More usually the invaders from cither side have been defeated close to the frontier; or, if successful, have not attempted to retain the territories occupied, but have retired home after exacting tribute in some form or other. Such conflicts have almost all taken place in Mesopotamia, in the region between the upper waters of Euphrates and Tigris. This is the most convenient campaigning ground — which, however, favours the Persians in the matter of ready access to food depots and garrison towns.
For several centuries after the time of Alexander, the Persian Empire was known as the Parthian because the Arsacids, the ruling dynasty, were of Parthian origin; but, about a hundred years before Constantine turned Christian and transferred the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, a descendant of the old Persian Kings, by name Artaxerxcs, had revolted and overthrown the Arsacids. His new dynasty, the Sassanids, restored the Persian name and tradition to the Empire and has maintained itself in power ever since. (At the time of which I write, Kobad, the nineteenth of the line, wore the regal diadem.) The Sassanids had purified and strengthened the ancient religion of the Persians, which is the worship of fire according to the revelation of the Prophet and Mage Zoroaster. This religion had been much corrupted by Greek philosophy — as the ancient Roman and Jewish religions had also been, and the Christian religion too. (Compare the fine, simple story contained in the four Gospels, obviously born among illiterate peasants and fishermen who had never studied cither grammar or rhetoric, with the wearisome philosophic Christianity of our time!) But King Artaxerxes banished all the philosophers from his realm. They returned to us with Persian notions and inflicted on Christianity a new heresy, the Manichean. These Manichees have hit upon a totally original theory of the nature of Christ. They hold that it was dual, and not only dual but contradictory: Jesus, the historical man, being imperfect and a sinner, and Christ, his spiritual counterpart, being a Divine Deliverer. Manichees are hated both in Persia and Christendom, and I have not a word to say in their defence. The Persians encourage them only in Persian Armenia, in order to weaken the bonds of religious sympathy between that country, which is Christian, and Roman Armenia, which is Christian too and rigidly Orthodox.
By forbidding talk of an unnecessary sort — this is all that philosophy appears to be to a practical person like me — and ordering a return to a primitive directness of action, speech, and thought, Artaxerxes restored the native power of the Persians alike in the civil and military sides of government. Great wars were waged between his descendants and successive Roman Emperors, in which, on the whole, the Persians had the advantage. But the fourteenth of the line was Bahram the Hunter, so called because he had a passion for hunting the wild ass of the desert. He became involved in a war with us because he persecuted Christians as fanatically almost as we persecute our fellow-Christians; and was conquered in battle and forced to pledge his royal honour to keep the peace for a hundred years. His sons and grandsons, for fear of provoking the anger of his ghost, kept the peace strictly, and the hundred years did not expire until modern times. Then, as I have already mentioned, war broke out again, and Anastasius's army, disgracefully led, was disgracefully defeated. This was the campaign which the burgess Simeon had witnessed.
The quarrel had several causes, but the chief of these was the wholesale price of silk. Silk is a material for clothes that is far superior in coolness, lightness, and handsome appearance to any other known. It was invented by a primitive Chinese queen, and for centuries it has been imported from China by sea and land for the use of rich and well-bred people and for dancing girls and prostitutes and such; and from a rare luxury it has become a common vanity. Silk takes dye readily, especially the purple dye of the shell-fish. Cotton is another useful importation from the East, principally from India; it is the fibrous flower of a marshy shrub, and can be woven into a light, tough cloth, cooler than woollens and easy to wash. However, cotton has not the glossiness or fineness of silk. There was never any mystery about cotton; but what the nature and origin of silk was nobody but the Chinese themselves knew, and they would not reveal the secret, because they wished to preserve their most valuable monopoly. Raw silk came to us in yellowish skeins wound on grass-stalks, each skein containing a certain weight of thread. Natural historians guessed that it was the thread of a gigantic Chinese spider, but others believed that it was fibre drawn from the bark of a certain palm-tree, and still others that it was made from the scrapings of the furry undersides of mulberry leaves. However, nobody could prove his own view to be the correct one, because our relations with China have always been maintained through middlemen — except for a short period 400 years ago when our ships sailed directly into the ports of Southern China. We have dealt either with the Persian merchant colony in Ceylon, by the sea-route, or with Persia itself, by the land-route. The silk caravans from China take 150 days to reach the Persian frontier by way of Bokhara and Samarkand, and another eighty to reach our frontier by way of Nisibis on the upper Euphrates; from thence a journey of twenty days brings the silk to Constantinople. The sea-voyage is perhaps less hazardous, but the silk must go through the hands of the Abyssinian traders of the Red Sea, and thus pay a double toll.
As the demand increased, the Chinese merchants raised the price of raw silk; and the Persians, unwilling that the Chinese should be the only ones to profit, increased the rcsale price more than was equable. Then our merchants, unable to make any profit by buying at this rate, decided to deal direct with the Chinese, if possible, by reopening an old trade-route passing to the north of the Persian territories, beyond the Caspian Sea: this long but practical route entered our territory through a narrow pass of the Caucasus mountains, to the cast of the Black Sea and at the boundary of Colchis, a rich land friendly to us. It was to Colchis that Jason of old went in company with the Argonauts to fetch back the Golden Fleece; which was, I think, a parable of Eastern riches brought by this northern route. In deciding to reopen it, our merchants were aware that they must pay toll to the savage Huns through whose territory it passed, but hoped that they would be satisfied with less money than the Persians. The nearest and most powerful of these tribes were the White Huns, so called because they were European in appearance, unlike the other Huns, who seem to us a sort of evil yellow animal. They lived between the Caspian and the Black Seas and were inveterate enemies of the Persians. A timely gift to these White Huns to persuade them to attack Persia from the north had more than once saved our frontiers from serious invasion.
But the merchants' plan failed. The Persians heard of it and persuaded the Chinese to deal only with themselves. Then King Kobad wrote sarcastically to the Emperor Anastasius that the White Huns had now made him responsible for the toll that the Romans had promised to pay them for the use of the northern route. If Anastasius still wished to buy silk, he must therefore first lend the Persian Government money with which to appease the disappointed Huns. Anastasius, of course, refused this demand with indignation, so Kobad invaded Roman Armenia with a small but well-trained army, besieging the important city of Amida on the Upper Tigris. Anastasius despatched an army of 52,000 men to its relief, entrusting its command, however, not to a single worthless general, as was customary, but to several worthless generals of equal rank — who constantly opposed one another's plans and could not agree on any single point. This huge force was therefore beaten, division by division, in several pitched engagements; and some parts of it fled without daring to come to grips at all. Our name thus won such discredit in the East that had Kobad not been distracted by a Hunnish invasion from the north — Anastasius had bought the services of the White Huns by paying the promised toll twice over- he would doubtless have attempted to overrun all Syria and Asia Minor, and doubtless would have succeeded. He had already taken Amida after a long siege, owing to the negligence of certain Armenian monks, supposed to be on sentry duty 3t one of the towers, who had eaten and drunk too generously after a long fast and fallen asleep: the Persians crept into this tower by an old underground passage that they had discovered and slaughtered the monks, every one. At the assault Kobad himself showed great energy for a man of sixty years. Mounting a scaling-ladder, sword in hand, he threatened to run any Persian through who turned back. It is said that the Persian Mages had dissuaded him from raising the siege, as he had intended to do when it grew wearisome, because of a sign: a group of prostitutes on the walls had taunted the Persians by lifting up their skirts at them, exclaiming, 'Come in and enjoy yourselves.' The Mages interpreted this as a sign that the city would soon reveal her secrets to them; and the discovery of the hidden passage proved them right. Kobad, returning to give battle to the White Huns, left a garrison of a thousand men behind at Amida, who succeeded in holding the city against the Roman relief-force and only consented to evacuate it, two years after its capture, on payment of 70,000 gold pieces.
Peace was concluded for seven years between Anastasius and Kobad, but continued much longer, because Anastasius was too weak and Kobad too preoccupied to continue the struggle. But two hostile acts were committed, one by each side. Kobad seized the Caspian Gates, the pass through the Caucasus through which our caravans were to have gone in search of silk; and Anastasius fortified the open city of Daras, close to the Persian frontier and commanding the main road joining the two countries.
To give an explanation of what these acts signified. The Caspian Gates are of great strategical importance. They are the only practical pass through the lofty and terrible Caucasus range, which acts as a barrier for many hundreds of miles between the broad Asiatic steppes, where the nomad Huns roam, and our civilized world. Alexander the Great had been the first to appreciate fully the importance of this pass, which is seven miles long and
