Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

Jerusalem in the East, with its incomparably holy shrines, all had been lost to the empire of the New Rome. Twice the Saracens had sought to capture Constantinople herself, their armies massed jackal-like on the shore of Europe, their ships crowding the Bosphorus. Twice, by the grace of the Virgin, protectress of the Holy City, they had been repulsed. The empire had been held together.

Still, though, the flood tides had continued to lap at its ramparts. In southern Anatolia, along the margins of a dominion much shrunken from its former greatness, raiding parties of infidel fighters – ‘mujahidin’, as they termed themselves — had yearly stained the mountain passes with blood, until Nicephorus, ‘the pale death of the Saracens’, had at last, and with a mighty effort, succeeded in pushing back the frontier. Even now, with the empire at its largest extent in centuries, the soldiers of the New Rome could not afford to relax their guard. Just as they knew Constantinople to be the bulwark of Christendom, so too did their enemies. The West, which imagined the Saracens pagans like any other pagans, was deluding itself. These were no pagans. These were something infinitely more menacing. That Constantinople remained, as she had always been, the prize most hungered after by the Saracens reflected a sense of mission on their part that no pagan would ever have understood: the belief that all the universe would one day submit to their faith.

Where had it come from, this presumptuous and terrifying heresy? ‘Many false prophets will arise,’ Christ had warned his disciples, ‘and lead many astray’ – and so it had proved. ‘Mahound’, whom scholars in the West took for an idol, had in truth, their Byzantine counterparts knew, been something quite different: the founder of the Saracens’ pestiferous superstition, and a veritable ‘forerunner of Antichrist’. Through his life and teachings, he had provided his followers with their surest model of behaviour, a model that all in Constantinople found so abhorrent as to seem diabolical. Christ, seized by His enemies, had ordered Peter to put away his sword; but Mahound – or Mohammed, as the Saracens called their prophet—had gloried in war and conquest.

Startling evidence of this bellicosity had been obtained by Nicephorus, in the course of his victorious campaigns, when he had captured a fortress containing a truly fearsome relic: a sword that the Saracens claimed had belonged to their prophet himself. ‘Zulfiqar’, they called it; ‘the Cleaver of Vertebrae’. Fitting weapon for a man who had, if the Saracens’ own boasts were to be believed, fought in battles, staged mass executions and even commissioned murder squads. ‘Do prophets come with sword and chariot?’ So the Byzantines, from the very onset of the Saracens’ assaults upon them, had asked in revulsion. That Mohammed had indeed been ‘an impostor’, and his heresy an affliction sent by God as punishment for their sins, appeared to them beyond all doubt. There is no truth to be found in the so-called prophet. There is only the shedding of blood.’

It was true that the Saracens were not alone in believing that instruments of war might be cherished of God. Otto, as he advanced into enemy territory, had the Holy Lance go before him. The more barbarian he, the Byzantines might well have retorted. No matter that they had been obliged for centuries to fight against enemies pledged to the capture of their holy city and the utter prostration of their faith, they had still, throughout it all, clung with a heroic obstinacy to the conviction that war was evil – indeed, ‘the worst of all evils’. That this sat awkwardly with the venerable claims of the New Rome to universal rule was something that most in Constantinople were content, by and large, to overlook. Gazing into the murky depths of human nature, and drawing on the teachings of the Fathers of their Church, they had judged that a lust for conquest could not help but corrupt the soul. What surer proof of this was there than the Saracens themselves, in whom violence and sanctimony appeared blended to such deadly effect? ‘Fight those who believe not in God,’ Mohammed had commanded his followers: an injunction that, to the Byzantines who had for so long borne its brunt, appeared nothing but the most vicious hypocrisy, merely ‘a licence to loot in religion’s name’. Especially repugnant to them was the claim, which for centuries had inspired the Saracen faithful on their larcenous raids, that any warrior who fell far from his own country, in the struggle to spread the dominion of his faith, might be reckoned a martyr, his sins forgiven, his soul translated to paradise. When Nicephorus, who had lived altogether too long ‘in the shadows of swords’, had made the shocking demand of his bishops that they sanction a matching doctrine, one that would grant to any soldier who died in defence of the Christian empire a martyr’s crown, they had recoiled in the utmost horror. The Church’s ruling on the matter, they had pointed out with icy finality, was clear. Any soldier who shed blood, even in defence of his fellow Christians, existed in a state of sin: only three years of the strictest penance could serve to purge him of the offence. Trust to Providence, the Church advised, rather than to the swords of sinful men. God’s hand would achieve all. In due course – and perhaps sooner rather than later, if the forecasts of the world’s imminent end were to be believed – global dominion would be restored to Constantinople. In the meantime, however, it was the duty of the empire’s leaders to man the ramparts, to patrol the frontiers and always ‘to prefer peace above all else, and refrain from war’.

Small wonder, then, that the instincts of the Byzantine military, to a quite striking degree, should have inclined to the defensive. Better the negotiations of diplomats, the payment of bribes and tributes, even the exercise of treachery, than open combat. Battle and the