* Far away, either in Iceland or in east Asia, these massive volcanic eruptions were spurting clouds of dust into the sky, generating what today’s scientists call a ‘dust-veil event’ that may have created the conditions for a rising world crisis: it changed the weather in ways that may have forced nomadic peoples to leave the steppes and ride westwards to attack the Roman and Persian empires – and that may have brought rats closer to humans, perfect conditions for a pandemic.
* Belisarius had died the year before in the wake of a last heroic command when he defeated a nomad army approaching Constantinople. Not long afterwards he faced a trial for conspiracy against Justinian, judged by a city prefect, Procopius, probably the historian and his former secretary. Justinian pardoned him. It is not known when Procopius died.
* ‘Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the owners of the Elephant?’ recounted Abdul Muttalib’s grandson, Muhammad, in the Quran. ‘Did He not make their treacherous plan go astray? And He sent against them birds in flocks, striking them with stones.’
ACT FIVE
300 MILLION
The Muhammad Dynasty
FAMILY FEUD
The boy’s father Abdullah died before he was born, his mother Amina died when he was young, so Muhammad bin Abdullah was brought up by his legendary elephant-vanquishing grandfather, Abdul Muttalib. Whitestreak and his sons al-Abbas and Abu Talib led caravans of spices and perfumes from Yemen and on to Gaza and Damascus. Before his death at eighty-one, Whitestreak ordered his son Abu Talib to raise Muhammad, who was nurtured by an Ethiopian nurse and a retinue of slaves. Abu Talib took young Muhammad on caravans to Syria.
Yet the family was divided into the two branches, descended from conjoined twins Umayya and Hashem, who had supposedly been cut apart with a sword. Hashem was Abdul Muttalib’s father, Muhammad’s great-grandfather. With Whitestreak gone, the Umayya clan pushed out Muhammad’s Hashemites. The two lineages fell out over the Kaaba shrine and caravan revenues, but later it became a battle for power, a family feud that still divides the Arab world today.
As Muhammad grew up in Mecca, Arabia was changing radically and the African kings of Yemen had reason to regret their attack on Mecca. Khusrau, informed by King Amr the Burner, his Arab ally, of an appeal by the Yemenites for help against the Ethiopians, sent a force down to Yemen that expelled these African Christians and annexed the kingdom. Here was a pretext for war if Emperor Justin needed one.
While Khusrau and Justin were still fighting their bipolar war, another people who would change the world were galloping across the steppes to their north. The Turks were nomadic horse archers from the borderlands of Mongolia/Manchuria, who, displaced by the turmoil in China, gradually moved westwards, sparking a stampede migration. Justin dispatched delegations to encourage the Turks to attack Khusrau, and he ceased his Persian payments. The Turks would open a northern front. But when the war started, Khusrau the Immortal, vigorous at sixty, took the Roman fortress of Dara, while the Turks never showed up. The humiliation drove Justin mad.
THE EMPEROR WHO CROWED LIKE A COCK AND BARKED LIKE A DOG: THE MADNESS OF JUSTIN
Justin tried to throw himself out of windows. Then he thought he was a shopkeeper hawking his wares around the Mega Palation: ‘Who’ll buy my pans?’ Next he started biting his eunuchs. Finally he just ‘barked like a dog, bleated like a goat, mewed like a cat and crowed like a cock’. The only things that quietened him were being wheeled fast by breathless eunuchs on a mini-wagon conveying his throne while listening to organ music – or hearing the threat that the Arab king ‘Al-Harith is coming.’ Empress Sophia took over, saying, ‘The kingdom came through me, and has come back to me’ – a true niece of Theodora. But the madness undermined the family. Sophia planned to give the throne to a Justinian cousin but, faced with raids by nomadic Avars in the Balkans and Persian advances in the east, Justin adopted a general, Tiberius. As commander-in-chief, Tiberius II, emperor from 578, selected an ex-clerk and his count of the Excubitors, Maurice, who, despite having no military experience, managed to hold off the Avars and halt the Persians. But Maurice struggled to control his flamboyant Arab ally al-Mundhir: in 581, the two of them just failed to take Ctesiphon. Maurice had the Arab king arrested. Their fallout would play a role in destabilizing the bipolar Roman-Persian world. In 582, on his deathbed, Tiberius married his daughter to Maurice, who started his own reign as emperor with a stroke of luck.
