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who had died in excruciating and blood-streaked agony upon a rough-hewn cross. Indeed, whether in the meditations of theologians or in the mosaics of artisans, He began to resemble nothing so much as a Roman emperor. Whereas the faithful had once looked to their Messiah to sit in awful judgement over Rome, now bishops publicly implored Him to turn His 'heavenly weapons' against the enemies of the empire, 'so that the peace of the Church might be untroubled by storms of war'. 18 By the fifth Christian century, prayers such as these were turning shrill and desperate - for increasingly, the storms of war appeared to be darken­ing all the world. Savages from the barbarous wilds beyond the Christian order, no longer content to respect the frontiers that had for so long been circumscribed by Roman might, were starting to sweep across the empire, threatening to despoil it of its fairest territories, and to dismember a dominion only lately consecrated to the service of God. Was this the end of days come at last? Christians might have been forgiven for thinking so. In ad 410, Rome herself was sacked, and men cried out, just as St John had foreseen that they would, '"Alas, alas for the great city!"' 19 Still waves of migrants continued to flood through the breached frontiers, into Gaul and Britain, Spain and Africa, the Balkans and Italy; and this too, it struck many, St John had prophesied. For the end time, he had written, would see Satan gather to himself nations from the far ends of the world; and their numbers would be like 'the sand of the sea'. 20 And their names, St John had written, would be Gog and Magog.
    To emperors struggling to hold together their disintegrating patri­mony, such talk was pure sedition. To their servants in the Church as well, desperate to see the imperial centre hold, the strident anti- Roman sentiments of St John's Revelation had long been an embarrassment. In 338, a council of bishops had sought to drop it alto­gether from the canon of Holy Scripture. In the East, where the more prosperous half of Rome's empire was at length, and with colossal effort, shored up against collapse, the Book of Revelation would not be restored to the Bible for centuries. Even as the western half of the empire crumbled away into ruin, an emperor remained sufficiently secure behind the massive battlements of Constantinople to proclaim that God had granted him authority over the affairs of all humankind - and to believe it. Whatever the barbarians might be who had overwhelmed the provinces of the West, they were self-evidently not Gog and Magog - for the end of days was yet to come, and the Roman Empire still endured.
    This conviction, simultaneously vaunting and defiant, would remain constant throughout the succeeding centuries, even in the face of renewed calamities, and the dawning recognition, hard for any people calling themselves Romans to accept, that the empire was no longer the world's greatest power. Smoke rising from the passage of barbarian war bands might repeatedly be glimpsed from the walls of the very capital; enemy fleets might churn the waters of the Bosphorus; frontiers and horizons might progressively contract, as Syria too, and Egypt, and Cyprus, were lost to the New Rome: and yet the citizens of Constantinople, no matter what the tides of disaster lapping at them, still trusted to their destiny. Like the Jews, they pre­sented themselves as God's elect, both afflicted and favoured on that account - and, like the Jews, they looked to the future for their ulti­mate deliverance.
    So it was, some time in the seventh century, and amid an unprece­dented series of defeats, that startling prophecies began to circulate. Written, it was claimed, by Methodius, a saint who had been martyred some three hundred years previously, these appeared to lift the veil, just as St John's vision had done, from the end days of the world. No matter that Methodius himself had been executed on the orders of a Caesar, the