Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Khusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his ‘extremely beautiful’ Christian queen,* and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan. Once in Roman territory, the boy shah proclaimed himself supplicant of Maurice, who adopted him as a son and, in return for western Armenia, lent him an army: in 591, Khusrau retook Ctesiphon.
Maurice and Khusrau both now terminated their unreliable Arab allies. Al-Mundhir’s Arabs, infuriated by Maurice’s arrest of their king, looted Palestine. Maurice ended their subsidies. Khusrau wanted to marry the daughter of his Arab ally al-Numan III, who refused this ‘vile abomination’. Arab and Iranian mutual disdain is ancient. ‘Aren’t the cattle of The Darkness [females of Iran] enough for him,’ replied al-Numan, ‘or does he have to have Arab women as well?’ Khusrau had al-Numan trampled to death by elephants. The defiant Arabs fought the shah in the War of the Camel’s Udder. On both sides of the desert, the monarchs had cut the Arabs loose. Amid a strange atmosphere of apocalyptic expectation, the World Game started to spin in unpredictable ways.
Khusrau remained loyal to his ‘father’ Maurice until 602, when the emperor, who had driven his troops too hard, was overthrown by a mutiny led by Phocas, a centurion. Phocas made Maurice watch the beheading of his six sons before he was killed himself – later followed by his wife and three daughters – an atrocity that shocked the bishops of Rome in a west that still revered the Roman emperors.
It was now in a benighted Rome, neglected by its distant ruler Phocas, ruined by Justinian’s wars, decimated by the plague, repelled by Constantinopolitan murders, that a bishop started almost by default to assume a sacred importance. The bishops of Rome – not yet called popes – were chosen informally by other bishops, Roman magnates and the emperors of Constantinople. Now a pious, charismatic aristocrat, Gregory, by then aged fifty, who as prefect (mayor) of Rome had made his name by feeding the poor, became the bishop who laid the foundations of the papacy, and of western family values. The west was dominated by Frankish and Lombard kings who were Christian but openly practised polygyny, keeping many concubines as well as a main wife, while marrying cousins and nieces to keep property and power within their clans. Gregory called this incest and banned it, the start of the Church’s obsessive multi-century campaign to promote a new vision of marriage. Simultaneously, he launched a mission to convert northern pagans.
In 597 Gregory sent an envoy called Augustine to Kent. Britannia had already been converted to Christianity once – by Constantine – but in 410, when Roman troops left, Roman luxury and Christianity vanished in some places, endured in others. The loss of running water, hot baths and villas with glass windows was dramatic, but in some towns mosaic floors were still being laid in villas decades after the Romans had gone. The Christianity of the Britanno-Romans was frayed if not erased by pagan invaders, Angles and Saxons, who arrived from Germany. They slaughtered, raped and looted, their depredations recorded by the monkish historian Bede. Yet DNA reveals that the invaders also by force or affection had families with the Britanno-Romans and settled. While north-western Britannia remained defiantly Celtic under the kings of Strathclyde and others, the east – known as Anglia – was colonized by Angles, the south by Saxons, who founded their own kingdoms. The Saxon king of Kent, Aethelberht, was married to queen Bertha, daughter of the Frankish king of Paris, who had brought her own bishop with her. Gregory ordered Augustine to assert papal control.
Aethelberht acquiesced, and Augustine became the first bishop of Canterbury. Although it was much less dramatic than advertised, Gregory trumpeted the ‘conversion of Britannia’. The rise of the papacy was further boosted by what happened next in Constantinople.
When Khusrau learned of the assassination of his adoptive father Emperor Maurice, he went to war. The shah had much to prove: everything had to be gigantic. He would sit enthroned in the colossal
