Many Christians, it is true, were appalled: some because they feared the damage that reluctant converts might do to the Church, and others because they believed, as Gregory had put it, that ‘humility and kindness, teaching and persuasion, are the means by which to gather in the foes of the Christian faith’.4 Yet even before Heraclius’ decree, many had come to dread that it was too late for such an approach. The same consciousness of living in the end days that so haunted Gregory had already prompted a few bishops in Francia to force baptism on the local Jews. In Spain, in 612, the king of the Visigoths had followed suit. Heraclius, too, for the entire length of his reign, had lived with a consciousness that the world was coming apart. ‘The Empire will fall.’5 So Theodore, the lettuce-munching ascetic from Galatia, had prophesied in the year of Heraclius’ accession – and so it had almost proved. War had ravaged the Roman Empire. The tides of a great Persian invasion had lapped at the very walls of Constantinople. Syria, Palestine, Egypt: all had fallen. Jerusalem had been stormed. Only a spectacular series of campaigns led by Heraclius himself had succeeded in hauling his empire back from the brink. Reclaiming the provinces lost to the Persians, riding through Syria, entering Jerusalem, he had repeatedly been told stories of Jewish treachery – and even of the occasional Christian, despairing of Christ, who had submitted to circumcision. Not merely accursed of God, then, the Jews were a plain and active menace. Heraclius, weary after his long struggle to save the Christian people from ruin, was in no mood to show them clemency. Now that the Persians were defeated, he aimed as well to eliminate the enemy within. His ambition: to fashion an exclusively, an impregnably Christian realm.
So it was, in Carthage, that the emperor’s policy was punctiliously applied. Any Jew who landed in the city risked arrest and forcible baptism. All he had to do was cry out in Hebrew when twisting an ankle, or perhaps expose himself at the baths, to risk denunciation. Most Jews, in their hearts, remained resolutely unbaptised; but there were some, persuaded by argument, or on occasion a vision, who did truly come to feel themselves brought to Christ.6 It was in consternation, then, in the summer of 634, that such converts listened to startling news brought from Palestine. There, it was reported, the Jews were cheering a fresh insult to Heraclius. The province had been invaded by ‘Saracens’: Arabs. They had killed an eminent official. They were led by a ‘prophet’. Some Jews, it was true, doubted his right to this title, ‘for prophets do not come with a sword and a war-chariot’.7 Many more were afire with excitement. They, no less than Christians, could recognise in the convulsions of the age the seeming imminence of the end days. Perhaps, they dared to wonder, the advent of a Saracen prophet portended God’s liberation at last of his Chosen People, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the coming of the Messiah?
What it certainly portended was an upheaval in the affairs of the Near East on a scale not witnessed since the time of Alexander. Palestine, although the initial target of the invaders, was not the last. Provinces of the battle-wearied Roman and Persian empires, like over-cooked meat slipping off the bone, melted into the grasp of Arab warbands. From Mesopotamia to central Asia, the lands ruled by the King of Kings were swallowed whole by the conquerors; those ruled by Caesar reduced to a bloody trunk. Heraclius, so lately triumphant, had barely been able to hold the line in the mountains of his native Cappadocia. The fate of Gaul and Spain – rule by barbarian overlords – was now visited on Syria and Egypt.
Yet the Arabs, despite the hearty contempt for them felt by the peoples of more settled lands, were hardly ignorant of civilisation. The influence of Rome and Persia had reached deep into Arabia. Even those tribes not employed as mercenaries on the borders of the rival empires had come to feel the seductive appeal of the superpowers’ gold – and of their gods. The Arabs had particular reason to feel flattered by Jewish and Christian scripture. Alone among the barbarian peoples who lurked beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, they featured in it. Isaac, so it was recorded in Genesis, had not been Abraham’s only son. The patriarch had also fathered a second, Ishmael, on an Egyptian slave. This meant that the Arabs – whom commentators had long since identified with the descendants of Ishmael – could claim a lineal descent from the first man to reject idolatry. Not only that, they were cousins of the Jews. Christian scholars were not long in waking up to the unsettling implications of this. Paul, warning the Galatians against circumcision, had declared that peoples everywhere – provided only that they accepted Christ as Lord – were the heirs of Abraham. But now, as though in direct repudiation of this, a circumcised people had seized the rule of the world – and done so, what was more, as claimants to an inheritance ‘promised by God to their ancestor’. So, at any rate, it was reported by a Christian writing in Armenia some three decades after the conquest of Palestine by the Saracens. Their mysterious ‘prophet’ – left unnamed in the report sent to the Jews of Carthage – was now identified as a man named Muhammad. ‘No one will be able to resist you in battle,’ he was supposed to have told his followers. ‘For God is with you.’8
Here, of course, was nothing that Christians had not heard before. Constantine had offered an identical assurance; so too, in the course of his campaigns against the Persians, had Heraclius. Even in the furthest reaches of the world, in the rain-lashed monasteries and monks’ cells of Ireland, many of the claims made by the Saracens for their prophet would not have seemed strange. That an angel had appeared to him. That he, unlike the Jews, had acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, and displayed a particular devotion to Mary. That he had revealed to them visions of both heaven and hell, and that the Day of Judgement was terrifyingly near. No less than Columbanus, Muhammad had preached the importance of pilgrimage, and prayer, and charity. ‘What will explain to you what the steep path is? It is to free a slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.’9 Here were teachings with which Gregory of Nyssa would readily have concurred.