The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade by Susan Wise Bauer Read Free Book Online Page B

out-and-out attack on Constantius, who (after all) had Constantinople and most of the east on his side. For his part, Constantius didn’t dare leave the eastern borders and march west against Julian. The Persian threat was too immediate; Shapur’s army was already approaching the Roman borders.
    The Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus, who later wrote a history of the Roman wars with Persia, had been sent secretly into Armenia (now Persian-controlled) to spy on the Persian advance. From the top of a cliff, he spotted the armies advancing: “the whole circuit of the lands filled with innumerable troops,” he remembers, “with the king leading the way, glittering in splendid attire.” 14 The Roman army burned the fields and houses in front of the approaching enemy to prevent them from finding food, and made a stand at the Euphrates river; but the Persians, advised by a Roman traitor who had gone over to their side, made a detour north through untouched fields and orchards.
    The Romans pursued them, and the two armies finally met at the small walled city of Amida, in Roman territory. The city was good for defense, since (as Ammianus Marcellinus explains) it could only be approached by a single narrow pass, and the Romans took up a defensive position in the gap. But a detachment of Persian cavalry had managed, without the Romans’ knowledge, to get around behind the city, and the Romans found themselves jammed into the pass, attacked from both sides. Ammianus, fighting in the middle of the throng, was trapped there for an entire day: “We remained motionless until sunrise,” he writes, “…so crowded together that the bodies of the slain, held upright by the throng, could nowhere find room to fall, and that in front of me a soldier with his head cut in two, and split into equal halves by a powerful sword stroke, was so pressed on all sides that he stood erect like a stump.” 15
    Finally Ammianus and the other surviving Roman soldiers made it into the city. The Persians attacked the walls with archers and with war elephants: “frightful with their wrinkled bodies and loaded with armed men, a hideous spectacle, dreadful beyond every form of horror.” Amida withstood the siege for seventy-three days. The streets were stacked with “maggot-infested bodies,” and plague broke out within the walls. The defenders kept the wooden siege-engines and the elephants at bay with burning arrows, but finally the Persians heaped up mounds of earth and came over the walls. The inhabitants were slaughtered. Ammianus escaped through a back gate and found a horse, trapped in a thicket and tied to its dead master. He untied the corpse and fled. 16
    Constantius was forced to surrender not only Amida but also at least two other fortresses, a handful of fortified towns, and eastern land. Meanwhile, Julian still threatened in the west. Suspended between two hostile powers, Constantius didn’t dare turn his back on one to attack the other.
    A fever solved his dilemma. On October 5, 361, Constantius died from a virus, his body so hot that his attendants could not even touch him. Julian was sole emperor, by default, of the entire Roman empire.

     

Chapter Five
     

The Apostate
     
    Between 361 and 364, Julian tries and fails to restore the old Roman ways
     
    A S SOON AS J ULIAN took control of Constantinople, it became clear that his Christian education had been entirely unsuccessful. He had been in correspondence for some years with the famous rhetoric teacher Libanius, who guided him in his study of Greek literature and philosophy, and had been in secret sympathy with the old religion of Rome for most of his adult life.
    Now he openly announced himself as an opponent of Christianity. His baptism, he said, was a “nightmare” that he wished to forget. He ordered the old temples, many of which had been closed under the reign of the Christian emperors, to be reopened. And he decreed that no Christian could teach literature; since a