Reeling from this fiasco, Justinian had to make an Eternal Peace with the new shah, Khusrau, at the cost of 11,000 pounds of gold. Humiliated, Justinian learned that his ally, the king of Vandal Africa, based in Carthage and also ruling Sicily, had been overthrown in a coup by a nobleman Gelimer. In 533, Justinian dispatched Belisarius and 92 warships, 30,000 sailors and 15,500 troops. The general discovered that Gelimer was away in Sardinia and, after resupplying in Sicily, sailed for Africa. In March 534, he took Carthage, first deporting and annihilating the Vandal ruling class, then returning to Constantinople for his triumph which ended with the
Next Justinian used the killing of his ally, the Goth queen of Italy, as a pretext to retake Rome. In 535, Belisarius and a small army captured Sicily, Rome and Ravenna, before going on to take southern Spain.
Justinian celebrated these triumphs by embellishing Constantinople to reflect his vision of Christian empire: he raised a 230-foot column topped by an equestrian statue of himself in armour, and built thirty-three new churches and, most dramatic of all, a monumental church, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom).* ‘Solomon,’ he mused, looking up at Hagia Sophia, ‘I have surpassed you!’ But invincibility is always temporary.
In 540, the Persian shah invaded Syria in response to the raids of Justinian’s Arab king al-Harith, who had attacked the Persian ally al-Mundhir. The proxy war spun out of control: al-Mundhir hit back, captured al-Harith’s son and sacrificed him to the sun goddess, al-Uzza. The feud did not end until al-Harith killed al-Mundhir in battle, but behind this sideshow was a Sasan shah who was Justinian’s match as conqueror, builder and lawgiver. Khusrau Anushirvan – Immortal Soul – had spent the years of peace liquidating any family rivals and crushing a new religion founded by a Zoroastrian priest called Mazdak, who had fused the dual cosmology of Ahura-Mazda and Manichaeanism with revolutionary ideas of equality and charity that had much in common with Christianity, together with a strain of feminist hedonism. Mazdak taught that wives were not owned by men, and his critics denounced Mazdakites as socialistic swingers. Seeing a threat to Zoroastrianism, Khusrau buried many of these Mazdakites alive with just their feet showing, telling Mazdak to admire his ‘human garden’ before using him for archery practice. Despite his human garden, Khusrau was more tolerant and eclectic than Justinian, inviting Indian, Christian and Jewish sages to his court, men who were soon joined by the pagan Greek philosophers expelled by Justinian. ‘We studied the customs and conduct of Romans and Indians and accepted those that seemed reasonable and praiseworthy,’ Khusrau explained. ‘We haven’t rejected any because they belonged to a different religion or people.’
It was no coincidence that he championed the Indian game of chess: now the Immortal advanced into Roman Syria, and avoiding time-wasting sieges, stormed the eastern capital, Antioch. Khusrau enslaved thousands, who were sent on a death march eastwards to populate a new city named Veh-Antioch-Khusrau (Khusrau’s-better-Antioch).*
Justinian recalled Belisarius from Italy and sent him to Syria, but then fell desperately ill – infected by a catastrophic pandemic that Procopius called ‘a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated’.
JUSTINIAN’S PANDEMIC – AND THE KILLER BIRDS OF MECCA
The pandemic forced Khusrau to retreat, but by summer 541 it was hitting Constantinople with lethal randomness, killing 10,000 a day at its height. Between 20 and 40 per cent of the city perished. This was the bubonic plague, carried by fleas bearing the bacterium
The conditions were set for disaster: in 536, a volcanic eruption had spurted dust into the atmosphere, and ‘the sun,’ recalled Procopius, ‘gave forth its light without brightness’; temperatures fell, harvests failed, people weakened.* The disease started innocently but killed quickly:
they had a sudden fever of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening … Not one of those who had contracted the disease expected to die. But not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called
