The Roman Emperor of Afghanistan
The Roman envoys who stood before the Chinese emperor in 745 AD did not seem quite as the old writings about the legendary empire in the far west had suggested to expect. For one thing, the gifts they brought with them - lions and antelopes - did not seem all that Roman. And for another, they spoke neither Latin nor Greek, but Bactrian, which was widespread in Central Asia and related to Persian. This was less surprising to the Chinese, as the delegation had not found its way to China from Italy or anywhere else in the Mediterranean, but from Kabulistan, a principality around the present capital of Afghanistan.
A prince had ruled there since 738 who referred to himself on his coins (in Bactrian) as "Fromo Kesaro" - "Emperor of Rome" - and now, through his ambassadors, asked for recognition of this title from the Emperor of China. Despite the not entirely coherent appearance, the Chinese court complied with this request. Not only had Fromo Kesaro and his delegation accepted the superiority of the Middle Kingdom, but he was also a potentially useful ally against the Arabs, with whom China was fighting for supremacy in Central Asia at the time. And his empire was far enough to the west that he could pass as a "Roman" for the Chinese.
Fig. 1 Silver coin of Fromo Kesaro (in Bactrian language "Emperor of Rome"), ruler of Kabulistan (in present-day Afghanistan) from the period between 738 and 745 AD (from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phromo_Kesaro._circa_738-745_CE.jpg,)
But how did a prince in what is now Afghanistan come up with the idea of adorning himself with the title of "Emperor of Rome" - more than 2500 kilometers as the crow flies east of the former borders of the Roman Empire and more than 250 years after the Roman Empire had ended in Italy? In fact, the power of the Romans impressed contemporaries throughout Eurasia far beyond the empire's borders for centuries. And even at the time of Fromo Kesaro there was still a Roman emperor, even if he no longer ruled in Rome, but in Constantinople. This (Eastern) Roman Empire had lost many of its territories in Africa and Asia to the Arabs in the 7th century, but had recently celebrated some military successes - against the very same opponents with whom the prince of Kabulistan was at war. Fromo Kesaro wanted to build on this glorious past and present of Roman power, which was associated with great prestige throughout Eurasia.
Traditionally, the Roman Empire is primarily perceived as a Mediterranean superpower. The Romans referred to the Mediterranean as mare nostrum – “our sea”. Their claims, however, always extended far beyond the Mediterranean. The Greek historian Polybius wrote as early as the 2nd century BC that with the expansion of the Romans, the fates of Europe, Africa and Asia were “intertwined” in a new way. In the centuries that followed, their empire expanded even further to England, the Rhine and Danube, North Africa and Egypt, as far east as present-day Turkey and the borders of Iraq. Around 390 AD, Latinius Pacatus Drepanius, who came from Gaul, even boasted in a eulogy to Emperor Theodosius I that the people north of the Black Sea were no longer protected from the power of the Romans by the cold, the Arabs no longer by the heat of the sun, and even the Indians by no means by the ocean. "your empire reaches places where the name of Rome has hardly ever reached before." In fact, Roman merchants were active in the Indian Ocean since the annexation of Egypt in 30 BC, and the Tabula Peutingeriana (the medieval copy of a Roman world map from the 4th century AD) records a temple to Emperor Augustus built by these merchants at Muziris in southern India.
Fig. 2 South India with the port of Muziris and the Temple of Augustus as well as the island of Taprobane (today Sri Lanka) on a facsimile of the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman world map from the 4th century AD (the original is in the Austrian National Library; from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TabulaPeutingeriana.jpg)
By the end of the 4th century, however, the imperium Romanum had already become a largely Christian empire, and the Romans' claim to world domination was now combined with the missionary zeal of the new religion. These claims were maintained in the east of the empire and in its new capital, Constantinople, even when Roman rule in the west of the Mediterranean collapsed in the course of the 5th century. Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565 AD) not only wanted to make up for these losses by initiating a "reconquest" of North Africa and Italy. He also sent missionaries to what is now Sudan and maintained diplomatic relations with communities that were already Christian in what is now Ethiopia, South Arabia, India, and Sri Lanka. His successor Justin II even sent embassies to the Khan of the Gök Turks in what is now Kyrgyzstan around 570, the diplomatic mission that advanced furthest eastward that we learn of in Roman sources.
However, Justinian's reign also marked a turning point; the expensive wars in the west and against the Persian Sasanians in the east overwhelmed the empire's resources. In addition, via the extensive trade routes the pathogen of the bubonic plague was introduced, which broke out first in Egypt in 541 and then throughout the Mediterranean. Further wars with the Persians weakened both superpowers so much that the Arabs, now united under the sign of Islam, were able to conquer the Sasanian Empire in its entirety from the 630s onwards and wrest Rome's richest provinces in Syria, Egypt and North Africa.
By the end of the 7th century, the Roman Empire of the East had shrunk to a regional power in Asia Minor, the southern Balkans and parts of Italy. However, doubts about the divinely ordained supremacy of the Romans only arose briefly. After initial defensive successes against the Arabs, which also impressed Fromo Kesaro in Kabulistan, the restoration of world domination was promised as a sign of the approaching end times, in which a Roman emperor would drive the enemies not only behind the former borders, but far into Central Asia.
However, a renewed expansion only became realistic when, from the middle of the 9th century, the central power of the Caliph in Baghdad within the Arab Empire began to decline. During this time, the scholar Photios (ca. 815-893) was sent from Constantinople to the Caliph's court. His interest in the near and far east of the empire in particular is also reflected in his reading of the 280 books from the period from the 5th century BC to the 9th century AD, the contents of which he described and assessed in his "Bibliotheke". This work served modern research primarily as an indirect source for numerous texts from antiquity that are now lost to us, but which Photios was still able to study in Constantinople in the 9th century. The "Bibliotheke" is also evidence of the geographical horizon of a learned Roman (as the Greek-speaking Photios saw himself) after the catastrophe of the 7th century; and this horizon still stretched from the legendary island of Thule in the cold North Sea to India, to the homeland of Fromo Kesaro in present-day Afghanistan and even to China. At the same time, Photios was gathering knowledge of governance for a possible further expansion of Roman power in these parts of the world.
Fig. 3 The Roman Empire around 200 AD (pale pink) and around 800 AD (red) and in yellow the places and regions mentioned in the “Bibliotheke” of the scholar Photios based on the reading of 280 ancient and early medieval texts around 850 AD (weighted in size according to the frequency of their mention; map created by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, 2024).
On this basis, Photios, now Patriarch of Constantinople, probably also contributed to the creation of the origin myth of a new imperial dynasty that came to the throne in 867 with Basil I. Basil came from rather humble backgrounds; but in the writings of the scholars at his court he was not only glorified as a descendant of Emperor Constantine the Great and Alexander the Great, but also of the Arsacid kings who had ruled Iran and Armenia until the 3rd and 5th centuries AD respectively. The emperor in Constantinople thus made use of imperial traditions of the Romans, Greeks and Persians that spanned the whole of western Eurasia - in a similar way to what his "namesake" Fromo Kesaro had done in Kabul the century before.
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller is a Byzantinist, environmental and global historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and key researcher in the FWF Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformations”. His new book „Byzanz. Das Neue Rom und die Welt des Mittelalters“ was published in 2023 with C. H. Beck (Munich).
English version of an entry to the EurAsia-Blog for the FWF Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformation” on the website of the Austrian newspaper “Der Standard”: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000224066/der-roemische-kaiser-von-afghanistan
Further reading on the Internet:
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Symploke and complexio. Entangling and Dis-Entangling the Networks of the Roman Empire of the East in the Early Medieval World, Fourth-Ninth Century CE, in: Proceedings of the Plenary Sessions of the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies. Venice 2022, https://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-590-2/021 (open access)
Claudia Rapp et al., Mobility and Migration in Byzantium: A Sourcebook. Vienna 2023, https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737013413 (open access)
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, "Justinianische Pest": Verheerende Seuche oder doch nur eine kleine Krankheitswelle? Standard-Blog, 20 March 2020: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000115630847/justinianische-pest-verheerende-seuche-oder-doch-nur-eine-kleine-krankheitswelle