On the subject of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, reader Mike Weatherford writes:

I’m currently reading Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia. Excellent book, well-written, and not dull. It’s a miracle that anything got done with such a collection of political hotheads. That the final document has served us so well for so long is a tribute to their tenacity and vision.

Dr. Boli agrees that our current Constitution is a tribute to the tenacity of the hotheads in Philadelphia. He has always suspected that delegates finally succeeded in coming to agreement on both the Declaration of Independence and, eleven years later, the Constitution because both assemblies were held in Philadelphia in the summer. A summer in Philadelphia makes any compromise seem preferable to spending another day in Philadelphia; the beastly heat would eventually wear down the most intransigent sectionalist. It can hardly be coincidence that, when the time came to pick a permanent national capital, the founders of our nation settled on the one site where the summer climate was even worse. Dr. Boli believes that much reform could be accomplished simply by prohibiting air conditioning in both houses of Congress.

As for our founders’ vision, at last count 27 serious errors in the original Constitution have been discovered and corrected. Furthermore, at least one of those corrections was itself a serious error.

Dr. Boli believes, in fact, that the great strength of our Constitution is its lack of vision, or even principle. Delegates committed to democracy would have insisted that the president be elected by the people. Delegates committed to aristocracy would have insisted that the president be chosen by the Senate. Delegates committed to getting out of Philadelphia before their brains melted into their collars were willing to accept the positively lunatic compromise that the people should vote for a number of electors more or less proportional to the populations of their states, but giving slightly more influence to the smaller states, and then those electors should meet and vote for the president. They did not accept it because anyone was happy about that idea, but because no one was more unhappy about it than he was about being stuck in Philadelphia in the summer.

Any number of other nations have imposed perfectly rational constitutions on their people, and the end result has always been a descent into tyranny and massacre. We grudgingly accepted a bundle of half-baked compromises that no sane person could enthusiastically embrace, and we have toddled along pretty well with it for a while now.

On this day in 1787, delegates from the thirteen states assembled in Philadelphia with the ostensible purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. In reality, their secret intention was to replace the existing government altogether with a completely new constitution. The convention, which straggled on into the middle of September, still holds the record as the longest and dullest coup d’état in history.

Second Series.

Sullivan, Sir Arthur. It was not revealed until many years after his death that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s famous “Lost Chord” was in fact stolen. Fearing a scandal, Sir Arthur had refused to refer the matter to the police.

On this day in 1693, the lesser-known Gloucester witch trials came to an abrupt end when all the judges mysteriously turned into toads.

Map of the Tri-State Area.

—

Dear Dr. Boli: I am in a fierce debate with my pekingese, which you may perchance be able to settle. What, objectively speaking, is the tri-state area? —Yours cordially, D. Wright, Esq.

Dear Sir or Madam: The answer to your question has varied over the long history of tri-state areas. When Charlemagne died, his empire was divided among his three sons, and many historians regard this division as the original tri-state area. In modern times, the most important tri-state area is, of course, the one surrounding Cumberland (Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia), but New York (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio), Cincinnati (Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana), Chandigarh (Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh), and Murtho (South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria) are also centers of important tri-state areas. Geographers now estimate that approximately 89% of the earth’s habitable land surface may be counted as belonging to a “tri-state area,” with the rest made up of various curious anomalies such as the Four Corners region or Iceland.

The leading objection against granting statehood to the District of Columbia has always been that doing so would create yet another tri-state area, which, added to the 138 already existing tri-state areas in the United States alone, might cause unnecessary confusion.

Pope Celestine V (not to scale).

—

Dear Dr. Boli: The newspapers keep saying that the Vatican has no idea what to do with a retired pope. If that’s true, do you have any suggestions? —Sincerely, Paolo “Cardinal” Bernini, Vatican City.

Dear Sir: It is not true that the Vatican has no idea what to do with a retired pope. When Celestine V retired, a perfectly workable protocol was established: his successor immured him in an inaccessible cell in Rome until he rotted away, and then gave him a magnificent funeral. This protocol is still in effect, and there is no reason to deviate from it in the case of Benedict XVI. The only new question since Celestine’s time involves the pontifical ruby slippers, which magically return the pope to the Sistine Chapel once he has absorbed a suitable nugget of homespun philosophy. It has been decided that, as a corollary to the Celestine protocol, the retired pope must hand over the slippers.

CHAPTER 15.—CHARLEMAGNE TURNS ON THE LIGHTS.

For two centuries Europe stumbled about in the darkness. Men (a word Dr. Boli has chosen with particular care) have generally fallen into two broad classes throughout history: those who believe it is a noble work to build up civilization, and those who believe it is a nobler work to tear civilization down. In ordinary times, the two classes are just about evenly divided; but the Dark Ages were characterized not just by an inability to maintain civilization, but by an active passion for tearing it down that extended to almost every class. The inveterate duplicity of the government in Constantinople made the barbarians see civilization itself as equivalent to vice, and barbarism per so as virtue. On the other hand, the Christian Church, which kept little sparks of civilization alive, was not at all eager to fan them into flames. The memory of the notorious immorality of civilized Rome, where murder was a spectator sport and adultery the favorite parlor game, made any attempt at bringing back the luxuries of the old days suspect at best. The baths, for example, were never restored after the Goths cut the aqueducts, partly because the Romans never had the leisure or the funds to restore them, but more because the Christian leaders, who were really the only leaders left in Rome, were dead set against bathing. The prostitution and vice that had surrounded the public baths had made cleanliness itself an unforgivable sin in the eyes of most Christian thinkers.

Every line of thought converged on the same point. In every way, civilization had made itself to stink among the peoples. The clean and polite man must be in league with the devil; the ideal man of the Dark Ages was grubby, smelly, and violent.

Violence the Dark Ages had in abundance. If the only legitimate occupation for the ruling class is war, then peace must be an intolerable burden, and any excuse for avoiding it must be taken up at once. Nevertheless, there were among the Christian leaders those who longed for a restoration of civilization—perhaps purified of such gross vices as cleanliness, but still something recognizable as civilization.

Fortunately, no matter how thoroughly barbarized the world had become, civilization still had one weapon which only it could wield with any measure of effectiveness: viz., the weapon of deviousness.

Most of what people believe most vigorously and sincerely is fictional, and only a true adept in the mysteries of civilization knows how to manipulate those fictions to his advantage. It was, for example, a recognized and unquestioned fact that, just as the government of the Church depended on the Bishop of Rome, so the secular government all hung from the Roman Emperor, its living and theoretical embodiment. This was clearly a fiction, since the emperors in Constantinople had about as much influence in western Europe as they had on the moon; but because it was clearly false, the doctrine was maintained with tenacious earnestness even in the darkest corners of western Europe.

If only this inextinguishable ideal of universal dominion could be joined to the practical and efficient violence of one of the more ruthless barbarian princes, the resulting combination could rule the world. Then the power behind the throne, the truly civilized being who had arranged it all in the first place, could force civilization down people’s throats whether they liked it or not.

In the late 700s came the opportunity that the devious forces of civilization had been waiting to seize. Charles, the new king of the Franks, had used a judicious combination of valor, policy, and bullying to accumulate a larger share of western Europe than had been united under one head since the time of Honorius. Not only that, but he had actually gone on the record as being in favor of learning and culture. He wasn’t all that good at this reading and writing stuff himself, but he liked to watch other people do it.

At the same time, things were not going so well in what was left of the Eastern Empire. Fanatical “iconoclasts,” or image-smashers, had taken over the government, bent on destroying every work of religious art that came to their notice, especially if ordinary people loved it. We may take it as a general rule: anyone who believes that God demands the destruction of art will end by murdering people as well. There is but one step from the image of the image of God to the image of God.

Iconoclasm was bad enough, but it was infinitely worse from the Western point of view when the imperial throne was seized by a woman, of all things. Irene, whose name means “peace,” had blinded her own son to keep herself on the throne; but that was, after all, only politics as usual in Constantinople, and could probably have been forgiven easily enough in the West. But a woman on the imperial throne! It was simply unimaginable. It did not compute. As far as the West was concerned, the throne of the Empire was vacant. It made no difference that Irene had tossed out the iconoclasts and restored the remaining images to the churches and monasteries; women could not be emperors.

Here we must pause for a moment and contemplate what history might have been if one little detail had changed, for we have come to one of those rare junctions in history where everything might have turned out very differently with only the slightest push in one direction. Very serious efforts were made to bring Charles and Irene together in marriage—efforts that very nearly succeeded. The old Roman Empire was within months of a personal union with the new empire in the West. What might the world have been if Charles and Irene had ruled jointly over Rome and Constantinople? Could this restored European colossus have brought the Renaissance five or six centuries closer? Would the Greek learning still preserved at Constantinople have permeated western Europe again, as it did when Rome first conquered Greece? Would our technology today be half a millennium more advanced, so that we would finally have the flying cars we keep dreaming about? These are the questions no historian can keep himself from asking; but he cannot answer them without making such a long detour into certain peculiar subgenres of science fiction that the thread of his narrative would be lost entirely. If there are any science-fiction writers who would like to take up the story of the Roman Empire as revived by Charles and Irene, Dr. Boli wishes them well. He will confine himself to the tale of what actually happened, which was that the arrangements for the marriage came to nothing.

We can imagine how disappointed the fans of civilization must have been. One of those disappointed fans was Pope Leo III, who had been chased out of Rome in one of those frequent brawls the popes used to get into, but whom Charles had restored to the papal throne. Leo, unlike the other disappointed fans, was in a position to do something about his disappointment. He decided to give his friend Charles a nice Christmas present.

And so, on Christmas Day in the year 800, while Charles was in church kneeling at the altar, Leo sneaked up behind him, dropped a crown on his head, and proclaimed him Emperor of the Romans.

At least that was how Charles and Leo always told the story, although some historians, pointing out that the battle-hardened Charles was not the sort of man you could sneak up on from behind and live, suspect that Charles may have been in on the gag.

It would be hard to imagine a better move on the part of the forces of civilization. Charles was already encouraging art and literature, and now that he was Roman Emperor, he went at it full tilt. If he had anything to say about it, the glories of vanished Roman culture would live again. This was a tall order, to be sure, but Charles came nearer to accomplishing it than anyone had a right to expect.

How did the semi-illiterate chief of a gang of barbarian warlords bring classical culture back from the grave? Historians give us any number of theories to explain his success, but the real secret was in the inventive mind of Charles himself. Seeing that the task he set before himself was one that required a great deal of expertise, Charles thought the problem through and invented the consultant.

This was actually Charles‘ greatest management innovation, so it is a great pity that he is not given more general credit for it. Other despots had amused themselves by keeping pet philosophers, but the idea of assembling a team of qualified experts to advise the government and actually taking their advice was entirely new. No one had ever tried it before. No one has ever tried it since, either.

Heading the team of all-star consultants was an English monk named Alcuin, widely regarded as the smartest man in Europe. With Alcuin’s help, Charles put his whole empire through a crash course in literacy. Charles made it clear that he expected his nobles to be able to read and write if they wanted to get anywhere in government service. This was, frankly, not the most popular idea among the nobles. If you try to imagine how a Marine drill sergeant might react to orders from the Pentagon that he must take ballet lessons every Tuesday and Thursday, you probably have a fair idea of how the Frankish nobility reacted to the new literacy requirements. They could not understand why Charles, who could personally beat the stuffings out of any of them, was suddenly going in for all this sissy stuff. But they fell in line, because Charles could personally beat the stuffings out of any of them.

Charles’ team of expert consultants did their very best to create a sophisticated atmosphere at court, full of witty banter and clever retorts. It was, of course, absolutely essential that the Emperor should be the wittiest of them all, so the consultants spent much of their time devising elaborate setups so that Charles could not fail to deliver a zinger of a punch line. One of them might come running into the imperial presence and announce with breathless drama, “The Saxons are revolting!” Or they might propose a philosophical debate:—”Quaeritur: Whether the reason for the chicken’s crossing of the road can ever be determined with certainty.” Charles would think for a moment, and then his eyes would light up and he would deliver the punch line with tremendous enthusiasm, and everyone would laugh until tears poured down their cheeks.

All good things come to an end, however, and the reign of Charles the Great could last only as long as Charles himself was alive. On his death, the empire, following Frankish custom, was divided among his three sons. The two stronger ones soon squeezed out the weak one in the middle, leaving a mostly Germanic-speaking kingdom in the east, and a mostly Romance-speaking kingdom in the west. These two kingdoms immediately began beating up on each other, commencing a long run of nearly incessant wars that lasted until 1945. Nevertheless, though the empire itself unraveled, the accomplishments of Charlemagne were numerous and permanent. You have perhaps his greatest accomplishment in front of you right now: the simple and legible characters in which every Western European language is printed. Printers of the Renaissance copied them from old manuscripts, mistakenly believing that they were reviving the classical Roman style of writing; but in fact the earliest manuscripts of most classical Latin works date from Charlemagne’s time; and the so-called Carolingian minuscule, the basis of our modern roman characters, was Alcuin’s pet project. So you may well say that you owe every book in your library to Charles the Great. He may have been a semi-literate barbarian warlord, but he certainly knew a thing or two about consultants.

CHAPTER 14.—NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE DARK AGES.

After Justinian turned out the lights in Italy, western Europe stumbled blindly into a period we call the Dark Ages. This is the part of history most of our schoolbooks skip over, and there is no reason why the busier class of readers should not skip this chapter and go straight to the next one. In fact, if you are exceptionally busy, you may wish to flip ahead to the very last chapter of the book to see how the story comes out.* There is no use in dawdling on the journey when you can teleport straight to your destination. You will miss nothing but fifteen centuries of war and devastation, broken only by the occasional doomed attempt to improve the human condition. You will probably even find it difficult to tell the difference between the twenty-first century and the sixth, from which you may deduce that nothing has really changed in that millennium and a half; and if nothing has really changed, than clearly there has been no real history worth reading. Go ahead. We’ll see you in Chapter 42.

——Now that all those insufferably impatient pessimists have gone, the rest of us can enjoy a more leisurely stroll through history, beginning with the Dark Ages, which will reveal themselves as the era when everything that was really important was happening.

You may recall (if you have any short-term memory whatsoever) that, when we left Justinian, he had destroyed civilization in the West and made most of the East hate him. We should not neglect to mention that he had bankrupted the empire, which, considering the amount of revenue he had added to it, must be counted as not the least of his accomplishments. The crushing taxes that followed did little to make Constantinople more popular in the provinces, and most of the spectacular conquests of Justinian’s reign were undone shortly after he died. The empire did maintain an “exarchate” of Italy for some considerable time, but “Italy” consisted mostly of a second-floor office in Ravenna with a sign on the door that said “Out to Lunch.”

In the rest of the West, the nations of modern Europe were being founded. That was not, of course, what it looked like at the time: what it looked like was a bunch of barbarian thugs squabbling over territory and stealing whatever was portable. But those barbarians were carving out territories that more and more resembled the map of Europe today. It just goes to show you that you can never see history when you’re in the middle of it. What our newspapers today describe as gang turf battles may be what future historians describe as nation-building.

We have already mentioned the Franks and their scheme to turn Gaul into France. At about the same time, gangs of Angles and Saxons (and Jutes, but nobody cares about the Jutes) were muscling in on Britain, carving the island into little territories for each clan, each territory under the control of a particular thug who had become successful enough to call himself a “king.” This is actually important, because Angle-land or England (apparently nobody cared about the Saxons either) would later turn out to be something of a big deal in history, so it is necessary for us to take note of its beginning now, when the ancestors of the English are grubby illiterate heathens. Who would have guessed that the half-grunted interjections of those brutish thugs would one day evolve into the elegant refinement of the language you see on the page before your eyes?

For a while the progress of the English (as we must eventually resign ourselves to calling them) was checked by the Britons’ King Arthur and his mighty deeds of valor, unless Arthur never really existed, in which case never mind. England’s first and greatest legendary hero was thus the implacable foe of the founders of the English nation, who would later idolize him, whether he really existed or not. This is the first instance of what will become a striking pattern in English history: the English will spend years of all-out effort in fighting an enemy—Joan of Arc, Washington, Napoleon, Gandhi—and then celebrate that enemy as one of their greatest heroes. It makes perfect sense to the English, but it utterly baffles their neighbors, who find that the surest way to win the hearts of the English is to inflict some catastrophic defeat on them.

Eventually, the English settled down and began to fight one another instead of the Britons, whom they insisted on calling “Welsh,” an Old English word meaning “dirty foreigner.” Our narrative, therefore, must lurch back to the East, where at just about the some time an Arabian named Mohammed was hearing God talk to him.

Soon Mohammad began to tell other people what God had said. As a former merchant, Mohammed had a keen eye for marketing. His new and exciting variation on the monotheistic theology of Abraham caught on and vent viral, and soon he had a considerable group of followers, which attracted the unfavorable attention of the authorities. Unlike the Christians, however, the followers of Mohammed’s Islam fought back when they were persecuted, and they had a habit of winning those fights. By the time Mohammed died, he had shown all of Arabia who was boss. Two generations after that, the whole east, south, and west of the Mediterranean belonged to the new Islamic caliphate.

Why did Islam spread so fast? Well, it is always very bad historical practice to assign a single cause to a complex historical event that must of necessity have had many causes. But, in a word, Justinian.

It was Justinian who made his subjects loathe the government in Constantinople. It was Justinian who launched the greatest persecution of Christians since pagan times against millions in his empire whose crime was in not accepting, or not understanding, the technical language of theology as promulgated from the capital. It was Justinian whose lavish spending led to unbearable taxes for the masses.

Then came the Arab armies dictating their harsh terns of surrender: “You must pay lower taxes and accept the license to practice your religion without suffering the extremes of torture for your faith.” For some reason, the people of the eastern and southern parts of the empire practically gave up without a fight. Not only did the Arabs take the better part of the Roman Empire, but they conquered Persia as well.

And why did they conquer Persia, too? This is one of history’s delightful little jokes: about fifteen minutes before the Arab conquest, the Eastern Roman Empire had finally and utterly destroyed the power of Persia, after seven centuries of constant rivalry and war. It was really the Empire’s most magnificent single accomplishment, but no one remembers it, because the Byzantine conquest of Persia lasted for about as much time as it takes oatmeal cookies to bake. Then the Arab conquerors swept into the defenseless, demoralized, and disorganized Persian Empire and made themselves at home.

The new landlords thus inherited not one but two vast empires with entrenched bureaucracies and long traditions of civilization. Not very surprisingly, it was the Islamic world that pedaled the bicycle of civilization for the next few hundred years. While the stubby remnant of the Roman Empire carried on pretending it was still the center of the universe, and the rest of Europe stumbled around in the Dark Ages banging into the furniture, the vast Islamic empire to the south and east carried on civilization in the grand style, mixing the ideas it had inherited from Greece, Rome, and Persia with the clear simplicity of Islam to create a flourishing urban culture that was distinctly its own. In fact, the Caliphate is so interesting in itself that it is a pity it does not form part of history proper except when it comes in conflict with its European neighbors. No matter how much the Muslim world may have accomplished, we must therefore resolutely ignore it if we are writing a respectable history of the world.

In contrast to life in the Caliphate, life in western Europe had become so unattractive that countless thousands decided to escape it. Leaving behind the broken-down cities and overgrown farms, men and women flocked to religious establishments, the only places left where life had any certainty, and where tho world seemed to make a bit of sense. Many of these new monks and nuns came from the upper crust of the old Roman society. They could not retain possession of their fortunes when they took their vows of poverty, but they discovered a clever little loophole. If they donated their wealth to the religious establishments they were entering, they were technically giving it to God, but practically taking it with them. Monasteries were a good bit safer from pillaging by the nominally Christian barbarians than private houses, so the cloistered life looked like a good investment even to the most avaricious. Monasteries began to look more like gentlemen’s leisure clubs than ascetic refuges from the temptations of the world. And that was a very good thing.

It was good because the monasteries were thus enabled to pickle what was left of civilization, so that it would be preserved for distant future generations who would have the time to enjoy it. Only in a monastery could a man spend time among old books and be told he was doing a good thing. The lower classes, as usual, had no time for literature, and the new barbarian rulers thought reading was for sissies. But monks were actually supposed to spend time reading old books—and, more to the point, copying them. We owe almost everything we have at classical civilization to the gentlemen of leisure who invested their hoarded wealth in the nearest monastery.

Outside the monasteries, on the other hand, life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short, if not always solitary. The only organization that retained any respect at all for the civilized life was the Church. Fortunately for civilization, the Church had a few tricks up its sleeve.

—

*This refers, of course, to the printed version of the book, which will appear later this year. You may still skip ahead if you have a working time machine and promise not to hold Dr. Boli responsible for any wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

CHAPTER 13.—CIVILIZATION DESTROYS CIVILIZATION.

For the next millennium, until the discovery of America, western Europe will be the focus of history. Other parts of the world will be doing things that are in many ways more interesting than what the Europeans are doing during that time, but they will not be making history properly so called.

Let us therefore pause for a moment to survey the shattered remains of the Roman Empire in the west in about the year 500. Everywhere we look, we see barbarian kings as acknowledged rulers. In Italy, the Ostro­goths have conquered; in Spain, Visigoths rule. In Gaul, the Franks have made themselves at home and are already beginning to think of naming the place France after themselves; but they have encountered some opposition from the Burgundians, who vote for calling it Burgundy. Across the Mediterranean, the Vandals have established themselves in the province of Africa and covered the public buildings with graffiti.

Anyone familiar with our school histories would say that we are looking at the begin­ning of the Dark Ages, but our school his­tories are wrong. The lights are still on. Given half a chance, the barbarians find that they enjoy civilization and can get pretty good at it. It will be the Romans themselves who ul­timately destroy classical civilization, because they would rather destroy it than let filthy barbarians have it.

If we take a closer look at Italy, we find that the whole peninsula is thriving. Rome is still the queen of cities; her ancient splendor has been restored, and quite a bit of new con­struc­tion is going on. Art and literature are flourishing; merchants are growing rich; travelers make it to their destinations unmolested. After the disasters of the 400s, it looks like a new golden age for Rome.

All this comes from the wise and just rule of Theodoric, the Gothic king who swept into Italy, got rid of Odoacer, and went on to rule fairly and well for a generation. Under his benevolent government, the old Roman bu­reau­cracy continued to function unimpaired, and decades of stability brought both economic and cultural recovery. Naturally, the Romans were seething with resentment against a barbarian king who had the temerity to govern their country better than they could govern it themselves. Oh, how they longed to be rid of these disgusting Goths, with their uncouth language and their Arian heresy and their just and competent government!

There is an old Roman saying about “the curse of an answered prayer” that would be very appropriate here.

As for the rest of the West, it is true that occasional waves of barbarians are still sweep­ing across the landscape. (Historians once believed that history was made up of a series of such waves, but modern historians have shown that history sometimes behaves as a particle as well.) On the whole, however, there is more stability in western Europe than there has been for a century, and there is good reason to hope that the lingering shadows will soon be dispelled by the strong light of civilization still beaming from Rome. (Historians usually resort to elaborate metaphors when they are not quite sure what they are talking about.)

Now we must turn our attention back to Constantinople for a moment. During the reign of Theodoric, the relationship of the Roman emperor to Gothic Italy was rather like the relationship of the British monarch to Australia: his face was on the money and his name at the top of the chart, but he was not expected to attempt any actual governing, and any active interference in western affairs would have been hotly resented In 527, however, a new emperor named Justinian came to the throne. Almost immediately he began rubbing his hands together and declaring that he was going to get a few things done around here.

Justinian is the most unaccountable character in history. No other ruler has ruled so well and so poorly at the same time. He could slip away unscathed from the most disastrous failures, but his successes were absolutely ruinous. His most conspicuous failure, the riots that burned half of Constantinople, ended up giving us the Church of Holy Wisdom, one of the most inspiring works of architecture on the planet. His most conspicuous successes, on the other hand, destroyed civilization in the west and caused the astonishingly rapid Islamic conquests in the East. He added millions to the tax base and bankrupted the Empire. There was nothing the man could not accomplish. And as if his life were not confusing enough, the historian who gave us the most fawning pane­gyrics on Justinian’s virtues, and the historian who penned the most outrageous calumnies against him, are the same man—Procopius, who, like many a cubicle-dweller since, kept a little notebook in his desk to jot down what he really thought of his employer.

Having consolidated his position with the usual round of murders, Justinian took it into his head that he was going to restore the Roman Empire to its former extent. This was without a doubt the stupidest and most unrealistic idea a Roman emperor had ever had. It was clearly impossible. Since no one dared to tell Justinian that, he very nearly managed to pull it off.

It helped a great deal that he happened to have an extraordinary military genius at his disposal. Belisarius, Justinian’s master strategist, took Africa from the Vandals so easily that his mere name could stir terror in a barbarian heart. From Africa he went on to Italy. Luckily Theodoric had died and been succeeded by a pack of idiots, so Belisarius rolled right up the southern half of the peninsula with very little trouble. As he continued his steamroller march toward Rome, the Goths decided that the wisest thing to do would be to run to Ravenna, screaming like little girls all the way. They took the most popular Roman senators with them as hostages and left the Romans some simple instructions (“Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do”) that they hoped would prevent them from handing the city over to Belisarius right away. Then they left, and the Romans handed the city over to Belisarius right away.

Holed up in the relative safety of Ravenna, the Goths had time to reconsider their position. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea after all to let the imperial army take the greatest city in their realm without a fight. It began to occur to them that there were a whole lot of Goths, whereas the imperial army was just a few dozen Greeks—the kind of people who sat around on velvet cushions and talked about philosophy all day. Why had they retreated? What were they afraid of? This Belisarius wasn’t so tough. So they decided to go down there and take Rome back. First, just to make sure they would be welcomed as liberators, they killed all the hostages; then they came and besieged the city.

They might have taken Rome easily except for two facts: first, that Belisarius was directing the defense, and second, that the Goths were spectacularly bad at sieges. They seemed to think that the way to besiege a city was to sit around in the suburbs until they got bored, and then hurl themselves at the walls, whereupon the imperial defenders would pierce them with arrows and crush them with stones until the Goths had had enough. Some­times Belisarius would send out a sudden sally while the Goths were still sitting around in the suburbs, which was awfully un­sporting of him, since they were never ready for him.

Having failed to take the city by standing around and glowering, the Goths thought up an idea that taxed the limits of their strategic thinking: they decided to cut the aqueducts, depriving Rome of her water supply. This was good thinking as far as it went: Romans were used to having water, and they would surely start to grumble against Belisarius if they had to remain grubby and unwashed. So the aque­ducts were cut, and the water ceased to flow into Rome. Instead, it poured out by the millions of gallons into the land around the city, turning the Gothic camps into squishy, malaria-infested swamps. This was not quite the result the Gothic brain trust had envisioned, though it might have occurred to any child who had ever played with a garden hose.

The Goths held out as long as they could, but it really did begin to feel as though Belisarius was somehow besieging them from inside the city. Every time they tried another assault, the Romans would rain down bits of statuary and architecture, not to mention arrows, which the Goths didn’t like at all. Belisarius, meanwhile, held firm. It was true that the greatest city in the world was being disassembled piecemeal around him, but he had the true military genius’ contempt for collateral damage. The important thing was that he was winning.

Finally, after a year, the Goths gave up, and the grubby unwashed citizens of Rome thought they had seen the last of them. They had not. It took several more years of the most devastating wars the Italian peninsula had ever seen before Belisarius could report back to Justinian, “I have returned Italy to the Empire,” the way a teenager might hand you a steering wheel and a bent fender and say, “Here, I brought back your car.” And even then, while Belisarius was reporting in at the palace, the generals he had left to guard Italy were botching the job so badly that the Goths reconquered almost the whole province, including Rome, and it had to be re-reconquered, and re-re-reconquered, and so on.

By the end of the Gothic War, as the imperial side called it, Italy was a wasteland. The city of Rome had been reduced to a clot of squalid villages huddling amongst the ruins. The great country houses, with their libraries and art collections, were blackened wrecks. Almost everyone who could properly conju­gate a Latin verb was dead. But it was Roman soil again, so that at least was cause for cele­bration. And that happy state of affairs lasted for about an hour and a half until the savage Lombards, seeing that there was almost no one left to defend the place, poured into Italy to destroy what little was left of civilization there.

So much for the destruction of civilization in the heart of the West, one of Justinian’s two greatest accomplishments. Meanwhile, Justinian had not been idle in the East. As the visible head of Christendom, he had the responsibility of seeing to it that his subjects enjoyed all the benefits of Christian ortho­doxy. It would be nothing less than rank dereliction of duty for him to allow a single one of his subjects to hold any religious opinion that differed in so much as a single iota from the orthodox standard. Immortal souls were at stake! It was clearly his duty to launch a ferocious persecution against the wicked iotists. He did not ask himself whether it would be wise to make half the East long to be free of the tyranny of Constantinople: he simply saw his duty, and he did it.

That is why half the East longed to be free of the tyranny of Constantinople. And those oppressed millions would soon get their wish, leaving them a millennium and a half to contemplate the curse of an answered prayer.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral could be played as a quadruple-sub-contrabass recorder until 1549, when the spire collapsed during a particularly vigorous performance.

Wenderman’s Patent Concretophone enjoyed a brief fashion before the First World War, but the maker’s allotment of concrete went to the war effort, and the manufacture was not revived after the Armistice.

Excavations in the south of France have discovered artifacts indicating that Neanderthal man possessed a rudimentary form of concertina.

The piccolinelletto sounds thirteen octaves above the written score.

The Uniphone, which sounds only the note A flat, was designed by Dr. Emil von Schnapps as a therapeutic recreation for his tone-deaf patients.

Rolfe’s Bovine Organ toured the athenaeum circuit in the middle nineteenth century. Though well received, it proved excessively expensive to operate, as the oxen could not be reused.