I
would call 365 of the Common Era the worst year for Christianity
since Jesus got arrested. It began in January when raiding parties of
Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine at Strasburg in Gaul. As a soldier
risen from the ranks, the new Emperor in Constantinople, the sour
faced Valentinian I, realized that if the Germans were having a
hungry winter, then spring would bring a full scale invasion. He
immediately ordered the commander of the two under strength legions in
Gaul, Charietto, to call for support from the loyal tribes. And he
started planing to move his court and his legions to the west.
The sour puss Valentinian (above) had only taken on the purple in March of 364, at 43 years old. He was smart and decisive. But he had little patience with
intellectuals, and when the Christian leader Hillary of Potiers
insisted the Emperor enforce persecutions of pagans and Christian
heretics the Emperor told
him to go home, into exile. Valentinian
was a Christian, but with so many enemies outside the empire, he did
not want to give anybody inside the empire - pagan or Christian - a
reason to join them. To an ideologue like Hillary, such practical
tolerance was an insult to God.
Hillary (above) had been waging war against the ideas of Bishop Arius of Alexandria
since the Council of Nicoea, back in 325 C.E.. Eventually even
Constantine the Great, who had convened the Council, got tired of
Hillary's insistent calls for punishing any who suggested that
God the father (Yawyeh) and God the Son (Jesus) were not the same
persona. “Jesus that I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than
God”, the “Hammer of
the Arians” insisted.
And yet even after Arius died in an Alexandrian toilet after being
poisoned in 336, his idea of God the father and the demigod his son,
refused to be stamped out Even after being dismissed by Valentinian
I, with the threat of exile hanging over his own head , Hillary could
not keep his mouth or his pen shut. In the spring of 365 Hillary's condemnation
of the Emperor became a minor best seller.
Like
many a Christian ideologue since, the 55 year old Hillary divined the
end of the world was coming because the Emperor refused to listen to
him. And if anybody could see the end of the world coming, it would
be Hillary of Poitiers, who helped create acceptance for the “Book
of Revelations” by the Council of Nicocea (above). That book prophesied
that one of the signs of the “end of times” would be the rise and
rule of the Antichrist. And wrote Hillary in the year 365, “the
Antichrist is ruling.”. Most educated people took his rhetoric as
just more holy hot air.
Back
in Gaul, as winter turned to spring, Charietto sent scouts into the
border forests, to attack the German raiders in their sleep. He paid
these hunters by the kill, which they proved by bringing in German
heads, which were then impaled on spikes around Gaulic villages as a
morale builder. But the bloody tributes failed to inspire the
population. So the general sought out the support of an aging pro
Roman Gaul, Serverianus, who managed to raise a small force loyal to
him. And that June, with his legions tied to the major cities,
Charietto was forced to use Severianus's men as a rapid response
force.
Unfortunately
the Germans ambushed the Gauls. Serverianus was thrown from his
horse and killed. Charietto managed to slow the rout for a time, but
when he was killed the entire force was either slaughtered or
scattered. And all of Gaul began to ask themselves what they were
paying Roman taxes for. It started to seem as if Hillary had been
right. God - father, son and Holy Ghost - was intent on punishing
the Roman world.
The
Emperor Valentinian I was
already on the road to Gaul, and had reached the old Imperial villa
at Mediana, in what is today southern Serbia, when word of the
disaster reached him. He immediately dispatched an old political
ally, Dagalaifus, to take charge of things on the ground in Gaul. But the disaster
highlighted, again, that the Empire was too big for one man to rule.
Valentinian had promised to name a co-ruler and he did so now,
handing over Constantinople and the eastern half of his realm to his
younger brother Valens . This division, in 365, would prove to be the
ultimate break between east and west, Greek and Latin Christianity,
but at the time it was merely a division of convience. Valentinian
then hurried on to Gaul, not pausing until he had reached the ancient
circular fortress town of Rheims.
Meanwhile,
roughly 17,000 feet beneath the merchant ships plying the surface
between the bread basket of North Africa and the way station island
of Crete, a truly earth shaking doomsday was looming. As yet
unimagined by human minds, ancient Greece and the islands of the
Aegean, birthplace of democracy and Western literature, was being
held in place by the anvil of the European plate, while from the
south the even larger hammer of the African plate was driving under
the Aegean plate at an inch and a half a year, downward at a 30 degree
angle and pulling the southern edge of Crete down with it.
And off the
island's southwest coast, just after dawn on 21 July, 365, the
rocks of the Aegean plate snapped, and the west coast of Crete
suddenly popped 20 feet into the air. Hillary of Poitiers may have
prophesied this as the end of the world, but it had happened before.
That was why Crete is there.
Almost two thousand years later the shaking would be estimated as an 8.5
earthquake on the classic Richter
Scale. Survivor Ammianus
Marcellinus would describe it as “...a thick succession of fiercely
shaken thunderbolts” which made “the solidity of the whole
earth...shake and shudder.” And he was 600 miles southeast of the
epicenter.
A mere 20 miles away, at the base of a peninsula on the
northwest coast of Crete, was the port of Phalasarna (above),
a wealthy harbor for over six hundred years. That morning, 21
July, 365, the entire harbor and town was lifted nine feet out of
the water.
Walls and stairways cracked, homes and work shops
collapsed and the stone supports for the piers (above) were lifted straight
upward, high and dry. In a few moments it became a port without
water. In the town, the dead outnumbered the living. And every town
on Crete was damaged or destroyed by the quake.
The
pagan writer Libanius attributed the disaster to the anger of
Poseidon, the god of the sea and of earthquakes, as punishment for the heresy of Christianity. The world was, “Like a horse
shaking off his rider...All the cities of Libya were destroyed...the
greatest cities in Sicily lie in ruins, as do those in the
Hellenes...beautiful Nicacea has been felled.” Meanwhile the Christian writer
Jerome described the collapse of the walls
and houses of the city Ar Moab, east of the Dead Sea in Palestine, as the Christian God's wraith for paganism.
But
the greater killer was the tsunami. To the west, 600 miles from the
epicenter, the first 82 foot high tidal wave hit 70 minutes after the
quake, washing up to a mile inland on Malta. On the south coast of Cyprus, 500
miles to the east, the wave drowned the city of Kourion, killing at
least 5,000, including craftsmen at their work benches. But the worst
was what the wave did to the great city of Alexandria, on the Nile Delta.
Marcellinus
was there when “...the sea was driven away...so that the abyss of
the depths was uncovered...Many ships, then, were stranded as if on
dry land, and people wandered...to collect fish and the like in their
hands; then the roaring sea....returning when least expected killed
many thousands by drowning...the bodies of people killed in
shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out
by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses...hurled nearly two
miles from the shore.”.The cost in Alexandria was at least 5,000
dead and 50,000 homes and apartments destroyed. Farmland in the rich
Nile Delta was poisoned by salt water for a decade.
Where
the island of Crete, north of the fault, had been raised in an
instant by 9 feet or more, south of the fault, in Alexandria, the
shore slowly sank by 20 feet, submerging the harbor breakwaters, the
famous lighthouse, even Cleopatra's tomb.
And the House of the Dead,
tomb of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest mausoleums in the
world, was shattered by the earthquake and then smashed by the
waves, its scattered stones scavenged until there was nothing left
of it. For two centuries Alexandria would memorialize “The Day of
Horror”.
In
far off Reims, in northeastern France, Valentinian I's only concern was
that in the midst of a Germanic invasion, he was suddenly told he
could expect no revenues from the rich lands of north Africa and
Sicily. Meanwhile in the east, his brother Valens was facing his own
crises.
Upon
becoming eastern Emperor, Valens (above) moved his legions to quell revolts in
Mesopotamia, and had reached Cappadocian Ceasarea, 600 miles from
Constantinople, when his father-in-law hit the fan.
As
commander of the Martensian legion responsible for order in the
capital, Pretronius Probus (the father-in-law) was running the city
in Valens absence. But according to our old friend Marcellinus,
Petronius was “ a man ugly in spirit and in
appearance...inexorable, cruel, savage and fearlessly hard-hearted,
never capable of giving or receiving reason” in his search for tax
debts going back decades. He “...closed the houses of the poor and
the palaces of the rich in great numbers....”
And
according to the Catholic historian Gregory of Nazianzus, Pretonius
even arrested (later Saint) Basil of Nazianzus,
to squeeze money
out of the church. It proved a repossession too far, and there was a
general uprising in the city. “Each man was armed with the tool he
was using, or with whatever else came to hand at the moment. Torch in
hand, amid showers of stones, with cudgel's ready, all ran and
shouted together in their united zeal....Nor were the women
weaponless...” As dramatic as the story told by both historians
may be, I suspect that what rose in Constantinople in the late summer of
365 was an “astro-turf” rebellion, for the benefit of Procopius,
a distant relative of the Emperor Constantine the Great, who promised the upper classes a
return of stability and power.
Learning
of all this in September, Valens thought briefly about abdication, or
even suicide. But his advisers (and his wife) would have none of
that. So he turned his military expedition around and started his
legions back to the capital. The first two legions to approach the city were
bribed by Probopius's supporters, and joined the rebellion, supported by Catholic Church leaders. This fed
Valens's growing distrust in the Church and
encouraged Valen's sympathy for the “Arians Christians”, who were more
understanding of the Emperor's need to raise revenues. The split
between Latin and Greek Churches was growing wider by the minute.
It
would be the next year before the rebel Procopius and his supporters
could be tracked down and killed. And that same year, of 366, before
the Germanic tribes would be forced back across the Rhine. For the time being.
In January
of 367 defender of the Trinity, Hillary of Poitiers, who prophesied
with certainty the world was coming to an end, instead died in exile.
But Christianity, and the world, both survived in spite of his vision.
This
was proof again that Christianity could survive even its most fervent
supporters, who always seem to confuse their personal doomsday with God's.
-
30 -en
