"There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son"

In first place, I must say that I am very much in favour of freedom of religion. I respect the right of people to believe whatever they want (save for some specific cases *cough$cientologycough*), as long as they respect the same right in me. For example, I know that the best football team in the world is Real Madrid, but I respect that others believe that title corresponds to Barça, Bayern Munich, Manchester United or any other of the thousands of football teams in the world.

Jokes apart, considering that Easter was a couple of weeks ago, I thought that maybe I should make this weeks' posts about things with some more religious connotations, and this post you are reading now will be about a novel where the point of divergence is religious.

Right now, I have in my hands a novel written by the man that many call "The Master of Alternative History": Harry Norman Turtledove, probably the most prolific alternative history writer nowadays (he has written more than eighty novels, no less). Considering that the thesis with which he earned his PhD is about the history of the Byzantine Empire (its official name is Eastern Roman Empire), I can just say that he knows quite well about what he is writing, at least when it comes to this novel.

Its name is Agent of Byzantium, which speaks about a Roman Empire reborn from its ashes thanks to the hard work of the Emperors that lead it from the city of Constantinople, and its people. The main character is Basilios Argyros, the secret agent the title refers to, and which readers, writers and critics talk about as a kind of Byzantine Agent 007.

The Point of Divergence that separates the story of this book from ours is Muhammad. When he was young, Muhammad made many commercial travels to Syria, where he undoubtedly made contact with Christian people: the Islamic tradition is that, when he was between 9 and 12 years old, he met a Christian monk or hermit called Bahira, who predicted Muhammad would be a Prophet of God.

In our history, Muhammad had his first revelations, that led him to write the Qur'an, when he was approximately 40 years old. Eventually, this would become the Holy Book (or one of them, depending of whether you are Sunni, Chii, or part of another branch) of the Islamic religion, which, unified in a great empire centered first in Arabia and then in Damascus, would end up controlling a great part of the known world, and other nations that professed Islam would end up defeating many kingdoms, including the Byzantine Empire, which disappeared in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who made it the capital of their empire and renamed it Istanbul.

In Basilios Argyros' past, it does not happen this way: Muhammad converts to Christianism, becoming a celebrated prelate and saint by spreading the Word of God through all of the Mediterranean Sea's coasts, and at the end of his life he is buried in the Iberian Peninsula. This post's title is, precisely, one of Saint Muhammad's most famous sentences, and the book's main character's favourite prayer (you'll see it many times if you read the book, and it can be a bit repetitive, but there are reasons for this).

World of Agent of Byzantium when the novel takes place (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Basilios Argyros' career begins as an army explorer, and the first time we see him is in a punishment expedition against the Jurchen tribes of the north, but this expedition is suffering problems, as the Jurchen shamans seem to have the power to discover the Romans' movements before they should be able to. However, Basilios, in a risky mission, finds out that it is just a primitive telescope, that has been accidentally invented by the shamans, and he manages to steal it for the Empire.

His action's audacity opens him the way to the Byzantine secret service: Basilios becomes a magistrianos, and from then he has many adventures against the enemies of the Empire, whether they may be internal or external, mostly against his main rival, Mirrane, a shrewd and seductive agent of the Persian Empire, where Zoroastrianism remains alive (see? Islam's non-existence not only affects Christianism), with whom Basilios has many encounters along several years.

One of the book's main hook's is that all stories have several inventions and ideas that are well known in our present (I will not be telling which they are, so that I cannot spoil the surprise for whoever decides to get this book and read it), but which for the book's main character are completely new, so it becomes very entertaining to see Basilios trying to understand these new concepts and try to either overcome the problems that stand in front of him, or try to gain something that may serve to expand the Empire's power.

It must be said, though, that this book is not a typical novel. At the beginning, it was a series of stories published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine between July 1985 and December 1989 (this is the reason why the prayer is repeated so much), which would later be edited and published in a book (I am lucky to have a translation of the 2nd Edition, which has all the stories published with Basilios Argyros, as the first edition is missing the first story). If you have ever read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, you'll know how exactly this works (by the way, the edition I have has a prologue written by Isaac Asimov), so there are no other surprises in regards to that.

Maybe the book will be hard to find, but if you manage, I can assure you that you will really have fun with Basilios Argyros' adventures, and will wish that Turtledove had written more about him.