Justinian, soi-disant ‘conqueror of many nations’, lived on, gripping the sceptre with sclerotic fingers, and refusing to name a successor. But Theodora had arranged the marriage of her niece Sophia to Justinian’s nephew, Justin, now serving as his
Khusrau’s Arab ally, King Amr the Burner (who often incinerated his captives as human sacrifices), clashed with the African king of Himyari, a Christian from Axum called Abrahah (an ex-slave of a Roman merchant), who now marched on Mecca with a corps of elephants.
The Meccans, now led by Abdul Muttalib, nicknamed Whitestreak because of his hair, guardian of the Kaaba, sheikh of the Quraysh clan, leader of regular caravans to Palestine, in 570 repelled the Ethiopian and his pachyderms using a targeted assassination: Abrahah was strafed by a killer flock of sacred birds which dive-bombed him with rocks. The elephants were defeated, the African king dismembered. This semi-mythical victory – the Year of the Elephant – took place the very year that a child named Muhammad* was born in Mecca.
* They were very special cabbages: ‘If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor,’ Diocletian replied to an envoy who asked him to return to politics, ‘he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace this calm and happiness with the storms of insatiable ambition.’ Much of his palace survives in Split.
* Slavery was inimical to Christian ideals; many early Christians had been slaves or freedmen, indeed it was in some senses an egalitarian slaves’ religion. Now it was no longer acceptable to enslave Christians nor to have sex with slaves: a master had to free an enslaved woman then marry her in order to have sex. Of course these rules were unenforceable: slavery – usually the enslavement of non-Christians – thrived in Christendom for another two millennia.
* As for Arius himself, he returned from exile to Constantinople where his theological incontinence led to a faecal explosion: while walking in the Forum, ‘a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius’, expressed in ‘a violent relaxation of the bowels’. Rushing behind the Forum, ‘a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: portions of spleen and liver gushed out in effusions of blood, so that he almost immediately died’. Heresy was a messy business: the churchman Socrates Scholasticus noted that tourists still pointed to the spot decades later. But Arius’ homoiousian views on the humanity of Jesus appealed to many of the Germanic tribes that converted to Christianity during the 360s.
* Already viciously persecuted, Jews were banned from Jerusalem for the next three centuries, though many risked death to worship there covertly and secretly visit the Temple Mount and its walls to pray.
* Georgia was not the first. In 301, Tiridates III, the king of Armenia, the buffer state between Rome and Persia, had converted after a Christian saint cured his mental illness – though this was done partly to assert his independence from the stridently Zoroastrian Persians.
* Empires throughout history favour the appointment of one ruler – a king – as intermediary to control their unruly subjects, in this case their Arab allies. The Assyrians too had appointed kings of the Arabs. This was the start of a long relationship between the Sasan shahs and the Lahkm Arab kings, but strangely the tomb of Amr was found in Roman Syria, suggesting that he later defected from Iran to Rome, the first of many such switches by Arab leaders between superpower patrons. Soon the Romans would find their own Arab protégés.
* Apart from the ill temper that killed him, Valentinian cultivated a brutish image, travelling the empire accompanied by a cage containing two bears, named Innocence and Goldflake, to whom he fed unfortunate dissidents. In a heart-warming landmark for wildlife conservation, Innocence was returned to the wild for having loyally eaten Valentinian’s victims.
* Later the Thervingi became known as the Visigoths (western Goths) and moved westwards, soon followed by their eastern brethren, the Ostrogoths.
* The world’s biggest cities were Constantinople, Ctesiphon/Seleucia, Pataliputra (Patna), Rome, Nanjing, Antioch, Alexandria and Teotihuacan.
