the olive-growing uplands of Numidia in Africa and Syria in the east. When we hear of an emperor or a philosopher who spent half the night reading and writing, what we should observe is not the studious one’s diligence but his prosperity.
For diversion you might play some of the games of dice that were popular, but if you were well brought up you did not snort when the dice went against you, as snorting was the conventional mark of the unmannerly dicer.20 Many gaming boards survive, including a famous one found in the forum in Timgad, 100 miles south of the Mediterranean on the plains of modern Algeria, with this inscription:
venari lavare
ludere ridere
occest vivere
Hunting, bathing,
playing, laughing
—THAT’s living!
Even the poor could agree with that.
LIVING IN THE SOCIAL WORLD
Every page of our story assumes a society of huge chasms with wealth and status running among people who lived with each other every day. All our modern studies of the splendors of ancient civilizations emphasize the similarities between the ancients and ourselves. But the similarities we are fond of invoking connect the rich and socially advantaged ancients and moderns to one another.
It is pleasant to think that Thucydides (for the realists), Cicero (for the optimists), or Boethius (for the intellectuals) have something in common with our own modern interests, predilections, and pastimes. We should remember, however, that their world and they themselves were very unlike what we know in our world today. If a time machine plunked us down in an ancient city, at the door of the house of a great writer or statesman whose name we know, the thrill of recognition would quickly be replaced by shock and dismay.
First, people took ill more often, lingered longer in sickness, were crippled for life by trivial accidents, aged rapidly, and died young. The people themselves were shorter than moderns and took for granted that they lived amid the effluvia, to choose a nice word for it, of human beings and their household and serving animals. Ancient cities stank. The people who bathed to remove some of their own odors then covered themselves with strong ointments and perfumes designed to counteract the smells of social living, and those remedies probably made the original problem worse (to a sensitive modern nose) rather than better. But those facts are physical.
Second, the privileged rich were few in number: a few dozen in a small city, a few hundred in a larger one, perhaps 1,000 or slightly more in Constantinople at its most glorious. Somewhat larger was the group of moderately protected, successful urban dwellers—merchants, artisans, government officers, people who managed the business of the comfortable world in which the rich could live. The poor, on the other hand, were many. Those with connections to the rich might derive some benefit—the well-dressed slave, for example—but might equally be abused by their overlords. By late antiquity the prevalence of slavery had subsided, but not for a particularly good reason. Great landlords didn’t need so many slaves (as southern plantation owners discovered after the Civil War) if they had tenants and sharecroppers for whom they had even less responsibility than they had for slaves. The urban poor similarly had no social safety net and were free to starve unimpeded.
Third, the social gradations of wealth and standing were sharp and carried with them the privileges of abuse. A clear hierarchy of secular dignities grew increasingly rigid in the empire after the time of Diocletian (who died about 316), softened only by the emergence of the parallel hierarchy of churchmen, who were not aristocrats but had protections. (Escaping from a lower social status into holy orders was an attractive form of social mobility.) In law there was a distinction between honestiores (the more honorable) and humiliores (the more humble), but it only codified the great fault line of society, between those who could be beaten and tortured readily and those theoretically immune to judicial violence. The more humble were always far more abundant. Not every poor man was beaten every day or every year, but every poor man knew that he could be.
Fourth, the privilege of the wealthy was reflected in some extraordinary vulnerabilities among the rest of society. A little girl growing up on the serving side of a great house could rarely imagine a bright future. To become, at or before puberty, a sexual instrument for the lord of the house or his sons—not even a plaything, just an instrument, an object—was not unlikely. Marriage of a sort offered some protection (but not from the lord of the manor, as long as a young woman preserved her sexual attractiveness), but was hardly a warm or sheltering life. Demographers calculate for such women of childbearing years (starting in the early teens) one pregnancy every two years, each one a potential death sentence for mother and infant, each one a hammer blow to the mother’s health and prospects of longevity.
The rich took it for granted that this society, which coddled them and crushed the many, was natural, orderly, inevitable, and acceptable. Christian kindness for the poor made some difference in late Roman times, but the poor who benefited were usually not the most downcast—the slaves, sharecroppers, hewers of wood, and drawers of water—but people with some social standing, whom we might think of as the lower middle class. Christian love of neighbor and Christian charity were focused mainly—some scholars think exclusively—on other Christians.
Soldiers were different and always had been. In classical Roman times, they could not marry or own property until they were given land at retirement—if they lived that long. We will see the ways that military forces were reshaped into mobile communities of families, acquiring ethnic identities to reinforce group solidarity. Compared with the poorest of the poor, a soldier had many advantages, but only a few soldiers advanced to high rank and opportunity, a few more became junior officers, and most lived hard but modestly protected lives—except when actual warfare exposed them to the ultimate risks.
Few readers of these pages will have any direct way of experiencing the world of the ancient (or for that matter modern) peasant. These lines by Rebecca West, from her luminous and sympathetic account of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, can open a window for at least a glimpse:
It was a poor day for the market. A storm had been ranging over the mountains all night, and as the year was still early and the crops light, most of the peasants had not thought it worth while to get up at dawn and walk the seven or eight miles to Trebinye. There were a few handsome women standing with some vegetables before them, soberly handsome in the same vein as their plain round caps and their dark gathered dresses, gripped by plain belts. We saw a tourist level a camera at two of these. They turned away without haste, without interrupting their grave gossip, and showed the lens their backs. These were very definitely country women. They wore the typical peasant shoes of plaited thongs, and by their movements it could be seen that they were used to walking many miles and they bore themselves as if each wore a heavy invisible crown, which meant, I think, an unending burden of responsibility and fatigue. Yet there were women among them who were to these as they were to town ladies, country women from a remoter country. The eyes of these others were mild yet wild, like the eyes of yoked cattle, their skin rougher with worse weather than the others had seen and harsher struggles with it; and their bodies were ignorant not only of elegance but of neatness, in thick serge coats which were embroidered in designs of great beauty but were coarse in execution, if coarse is used not in the sense of vulgarity but to suggest the archaic, not to say the prehistoric. There was a difference among the men also. Some seemed sturdy and steadfast as the rock, others seemed the rock itself, insensitive, except to the weathering power of the frost and sun.21
For such people, the most miserable or abject, the world’s delights are few and measured. They could be matched in accounts from many places and times, for they are the mass of humanity in all periods. We forget them often, always to our moral weakness, and often enough with greater peril still.
WHAT BECOMES OF THE ROMAN-HEARTED?
The long, long shadow of a short, fat man darkens our understanding of the Roman world, and of our own. Edward Gibbon was an astonishing figure, for his erudition, for his energy, for his mastery of two languages of composition (French and English), and for his dachshund-like ability to pursue his prey to ground and hang on for dear life. The first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, when he was thirty-nine, and the last twelve years later. Between first and last, his vision of the Roman empire broadened and expanded. What might have ended with a conventional explanation, however splendidly developed, of how emperors ceased to rule in the Latin west in the fifth century unfolded instead into a broad canvas reaching the steppes of central Asia, with a narrative introducing Tamerlane and Genghis Khan and culminating with the capture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. No page of Gibbon is not worth reading; few of his footnotes are not worth considering carefully.22
Few pages of historical works are as famous as the one where he describes himself conceiving the ambition to write The Decline and Fall while sitting on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, contrasting in imagination the mixture of ruins and churchly power before him (“as I sat musing in the church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the capitol”23), drawing on his classical education to make vivid the glories of the past to his mind’s eye. It is almost irrelevant that the pretty scene on the Capitoline probably never happened in quite the way he reports. His themes and biases were evident—“the triumph of barbarism and religion,” as he put it—and they had immense interpretive power in the eighteenth century, but his main lines of interpretation have been undermined and rewritten since. His blindnesses, moreover, were significant, not least his inability—for he published his first volumes in the same year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations—to grasp the main lines of economic argument that need to be spun around these societies in order to understand their development. In his own time, his scapegoating of Christianity led to outrage, but his scholarship defeated objections. Not until the last two generations did scholars rehabilitate priests and barbarians alike, not to whitewash, but to recognize that simplistic solutions always mislead. “They were, those people, a kind of solution,” the poet Cavafy said ruefully of barbarians who failed to materialize and could not play the role of scapegoat assigned them.
The myth has two things wrong with it. First, this expansive multiethnic and long-lived community of nations had little do with anything Roman. The most prominent citizens of the Roman empire in its most prosperous times lived far from Italy (mainly in the cities of the east) and owed their wealth to many factors, of which the brutal imposition of the Roman peace was only one, and not indispensable. To make sense of the economic, social, cultural, religious, and even political history of, for example, Asia Minor in the second century CE requires various kinds of competence and broad specific knowledge. It’s narrow and limiting to connect the urbane people and societies of that period and place with a community that had its base in a trading post at a crossing of the Tiber River 900 years earlier. But because men and women in the second century believed the story of Romulus and Remus and how that trading post became a great city and founded a great empire, they made it true and relevant—at least to some extent.
Second, the traditional story offers a single narrative point of view, one focus, and a sole omniscient narrator who identifies with an empire seen at the scale of empire itself. The historian who chooses the Roman empire for his topic will inevitably under-imagine the distinctiveness of local cultures and places in that world. Even worse, looking at the history of the Roman empire makes it easy to neglect points of view beyond the ken of the Roman elite. We lose the perspective of provincials, soldiers, women, slaves, businessmen—everyone who lived outside the Beltway, so to speak. Much of the best and most exciting scholarly investigation of our time has plunged with relish into Rome’s provinces and sought out its many and various peoples.
Here’s an example: in the late fifth century, the Isaurians at last fell under Constantinople’s political control. But to judge by the brightly colored maps we post on classroom walls, Isauria, in southern Asia Minor, had long been part of the empire. Because it was mountainous, sparsely populated, and off the beaten track, and so had long been a marginal outpost from which a few soldiers or adventurers might occasionally emerge, there couldn’t have been much “Roman” about it. Isaurians first show up in the Roman empire’s lore more than sporadically when they are the stereotypical heavies in narratives of the fourth and fifth centuries—“barbarian” in every way except that they found their homes inside rather than outside the empire’s borders. Then suddenly their chieftain, Tarasicodissa, famous for having no kneecaps and thus being able to run faster than ordinary men, ascended the imperial throne. By promptly taking the reassuringly and traditionally Greek name of Zeno, he guaranteed that he would disappear into the imperial lists unremarked, as he wished. Within a generation, Isauria was quietly paying taxes and we hear no more of Isaurian bandits and brigands. The Roman empire had just gotten there a few centuries late.
No empire is an island, least of all one in a dead-end corner of the Eurasian landmass. The forested, mountainous, but well-watered and fertile land of the remote western peninsula that trapped all the migrating peoples who moved into it was only a small part of a great stage on which many others interacted. Travel east from Rome’s Rhine through land progressively less promising, skirting your way through the marshes of Poland, shying away from the northern winter toward the plains of Scythia not yet turned into farmland, and go on into the steppes of western and central Asia, and you’ll have seen a little of the neighborhood that Rome lived in.
Rome, to be sure, still holds our imaginations. The ancient Greeks appeal easily to lovers of beauty and tragedy, but also to flinty-eyed political hawks who prefer to relive Persian, Peloponnesian, and Alexandrian wars. The traditional middle ages call to sentimentalists who admire virtuous primitives, and the Renaissance endures for Whigs of all generations with their self-glorifying provincialism.
Huns and Persians draw few modern enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the allegiance that several generations of nineteenth-and twentieth-century German scholars expressed to the “Germanic” invaders of the Roman empire (the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, above all) has largely collapsed, toppling under the weighty disgrace of German nationalism following World War II, and undone by more keenly skeptical scholarship. But classical Rome lives for moralists, those people who always know exactly what other people should be doing.
In the Roman world, as one might expect, the books that survive side with the Romans. Even the few narratives that seem to reflect a “barbarian” pride were written in Greek or Latin. Jordanes, a man on the make in Justinian’s Constantinople, wrote his book Getica (“Gothics”) in Latin, inventing a glorious past for the Goths, trying to make sense of contemporary history from the capital’s perspective. Goths, Persians, and Huns very likely had tales of their own, to say nothing of their documents, but the Romans were far and away more documentary and textual, and therefore more like us, and therefore capable of making their voices and personalities more vividly known to us. The “glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” (in the words of Poe) still enchant many who know little about the realities of ancient life.
If you seek the last day of the Roman empire, you’ll have many choices. Never mind that the Roman historian Sallust, Augustine of Hippo in his City of God, and the modern historian Arnold J. Toynbee all date the downfall of Rome from its victory in the second Punic War in 202 BCE. Almost all historians agree that creating an empire to succeed a republic (which is how we conventionally describe the successful putsch by Caesar’s nephew Octavian and his self-remaking under the name Augustus Caesar) merely exalted the Roman past, while abandoning many of its excellences. Dissolution often threatened the hold of the imperial regime over its far-flung realms. Between 235 and 284 dissolution very nearly prevailed, when the longest-reigning emperor of that period was a usurper too marginal for more serious but shorter-lived contenders to bother taking time to exterminate. The remaking of empire in 284 and after, first by the emperor Diocletian and then by Constantine, was intended then and is accepted now as an expression of continuity, though much had to change in order to create a stable new regime. Many historians have long been persuaded that at some time in the fifth century, something decisive occurred. The date of 476 was chosen in the sixth century, for political reasons explored below, and has crept into textbooks repeatedly, down to the present day. But there is no good reason to accept it.
So if Rome did not fall in 202 BCE or 476 CE, when did it fall? In 800 CE the Frankish king Karl, Carolus, or Charles—that is, Charlemagne—concluded that the empire had finally lost its way when the eastern throne fell into the hands of a woman, the empress Irene, and so he had himself crowned emperor by the pope in Rome on Christmas day. Shall we call his dominion—that medieval avatar of empire in the west—a Roman empire? It did business under that name for 1,000 years, until Voltaire waggishly commented that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. True enough, but at about the same time, in his autobiography, the young Goethe described the impressive ceremonies he had seen himself in Frankfurt for the election of the Roman emperor. That version of Rome finally disappeared in 1806, when Napoleon dispensed with old imperial tradition in order to create his own imperial edifice, however short-lived.
Other dates offer themselves: we have already seen Gibbon’s choice, at the sack of Constantinople in 1453, but that was the whimper, not the bang. The balance of power in medieval Asia Minor had tilted strongly toward the Turks 200 years earlier, when the other Roman empire and its allies and friends, the crusaders, overthrew the Christian empire of Constantinople. Constantine’s fundamental idea, that he could maintain hegemony over the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the eastern lands beyond from a perch in the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, is exactly the idea that Mehmed the Conqueror accepted when he put Constantinople out of its misery and made it his capital. Dismantling the dilapidated city’s pathetic rump of an empire in 1453 secured Turkish domination more by securing continuity than by changing anything fundamental. (Some western powers even welcomed the new partner.) Mehmed saw himself as the successor to the Roman emperor, and thus in an important way Constantine’s fundamental vision was sustained intact not merely till 1453, but till 1924—the last gasp of the Ottoman empire and its suppression in favor of a more modest and modern republic of Turkey.
If we ask what became of the Roman-hearted (who had power that’s now departed), looking for a single date at which a switch was thrown and an empire ceased to exist never makes real sense. Instead, we’ll first have to reframe the question as one that can be answered, and answered on a human scale. Human beings live in a moving window of time that remembers a generation or two of the past reasonably well and that imagines a future best measured in decades, not centuries or millennia. The century or so from 476 to 604 CE reflects human plans and wishes with their successes and failures, showing how rulers who could not understand their world as existing on a continuum much older than themselves squandered countless opportunities.
WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?
I will identify the dates of events using the western convention BCE and CE, corresponding to BC and AD. No one alive in the time of this story used that dating system regularly, and only a few were aware of it, but many would have understood it if you had described it to them. To the best of our knowledge, the scheme was devised in the 520s by Dionysius Exiguus (“Denis the Short” or perhaps merely “Denis the Humble”), who calculated that Jesus had been incarnated at the Annunciation—the moment when Mary met the angel and became pregnant, which he dated to March 25 in the year 754 of the city of Rome: that is, 1 CE or AD 1. (The first Christmas, by that reckoning, fell on December 25 of the year 1.)
Fortunately for us, Dionysius had the year wrong. Jesus was born no later than 4 BCE and perhaps as early as 8 BCE. If Dionysius had been correct, then the second millennium would have arrived between 1992 and 1996 and a generation of computer programmers would have had even less time than they did to forestall the confusion of Y2K. We hear of Dionysius’s work first in his own time in another writer’s treatise on the mechanism for fixing the date of Easter, and at least one seventh-century chronicler reckoned dates that way, but it was not until the eighth century that the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede employed it consistently and found a relatively wide readership. The scholar Alcuin took the idea to the continent, where it caught on and flourished under the influence of Charlemagne.
In the sixth century, in other words, there was no sixth century. People were generally aware of how long it had been since Christ was born (in the late fourth century some surmised that the 365th year after the crucifixion would see the second coming of Jesus), but public documents and official records, even church documents, used more ancient ways of counting. The commonest and most venerable were still consular years, and until 541 CE one or two consuls were appointed in each year and the year bore their names—“in the consulship of X and Y”—and the roster of names going back to 509 BCE was a source of pride for the families who found ancestors on it. When consuls were no longer named, counting and naming years from the beginning of the current emperor’s reign was more common.
Meanwhile, a separate reckoning flourished in imperial offices, the so-called indiction, which is effectively the name for a tax year on a fifteen-year cycle. Hence men would speak of the “first indiction” or “the twelfth indiction” and the first would follow again the year after the fifteenth. This system had begun under the reforming emperor Diocletian in 297 and had run for almost fifteen full cycles when our story begins. The practice reminds us that for many purposes, even something so inefficient was serviceable. Periods longer than fifteen years didn’t come to mind very often, not as requiring exact dating, but the tax man came every year and defined economic reality for many. People did not much talk about how old they were until their relatives needed to write their age on the tombstone—and often not even then. The people in this story lived in the bright light of the present, with far less sense of an accurately accounted history—short or long—than even poorly educated moderns have.