Chapter 12

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But all the victories against idols, idolaters and heretics do no more for Byzantium than they did for the Israelites. The remnant Roman Empire continues to Decompose. Visigoths and Ostrogoths set up camps just outside the Empire’s boundaries and insist on staying. Huns establish themselves just North of the boundary, defeat every army Byzantium sends against them, and force tribute payments to go to from the Roman Emperor to the “Scythian Shepherds.”

The Huns are no longer fleeing from Leviathan. Armored with Leviathanic traits and technologies during their long defensive war, they are now attacking on every front. They invaded China. They destroyed the Gupta Empire in India. They defeated Byzantium’s armies. They defeat Persia’s Zarathustrian ruler Firuz and install themselves in Persia’s eastern provinces.

The defeat of Persia’s armies by Huns is followed by a social revolution in Persia. Manicheans and radical Zarathustrians rise up against clergy and nobility, redistribute lands, and establish classless communities where sharing replaces hoarding. The Sassani aristocracy and the Zarathustrian clergy are overthrown. This is the oment the Byzantine Emperor chooses to invade Persia.

The prospect of Byzantine serfdom frightens Persian revolutionaries, familiar as they are with the numerous persecuted Christian heretics who have found refuge in Persia. The Persian aristocrats recruit an army of huns and Arabs to crush the revolution and massacre the Manicheans. The Persian nobility and clergy are restored — but not for long.

Both the Byzantines and the Persians enlarge their armies by recruiting in arabia. They do not know they are training their own gravediggers.

Now another one of Civilization’s great men accedes to the Byzantine throne, a warmonger named Justinian who tries to bring back the days when armored letgions devastated the world from one extremity to the other.

Autocrat Justinian dispatches a vast floating army to North Africa, to devastate the realm of the Donatist peasants’ Vandal deliverers.

The Byzantine army tries to reinclude Rome in the Roman Empire by ousting the Goths, and it proceeds to achieve this aim by invading and repopulating Italy. Peasants spared by the armies are killed by the famines. Italian cities are abandoned by their starving inhabitants. The Byzantines do smash the Ostrogoths and regain Rome, at least until the Lombards arrive and chase the Byzantine officials to their last Italian footholds, Venice and Ravenna.

After depopulating Italy, the Byzantine armies march against Persia.

All these wars exhaust the two remaining Leviathans west of China. These vast military undertakings with their costly technologies and enormous armies are all borne gy the enserfed peasantry, not by a mercantile network. Sassanid Persia is heir to the land worms of the Fertile Crescent, and there’s nothing Greek about the Byzantine Empire except the location and language.

Byzantium is no more an octopus than its Roman parent was. Byzantium is a worm with a fleet, and its wealth comes, not from the circulation of commodities in the holds of ships but from the burdens borne by the peasantry. This makes the peasants hospitable to all invaders who make incursions into Byzantine territory. Invaders grow more numerous the more the Leviathans stir up the Steppes and Arabia.

The Byzantines bribe people called Avars to plunder and destroy communities of Slavs.

The same year, Persians bribe iron-armed Turks to plunder Huns and other Turks.

The Slavs and Turks will later dismember both empires and be welcomed by peasants as deliverers from unbearable oppression.

In their continuing wars against each other, Byzantium and Persia have recourse to ever-more recruits from Arabia. The Persians, attacked by Arabs allied with Byzantium, occupy the Levant and Egypt as well as part of Anatolia. The Persians even reach the walls of Byzantine itself with an army of Avars, Bulgars, Jews and Slavs.

Byzantine Emperor Heraclius counterattacks with an army of Khazar Turks. The Byzantines and their Turkish troops overrun the Levant; they plant a True Cross in Jerusalem to celebrate their victory over the Zarathustrians, Jews and heretics.

If the Byzantines know that a man called Muhammad and his followers are just then occupying Medina, this information cannot be very important to them.

Four years later this Muhammad’s followers defeat a Byzantine army in the southern Levant. During the next seven years, these Arabs who are perfectly familiar with Byzantine technology and military tactics occupy all of the Roman province of Syria including Jerusalem as well as the provincial capital Caesaera, all of Egypt including Greek Alexandria and, a generation a a half later, all of North Africa, taken so recently from the Vandals at such a great cost, including Byzantine Carthage. And wherever the invaders go, they are welcomed as liberators by Byzantium’s oppressed peasants and persecuted heretics.

Now the Roman Empire is confined to Anatolia and the Balkans. Muhammad’s followers are now of interest to all Byzantium, whereas Rome’s former far-flung provinces are of interest only antiquarians.

The successor to the monster that once encased a third of Eurasia’s peoples still exists, but it is no longer a viable Leviathan. The capital, pretending that it is still the head of a world-embracing Leviathan, continues to maintain an imperial court and its corps of guards, a nobility whose former far-flung Latifundia are now as distant as Rome’s former provinces, priests enough to shepher a continent of sheep, as well as the imperial army.

The remaining peasants are now virtually expropriated. The consequences are obvious. Bulgar peasants align themselves with a local potentate who proclaims himself Khan, Slavic peasants proclaim themselves independent of the Byzantines, and at last Anatolian peasants welcome Seljuk Turks as deliverers from an oppression beyond human endurance.

Then Frankish and Norman knights arrive from Rome’s former western provinces, not as allies, but as seekers of spoils in what remains of the Empire.

And the most miserable moment comes when Venetians, descendants of the last Byzantines in Italy, divert the Fourth Crusade and make Byzantium itself the victim of the greedy fanaticism of Western Knights.

Constantine’s polis is all that’s left of the Roman Empire.

The fall took long, so long that none remember what was supposed to follow the fall of the Fourth Kingdom. Consequently none are surprised when the Turkish army of a certain Uthman moves across Anatolia (a region called “Rome” by the Turks) and turns Constantine’s polis into the capital of a fifth kingdom.