Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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Kings and kingship 573

East.

The Spanish regime of the Visigoths had much in common with the

Lombard, including the Flavian nomen and problems in reconciling a dynas-

tic principle with a military aristocracy’s wish to be given (or provide) strong

leadership. The usual solution was that an emergent successor married into his

predecessor’s family: King Egica was son-in-law to Ervig (680–687). But such

a system was inevitably attended by palace intrigue. Egica’s son was succeeded

byagrandson of a mid-seventh-century king, and his rule was in turn disputed

by rebels who may or may not have had their own dynastic claims.

Contro-

verted succession was a luxury no medieval kingdom could afford. Within two

decades of Egica’s death, Visigothic Spain was engulfed by Islam.

Northofthe Alps and the Pyrenees, where by 700 ad there had long since

ceased to be any question of Roman rule, the political scene was ostensibly

very different. The only king in Frankish Gaul was Childebert III. He had

come to the throne as a boy like several later Merovingians, but lasted, unlike

most, well into adulthood. Child kings reﬂected the strictly hereditary nature

of kingship in this part of the West. But this also meant that actual power was

often in the hands of regents, the ‘Mayors of the Palace’.

The strongest of

these in 700 was the Austrasian, Pippin II. It was his descendants who would

halt the Muslim advance into Gaul and ﬁnally take control of both Frankish

and Lombard kingdoms. Unlike the Romans, the Franks laid claim to the

lands across the Rhine. They met with only mixed success. Their sources call

Radbod of the Frisians a ‘duke’, where Anglo-Saxons with no political axe

to grind regarded him as a ‘king’. The Alamans and Bavarians were ruled by

‘dukes’, who were already de facto self-governing and would soon aspire to

formal independence, though the mounting power of Pippin’s dynasty did not

allow them to enjoy it for long. References by the biographer of the Anglo-

Saxon missionary Boniface to ‘tyrannous dukes’ of the Thuringians may mean

that they were similarly placed.

Among the Saxons to the north, constitutional

arrangements were not even formally kingly in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon

historian Bede writing in 731, nor was there as yet any question of Frankish

overlordship. To their north, however, some Danes at least were ruled by a king,

Ongendus: nothing is known of either him, his antecedents or his posterity,

except that, though ‘crueller than a beast and harder than a stone’, he treated

the visiting St Willibrord with studied courtesy.

It was presumably his style

of authority that enabled someone in Jutland not long afterwards to erect the

complex of frontier defences known as the Danevirke.

SeeBarbero and Loring, chapter 13 above.

Claude (1971), pp. 195–8; Collins (1983a), pp. 112–16, 120.

SeeFouracre, chapter 14 above.

Wallace-Hadrill (1971), p. 19 (n. 65); Werner (1972), pp. 503–14;Willibald, Vita Bonifatii c.6;Mordek

(1994); Wood (1994), p. 163.

Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi, c.9.

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574 patrick wormald

The British Isles was less ambiguously a world of kings, whether in the

Germanic parts where Rome had held sway, or in the Celtic areas where on

the whole it had not. Kings in the Anglo-Saxon lowlands seem less numerous

and correspondingly more powerful the further west and north one looks.

the small south-eastern realms of Kent, Essex and Sussex, kingship was often

shared, though Wihtred of Kent had shaken off his partners to reign with some

effect. To the south-west, Ine of Wessex controlled a territory that now stretched

to the River Tamar, though he had apparently shared power with his father

for a while. North of the Thames, the East Angles were a distinct kingdom

under Aldwulf, but the rest of the midlands as far as the Welsh border made up

Æthelred’s Mercia; by 700 or soon after, the dependent rulers of the principal-

ities either side of the Severn could no longer call themselves kings. Aldfrith’s

Northumbria was bigger yet. Its extent, to the Forth and beyond the Solway,

may partly explain a level of Northumbrian political instability, which was

already as notorious in the later eighth century, as it has become for historians.

British Britain constituted a similar political patchwork, though its kings are

incomparably more obscure. Of the rulers of the four main political quarters of

Wales, Morgan ap Athrwys can be named, because charters of his south-eastern

area survive. That Idwal, Gwalluc and Cadwgan were kings of Gwynedd, Powys

and Dyfed has to be guessed from their place in the genealogies of later rulers.

Outside Wales proper, Beli of Strathclyde and Geraint of Dumnonia are his-

torically identiﬁable, but Geraint is the only king from the sixth century to the

ninth-century extinction of Cornish independence of whom this is true. The

Irish record, by contrast, is rich enough to reveal a plethora of kings. No less

than forty-four men listed as guarantors of the ‘law’ protecting clerics from the

hazards of warfare which Abbot Adomn

an of Iona issued in 697 could be called

kings.

They ranged from Loingsech, the U

ıN

eill over-king, down to the regal

midgets who were still kings in Irish eyes, however petty their status. Other

royal guarantors were the supremos of Munster, Ulster and Leinster and the

heir to that of Connacht. They were accompanied by Eochu, king of D

al Riada,

the Irish (or, as Romans and some Irishmen preferred, Scottish) offshoot in the

Isles and Argyll, whose expansion would one day recast the politics of north

Britain. And, also on the list, was the ruler of the most obscure, Slavs apart, of

Europe’s polities, the Picts of north-eastern Britain. They too may have been

a people of many kings, but only one royal line was preserved for posterity. Its

representative in 697 was Bridei son of Derilei: and intriguingly, his afﬁliation

See Thacker, chapter 17 above.

Davies (1978), pp. 68, 79, 88–9, and see Davies, chapter 9 above.

ıDhonnchadha (1982): a prosopographical tour de force facilitated by the unparalleled detail of

Irish annals and genealogies.

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Kings and kingship 575

has been taken to mean that what had qualiﬁed him for ofﬁce was his mother’s

identity.

Nearly all these men had titles reasonably translated as ‘king’. Even ‘Abd

al-Malik’s name is Arabic for ‘son of a king’, while the title ‘khagan’ is Turco-

Mongol equivalent to Persian Shahanshah (i.e. king of kings).

This single

political label obviously covers a multitude of very different jobs. A kingly

title was perhaps about all that rulers on the Bosphorus and on Loch Tay had

in common. Monarchy was none the less the norm. This chapter is mainly

concerned to ask why. No early medieval regime, not even ‘Abd al-Malik’s,

had the resources in men or money of their earlier or later equivalents. Royal

behaviour was therefore more completely dependent on at least passive assent

from those who could otherwise have resisted it. The enquiry is thus a study in

what can loosely be called the political culture of early medieval communities:

the theories of the articulate but also the assumptions of the elite as a whole.

What are kings said to be for? What did kings do,asamatter of course? It

is fundamental that these were still open questions in post-Roman Europe.

Because they were open, their answers might vary from one context to the

next. This in turn means that they are answerable only by attention to the

speciﬁcs of each regime. Above all, it must never be forgotten that there was

nothing foregone about the pattern that emerged from events.

imperial rule

The main reason why almost the whole of the area covered by this chapter

was a mosaic of monarchies in the year 700 is transparent. Over the previous

seven centuries, it had all been affected directly or indirectly by experience

of Rome. The Roman Empire was in fact an autocratic monarchy, whatever

the constitutional niceties. The story of post-Roman kingship thus begins

with ‘New Rome’ on the Bosphorus. When writing to the senate, Roman

emperors used a formula which pithily expresses their relationship with the

state: ‘If you are well, it is well. I and the army are well.’

The primary, perhaps

always the fundamental, sense of imperator was ‘commander-in-chief’. It was

command of the army that made Rome once again a monarchy, against its basic

principles. Triumphsfor emperors – and none but emperors– in full military rig

Anderson (1973), pp. 175–6. The possibility of multiple kings of the Picts is explored in unpublished

work by A. A. M. Duncan.

Kollautz (1954), pp. 136–7, though cf. Pohl (1988), p. 396,n.15.

The formula ﬁnds its clearest Latin form (ironically) in Cicero, Ad Familiares xv.1.2:

S.V.V.B.E.E.E.Q.V.: si vos valetis bene est ego exercitusque valeo. The Greek version, already nor-

mal for Julius Caesar and Augustus, is reported as habitual by Dio, Roman History lxix.xiv.3: see

Millar (1992), p. 353.

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576 patrick wormald

highlighted their image as bringers of victory.

Coins whose obverses almost

always carried an imperial portrait had reverses which, in at least one issue

for nearly every emperor, harked on military themes: victory itself; avenging

Mars; a captive or otherwise humiliated barbarian; a loyal soldiery attending

its commander’s speech or receiving his bounty.

Yetitispossible to overstress

the military essence of imperial rule. Emperors were pre-eminently members

of a cultivated upper class. The Roman military aristocracy had a thick civilian

patina from its earliest recorded days. The acceptable face of imperial rule

was perforce civil even as its sinews were military.

Emperors were rarely if

ever in the front line. For two centuries after the 390s, they ceased to go on

campaign altogether, while offering their subjects the doubtful reassuranceof an

enhanced martial image on their coins; both developments may be attributed

to the deterioration of the real military situation.

Generalship seldom led

directly to the throne between 306 and 602.

Only in the Western Empire’s

last two decades did commanders make and unmake emperors at will: a process

that reached a logical d

enouement when barbarian soldiers opted for rule by a

barbarian king.

So it was that Justinian, self-styled victor over so many barbarians, was rarely

seen outside his palace complex. And when the emperor Maurice was minded

to take the ﬁeld in 590,hewas successively discouraged by senatorial advice,

an eclipse of the sun, assault by a wild boar, a horribly deformed birth, and,

ﬁnally, the arrival of an embassy from Persia.

It took the post-610 revival of

the Persian threat, in a more explicit form than had been known since Xerxes’

day, to induce an emperor to revive the role of Alexander and to better effect

than had been managed by almost a millennium of imitators.

George of

Pisidia made a point of Heraclius’ exchange of an emperor’s red buskins for

the black boots of a soldier. But the inspiration by then transcended even

Alexander. Heraclius aimed to retake Jerusalem and to recover the True Cross.

His was in a real sense the ﬁrst of the crusades. A famous set of silver plate

depicting the Life of David was almost certainly made with him in mind.

Campbell (1984), pp. 133–42;McCormick (1986), pp. 112–15.Much that follows is indebted to these

two notable studies.

Campbell (1984), pp. 142–6, 182–4.See, for example, Kent (1978), nos. 168, 178, 204–5, 213–14, 235,

238, 244, 252, 263–4, 294–6, 312, 318, 341–2, 347, 349–50, 356.

Cf. Millar (1992), pp. 63–6,onthe emperor’s military ambience.

McCormick (1986), pp. 41–4, 47, 78.Kent (1978), nos. 695, 702–3, 705–6, 711, 726, 729, 731, 738–40,

743, 745–6, 752.

Jones (1964), pp. 322–5.

Theophylact, Historiae v.xvi.2–6; vi.i.58, vi.iii. 5;cf. Mi. Whitby (1988), p. 156.

On the lure of Alexander and its generally unfortunate effects, see Campbell (1984), pp. 391–3, and

Matthews (1989), pp. 137–8.

Ma. Whitby (1994, and cf. 1995); Mango (1994), pp. 122–31.

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Kings and kingship 577

Militant Old Testament heroes provided imperial rule with a new inspiration.

Even so, Heraclian coinage remained strikingly civilian: the helmet, dropped

by Justinian I, made a brief comeback only under Constantine IV, as the Arabs

invested the city itself.

Thereafter, Byzantine emperors often led armies on

campaign but rarely in battle. Too military an image was a solecism that could

be as lethal as enemy action. One of the few emperors who died sword in hand

was the last.

Emperors were generals by deﬁnition. Most Romans, like most Roman

historians, probably saw their ruler as above all a military man. But it is as

judge that he appears in the many thousand transactions of emperor and

subject recorded by subjects themselves on inscriptions or papyrus, or else in

the great codes of Theodosius II and Justinian. The words with which Justinian

launched his Institutes would ring down the centuries: ‘Imperial Majesty should

not only be distinguished by arms but also armed by laws ...sothattheRoman

emperor . . . should appear as devout in justice as triumphant over defeated

enemies.’

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as a galvanic force imposing its

will on a huge swathe of humanity until ﬁnally overwhelmed by forces beyond

even its control. But emperors in a legal role were more often passive than

active parties. The main inﬂuence on the development of imperial jurisdiction

was the expectation that imperial power evoked in Hellenistic cities whose

political culture predisposed them to seek monarchical patronage. Emperors

were from the outset deluged by petitions, legal grievances prominent amongst

them.

The urge that promoted an ‘appeal to Caesar’ predictably made the

most of the reply (‘rescript’), regardless of its formal status; and the fact that

most rescripts owe their survival to incorporation in Justinian’s code shows

that they certainly came to be seen as law. Constantine’s reign appears to mark

a change because the Theodosian Code (438) took its starting point from 311,

and was meant to include only laws with ‘sacred generality’. Yet what had

really changed was not the pressure of petitions but the tone of response.

Under Constantine the ‘Quaestor of the Sacred Palace’ became the imperial

spokesman. To judge from the job-description given by Cassiodorus, who held

it under the Ostrogoths (506–512), legal expertise was relevant, but rhetorical

technique more so.

Petitions to the emperor had always needed to be couched

in the stylised rhetoric that was an educated Greco-Roman’s hallmark. The

Breckenridge (1959); Whitting (1973), pp. 33–9, 133–52, 154–8.

Corpus Iuris Civilis xvi.1.xxiii. On what follows, see especially Millar (1992), chs. v–viii and

‘Afterword’; Honor

e(1978), chs. 1–4, 8–9;(1981), chs. 1–2;(1982), chs. 1, b-9;(1986).

See the example discussed by Halsall, chapter 2 above.

Cassiodorus, Variae vi.5,cf.x.6.See Honor

e(1986) (especially pp. 147–50 on Ausonius’ contribution)

and (1993).

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578 patrick wormald

skills, which had earlier won the emperor’s favour, now took control of his

pronouncements.

The tendency of later emperors to meet speciﬁc grievances

with general fulminations, that were then collected into huge codes in their

name, made them look more and more like makers of law.

Such was the context of the supreme legislative achievement of this or any

age, Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis.

Even here, the all-encompassing imperial

initiative is in part illusory. The constitutions introducing the various stages of

the project were written by the Quaestor, Tribonian; his were the priorities that

have seemed typically Justinianic. Eastern intellectuals had always seen law as

the one area where Latin culture measured up to Greek philosophy. Since the

third century they had thronged the Beirut law-school whose professors were

among Tribonian’s colleagues.

Justinian’s temple to the ‘public reason of the

Romans’ (in Gibbon’s phrase) can thus be seen as a crucial stage in the recasting

of imperial rule by a Hellenistic intelligentsia. Two otherwise puzzling facts

then come into focus. The ﬁrst is that Justinian’s great project was of course in

Latin, but his Novels over the last thirty years of his reign were overwhelmingly

in Greek. Had Latin been relevant in legal practice, it should not have given way

so soon. Secondly, there was marked decline in the number of laws Justinian

made in either language after 539.For all that it is a monument to the human

intellect of measureless importance, the artiﬁciality of the Corpus Iuris in its

own time is exposed by its lack of immediate resonance. Justinian’s successors

down to Heraclius issued few laws. Heraclius seemingly made none, except

when trying to crystallise doctrinal orthodoxy.

Leo III’s Ecloga (741)hasa

pertinent prologue: ‘knowing that the laws enacted by previous emperors have

been written in many books and . . . that the sense is difﬁcult . . . we considered

that the decisions...should be repeated more lucidly’.

The eighteen succinct

Greek chapters that follow are perhaps the nearest to a real ‘Digest’ of law for

routine use that any early medieval ruler managed. In addition, in twice citing

‘thewise Solomon’, the prologue chose a model who would have more inﬂuence

on western royal law-makers in the coming centuries than any Roman.

Oneofthe nostrums of Roman history is that an ‘imperator’, with his

austere if informal ‘senatorial’ style, made way for a ‘basileus’, a title that had

once symbolised the difference between Greek freedom and enslavement to

aPersian autocrat. Much discussion has attended the formal adoption of this

title by Heraclius in 629.

Greek speakers had in fact been using the word

SeeWieacker (1963), but also Voss (1982).

See Louth, chapter 4 above.

Collinet (1925). See also Honor

e(1962), pp. 85–96.

IusGreco-Romanum i.i.xxv, ed. Zepos; Cf. Haldon (1990), pp. 254–64.

Burgmann, Das Gesetzbuch: trans. Freshﬁeld, Ecloga,pp.67–9.

IusGreco-Romanum i.i.xxv, ed. Zepos; cf. Br

ehier (1906); R

osch (1978), pp. 37, 106–7, 170; Chrysos

(1978).

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Kings and kingship 579

of emperors for centuries. Its ‘ofﬁcial’ appearance (if that is what happened in

629) merely set a seal on the Hellenistic inﬂuences to which Roman rule had

so long been exposed.

The educated easterners who pressed hardest on an

emperor’s business came eventually to dictate his patterns of behaviour.

This sea-change is most vividly reﬂected in the new signiﬁcance of the

palace. The word derives from the fact that the ﬁrst imperial headquarters was

an admittedly unusually opulent private house on the Palatine. No one could

mistake Constantinople’s sacred palace for an aristocratic residence. Already by

the ﬁfth century it covered quarter of a million square metres.

For imperial

rule, the late Roman rebirth of a ‘palace culture’, such as had not been seen

west of the Levant since Mycenae, meant two things above all. First, it both

symptomised and facilitated the emergence of a bureaucracy. The total staff

actually present under the palace roofs may have run to four ﬁgures, as against

an attendance on early emperors of under two hundred.

This burgeoning

government machine was what gave educated provincials their new access to

the levers of power. To emperors it brought a more systematic approach to the

raising of revenue and the keeping of archives than was ever possible on the

Palatine.

Second, the rise of the palace entailed the elaboration of the court

ritual for which ‘Byzantine’ is a byword. It is hard to say how much of the

ceremonial codiﬁed by Constantine VII in the tenth century goes back to the

sixth or seventh. But appendices to Book i of Constantine’s collection include

excerpts from Peter the Patrician’s sixth-century De Magistro Ofﬁciorum, which

show that emperors were by then crowned in the Byzantine tradition: senior

or solo emperor by the patriarch, associate by senior emperor, with no unction

of any sort involved.

Already in evidence too are the elaborate diplomatic

protocols which would before long be ridiculed and resented in the West.

The Persian embassies at whom they were mainly aimed may have been more

impressed.

But the most illuminating aspect of court ceremonial was perhaps

that centring on the Hippodrome, an extension of the palace complex. It had

always been in the circus or amphitheatre that emperors staged their dialogue

with the Roman people. At Constantinople, however, the circus factions of the

This is perhaps the central motif of Millar (1992) (e.g. pp. 613–15); it is already foreshadowed in

Millar et al. (1967).

Mango (1986), p. 28;cf. the plans at the end of Constantin VII, ed. Vogt (1935–40), i.Finsen (1962)

shows the (increasingly large) ﬁrst-century palaces on the Palatine.

Heather (1994a).

Jones (1964), pp. 412–62, 572–92;Kelly (1994), pp. 161–7:cf.Sirks(1993), pp. 49–56.

De Ceremoniis i.91–5, which can be compared with the tenth-century ceremony at i.38.See discussion

by Av. Cameron (1976), pp. 154–79,ofJustin II’s coronation, and cf. Theophylact, Historiae i.i.123,

i.x.19 for that of Maurice; also Gregory of Tours, Hist. v.30 on Tiberius.

De Ceremoniis i.87–90; Al. Cameron (1976), p. 257; for Carolingian opinion, see the splendid story

in Notker, Gesta Karoli Magni ii.6, with comment by Leyser (1988), pp. 134–42.

580 patrick wormald

Blues and Greens were no longer mouthpieces of public opinion; their role was

ever more tightly circumscribed by the orchestration of imperial acclamations.

It is typical that a Book of Ceremonies provides most of the evidence of what

went on at the races.

An obsession with ceremony was one of the few brickbats that Procopius

did not throw at Justinian, preferring to stress his lack of dignity. But few of

his images are as unforgettable as that of an emperor pacing the corridors of his

own labyrinth by night, scorning sleep and snatching odd bites off the imperial

table as he passed.

One way towards a more sympathetic view of Justinian

is to appreciate that in the professionalism that so enraged Procopius lay the

way ahead. Palace ofﬁcers after the 630s had little time for history, panegyric

or even invective, which is why this is Byzantium’s Dark Age. The East Roman

aristocracy was no longer an elite for whom service to the state was a function

of its culture, but a service elite proper, its literary culture less a qualiﬁcation

than an option, and its education dedicated to the very survival of the world

it knew.

Within a year of founding his city, Constantine was ensconced at Nicaea

among the bishops of his empire, debating the structure of the Trinity. It was

an image the Byzantine Empire never forgot. His burial twelve years later in his

new Church of the Twelve Apostles was profoundly symbolic. He was ‘theequal

of the apostles’, isapostolos.His heirs would stand as guardians not just of the

church’s interests but also of its teaching. Byzantine emperors were the ﬁrst to

act on the principle espoused by European monarchs until the Enlightenment:

rulers answer to God for their people’s observance of the Faith.

It is reasonable

to see the emperor’s prominence in church affairs as one more aspect of the

acceptability of the imperial destiny to those with a background in Hellenistic

notions.

Emperors seemed to give a spiritual lead. It was because the patri-

arch Acacius’ Henoticon formula (482) had been promulgated in the emperor

Zeno’s name that Pope Gelasius rebuffed it as he did in a fateful letter.

Emperors chaired sixth- and seventh-century ecumenical councils, which got

under way with chanting of the imperial laudes.

The ‘Quinisext’ Council of

691–692 bears several marks of Justinian II’s personal initiative and set about the

detailed ordering of a Christian society in ways that foreshadow Carolingian

approaches.

As thus implied, however, one can draw too sharp a line between

eastern and western ecclesiologies. Justinian I’s doctrinal expositions were his

own work (which is how we know that the constitutions introducing the Corpus

Al. Cameron (1976).

Procopius, Anecdota, 12.

Whitby (1988), pp. 347–57;Haldon (1990), pp. 388–99, 426, etc.

Ensslin (1967), pp. 7–13; Lane Fox (1986), pp. 643–62.

Sansterre (1972).

See Louth, chapter 11 above.

Chrysos (1979).

Herrin (1987), pp. 284–6 (and for the more general point, pp. 116–18).

Kings and kingship 581

Iuris were not).

Emperors were not otherwise authors of doctrine. Heraclius

was said to have disavowed his Ecthesis as the work of the patriarch Sergius.

What embroiled emperors in ecclesiastical dispute was their duty as much to

preserve peace as to formulate orthodoxy. Conversely, the easterner Maximos

the Confessor was as ready to anathematise imperial intervention as any pope,

so inaugurating an illustrious Byzantine tradition.

Imperial apostleship was articulated in quite another way by care for the

poor. There is a difference between the provision for fellow-citizens that pagan

emperors channelled through recognised corporations with some of the sta-

tus of trade unions, and the targeting of the destitute as a religious duty that

was tirelessly reiterated by Old and New Testaments.

Procopius’ account of

the hospices for the incurably ill and xenodochia for the merely itinerant built

by Justinian in the capital and elsewhere is circumstantial.

It is revealing

that the stuff of panegyric, which had always covered an honorand’s construc-

tions, should now extend to foundations like these. The work of Justinian

and Theodora for repentant prostitutes even attracted the notice of the far-

away Monophysite chronicler John of Nikiu.

It was an item to this otherwise

‘unorthodox’ emperor’s credit.

The Empire’s traumatic seventh-century experience of loss, recovery and

loss again lent imperial religious leadership new urgency.

Heraclius’ ‘David

plates’ show enhanced sensitivity to the Old Testament model of a people

embattled but beloved. The critical point about Heraclius’ new title was that

it was ‘pistos basileus’, or, as Latins would have it in similar contexts, ‘rex ﬁdelis

(faithful king)’.

When Justinian II relegated his own image to the reverse

of his coins, and replaced it on the obverse with that of Christ, the ideal of

Byzantium as a new Holy Society reached an apogee. Emperors would soon

seek to enforce God’s Law against idolatry. Meanwhile, a sinister side-effect of

this heightened consciousness was increased pressure on the original people of

God. Heraclius had introduced a programme of forced baptism for Jews by

Honor

e(1975).

ethel (1979), pp. 48–9, 104.

Herrin (1987), pp. 206–19, 252–9, gives a particularly telling evocation of this and other themes in

the so-called ‘Monothelite’ controversy.

On this see Brown(1993), pp. 78–103, 15–27.Iamalsomuch indebted for what follows to unpublished

work by Peregrine Hordern.

Procopius, Buildings i.ii.14–17; i.ix.1–10, 12–13; i.xi.23–7; ii.x.25; iv.x.21; v.iv.17; v.vi.25; v.ix.4, 22,

27, 34–5, 38, etc.

The Chronicle of John of Nikiu,pp.139, 143.

Av. Cameron (1979); Haldon (1986); cf. Haldon (1990), pp. 281–375.

Some of the endless Hippodrome rehearsal of the ‘Orthodox emperor’ theme, De Ceremoniis i.69,

may go back to this period: as it stands, the ceremony of the presentation of ﬂowered crosses clearly

relates to the defeat of more ‘recent inﬁdels’ (Constantin vii, ed. Vogt, ii,pp.137–9); but it would

not have been out of place in the fevered context of Heraclius’ defeat of the Persians.

582 patrick wormald

the 630s.

In the world of the new Israel, there was less and less room for the

old.

Damascus

Islam and Central Asia have their own Cambridge Histories.But each spawned

models of imperial rule at least as conspicuous as New Rome’s in the sixth

and seventh century. These alternative models can serve to offset post-Roman

regimes elsewhere. Given that the Arab conquerors of the civilised world came

from one where leadership was ostensibly limited to that of the ‘shaikh (old

man)’, it seems unlikely that the structure of authority in Islam’s new empire

would owe much to models imported by its makers, and the sheer speed of

the conquest left much of the machinery of power in the Fertile Crescent

intact. Middle-Easterners could and did expect to serve and exploit the new

rulers as they had the old.

The proﬁle of khalifal rule thus in many ways

resembled that of Roman and Persian hegemonies. They were more rarely

seen on campaign even than ﬁfth- and sixth-century emperors. Caliphs too

were creatures of the palace. The Baghdad extravagances immortalised in the

Thousand-and-One Nights were previewed in Umayyad desert lodges (qu’sur).

Justinian II is known to have sent men and materials to assist ‘Abd al-Malik’s

mosque-building programme.

More fundamentally, a judgemental role for

God’s caliph was implied in what the Qu’ran itself had to say of David and

Solomon. The Umayyads are found issuing edicts in imperial style: it could be

claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, that ‘[no] governor nor judge would

ever give judgement without referring it to the caliph in Syria’.

It is hard

to resist the impression that a caliph’s legislative activity arose more from the

pressure of his new subjects, with the expectations they were bound to have

of rulers, than from those who saw him as super-shaikh or successor to the

prophet.

All of that said, it is hardly probable that an Arab regime would have been

entirely unmarked by ancestral political culture, least of all when it was now

suffused by a gleaming religious ideology. It was a criticism of Mu’awiya,

founder of the Umayyad dynasty, that he was ‘hiraqliyva’ (‘like Heraclius’).

Caliphal authority was inspired by the sense that God must retain a deputy on

Sharf (1971), pp. 43–7;cf. Haldon (1990), pp. 345–8.

Nasrullah (1950), pp. 154–7.For the ex-Sasanian dihqan who set the tone at Baghdad, cf. Kennedy

(1981), pp. 101–2, and (1986), p. 11, etc.

Hillenbrand (1982); see note 58.

Theophanes, Chronographia am 6183;Gibb (1958).

Crone and Hinds (1986), pp. 44–8;cf.Gibb (1955).

Crone and Hinds (1986), p. 115. Another term of abuse was ‘kisra l’arab’ after the great Shah

Khusro 1.