An Age of Magic

 

This was the epic age of the Teutonic tribes. Theoderic the Great (454 – 526 AD) – “Dietrich of Bern” – and Attila the Hun (406 – 453 AD) – “King Etzel” – are characters in the Nibelungen saga; the formidable Hagen is the prototype of Darth Vader. The glow of the Hagias Sophia gave the Golden Horn its name; according to Roman propaganda the treacherous city on the Bosporus was now the New Jerusalem. The David and Bathsheba of this New Jerusalem – Emperor Justinian (483 – 565 AD) and his wife Theodora (500 – 548 AD) – were doing a Bonny and Clyde act. Both invented countless schemes to invade the pockets of their subjects. The historian Procopius (500 – 565 AD) knew the two personally. He was not the only one to think of them as a pair of demons, sent to harass the human race. Justinian was a hyperactive bat, never sitting down for a meal but devouring scraps on the go; Theodora spent one half of the day on her beauty sleep and the other half masturbating behind a veiled window to the torture chambers in the dungeons. A regular to the brothels would recognize Theodora’s type: quick-witted and sarcastic, with a short attention span.

It was her custom to keep a petitioner standing for days in a stuffy and overcrowded antechamber without chairs and bathroom facilities. Then in the company of her maidservants she would flip with breakneck speed through the most elaborate deposition, only to dismiss the petitioner with a joke about his cramps: “you better take care of your hernia” (Procopius).

The currency experienced a meltdown and in the year 476 AD the western half of the Roman Empire declared bankruptcy. The last emperor of the West retired to a chicken farm near Naples. His former chief of staff waited for instructions from Constantinople. If he expected to receive accreditation as the new governor of Italy, he was sadly mistaken. There was already a successor waiting to replace him. We like to think of the fifth century as a time of bad sanitation, bad government, bad food, bad teeth, bad hygiene, bad everything. In the real world there was undeniable vitality, a reckless and irresponsible exuberance and curiosity. In Toulouse a clairvoyant engineer attached waterwheels to the hull of a ship using a pair of oxen as the propellant. Byzantine monks returned from a long journey to the East. Hidden in their hollow walking staffs they had smuggled the eggs of silk worms through the Chinese border controls. It broke the monopoly of China, but silk still continued to be manufactured under a monopoly. The Byzantine emperor’s financial wizard, John of Cappadocia, made sure of it. A textile manufacturer In Syria carved patterns into wood and printed it on the fabric. The Chinese used the exact same technology for printing books.

There was an increase in the population. We hear of people reaching a biblical age. Many of the key players began their career late in life. Narses was in his sixties when he started his career in the services of Justinian and Theodora, and he was still making plans for the future at the age of 98. King Gaiseric died at 88, Emperor Justinian, like his uncle, at 83 and we hear of centenarians in the monastic community.

Stripped of gold and ornaments, the imposing facades of the ancient temples were still maintained, although the populace was using these premises as public urinals. In the capital cities the magistrates continued handing out foodstuff to the citizenry, a handout irrespective of actual need. The vast public baths, the games in the arena, the theatre, the races in the hippodrome continued on the public budget. In Trier, Carthage and Rome, the people, although mostly Christian, remained convinced that the occult power of the games in the arena protracted the survival of their city. With insane expenses to their private purse, the sponsors accommodated ever more grandiose displays of water battles and wild beast hunts. The marvelous and wonderful captured everybody’s imagination. People told stories of a traveler who’d lost his way in the desert and delirious with thirst was found by a satyr. It was a satyr of the goaty kind, walking on hooves, with pointy ears and hairy thighs. The strange creature provided food and water and the traveler repaid kindness with kindness, inviting this descendant of Pan to be his guest in Alexandria. At the traveler’s home the satyr suddenly fell ill and died. Pickled in salt the corpse was sent to Antioch, presented to the Emperor and held on display there for many years. This was widely believed to be true. Even the eminent Jerome (347 – 420 AD) kept an open mind whether such creatures indeed existed – perhaps somewhere in the remote reaches of the antipodes, hanging there upside down like bats in a cave?

The gods of the ancients had retired to the edges of the world, lingering on there in the shadows. People thought of them as demons or, sometimes, as benevolent genies. Baptized or not, everybody shared a belief in demons and blood sucking Lamias. The Christians in Africa continued celebrating the pagan cult of daemon coelestis (Salvian, I, c, and lib VII, VIII).

There are more epistolary collections from the 5th century than of all previous ages together. It was the time when the autobiography was born. Travelers have left us their itineraries, there was an Indian summer of outstanding poetry and some of the greatest preachers of the Church left us the tomes of their sermons. The Gentile intelligentsia, many of them formally baptized without really meaning it, produced a last bumper-crop of talent. The Athenian Proclus (412 – 485 AD), the last in the golden chain of Neo-Platonic philosophers, was a mathematician of note. In Africa, sometime after the invasion of the Vandals, Martianus Minneus Felix Capella single-handedly invented the medieval curriculum of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. He wrote a book On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts. In Constantinople another immigrant from Africa, Nonnos of Panopolis (400 – 476 AD), the most versatile poet in the Greek language ever, composed the Dionysiaca, a story about the life and exploits of the god Dionysus. A work of sheer genius, baroque, complex, and of insufferable monotony; the Finnegan’s Wake of ancient times. After 21,000 hexameters of unrelenting mythology, Nonnos finally got fed up and went to the church next door for a dip into the baptismal basin. He took holy orders and later published a poetic paraphrase of the Gospel of John.

By far the finest philosophical brain of the period was St. Augustine (354 – 430 AD). Apart from his theological preoccupations he is mainly remembered for his speculations on the character of time. His dialogue on the nature of language is an under-appreciated piece of advanced reasoning.

A certain Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (late 5th – early 6th century) was living in Carthage, which was still a cosmopolitan metropolis when the Vandals made it their capital. Fulgentius was a schoolmaster; he excelled in bilingual epigrams in Latin and the language of the Vandals and has left us 75 allegorical narratives on mythological subjects with biblical parallels. Urban education was still going strong. Under King Theoderic Italy experienced a first renaissance. The state kept teachers and doctors on the public budget, the senators in Rome received compensation for their expenses in the election campaigns. Everywhere the builders erected scaffoldings; sculptors and silversmiths produced a dazzling array of miniature work. Yet we should not romanticize the period. Theoderic the Great was a tyrant. At the drop of a hat, members of the opposition found themselves imprisoned, waiting to get their eyes gouged out before been bludgeoned to death. In 524 AD, one of these dissidents on death row, Boethius (480 – 524 AD), wrote an all time golden book, The Consolation of Philosophy. It remained a bestseller and perhaps the most loved book throughout the medieval ages. The author was a highly educated mediator between Latin and Geek. He translated Aristotle and Porphyry. He was a Christian and has also left a body of homilies. The Consolation, however, is taking recourse exclusively to Gentile philosophy, and Christianity is not even mentioned.

Yet at the same time the big monasteries begun recruiting the very young. These adolescent monks and nuns did not simply vanish behind the cloister walls. Years later, they reappeared as the new clerical elite with a Christian education based exclusively on liturgy and the Bible. What this means we see these days in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Education is mandatory but the state will not spend a single penny on public schools. So the pauper, who can’t afford the fees for private schooling, will send his kids to the Maddrassas where the only item on the curriculum is the Quran and nothing but the Quran. This has become the breeding ground of the Taliban. Something very similar happened in the fifth century. It inaugurated the universal decline of urban education, and in 529 AD, on Good Friday, Emperor Justinian shut down for good the last remaining institution of higher learning, founded by Aristotle himself, 900 years before. Justinian's decree drove into exile every Gentile lecturer if he refused baptism. It took a treaty, presented by foreign powers on the point of a scimitar, before some of the more prominent exiles could rejoin their families and end their lives in obscurity and peace. The Christian apparatchiks decided, if the end of Hellenistic learning meant the end of learning, so be it. Pope Gregory, “the Great” (590 – 604 AD), found it was his most pressing business to reprimand a cleric in France for being “in the habit of expounding grammar. This thing we strongly disapprove,” said Gregory, “it causes us groaning and sadness.” And as late as 1049 AD, a synod in Constantinople still anathematized those “who go through a course of Hellenic studies and teach them without hesitation.” So when in the 13th century Dante celebrated Homer as the king of the poets, it was a mere name to him. He had never seen any of Homer’s works. There existed no translation, and Dante, like most of even the well educated, didn’t speak Greek.

Back in the 5th century this was still unthinkable. Synesius of Cyrene (373 – 414 AD) was a true gentlemen and scholar. In his hours of leisure he wrote allegorical satires about the corruption of Roman officials. He married in 403 AD and was totally taken by surprise when six years later, with popular acclaim, a committee of Christians invested him as Bishop of Ptolemais. Apparently Synesius neither received holy orders nor was he ever baptized. This didn’t prevent him to become an efficient cleric. Yet before taking up office, he insisted on written guarantees from the Bishop in Alexandria, allowing him to differ in his opinions on the creation of the soul, the literal belief in the resurrection and the end of the world. In other words he never abandoned his Gentile beliefs. Synesius had the good fortune to end his life unmolested from the fanatics and doctrinaires.

A peace sometimes given to the meek, other people were less fortunate. Fanatically unwashed and flea infested, the monks either camped out in a solitary makeshift shelter or incarcerated themselves in a monastic compound where they flogged each other to the point of sepsis. In Antioch, Martha, the mother of Simeon Stylite the Younger (521 – 597 AD) trained her seven-year-old son to perch like a bird on a tall pillar. He became the first of a whole gaggle of child saints, crapping and peeing on the gawking rubbernecks underneath. The pillars overlooked wide stretches of desert where the wind carried from the monasteries the hollering and wailing of monks and hermits suffering from involuntary hallucinations. It was not uncommon to hear the voices of “wailing infants, the lament of women, the roar of lions, the stomping feet of an army on the march.” To draw a line here between asceticism and mental instability is almost impossible. The writer and poet Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was institutionalized for thinking that “it seemed so silly to wash my clothes and my hair one day when I would have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it” (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar). Living on “one grain of spelt a day, picked from the dung of a camel” (Jerome), one of these unfortunates was heard to scream on the top of his voice when he felt “a tormentor spring upon his back and drive his heels into his sides” (Jerome, Vita Hilarionis); a scene as if from J.K. Rowling’s book. A sight that made the passing tourist pause: “Fleeing from the light,” says Namatianus, “these men call themselves monks or solitaries. They fear the gifts of fortune, and from the apprehension of losing them embrace voluntary wretchedness. Unable to support the blessings of the human condition, they exercise on their own bodies the tortures which the hand of justice is inflicting on fugitive slaves" (Itinerary I: 439-448).

Among the major players of the period the Vandal nation was the smallest. Harassed from all sides by Huns, Goths, and Romans, the Vandals took to the road. Persian tribesmen, the Alani, lost their leader in battle and voluntarily placed themselves under the authority of the Vandal king. So when in Constantinople the Alani Flavius Ardabur Aspar (400 – 471 AD) rose to the rank of supreme commander of the Byzantine forces, the king of the Vandals was Aspar's king as well. For the moment this didn’t mean a whole lot.

After years of travel and defeat, a beaten people, the Vandals and their allies crossed the Pyrenees to Spain in 409 AD. They settled in comfort, farmed the land and gave Andalusia its name. In 420 AD, the Vandal-Alani alliance even defeated a small Gothic raiding party in Roman pay. But the Vandal leadership knew, their vineyards grew on borrowed time. The western branch of the much stronger Gothic nation continued filtering through the Pyrenees and their settlements gradually encircled the possessions of the Vandals. So when a new King acceded to the throne of the Vandals, he proposed a radical solution to the problem. King Gaiseric (389 – 477 AD) was a medium sized man with a limp and three sons taller than him, a man of few words who never let on what he was thinking. He transformed an intimidated crowd of fugitives into a warlike nation of seafarers who commanded the strongest navy in the Mediterranean. In 428 AD, King Gaiseric received an invitation. His "Illustrious and Magnificent Highness," the Roman Governor of Africa, Count Boniface, contemplated sedition from Italy. It came to hostilities between Rome and Carthage. In return for the promise of land allotments, Boniface asked the Vandals to send him troops. He really thought he could buy the king’s services for a stretch of barely arable land towards the Sahara, where the Vandal settlers were supposed to shore up defenses against a new breed of raiders, nomads attacking on camels. (In 272 AD the Roman military imported the camel from the Arabian Peninsula. It soon changed hands to the natives.)

King Gaiseric spotted the opportunity of a lifetime.

The province of Africa was the breadbasket of the Roman world and seemed indispensable for Italy’s economy. North Africa was a torn country of religious schisms between Catholics and Donatists, Donatists and Montanists, Montanists and Tertullianists. When the exchange of harsh words failed to make an impression, their conflicts often ended in bloodshed.

Africa seemed an easy prey. King Gaiseric convinced his people to give up all their possessions in Spain and entrust their fortunes to the sea. He held a census. The figure added up to barely 80,000 people: the Vandals, their Alani confederates, women, children and slaves, fugitives and political refugees picked up from every nation along the long trail of their wanderings. In three waves King Gaiseric ferried this motley crowd across the straights of Gibraltar and forged a Vandal kingdom on the Roman territories between Hippo Regius (the modern Annaba) and Tripoli, with the third biggest city of the Mediterranean as his capital: Carthage, (the modern Tunis), in which the population outnumbered the Vandals several times over.

North Africa was virtually denuded of defenders and yet it took Gaiseric eleven years before he actually could make Carthage his residence. Count Boniface had realized his mistake and tried to stop the Vandals’ advance. His men got caught up with fugitives from all over the country who sought safety behind the walls of Hippo Regius. A long siege brought misery and disease to both sides of the walls. In the streets of Hippo, Saint Augustine led a procession to the church, praying for relief. He combined this prayer with an appeal to turn this war into a religious confrontation between Roman Catholics and Vandal Arians. This radicalized the conflict and the consequences remained with the country for decades to come, while the instigator of the sufferings died in the third month of the siege, in 430 AD.

Over a year later, Hippo was still under siege when a Byzantine expedition force under Marshal Aspar landed at Carthage. The marshal handed the troops over to Count Boniface and himself took position on the walls of Carthage to watch the events unfolding. The Vandals were outnumbered, yet they consummately routed the Count’s positions and perhaps not unexpected, Boniface shipped back to Italy leaving it to Aspar to pick up the pieces.

The marshal and King Gaiseric exchanged gifts and hammered out a formal treaty that initially did not include the possession of Carthage. As a gesture of good will, Gaiseric agreed to send his oldest son Prince Hunneric as a hostage to the court at Ravenna. At the same time and unknown to Aspar, King Gaiseric struck an alliance with Attila the Hun. After eight years in Ravenna, on October 19, 439 AD, Prince Hunneric took leave from his gracious hosts and returned to Africa on a flotilla of Vandal navy cruisers. In a surprise assault the prince overpowered the harbor defenses of Carthage and conquered the city, presenting it to his father as a birthday gift. The secure moorings and supplies of the strongest naval base in the Mediterranean now belonged to the Sea Lord of the Vandals. Yet this was a violation of the treaty with Byzantium. If Gaiseric had meant to test Aspar’s resolve he was in for an unpleasant surprise. In 440 AD, a Byzantine fleet defeated the Vandals in the waters of Sicily. To gain time for regrouping, Gaiseric sent his envoy to Attila and asked a favor, throwing in some treasure into the bargain. Attila agreed to pay the Byzantines a visit. King Gaiseric had no intention to keep this a state secret and the Byzantine forces returned to base. Premature, as it turned out.

The burghers of Azimuntium, a small town in Thrace on the border to modern Bulgaria, had no garrison to defend the less than impressive looking walls and depended entirely on emergency levis from the town’s citizenry. No match for the Huns, one should think. Yet the Azimuntians sallied out and raided the Huns with impunity, even captured hostages, then negotiated a prisoner exchange but executed the Huns they held prisoner without holding their end of the bargain. And Attila, the mighty Attila, “the scourge of God,” was powerless. His envoys even lodged a complaint at the court of Constantinople, demanding compensation, but only received a shrug: “As much as we like to comply, we’ve lost jurisdiction over the Azimuntians. Must be the water down there, it makes people cranky.” The great chieftain was beginning to look ridiculous. So, did he call together his confederates and in full force came to wipe out Azimuntium? This would have been overkill and make him look even more ridiculous. Instead Attila negotiated and offered more hostages as guarantee for the safe conduct of the Azimuntian envoys. He got nothing and his hostages were executed as well, apparently even before the town’s returning delegation had crossed the gate.

In 443 AD the Vandal kingdom became the first foreign nation to receive diplomatic recognition as an autonomous state on Roman territory. The Empress Eudoxia betrothed her daughter to King Gaiseric’s son Prince Hunneric, hoping to at least maintain an alliance with the former territories.

Gaiseric's kingdom stretched all the way to the Balearics, Sardinia and Corsica, including Sicily and the isles in the Adriatic. In Africa there was the inevitable land reform and some of the wealthiest people in the ancient world went into exile, singing for a meal in the streets of Antioch. It was unheard of; the camel had passed through the eye of a needle. Only yesterday these people had been proverbial for owning the whole of Africa – between the four of them. Meanwhile the populace in Rome celebrated a major victory over Attila’s Huns in the fields of Chalon, and although the retreating Attila was raiding the north of Italy, he felt not strong enough to pursue his campaign without calling in his favor from King Gaiseric. The Vandal king could have safely ignored the demand, but once again the diplomat in Carthage spotted an opportunity. Letters crossed the Sea between Hunneric and his mother in law in Ravenna. Subsequently the Empress Eudoxia arranged for the assassination of the Roman general who just had defeated the Huns. This was the favor; next season Italy would be wide open for the Huns. In his Hungarian camp, Attila celebrated the news with a marriage to a Gothic maiden. The next morning he was found dead in his bed. This, however, was not part of King Gaiseric’s plan; the maiden was on the payroll of the secret service in Constantinople. But it was part of Gaiseric’s plan to drop behind the back of the assassins an anonymous tip to the troops of the murdered Roman general. In a riot the angry soldiery murdered the teenage emperor and, as expected, the Empress Eudoxia, fearing for her life, wrote to Carthage for help. After all, Gaiseric was her daughter’s father in law. This gave the wily Vandal the pretext he needed. On Mai 31, 455 AD, King Gaiseric took command in person, sailing for Ostia, the seaport of the city of Rome.

The word “Vandal” and “vandalism” these days stands for mayhem and mindless destruction. Nothing could be further from truth. King Gaiseric assured the intimidated magistrates that there would be no killing, no destruction of buildings, public or private, and no torturing to discover the location of hidden treasure. He kept his promise. The Vandal expedition force entered the city of Rome without firing a shot. The plunder was conducted with dispassionate precision and discipline. For two weeks the Vandals collected all the items on their shopping list, treasures, statues, the gilded tiles on the roof of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Everything was carted to Ostia and loaded into the waiting ships. The fleet departed in good order, nobody in Rome came to harm. The Empress Eudoxia and her daughters sailed with Gaiseric into exile. Back home, however, there was trouble. The Vandal nobility resented the illegitimate birth of King Gaiseric. Encouraged by enemies across the border, they repeatedly plotted the assassination of the king.

The Vandal barons were connoisseurs of Arabian horses and looked with disdain on the new breed of Gaiseric’s weather hardened mariners. Perfumed and pampered, the Vandal grandee presided over opulent banquets in mosaic-incrusted halls of marble. He wore long-flowing, almost transparent silk robes and had a maiden with a basket full of rose petals walk before him. The puritan temper of King Gaiseric had no patience with these treacherous ponces and his retribution was harsh, inflicting heavy losses on the Vandal aristocracy. The actual number of executions remained a closely guarded state secret. The king appointed his cabinet strictly on merit and recruited many of his administrators from the Roman civil service.

The faith of the Vandals was Arian, but Gaiseric himself was baptized as a Catholic before he converted to Arianism. He expected the same from the foreigners in his administration. Not every Roman patrician collaborated, and a vessel with refugees set sail for Constantinople and an uncertain future of hopes and handouts. Since Augustine’s inflammatory appeal, the Catholic clergy continued opposing the Vandals every step on the way. Gaiseric closed their churches and deported the priests who refused to perform the Arian liturgy. The king felt he couldn’t tolerate resistance in any form; he didn’t have much of an army.

His forces on land barely amounted to 5,000 cavalry, most of them Alani, mounted archers without heavy armor. The two Gothic Nations could put 60,000 ironclad horsemen into the field, forerunners of the medieval knight. At least on two occasions it was the loyalty of his Iranian guards, which protected the king from assassins. The Vandal troops were thinly stretched. Time and again the camel-nomads punched through the defenses towards the Sahara, and in one of these skirmishes King Gaiseric lost the tallest of his sons, Prince Genzo. Observers from abroad took notice.

In 468 AD, if the figures can be trusted, Constantinople launched the greatest amphibian venture before the landing in the Normandy. The Vandals got off to a bad start, lost their overseas bases and were defeated in two naval battles near Sicily and Sardinia. Unimpeded the Byzantine expedition force landed at Tripoli. The Vandals threw at them their best troops, even camel corps from the nomads, but were forced to retreat, screening the main-road to Carthage. It was time for King Gaiseric to pull a rabbit out of the hat; and he did. When the Byzantine main fleet dropped anchor at Cape Bon, Tunisia, Vandal emissaries approached the commanding admiral and initiated negotiations of surrender, buying time for Gaiseric’s next move. In a night attack the outnumbered Vandal navy burned to smoldering ember half of the Byzantine fleet, the rest slipped anchor and fled in panic. It was the signal for the Byzantine troops in Libya to run for their transports in Tripoli before they, too, could be destroyed. Another fleet of the Byzantines could have saved the day, yet mysteriously the commander was found strangled in his cabin. Who was behind the assassination has remained a well kept secret ever since.

Constantinople was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. It would take decades to recover the losses. Marshal Aspar was forced into retirement. Three years later an assassin killed him and his family in his own home. For King Gaiseric this was the signal to land raiding parties in the territories of the East. The imperial court in Constantinople could not afford another war and sent its best diplomats to Carthage. The negotiations ended with a full recognition of all Vandal possessions in exchange for the prisoners and hostages held in Carthage. As a political bargain chip, Gaiseric threw in a voluntary recall of all Catholic clerics living in exile and permitted to reopen the Catholic churches. The treaty was signed, the Vandal cruisers lifted the blockade, the kingdom was secure. For two generations at least, before Gaiseric’s inapt successors would lose it all.

The other nations took notice of Gaiseric’s example and began establishing their sway over Roman territories in the North. The Franks gave Gaul their name, the two branches of the Goths established kingdoms in Italy and Spain. Spain remained a Gothic possession until the Arabs invaded it, but in Italy, after King Theoderic’s death, Byzantine diplomacy and a small expedition corps ended a brilliant reign. The Byzantine commander ordered the evacuation of the city of Rome and repopulated the abandoned city with squatters from the South of Italy. It was the end of ancient Rome and her beginning as a medieval town.

© – 3/23/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,700 words, all rights reserved