The World

Three Roman emperors perished fighting Shapur, and at least one had to submit to the king of kings. The cruellest cut came in 260, when Shapur defeated and then captured Emperor Valerian ‘with his own hands’, he claimed, before going on to take the eastern Roman capital, Antioch. Valerian was used as Shapur’s mounting block, then flayed alive, the skin painted red and stuffed with straw and exhibited in a temple.

As Rome descended into civil war, it looked as if Persia would replace Rome in the east – until a Arab conqueress changed the World Game.

ZENOBIA AND CONSTANTINE

Just as Shapur was returning laden with loot, Odeinath, ruler of Palmyra, declared himself king, and attacked Shapur, defeating him near Samosata. Bearded with curled hair and Greek diadem, Odeinath (Odaenathus in his Roman identity), forty years old, was an Arab merchant prince, ras (rais

) – chief in Arabic – and exarch of Palmyra, a desert trading city of 200,000 Arabs, Aramaeans, Greeks and Romans, grown rich from the caravans of the eastern trade, its ruins still magnificent even today. Odeinath was married to an Arab-Greek girl, Zenobia, who was descended from the Ptolemies, related to Cleopatra – though her achievements would make the Egyptian queen seem footling.

‘Her face was dark and swarthy,’ wrote a Roman historian, ‘her eyes were black and powerful, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible. So white were her teeth that many thought that she had pearls in place of teeth.’ Marrying the exarch when she was around fourteen, she hired a Greek-Syrian tutor named Longinus to teach her Greek philosophy.

Now Odeinath recaptured Edessa and Emesa for Rome, then in 262, mustering a large army of Palmyrene archers, cataphracts and Arab cavalry, invaded Persia, besieging Ctesiphon. Odeinath was hailed by Palmyrenes as a god and rewarded by the latest, weak emperor as Corrector Totius Orientis, eastern viceroy, granted the

agnomen Persicus Maximus, but instead he declared himself king of kings, portraying himself as the divine hunter killing two tigers – Rome and Persia. In 267, when a horde of nomads, Goths – making their first appearance – raided Syria/Iraq, Odeinath repelled them, but was then assassinated by a disgruntled nephew who had been humiliated on a royal hunt and now seized the crown – for one day. Zenobia, now twenty-five, was with him. She rallied the army, killed the nephew and seized the throne, crowning her baby son Vaballathus (Wah-balla¯t, or Gift of Allat, an Arab goddess). During an astonishing three years, she seized Antioch, where she set up court, advised by Longinus her philosopher, and, commanding an army of 70,000, directed the conquest of today’s Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, Israel, Arabia and Egypt – just as Shapur, vanquisher of so many emperors, died, leaving Zenobia unchallenged, and Persia paralysed by religious schism.^*

In 272, Zenobia declared herself Augusta – empress – and her son Augustus, but to the west, a dynamic Roman general, Aurelian, first expelled rampaging barbarians from Italy then marched eastwards to regain Egypt, then Syria, defeating Zenobia at Emesa (after seeing a vision of Sol Invictus, Invincible Sun god, promising him victory). Trying to escape on a camel, Zenobia was captured.^*

Serving in Aurelian’s army when it took Palmyra was a young Roman officer named Constantius Chlorus, whose son would radically change the world.

Born of humble family in Roman Dacia (Serbia) in 250, Constantius won the attention of the emperor, who made him one of his bodyguards. At a tavern in the east, Constantius met a Greek girl from Bithynia named Helena, whom he married, and while he was governing Dalmatia she gave birth to a son, Constantine. It is likely that Helena was already a follower of the Christian sect. Bold-faced, big-jawed and pointy-chinned with a Caesar haircut – a proper Roman general – Constantius was not a Christian. Instead he revered Sol Invictus, the god who had helped Aurelian defeat Zenobia.

After the assassination of Aurelian, Constantius backed a new claimant to the throne, Diocletian, a Dalmatian general who struggled to repel or absorb waves of tribes migrating from the eastern steppes. Goths, Saxons, Samaritians, Franks and Alemanni probed his frontiers in a stampede migration: each fearsome invasion was also a terrified migration fleeing a more fearsome attack. Behind Goths and Franks came the Huns, who now raided eastern Persia.

In 285, Diocletian, realizing that his job was too much for one man, raised a general Maximian to co-Augustus. While Diocletian ruled the east from Nicomedia (near the Bosphoros), Maximian, based at Mediolanum (Milan), promoted Constantius to govern Gaul.^* Constantius married Maximian’s daughter, without ever rejecting Helena and her son Constantine. But the connection paid off when the two Augusti appointed Caesars – Constantius in the west, Galerius in the east, creating a tetrarchy – the rule of four.