The Mid-Sixth-Century Crisis and the Unraveling of Empire

The rise of these peripheral peoples is likely to be connected, at least in part, with a decline in the fortunes of the empires of Byzantium, Persia, and China in the fifth and sixth centuries, which came to a head in the second half of the sixth century. This means that we should probably consider the Arab conquests as an outcome of this decline rather than its cause.24 A feeling that matters were going downhill is certainly noted by contemporaries. “There was a time,” narrates an eyewitness of the Avar raids around Constantinople in 619, “when things were going well for us and there was no warfare to terrify us; but the summit of prosperity, as they say, was changed through our carelessness and tripped us up, for we were not able to maintain our good fortune untarnished.” Little more than a decade later, a Jewish merchant, native of Palestine but on business in Carthage, was to confirm this view: “The territory of the Romans used to extend until our times from the ocean, that is from Scotia, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Thrace, as far as Antioch, Syria, Persia and all the East, Egypt, Africa and the interior of Africa. . . but now we see Rome humbled.”25

Although politically correct scholars hate to use such value-laden terms as “decline,” this perception of shrinkage and diminution given by contemporaries does seem borne out by the evidence. A number of minor polities, like Georgia and Ethiopia, which had still been thriving in the early sixth century, seem to splutter and lapse into torpor toward the end of that century. The kingdom of Yemen, ancient Sheba, is so enfeebled that, despite a continuous history going back a millennium and a half, it becomes a puppet state first of Ethiopia, then of Persia. The rest of Arabia is similarly hard hit: the commerce in the Arabian port cities of the Persian Gulf that had boomed in the Hellenistic and Roman period slows to a trickle in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the oases and pilgrimage sites of northwest Arabia not a single inscription in any language or script is to be found that is dated to the sixth century despite a rich epigraphic tradition that stretched back more than a thousand years. Even the rich olive oil producing lands of northern Syria show a sharp retrenchment in building inscriptions and economic activity in the late sixth century.26

As far as contemporaries were concerned there were two key factors responsible for this downturn: recurring bouts of bubonic plague, commencing in 542, by which “nearly the whole human race was annihilated,” and the increasing frequency and intensity of confrontation between Byzantium and Persia. As a historian writing in 580 put it: “Nations have been wiped out, cities enslaved, populations uprooted and displaced, so that all mankind has been involved in the upheaval.” Both phenomena had a major depressing effect upon the population, in turn affecting the economy, which in pre-modern times was very sensitive to demographic fluctuations. It has also been postulated that environmental catastrophe played a part in this mid-sixth-century recession. Chroniclers from Ireland to China mention crop failures, abnormal cold, and prolonged reduction of sunlight in the year 536—37, and this is attributed to ash clouds resulting from volcanic eruptions or meteorites crashing to earth. A substantial and sustained reduction in harvests would certainly trigger major social unrest further down the road, and one could see this as the ultimate cause of the change and upheaval of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, provoking empires and steppe peoples alike to fight over diminishing resources. Many modern historians are, however, wary of such ideas, in part because they do not understand the science, and in part because they focus principally on human actions rather than environmental factors. Of course, even if disaster hits, humans can still influence their fate by the way they respond to it; one thing for sure, though, is that the choice of the Middle Eastern superpowers to engage in large-scale warfare was the Wrong response.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that the empires of Byzantium and Persia failed to keep in check the steppe peoples within and beyond their borders in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The Turks, Avars, and Arabs are all able to make significant encroachments over the course of this period. The same can be said for China where the Wei dynasty collapsed in 534 and decades of infighting ensued, which was reduced somewhat by the Sui dynasty (589—618) but only properly brought under control with the establishment of the Tang dynasty by Emperor Gaozu (618—26). The Persian Empire suffered the most, since its capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, was dangerously close to the steppe lands, and the deserts and mountains within its realm favored regional autonomy and limited centralization. Ignominious defeat at the hands of Emperor Heraclius and an ensuing civil war fatally weakened the regime’s ability to respond when the Arabs overran their lands. The capitals of the Byzantine and Chinese empires, on the other hand, were far from the steppe and extremely well defended, and the empires themselves, organized around large bodies of water (the Mediterranean Sea and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, respectively), were reasonably well integrated. This meant that though they also suffered many defeats at the hands of steppe raiders, they were able to weather the storm. The Avars and Turks clearly had ambitions to penetrate further into the lands of Byzantium and Persia, but they were coming from the difficult northern and eastern sides of the two empires, where they faced substantial man-made and natural obstacles, whereas the Arabs were directly adjacent to the soft southern underbellies of these empires, and so it was they who ultimately triumphed in this seventh-century great game.