The Immortal Emperor

by Donald M Nicol

  Then his misfortunes were compounded by the death of his brother Kalojoannes, the wise Emperor. The hour of his death was the hour of ruin for the Orthodox Christians. The foundations of Constantinople were shaken; and it was an evil day when Constantine was summoned from the Morea to be crowned Emperor in the unhappy city, for bad luck had always followed him. But they brought him to the palace and they crowned him Emperor in St Sophia; and on z9 May, a black day that should never have dawned, the Turkish dogs captured the city. It was an event to be lamented by all Christians of east and west and brought upon them by their own sins. Yet the Emperor was not to blame. It was not his fault. He and his people had pinned their hopes on help coming from the pope of Rome and his cardinals, from the King of France, from dukes, counts, princes and republics of the west, from the Emperor of Germany, the Serbs, the Russians, the Hungarians and others. The Emperor was expecting ships from Venice, Genoa, the Catalans and all of Italy. But his hopes were not realised; and he died, they say, falling on his own sword. The poet then goes on to describe the horrors of the Turkish sack and plunder of Constantinople and to exhort the rulers of the west, especially the pope, to come and liberate the unhappy city, warning them that if they delay and give the Turks time to consolidate their power in the east, the west too will soon be swallowed up. Towards the end of his poem he addresses the illstarred Emperor Constantine Dragases: `Tell me, where are you to be found? Are you alive, or did you die by your own sword? The conquering Sultan Mehmed searched among the severed heads and corpses, but he never found you ... There are those that say that you are hidden beneath the almighty right hand of the Lord. Would that you were really alive and not dead. 't'

  Another anonymous poem lamenting the fate of the city, written in or soon after 1453, is known as the Anakalima of Constantinople. Its author seems to have come from Cyprus, and he writes in a more demotic style. He gives a colourful and dramatic account of how the unfortunate Emperor Constantine died, begging his Cretan soldiers to cut off his head and carry it off to Crete rather than letting him be taken alive by the Sultan Mehmed and his ravening dogs. But the poet holds out no hope for the future of the once renowned city of Constantinople. It has become `Tourkopolis'. The angel whose task it was to guard the church of the Holy Wisdom has gone; and the young man who, it was popularly believed, would have taken over the guard has come in another guise - the son, not of the founders of the church, but of the Antichrist, Mehmed; and the angels and the saints will help no more.15

  The historian Doukas, in his account of the fall of the city, tells the following tale.

  When the Turks broke in, the Christians rushed to the Great Church, monks and nuns, men and women carrying their babies and abandoning their homes. The street was packed with people making for the church. The reason for their stampede was this: there was an ancient and false prophecy that the city was destined to be violently captured by the Turks, who would slaughter the Christians as far as the column of Constantine the Great. At that point, however, an angel bearing a sword would come down and hand over the sword to an unknown man, a very plain and poor man, standing beside the column. The angel would say to him: `Take this sword and avenge the Lord's people.' The Turks would then take flight, with the Christians chasing them and cutting them down as they fled; and the Christians would drive them from the city and from the east and west as far as the borders of Persia, to a place called Monodendrion. The people had long believed that they would be safe if they put the column of the Cross (or of Constantine) behind them.

  Chalkokondyles, describing the same rush of refugees towards St Sophia, says that the prophecy foretold that the Turks would be stopped in their tracks in the district of Tauros, the Forum of the Ox or of Theodosios.18

  In later Greek folklore the story was that the Turks would be driven east as far as a place called Red Apple Tree (Kokkini Milia) or Monodendrion, which was thought to be their original home or the birthplace of Muhammad. The legend of `the poor man' who would one day be entrusted with the rescue of the Christian people and their city, crushing the `Saracens' and taming the `fair-haired races', derives from an amalgam of oracles and prophecies. The so-called Visions or Revelations of the Prophet Daniel seemed to foretell that `the poor emperor', by name Ptocholeon, would destroy the Ismaelites and pursue them as far as Monodendrion. Other versions had it that `the emperor who had been supposed dead' would emerge from a city called Tyrannis or Tyrannos and would defeat the Ismaelites in a great battle, in which `the fairhaired races' would fight alongside him as his allies."

  The Byzantines who crowded into the cathedral of St Sophia behind the column of Constantine on z9 May 1453 were cruelly deceived in their naive faith that `the poor emperor' standing by the column would save them. Prophecies, however, often remain open to reinterpretation. Later generations came to believe that their city would be restored and revived by an Emperor who was dead and entirely forgotten. He would awaken from his long sleep and take up again the sceptre of his Empire. This tale, of which there were many variations, was recorded in verse and was based on the so-called Oracles of Leo the Wise.1B In some of its versions the legendary `poor man' has been upstaged by a greater figure. The Emperor to be resurrected was Constantine Palaiologos, the hero of the last days of Christian Constantinople who had been turned into marble and thus immortalised. An angel of the Lord had rescued him when he was about to be killed by the Turks. The angel had swept him up, turned him into marble and concealed him in a subterranean cave near the Golden Gate of the city. There the marble emperor sleeps and awaits the angel's call to wake up. The Turks, continues the legend, know all about this miracle, but they cannot find the cave. So they have walled up the Golden Gate through which the Emperor will one day come to liberate the city. But when God so wills the angel will come down, reanimate the marble Emperor and give him back the sword which he had in battle; and he will come to life, march into the city and chase the Turks as far as Red Apple Tree.

  The full cycle of the resurrection, enthronement and triumphs of the sleeping Emperor is illustrated in seventeen miniatures in the Chronicle of the Cretan painter George Klontzas which dates from 159o. The Emperor is shown guarded by angels as he lies in his tomb before being awakened, then being crowned in St Sophia and entering the palace in Constantinople. He then fights a series of six battles against the Turks. He is next seen praying at Caesarea in Cappadocia, marching on Palestine, returning in triumph to Constantinople and finally entering Jerusalem. There he is seen to deliver the Cross and his crown to the church of the Resurrection before handing back his soul to God at Golgotha and being buried in the same church at Jerusalem. Until the hour came for his own resurrection, however, the marble or sleeping emperor lay hidden beside the Golden Gate of Constantinople, the gate through which emperors in the past had come back in triumph from their battles. The fact that the Turks had walled it up added weight to the prophecy, for it showed that they were afraid that there might be some truth in it. Turkish tradition had, after all, set the scene of Constantine's death at the Golden Gate.1°

  In 1625 Sir Thomas Roe, then British ambassador to the Porte, sought permission to remove some of the antique statuary and carved stones from above the Golden Gate to send them to the Duke of Buckingham for his collection of antiquities. He observed that the Golden Gate had been walled up and had never been opened since `the Greek Emperors' lost the city. He failed to remove them not so much because of official interference as of local opposition. The Turks round about had a superstitious dread of the Golden Gate and all that went with it. Sir Thomas's interpreter told him that there was a prophecy that the statues on it were enchanted and that if they were taken down `some great alteration should befall this city. He spake of a vault underground, that I understand not; ... and it is true that, though I could not gett the stones, yet I almost raised an insurrection in that part of the citty.'20

  In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the then British Ambassador in Constantinople, told a strange tale of Turkish
superstition. It concerned a very fine Egyptian mummy which the King of France had wished to send as a present to the King of Sweden, Charles XII. `He gave a great Price for it', she writes, `and the Turks (for it had to pass through Istanbul on its journey) took it into their heads that he must certainly have some considerable project depending upon't. They fancy'd it the body of God knows who, and that the Fate of their Empire mystically depended on the Conservation of it. Some old prophecys were remembered upon this Occasion, and the Mummy committed prisoner to the 7 Towers, where it has remain'd under close Confinement ever since.'2' The traveller and later French consul Pouqueville had heard this story from a Turk and understood that the mummy had been intercepted and impounded by the janissaries at the Edirne Gate. They supposed it to be the relic of some saint and placed it under guard in the castle of the Seven Towers. Pouqueville was himself held prisoner there from 1799 to 18oi and he discovered where the mummy was hidden. He was never told that the Turks regarded it as a form of talisman for the protection of their city; and he had so little respect for its supernatural powers that he removed its head, slipped it in his pocket and carried it away.22 None the less, Lady Wortley Montagu's story may have some substance, at least in so far as the Golden Gate in the Seven Towers was haunted by the mythical corpse of a saviour emperor who might one day come alive again and cause `some great alteration' to befall the city.

  The awakening of the sleeping emperor would, it was said, be heralded by the bellowing of an ox. There was, however, some difference of opinion about his name. The ninth-century Patriarch Tarasios is alleged to have foretold that the emperor who would be roused from his long sleep would have a name beginning with I and ending with S, signifying salvation, in other words Ioannes or John. Leo the Wise was credited with having drawn up a list of future Emperors and Patriarchs. That too went no further than an Emperor called John, presumably Constantine's brother and predecessor John VIII. Chalkokondyles, who was a great admirer of Leo's understanding of stars, spirits and their powers says that Leo did not list Constantine among the Emperors, because `he was killed by barbarians and did not die in the imperial majesty'. Nor did he list the Patriarch Gregory III because Gregory resigned and went off to Italy.23 The Patriarch Tarasios, from the dim shadows of the ninth century, seems to have foreseen what Leo the Wise recorded and what Chalkokondyles knew to be true, that John VIII was the last of the Byzantine Emperors to be properly crowned in Constantinople.

  Other versions of the legend had it that the sleeping body at the Golden Gate in the castle of the Seven Towers was either John Palaiologos or St John the Evangelist who, in Orthodox tradition, was also the author of the Book of Revelation and so a unique authority. He was said to be an old man with a long white beard; and he held in his hand a book in which he recorded all the sins of the Turks as well as the Christians. Access to the Golden Gate was strictly forbidden. But those who got anywhere near the old man could hear him muttering: `The time has not yet come. The hour has not sounded. The remission of sins has not occurred.' It was said that the Turkish guards lit a candle here every night and draped the body in a coverlet which they renewed once a year. They foretell that the day will come when Constantinople is besieged and captured by seven nations who will fight among themselves for possession of the city. Rivers of blood will flow in the streets and it will be the worst disaster since the beginning of the world. Then the sleeping John, Evangelist or Emperor, will awaken from his long sleep and, standing in the midst of the city, he will shout to the seven nations: 'Stop! Enough blood has been shed.' The fighting will cease and John will reign in glory for three days and three nights before disappearing. Peace will then prevail in Byzantium."

  A similar tale of folklore, known to the Turks as well as the Greeks, was that three holy men had, since 1453, been sleeping in the crypt of the mosque called Gill Camii, which had once been the church of St Theodosia or the Virgin of the Roses. They slept upright and if the visitor were a Christian he could hear them declaring in a solemn voice that the time and the hour had not yet come. The sins of the people had not yet been forgiven. The three holy men held registers in which they recorded every least peccadillo of the Christians. Yet another popular belief, at least by the eighteenth century, was that the `sleeping emperor' lay in a coffin in St Sophia.25 By then the whole corpus of Byzantine prophetic literature had passed into Russian. Nestor Iskinder had declared in the fifteenth century that nearly all the prophecies of Methodios of Patara and Leo the Wise about the fate of Constantinople had been fulfilled and that those that awaited their fulfilment would be proved right.28 One theme especially dear to Russian exegetes of the prophets was that of the `fair-haired nation' which would conquer the Ismaelites and take the City of the Seven Hills or Constantinople and its dominions, fighting as the allies of the long-lost Christian Emperor. In earlier times the blonde or fair-haired races of the prophecies had been identified as the Northmen or Normans and therefore the enemies of Byzantium. By the eighteenth century, however, they were thought to be the Russians and especially the Muscovites, willing and eager to fight for the restoration of an Orthodox Christian Empire centred on Constantinople.27

  The liberation of the city by a blonde race of Russians seemed to be foretold if not confirmed by an enigmatic inscription from the tomb of Constantine the Great, first published in the seventeenth century. The interpretation of its meaning was ascribed to the Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios. It was odd that it had never been recorded before and had never been included in the compendious collection of the works of Gennadios. In fact the inscription as well as its interpretation seem to have been invented by the ingenious Pseudo-Dorotheos of Monemvasia, whose chronicle in demotic Greek was compiled in 157o and first printed in Venice in 1631. It was an immediate success and went into numerous editions. There were also Slavonic, Rumanian and Russian versions. Byzantine prophetic literature thus played its part in nourishing the conceit that Moscow was the third Rome and that it was Holy Russia's sacred mission to drive the Turks out of Constantinople. ze

  Pseudo-Dorotheos became a best-seller in Greek and other languages. Even more popular in the eighteenth century, however, was the book of visions and revelations that went under the name of Agathangelos. It was said to have been put together in Messina in 1279, published at Milan in 1555, and translated into Greek in 1751 by a Greek archimandrite from Adrianople. His name was Theoklitos Polyeides and it is clear that he was the only begetter of the text. As the Ottoman Empire began to decline and the Russian interest in Greece and in Constantinople grew, the Visions of Agathangelos seemed to point the way forward. Rigas Pheraios, author of the first constitution for a Republic of Greece still to be freed from the Turks, was no gullible peasant. But he had read his Agathangelos and he persuaded a publisher in Vienna to put it into print in 1790.29 Even after the Greek War of Independence and the liberation of part of Greece in the 18zos, the market for oracles and their interpretation remained buoyant. One of the first books to be printed in Athens, in 1838, was a collection of prophecies put together by one Petros Stephanitzes of Leukas. It contains, among other oracular effusions, the prognostications of Methodios of Patara; the spurious inscription from the tomb of Constantine the Great; the oracles of the Patriarch Tarasios and Leo the Wise; and the Vision of Agathangelos. The learned Dr Stephanitzes helped spread the word that the liberation from the Turks of the mainland and islands of Greece was only a beginning. He produced the evidence to show that the prophecies about the recovery of Constantinople were still to be fulfilled.30 His pronouncements fuelled the dangerous notion held by politicians as well as more humble Greeks throughout the nineteenth century that the resurrection of the immortal emperor in Constantinople would herald the restoration of a Greek Empire centred on the city. Stephanitzes fed the flames of what was called the Megali Idea, the Great Idea. But he was no simple fool. He was an educated man and a qualified physician who helped care for Lord Byron in his last days at Missolonghi and was rewarded with Byron's sword.31


  Later in the nineteenth century the myth of the sleeping emperor became a theme for contemporary Greek poets. George Bizyinos (11849-96) wrote a poem entitled `The Last Palaiologos' which concludes with the tale of the emperor being woken by the angel and, repossessed of his sword, chasing the Turks all the way to Red Apple Tree.32 George Zalokostas (1805-58), in his poem `The Sword and the Crown' first published in 1854, foretells the day when the crown of Constantine, taken away for safe keeping by the Lord of Heaven, will be restored to rest upon the head of a fairhaired emperor.33 The myth was given new meaning when, for reasons best known to himself, the Danish King of the Hellenes, George I (1863-1913), had his son and heir baptised as Constantine. Readers of Agathangelos and Stephanitzes were enraptured. The monks of Mount Athos were at their most prophetic. Clearly the heir to the Greek throne was in the direct line of succession from the first and the last Emperors of Byzantium, Constantine I the Great and Constantine XI Palaiologos. We have seen how the Greeks in Constantinople presented the young Constantine with what they alleged was the sword of the last Christian ruler of their city. When he came to the throne of Greece in 1913 there were many of his subjects who hailed him as Constantine XII. His leadership in the Balkan Wars of 1912-i3 and the eviction of the Turks from Thessaloniki fortified the fantasy that the Red Apple Tree would be his next stop. It was unfortunate that he fell foul of his prime minister Eleutherios Venizelos and had to abdicate before accomplishing what many believed to be his sacred mission.39