Agent of Byzantium

Preface

I’m a science-fiction writer and a historian. The combination is not as uncommon as it sounds—to name just a few, Barbara Hambly, Katherine Kurtz, Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz, and JohnF. Carr all use what they studied in college to give depth and authenticity to the worlds they create. In my case, the connection between the two is even tighter. Were I not a science-fiction reader, I probably never would have ended up studying Byzantine history. I was in high school when I read L.Sprague de Camp’s classic Lest Darkness Fall, in which he dropped a modern archaeologist into sixth-century Italy. I started trying to find out how much he was making up and how much was real, and I got hooked. The rest, in more ways than one, is history.

This book, then, draws heavily on my academic background. It’s set in the early fourteenth century of an alternate world where Muhammad, instead of founding Islam, converted to Christianity on a trading mission up into Syria. As a result, the great Arab explosion of the seventh and eighth centuries, which in our world spread Islam from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China, never happened. The Roman Empire (which in its medieval, eastern guise we usually call the Byzantine Empire) never lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and north Africa to the invaders, never had to fight for its life in Asia Minor or defend Constantinople in a siege that, if lost, would have sent the Empire crashing into ruin. Freed from such desperate pressure in the east, the Empire took a more active hand in Western Europe than it could in our universe. Over the centuries, it took Spain back from the Visigoths, Italy from the Lombards, most of the southern coast of France from the Franks. To the western states that kept their freedom, Constantinople was to be envied as much as it was feared.

In the east, the history of Rome’s ancient rival Persia also differed greatly from its fate in our world. Without the Arab invasions to lay it low, it remained the other great power in the world west of China, the one nation that could treat with the Empire as an equal. Sometimes the two states clashed openly; more often they quietly maneuvered to gain an advantage here, to stir up trouble in each other’s lands there. Each continued to dream of and work for the final victory neither had ever seen. Such is the world of Basil Argyros, soldier and agent of the Empire. It is perhaps a more conservative world than our own, at least in the sense of having changed less drastically from classical times. But no world, as Argyros learns (not always to his comfort), stands still forever. A final note on chronology: the Byzantines did not often use the Incarnation as the starting point for their era. The etos kosmou (year of the world) ran from September 1 to August 31 and was reckoned from the Creation, which Byzantine scholars dated to September 1, 5509 B.C. Thus etos kosmou 6814, the year in which this story begins, runs from September 1, 1305, to August 31, 1306.