The empire is crumbling.
Rome has been fractured, separated into three states.
The west is desperately trying to hold the borders of Gaul,
the east is being overrun by the Sassanids,
the Rhine provinces are in disarray.
In the center, Italy alone stands.
The year is 260 AD, the emperor Valerian has marched East
with an army of 70,000 legionaries to push back the Sassanids
and regain control of the economic heart of the empire.
Plague has struck. Disease travels like a hurricane through the camp.
Legionaries are sick, dying, laid low...
And the Sassanids, the mighty new form of the Persian Empire,
have come to deliver the coup de grace.
The armies met near a town called Edessa in Cappadocia, now southern Turkey.
Outmatched, weighed down by sickness, the Romans don’t stand a chance.
The battle turns into a rout, then a massacre.
Not one man escapes.
The emperor meets with the Sassanids to discuss terms,
but during parley he is betrayed and taken prisoner.
For the first and only time in the history of Rome,
an emperor is made captive on the field of battle.
The shockwaves from this event are immense.
The emperor is not dead, but he’s also not ruling,
so... who’s running the empire?
Imperium breaks down.
The East is left devoid of legions,
the Sassanids are rampaging through Roman territory,
no army within a thousand miles stands to oppose them.
Complete collapse is imminent.
But despite all of this, the East would stand for 1200 more years,
a bulwark to the West.
What prevented its collapse?
What allowed the legacy of Rome to last long enough to
be passed down to those who would help shape the Renaissance,
and thus the modern age?
A little known Palmyrene prince named Odenathus.
Palmyra was an oasis town just at the fringes of the Roman Empire,
in modern day Syria.
It was unusual because, although it was technically within Roman territory,
it was allowed to continue operating as an independent city,
with its own government and even its own military.
It lay right across the Silk Road and was one of the most important
reprovisioning stops for caravans moving goods from Asia to Rome.
So as Roman wealth grew, so did the wealth of Palmyra,
and by the second century, it was a monument of classical city building.
It had great temples and amphitheaters, statues and
a massive roadway that was flanked on either side by monumental columns.
Hidden among the desert dunes, this was a city to rival perhaps
any in the west besides Rome itself.
As the city prospered, so too did its citizens, and soon they
clamored for the rights and honors afforded to all prosperous Romans.
By the start of the third century, the city was named a Colonia,
the highest status the Romans could give a city, and its most notable
citizens were acknowledged as equals in rank, if not of lineage, to Senators.
One such citizen was Lucius Septimius Odenathus.
His family, having been granted Roman honors by Septimius Severus,
had long been one of the leading families of Palmyra.
At the time our story begins, the time of Valerian’s ill-fated
expedition to the east, Odenathus was serving as Exarch (governor) of Palmyra.
As Rome and the Sassanid Empire came to blows,
Odenathus realized that this could mean nothing good for his desert city state.
At first he tried to remain neutral, but after the disaster outside of Edessa,
he realized that neutrality was impossible. He would have to choose a side.
The king of the Sassanids, Shapur, with no Roman force left to oppose him,
clearly aimed to annex Palmyra, so Odenathus decided to cast the die
and throw his lot fully in with beleaguered and dying Rome.
And here is where history turns.
As the invincible Sassanid army returned from ravaging the eastern
Roman Empire, laden with booty and captives, tramping through the desert
a thousand miles from the nearest army that could stand against them,
a strange thing happened.
The vanguard saw dark shapes upon the dunes,
thousands of them, men outlined by the sun.
Before they could even raise the cry, this phantom desert army was upon them,
tearing through their lax and ill formed lines.
This Sassanid army, the army that no legion could stand against,
that had savaged the eastern empire unopposed and come within
a hair's breadth of annexing all of the eastern provinces of Rome,
was gone in an instant, ruined by these ghosts of the desert,
scattered like windblown sand.
And this mirage army, seemingly conjured from the desert itself?
This was the army of Odenathus. It was a last stand.
Here the Eastern Roman Empire would live or die, and Palmyra with it.
Odenathus, when he had heard of the Roman defeat, had known that this
was his only chance, the only chance, at holding off the Sassanids.
He had pulled together every troop his city state could muster,
he had gathered what remnants of the Roman legions he could find
scattered in the desert and had armed his peasantry to make his stand.
And then he descended on the Sassanids with fury,
like the howling desert winds. From here he moved like lightening.
He marched north to defend the legitimate Roman Emperor,
the son of Valerian, from pretenders from the east.
Then south to smash the now hobbled Sassanids.
He came to the very gates of the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon twice,
and his patchwork army of peasants, legionnaires, and soldiers of Palmyra
liberated province after province, bringing them back into the Empire.
His desert army soon became the most feared in the east,
and he personally ruled a kingdom that spanned from Anatolia to the Levant.
But he never rebelled. Unlike so so many in this time,
he never named himself Emperor or Augustus - though he perhaps
controlled more land and a more impressive army than the emperor of Rome.
And for this, he was granted titles extraordinary in all of Roman history.
He was elevated to Dux Romanorum, or Leader of the Romans,
and then Corrector Totius Orientis, the Righter of the East,
and then finally Rex Regum or King of Kings.
This last one was a bit of a dig at the Sassanids,
whose customary title for their leader was “King of Kings”.
This was Odenathus and the Romans telling the Sassanids
who was now the real boss in the middle east.
Yet still, despite being made King of Kings, he considered himself a
servant of Rome and faithfully defended the Roman borders in the east,
bringing back into the fold the provinces that had slipped away
during the third century crisis, until his death in 267.
Would he have, with the passage of many more years, eventually
declared himself emperor and created a new empire from the now
massive part of the East he controlled for the Rome?
We’ll never know, because as he rode to Cappadocia to quell
an incursion of Goths, he went hunting with his nephew and son.
He told his nephew to leave the hunting party, because of some
act of rudeness, and while this nephew waited out his time away
from the group, he stewed and stewed…
At the next great feast, he killed both Odenothus and his heir.
And like that, history turns again.
With no heir of age left, Odenothus’ wife, Zenobia, actually did take that
final step and declared herself empress of what she called the
Palmyrene Empire and for this Zenobia really deserves her own episode someday.
But by the time she declared this Palmyrene Empire, her late husband
had bought Rome enough time to recover and regain its footing.
And a newly reforged Rome would make sure that the Palmyrene Empire
was not long for this world.
And with its fall Rome would, at last, fully reintegrated the east.
So how much long term difference did this one Arabian prince choosing to
fight for Rome and pulling together an army out of an oasis town really make?
Well, consider this:
it’s entirely plausible that, without Odenathus’s actions,
Eastern Rome would have disappeared forever right here.
And without Eastern Rome, the Roman Empire as a whole
would pretty much be over.
Now, it’s true that the Roman empire would still collapse 200 years later,
but those 200 years of Roman existence have had
an enormous impact on Western culture.
If nothing else, consider just this one fact:
this all happened in the year 260. 130 years before Christianity
was named the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Who knows what would have happened if this little known noble
in the middle of the desert hadn’t decided to stand for Rome?
How different would today’s world be?
For better or worse, this one prince’s decision may well have helped to lead
to the profound impact Christianity would have on history
for thousands of years to come.
History so often hinges on these small events.