The World полностью

The three sons met to divide up the empire: Constantine II the eldest, now twenty-one, who regarded himself as the main heir, got Britannia, Hispania and Gaul; Constans Italy and Africa, Constantius the east, where he soon halted Shapur. However, the brothers quickly fell out and two were killed, leaving Constantius as sole emperor. But he was thinly stretched.

Only two male Constantinians had survived his family hecatomb – his cousins Gallus and Julian, who lived quietly on a Cappadocian estate, lucky to be alive. Gallus was ambitious; Julian eschewed politics and studied philosophy. Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar, who then unwisely presided over the games in Constantinople, prerogative of Augusti. Constantius had Gallus beheaded, and wondered whether to kill Julian too. The emperor’s wife Eusebia, a cultivated, kindly Macedonian, now brought Julian to the emperor. Constantius agreed to let him study philosophy in Athens, where he rejected Christianity and embraced the worship of the sun god.

Constantius needed a partner in the west even though he was ‘suspicious’ of Julian’s popularity. But, encouraged by Eusebia, he raised Julian to Caesar and sent him to Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris).

Julian surprised everyone (especially himself) by defeating the Alemanni, but in 360 Shapur attacked in the east backed by an army of Hunnish auxiliaries. Already both the Roman and Persian armies deployed large corps of ‘barbarians’. Constantius ordered Julian to send half of his legions eastwards. Julian had just lost his sole ally, Eusebia having overdosed on fertility drugs. In Paris, he was declared Augustus. Constantius rushed back to destroy him, but died of fever on the way.

Now sole emperor, Julian tilted the empire back towards paganism, attacking Christianity and restoring pagan temples, even giving Jerusalem back to the Jews so that they could rebuild the Temple. One man, his uncle, had imposed Christianity; the nephew could have overturned it – if he had been lucky. But his most urgent business was Persia, where he planned to take Ctesiphon, rowing his army of 65,000 down the Euphrates and along a canal into the Tigris. When he disembarked, he showed his confidence by burning his flotilla but failed to destroy the Sasan army. Ctesiphon did not fall and Julian retreated, harassed by Sasan cavalry. On 26 June 363 near Samara, he rushed towards the fighting, forgetting to pull on his mail. A javelin struck him in the side. His Greek doctor tried to sew up the torn intestine, but Julian died – and the Romans, desperate to get home, gave Shapur everything he demanded.

In the chaos after Julian’s death, which ended the Constantinian dynasty, an irascible general Valentinian was chosen as Augustus, appointing his brother Valens as eastern emperor, but both were forced to firefight invasions of barbarians. When Valentinian died of a stroke when enraged in 375,^* Valens faced the armed migration of Germanic Goths, known as the Thervingi, cousins of peoples who lived in Ukraine and Russia.^* Valens had hired them as foederati or allies and granted them lands, only for Roman officials to steal those lands: the furious Goths went to war. In 378, at Adrianople (Edirne), a Gothic horse archer got a bullseye, hitting Valens in the face.

In 378, as Valens fell, so, far to the west, did the ruler of Tikal in Mesoamerica when Spearthrower Owl, a warlord from Teotihuacan, the magnificent city in the Mexican valley, ordered Tikal’s conquest.

FIRST CROCODILE AND RUGILA THE HUN

Spearthrower’s general Siyah Kak (Fire-Is-Born) marched six hundred miles southwards to defeat Tikal’s ajaw, Great Jaguar Paw, who was defeated, captured and most likely sacrificed. While some scholars doubt that a leader could have arrived from Teotihuacan, people certainly moved between the two cities – and it would not be the last dynasty founded by a stranger steeped in the mystery of faraway places. Much of this narrative remains mysterious but probably Fire-Is-Born became regent – Lord of the West – while Spearthrower Owl appointed his young son, First Crocodile, as ajaw of Tikal. Spearthrower Owl ruled for many years, but this was not the end of the dynasty of First Step Shark: Spearthrower married his son First Crocodile to Lady Kinich, daughter of Great Jaguar Paw, uniting the two families. First Crocodile ruled for many decades and when he died he was entombed with a headless crocodile and nine young sacrificed humans, the youngest being a boy of six, along with a censer statue of an old god sitting on a stool of human bones. This conquest marked the apogee of Teotihuacan.^*