8
EMPERORS SHOULDN’T SKIRMISH
Julian the Apostate
By Harry Turtledove
Julian, often called the Apostate because he rejected Christianity, was Augustus (Roman emperor) from 360 to 363 and sole Augustus following the death of his foe and cousin, Constantius II (reigned 337–361). Constantius was the last surviving son of Constantine the Great (reigned 306–337), who made Christianity first a permitted and then the dominant faith of the empire. At the Council of Nicaea, which condemned the Arian heresy in 325, Constantine began a long tradition of imperial meddling in church affairs.
Although down, Arianism was not yet out. Constantius adhered to it and persecuted its opponents. Sandwiched between his illustrious father and spectacular cousin, Constantius gets short shrift nowadays. He was a grayly competent ruler and capable administrator with a gift for civil war—he handily disposed of Magnentius, the rebel who had overthrown his brother Constans (who had already crushed their other brother, Constantine II). Constantius might well have defeated Julian, too, if sickness hadn’t killed him at only forty-four.
Julian was the son of Constantine’s half brother, and thus Constantius’s half first cousin. He spent his early years staying as inconspicuous as he could. Drawing too much notice from Constantius would have been hazardous to his life expectancy. He went to Athens for the ancient equivalent of a university education. Many philosophers—professors—remained pagan. Julian seems to have cast off whatever attachment he had for Christianity while in Athens, though coming out and saying so at the time would have been fatal.
With Constantius’s brothers deceased, he needed officials he could rely on. He named Julian’s older half brother Gallus Caesar (a rank just below that of Augustus) in the east in 351, so he could fight Magnentius in the west. Gallus proved untrustworthy and alarming. Constantius gradually reduced his power, then had him arrested and executed in 354.
But troubles kept coming. Under Shapur II (309–379), the Sassanid Persians attacked Roman territory in the east, while the Alemanni, a German tribe, crossed the Rhine and began conquering Gaul. Desperate, in 355 Constantius appointed Julian Caesar to deal with the German invaders while he fought the Persians himself. Although trained as a philosopher, Julian proved a good general. He defeated the Alemanni and drove them back over the Rhine.
In 360, the Persians took the important Roman fortress of Nisibis. Constantius summoned many of Julian’s soldiers to fight in the east. They refused, and proclaimed Julian Augustus in defiance. Constantius was on his way west to fight his cousin when he died. To avoid further strife, he named Julian his successor.
As soon as Julian became sole emperor, he disestablished Christianity. He stopped state subsidies for the religion. He started them for the elder faiths. He also tried to organize their priesthoods in a hierarchical system like the one the Christians used. And he gave the Jews permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, aiming to show Christian prophecy false (this failed, due to what the Christians called a miracle and what looks to an outsider uncommonly like arson) and to give Christianity another strong theological rival.
He also continued Constantius’s war against Persia. His attack nearly reached Ctesiphon, the Persian capital (near modern Baghdad). But his opponents’ scorched-earth policy forced the Romans to fall back. A Persian said he knew a good, well-supplied land route for the retreat. Julian made the mistake of believing him, and burned the Roman army’s boats on the Tigris to leave his men no other choice.
But the Persian was a plant, as the Romans soon discovered. They were dogged by heat and hunger and thirst as they moved north and west. And Julian himself did not have the sense to stay out of a no-account cavalry skirmish. He was speared, probably (though not certainly) by a Saracen horseman on the Persian side, and died not long afterward. Any hope for a pagan revival died with him. His successor, an officer called Jovian, had to agree to a humiliating peace with Sassanid Persia as the price for extricating his army from its impossible position.
What if Julian had gotten back to the Roman Empire, though? What if he’d ruled for twenty-five or thirty years, as his two predecessors did? What would the world have looked like then?
Obviously, he wouldn’t have destroyed Christianity. It was far too well established for that, after half a century in the saddle. But he might have managed to keep it from entrenching itself as the state religion—and less in the way of state interference (the fancy word is caesaropapism) might well have proved good for it. A temple rebuilt three centuries after its destruction would have had an enormous and incalculable effect on Judaism, too.
Constantine’s Edict of Milan, promulgated in 313, allowed all religions, Christianity included, to be freely practiced on equal terms. Only gradually did Christianity become not just allowed but favored. Had something on the order of the original equality been restored, and had it had a generation or so to take hold, the world might have become a more tolerant one than it really did.
On the political-military front, Julian already had experience fighting German invaders in Gaul. He might well have done better against the Goths entering the Balkans in the 370s than the existing authorities did. He could hardly have done worse; at Adrianople in 378, the Goths destroyed a Roman army and killed the Emperor Valens. Their wanderings through the Roman Empire did much to weaken its grip. The Visigoths would end up ruling Spain and southern Gaul after sacking Rome itself in 410. After they left Italy, the Ostrogoths took control there in their place.
Had the Goths been either defeated or peaceably assimilated, the stress on the Roman Empire during the late fourth and early fifth centuries would have been greatly reduced. Rome might have remained a unified political and cultural entity stretching from the Atlantic all the way to Mesopotamia.
Most people then living in that part of the world would probably have adjudged it a better deal than the one they got. Whether the world now would be better or worse . . . well, who can say what 1,700 years of changes would have done? It would certainly be different. But Julian rode out to skirmish, and we have what we have.