Why AD 599?
If you could walk into one year of Roman history with a pack of silver and fourteen centuries of hindsight, which year would you choose?
For The Silver Meridian the answer was 599. It is not the most famous year of the Roman Empire, and that is part of the point. Nothing in it looks like the end of anything. Maurice Augustus is in the seventeenth year of his reign. He has made peace with Persia on the best terms in a generation, after helping the young Khosrow II back onto the Persian throne. His armies are on the Danube, carrying the war to the Avars and the Slavs who had spent twenty years plundering the Balkans. The Empire still holds Italy, Africa, Egypt and Syria. Its gold coin is the money of the known world.
And yet almost everything that will go wrong in the next forty years can be traced to the three years that follow.
The prisoners
In 599 or 600 (the sources do not agree) the Avar Khagan took some twelve thousand Roman soldiers prisoner. He offered them back for a ransom. Maurice, whose treasury had been emptied by two decades of war, refused to pay. The Khagan had the prisoners killed.
Maurice had a reputation for counting every coin, and the army never forgave him for it. Earlier in his reign a cut in soldiers' pay had already provoked a mutiny on the Persian front. The prisoners on the Danube were remembered.
The mutiny
In the autumn of 602 the Emperor ordered the Danube army to spend the winter north of the river, in the enemy's country, living off the land. The soldiers refused. They chose a junior officer, Phocas, as their leader and marched on Constantinople. In November the City rose against Maurice. He fled across the Bosporus, was taken, and at Chalcedon was made to watch his sons killed before he was killed himself.
The war
Khosrow II owed Maurice his throne, and he took the murder as his cause. The war he began in 603 lasted, with hardly a pause, until 628. Persian armies took Syria, Jerusalem and Egypt; Avars and Slavs came down the Balkans to the walls of Thessalonica and Constantinople. The Empire survived, under Heraclius, at enormous cost. Both empires came out of it exhausted, and within a decade the armies of Islam had taken Syria, Palestine and Egypt from one; within a generation they had taken the whole of Persia from the other. The Mediterranean that Rome had held together for seven centuries was never one world again.
The hinge
A historian would say, rightly, that none of this was inevitable, and that much of it had causes older than Maurice. A novelist is allowed to ask what one man could change. In 599 the Empire is still whole, the Emperor is still alive, and the mutiny is three years away: long enough for a man who knows what is coming to do something about it, and short enough that he must start at once.
That is where Andreas comes in. He arrives in Syracuse in May 599 with silver bars in his pack, and he has one year before he must be back at the cave.
Further reading: the main narrative source for these years is Theophylact Simocatta, writing a generation later, alongside the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor. Both are available in good English translations.