A Criminal History of Mankind (39 page)

In Ravenna, one of Honorius’s eunuchs brought him the news. Honorius apparently kept chickens and was particularly fond of a cock named Roma. When the eunuch said ‘Rome is lost,’ Honorius gave a yelp of agony. ‘That’s impossible. He was just eating out of my hand.’ When told that the eunuch meant the city, not the bird, he gave a sigh of relief.

After six days the Goths left Rome, which now had nothing more to offer them, and marched south, taking Nola and Capua on the way. Alaric’s fleet sailed for North Africa; but his luck had run out. They were scattered by winter storms, and Alaric died shortly afterwards.

It was the beginning, not the end, of Rome’s troubles; but the story of its remaining sixty-five years as the capital of an empire has a curiously repetitive air. Honorius’s successor, the emperor Valentinian III, was also lazy, foppish and vicious. During his unfortunately long reign, the Vandals crossed from Spain to North Africa and devastated the Roman province there with a thoroughness that has made their name a byword for mindless destruction. Valentinian’s sister was a nymphomaniac named Honoria, who got herself pregnant by the court chamberlain and was packed off to the care of some religious aunts in Constantinople. Bored and sex-starved, she wrote a letter to a sinister barbarian named Attila the Hun, begging him to come and rescue her. Attila was a descendant of the Mongols who had been driven out of northern China, and Honoria was undoubtedly unaware that he was short and squat, with a face like an ape. Attila probably had no sexual interest in Honoria; he already had several dozen wives and, to a puritanical savage, the knowledge that she had already got herself pregnant would seem disgusting. But the opportunity for blackmail was too good to miss; so Attila sent Valentinian a message asking for his sister’s hand, and demanding half the empire as dowry. Valentinian refused indignantly, and Attila declared war. Fortunately for Italy, he decided that Gaul would be an easier target, and swept across Europe, capturing city after city. If he had captured France, present day Englishmen and Frenchmen would probably have slit eyes and yellow features. But a Roman general defeated him at Chalons, and Attila led his army back into Italy, where Valentinian was forced to bribe him to go away. Soon after this, Attila died in a manner worthy of a conqueror, bursting an artery in the act of taking the maidenhead of a beautiful virgin.

Valentinian himself was eventually murdered by a general named Maximus, whose wife he had raped. Maximus made the mistake of marrying Valentinian’s empress Eudoxia, who disliked him so much that she sent a message to the Vandals in North Africa asking them to come and save her. Honoria’s example should have taught her better. The Vandals came and sacked Rome, and when Eudoxia rushed with outstretched hands to meet them, stripped her of her jewellery and carried her and her two daughters off to Africa as slaves.

This was virtually the end of Rome. It staggered on for another twenty years under various emperors and pretenders, the last of whom was a mere boy, Romulus Augustulus. By this time the Roman Empire was really in the hands of several barbarians who had enlisted as Roman soldiers; when they asked the emperor’s father to share out the empire, he refused, and they murdered him. The boy-Caesar resigned after only eleven months. After that, there were no more Roman emperors, either in Rome or Ravenna. The Christian pope remained the real master of Rome, as he has to this day.

The story of Constantinople must be continued for a few more years - the throne endured for another thousand - because it is the necessary prelude to the next stage in the history of Europe.

The emperor Justinian, who came to the throne in 527 A.D., was possibly the worst ruler since Caligula and killed more people than all the other Roman emperors put together. This was not out of sadism, but because he fancied himself another Constantine and tried to force all the pagans in his empire to accept Christianity; those who refused were killed, and vast numbers refused. He left behind a legacy of bitterness that paved the way for the success of Mohammedanism a century later. It is one of the tragedies of European history that this weak, vicious and disagreeable man held the throne for so long - thirty-eight years. It is not, however, a mystery; he owed most of his success to his empress, the ex-prostitute Theodora.

Justinian met Theodora four years before he became emperor. She was the daughter of a man who looked after the circus animals, and she and her two sisters went on the stage as members of the Roman equivalent of a song and dance act. They became high-class tarts; even as a child, Theodora knew how to satisfy lovers - the historian Procopius said that she was so expert at fellatio that people said she had a second vagina in her face.

Justinian quickly became her slave and, when he became emperor, had the law changed so he could marry her. She proved to be an excellent choice; she had a stronger character than Justinian, and a good head for business.

Trouble almost ended his reign before it had properly started. Constantinople was obsessed by sport, and its two leading factions - equivalents of modern football hooligans - were called the Greens and the Blues. These also took opposite sides in one of the sillier Christian controversies, the question of whether the divine and human natures in Christ were joined together or separated; in the true Christian tradition, they reinforced their arguments by murdering one another. In 532, the prefect of police ordered them to stop the killing, and in the resulting riots, half Constantinople was set on fire. Justinian was terrified and wanted to flee; Theodora called him a coward and refused to budge. Justinian’s greatest general, Belisarius, settled the matter by taking his army into the streets and killing thirty thousand people, which convinced the Blues and Greens that they had better return to a less ambitious scale of homicide.

Unfortunately, Justinian was deeply impressed by this beautifully simple way of settling political questions, and decided to apply it to the rest of his empire. He sent Belisarius off to North Africa to convert the Vandals; these were, it is true, already Christians, but of the Arian persuasion. Since Belisarius happened to be the greatest military genius of his age, he was able to carry out this order with magnificent efficiency, exterminating all who declined to believe that Jesus had no beginning. Next, Belisarius was sent off to convert the Goths, who were also Arians; this took him five years and drastically reduced the Goth population. Justinian was by this time in the grip of a curious dilemma. He was convinced that Belisarius wanted to usurp the throne - a suspicion that was entirely without foundation, Belisarius being almost moronically loyal. So when he had to send Belisarius off to Syria to fight the Persian king Chosroes, he reduced his armies to a minimum, half-hoping to see him defeated. In spite of this, Belisarius performed miracles and came back victorious; at which point, Justinian allowed him to vanish into more-or-less dishonourable retirement. Since Belisarius also had a nymphomaniac wife, who had seduced his adopted son, he had more than enough to occupy his mind until Justinian was forced to call him from retirement to drive the Huns away. After that victory, Justinian had him arrested on a trumped-up charge and thrown into jail. The death of both men put an end to a story that would no doubt have gone on repeating itself indefinitely, since Belisarius seems to have been incapable of learning from experience. As soon as Justinian was in the tomb, his empire collapsed like a pack of cards.

We have been witnessing once again the sheer inadequacy of human beings to deal with affairs that extend more than a short distance beyond their personal horizons. Justinian was not actually a bad man and his achievement in rebuilding the empire, in creating vast public works, in reforming the law and improving administration, has led historians to label him ‘the Great’. But the moment we look at Justinian the man, we can see why human history is basically a record of ‘crimes and follies’. To place him in charge of an empire was like placing a ten-year-old boy in charge of a transatlantic jet. He was simply too childish for the job.

This, we can see, was also the trouble with the Roman Empire. It grew of its own accord, like a snowball rolling downhill, because the challenge of invaders turned the Romans into soldiers. But from the founding of the Republic, it was built on selfishness and injustice, and its expansion beyond the shores of Italy was an act of criminal aggression. Yet Rome flourished because it had its own peculiar genius: a genius for imposing order. It was this genius that was lacked by the barbarians - the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns: this is why they vanished from history so quickly.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the failure of the Roman emperors was the failure of Rome itself. With a few rare exceptions, they were egomaniacs who loved the sensation of power; and Rome developed the same taste for giving orders. In its early days, Rome was secure because men were proud to be called Roman citizens. In the Christian era, this came to mean less and less. The citizens had no say in the running of the empire, or even of their own city. In order to have influence, you had to fight your way into a position of power. This explains why the citizens of Thessalonica and the Blues and Greens of Constantinople were so obsessed by their chariot races; they were the only outlet for surplus energies. The citizens were treated like children and they behaved like children. Meanwhile, Justinian and Theodora ruled like juvenile delinquents. And Europe’s greatest attempt at civilisation collapsed into the chaos of the Dark Ages.

EUROPE IN CHAOS

To grasp what has happened to our earth in this thousand-year period of the Roman Empire, let us imagine that we are visitors from another star system, hovering over the surface of the earth in the year 500 B.C. From a thousand miles out in space, it looks hospitable enough, with its blue-green haze and its misty seas. But the polar ice caps are considerably larger than in our own time. In fact, this has only happened in the past few centuries, for the climate of our planet swings through its variations every thousand years or so. In the time of King Minos it had been as warm as today; a thousand years later, it had become cold and wet. Our space travellers would see no sign of human habitation, even from a mere fifty miles or so. The cold has driven civilisation into the valleys; the higher passes are closed, and glaciers like those of the last ice age have appeared once more.

Much of this earth is covered with forest - Russia is one vast carpet of forest, which still conceals the gigantic prehistoric ox called the Auroch. But the forests are shrinking, replaced by peat bogs - damp, marshy ground covered with plants like sphagnum moss. The space ship can float over whole continents - such as Australia - without seeing a sign of life except for ostriches.

Over the Americas, the travellers would have to fly low and search hard for signs of human existence. In fact, a mongoloid race - of the same stock as the Huns - had moved on to the American continent two or three thousand years earlier, when there was a land bridge across what is now the Bering Strait joining eastern Russia to Alaska. These Mongols had slowly penetrated south. On the prairies of Arizona, which are green and rich, they hunt the bison and the reindeer; farther south, in the forests of Yucatan, they have begun to create the civilisation of the Mayas.

If the space travellers moved west, they would pass over the islands of Japan, inhabited by a race who moved down from Siberia; the Japanese are as primitive as the American Indians; they wear clothes of bark and skins and live by fishing and hunting, with a little agriculture. China at first seems another empty continent, for it contains very few human beings in comparison to its size; its largest pocket of civilisation is to be found in the extreme east, in the Shantung peninsula, and the capital, Anyang, is located on a bend of the Yellow River. Here the upper classes live in wooden houses built on platforms of earth, and they wear linen, wool and even silk. But most of the people of China are peasants who live in clay huts, just above the flood level, in extreme misery and poverty. Canals have not yet revolutionised the agriculture of China, so the areas of cultivated land are hard to see from the air. A middle-aged philosopher named K’ung, later latinised as Confucius, has just set out on his travels, looking for a wise ruler who will put his precepts into practice; but he will die without finding him.

The sub-continent of India is in much the same stage of civilisation. There are parts where life has not advanced beyond the Stone Age. In the north, the Aryans have brought their culture and their religion, and the number of temples points to a highly developed religious life. In fact, Gautama, the Buddha, is now alive, and has achieved a far wider acceptance than his contemporary Confucius in China. But then, his philosophy of renunciation is appropriate in this poverty-stricken land. Another great teacher, Mahavira, is also wandering around and preaching; his doctrine is closer to the ideas that Jesus will preach five centuries later: reverence for all life. As the travellers move westward, along the Indus valley, they observe that these human beings are more interested in conquest than in high moral doctrines; the Persian king Darius is in the process of adding this part of India to his empire. And as they move west towards the (Caspian Sea, the travellers will observe the first signs of a great civilisation: the mighty cities with their walls, temples and palaces. This Persian Empire has no less than four capitals: Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, and its towns and provinces are joined by long, straight roads with post stations every few miles. Yet in a mere ten years from now, in 490 B.C., the Greeks will call an abrupt halt to the spread of this great empire at the battle of Marathon.

And so the travellers come to the true centre of civilisation on this blue-green planet: the Mediterranean. They can observe Athens in its finest period, and Sparta at the height of its power. The Roman republic has only just come into existence, and is being threatened again by her old enemy - and neighbour - the Etruscans. This new republic is healthy, vigorous, and full of high ideals - many of them derived from the Greeks; the centuries of warfare, murder and betrayal lie ahead. Across the Mediterranean, Carthage is already a sea power and has waged several successful wars - at this stage it looks like the chief contender for the position of master of the Mediterranean. Darius the Persian has not penetrated that far to the west, and he never will; but he has conquered Egypt. And the Jews, only just back in Jerusalem from their Babylonian exile, are also subjects of the Persian monarch.