Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  CONSTANTINOPLE WAS THE CAPITAL of what historians now call ‘Byzantium’ or ‘the Byzantine Empire’. But ‘Byzantine’ is just a name of convenience, coined after the empire had ceased to exist. The ‘Byzantines’ themselves never used such a term – they called themselves Romans, and they were the inheritors of the incomparably great civilisation that once had dominion of all the lands from the north of England to the Syrian desert, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Danube River. Emperors of Constantinople were proud to trace the line of their predecessors all the way back to Augustus.

  In Augustus’s time, the city of Rome was indisputably the heart of the empire it had given its name. But as centuries rolled on, the Eternal City became less and less relevant, too far from the action and the money. So in 330 AD, the emperor now known as Constantine the Great rebooted the whole imperial project and shifted the Roman capital to the east. Constantine cast about for an ideal site and found it in the small Greek city of Byzantium, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. The site was on a promontory, surrounded by water on three sides, so its location was both defensible and spectacularly beautiful. Here Constantine could re-found the empire and Christianise it, away from the traditionalists in Rome. The city’s first name was simply Nova Roma – ‘New Rome’ – but it soon adopted the name of its founder and became Constantinople, the city of Constantine. In time, the Romans came to build a city so large, powerful and beautiful that people from all over the world would describe it as a mirror of heaven.

  THIS LOST WORLD of the eastern Romans was somehow forgotten by the west. I was taught in school that the Roman empire sputtered out in 476, when the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus was ordered off his throne by a German chieftain and sent into a very early retirement. But as the memory of Roman rule faded in the west, the Roman empire in the east, based in Constantinople, endured for another thousand years. The arc of its lifespan is an awesome thing, touching the ancient world at one end and the Age of Discovery at the other. While western Europe struggled through the miseries of the Dark Ages, Constantinople blazed with light as a bastion of Roman law, Greek culture and Christian spiritualism.

  The city was protected by the most elaborate defensive fortifications in the world. Constantinople projected into the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus Strait like a stubby thumb. Two-thirds of its perimeter was surrounded by water. A hostile land army could therefore attack the city from one direction, and one direction only: the stretch of land on its western side. But here the invaders would be rebuffed by the legendary land walls of Theodosius: a massive, triple-layered defensive network of thick stone and brick walls and towers that were a wonder of the medieval world.

  SAFE BEHIND THEIR IMPREGNABLE walls, the Romans of Constantinople changed beyond recognition, like sea creatures that had evolved to walk on land. By 1453 they bore little resemblance to the Romans of the ancient world. The use of Latin evaporated, replaced by the Greek patois that was much more widely used across the eastern Mediterranean. Worship of the old pagan gods of Jupiter, Diana and Saturn had been long since rooted out and expunged; the Romans were now devout Christians who could be drawn into tiresome infighting over the most intricate points of theology. But the Romans of Constantinople saw no rupture with their glorious ancestors, only a renovation; the strong links of continuity with the Roman past were more meaningful to them than the differences. They called themselves Romaioi, and the lands under their dominion ‘Romania’.* To their minds, ‘Roman-ness’ was a shared set of ideas and traditions that had little to do with geography, much the same way that modern Australians consider themselves westerners, while living south of East Asia.

  But by the fifteenth century Constantinople had lived too long, seen too much and done too much; its glory and greatness had dissipated, its treasures stolen and scattered across western Europe. The capital of the Roman empire was little more than a broken Christian city-state, with much of its population melted away. Whole neighbourhoods were destroyed and then abandoned; fields and orchards sprung up within the city walls to replace them.

  By the time Mehmed and his army showed up at the gates in 1453, the Ottoman Turks were already in possession of all the lands around the city; Constantinople had become a conspicuously Christian island in an Islamic sea. But, shrivelled as it was, Constantinople glimmered dimly with the aura of the Roman name. It was a truism, still uttered throughout the Christian and the Muslim worlds, that ‘he who becomes the emperor of the Romans, becomes the emperor of the whole world’. Mehmed had made his plans to seize that world-throne for himself.

  Alone and almost friendless, Constantinople could summon only six thousand men to defend it. Women, children, nuns, priests and the elderly were called to the walls to help.

  THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF BLACHERNAE sat high above the north-west corner of the land walls. On that spring day in 1453, the emperor watched from a tower window as the Turkish forces fanned out along the full length of the walls. Then he left the palace with his retinue of advisors and set up a command outpost close to the most vulnerable section of the walls at the Romanus Gate. His name was Constantine XI Palaeologus and it fell to him to be the very last emperor of the Romans. He was forty-eight years old.

  Constantine XI and his court were operating under a different cloud of prophecies and predictions. The most famous of these was attributed to Methodius, a church founder who foresaw that the destruction of Constantinople would trigger nothing less than the end of the world. In this apocalypse, the last emperor of the Romans was to play a critical role. As the end of days approached, he said, the armies of Gog and Magog, who had been held behind iron gates for thousands of years at the edge of the world, would be unleashed. The unclean hordes would swarm towards the city, but the last emperor would stand firm and defeat them in a cataclysmic battle. Then the last emperor would travel to Jerusalem, to the hill of Golgotha. There he would place his crown on the Holy Cross, and then fall down and die, as the cross and crown would be gathered up into heaven.

  The prophecy was widely known and accepted among the people of Constantinople. As the Ottoman threat began to loom over the city, monks and priests clustered on street corners to remind the Romans of their long-foretold doom. In these final weeks, with Gog and Magog evidently at the gate, the people of Constantinople believed themselves to be the central actors in a drama in which the fate of the cosmos hung in the balance.

  ALTHOUGH THE CITY’S DEFENDERS were badly outnumbered, Constantine had not succumbed to apocalyptic despair; he was busily preparing to fight to the death. Even as reports came to him of the enemy’s overwhelming numbers, the emperor had reason to hope he might prevail, as his ancestors had so many times before. Everything depended on keeping the Theodosian Walls intact.

  The Theodosian Walls had made Constantinople a standing affront to Islamic supremacy, ‘a bone in the throat of Allah’. They confronted any would-be conqueror with three parallel layers of defences: a walled ditch, followed by a high protective outer wall, followed by an even higher inner wall, with a network of platforms, battlements and defensive towers on each level. So long as the walls could be adequately manned, the defenders could protect the city against an invasion force ten times as large. But the emperor’s forces were sparse, and Mehmed had arrived at the walls with a new weapon for a new age of warfare: the bronze cannon, hauled by fifty oxen and two hundred men. It was the biggest gun in the world, and it had the power to smash gaping holes in the Theodosian Walls.

  By 1453 the conquest of Constantinople seemed both impossible and inevitable.

  THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE expired in ignominious circumstances, but the death of Roman civilisation in the east a thousand years later has all the qualities of an epic tragedy. At least, it does to western eyes; from a Turkish point of view the conquest of Constantinople is a moment of triumph and renewal, a victory that allowed a clapped-out city to be reconsecrated to a new faith and a fresh imperial project.

  The mural of Mehmed and his army that my son and I stumb
led on in that dingy underpass is a work of Turkish propaganda, an invocation of that glorious day in 1453 when their ancestors broke through the walls and took the capital of the world for themselves, the moment when God confirmed their greatness as a people. It’s just as well the artist chose lurid colours, because there are fantastic scenes in the story of Constantinople’s last days that would be difficult to believe, had they not been separately recorded by historians, priests and a ship’s doctor who lived through the city’s spectacular downfall.

  But the painting only tells half the story; absent are the city’s defenders. Unlike Romulus Augustulus, Constantine XI did not resign his throne. Instead he drew on every reserve of courage, resilience and ingenuity he could find, within himself and his people, to make a last stand, and the defenders held out for seven weeks against their doom.

  It was all in vain. Mehmed’s armies eventually broke through, and Constantinople was remade as Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Turks and the new centre of Islamic power in the world. The Ottomans would go on to create their own distinct civilisation, inspired as much by the example of Roman grandeur as by the faith created by their Prophet. Today, Istanbul is a boomtown, the largest city in Europe, but traces of Constantinople still linger, visibly and invisibly. The local Istanbullus have become accustomed, even indifferent, to living with a ghost in their house, the disembodied spirit of Byzantium.

  Once you know the story of this lost empire, you feel the ghost of Byzantium pressing against you at the crumbling land walls. You become suffused with it when you stand under the golden dome of the Hagia Sophia, and you glimpse it within the shadows of the underground cistern of Justinian. The story of how Constantinople flourished into greatness and expired in terrible violence is one of the strangest and most moving stories I know. I wanted my son to have that story too.

  Richard Fidler

  CHAPTER ONE

  Radiant City

  Constantinople, from the Nuremburg Chronicle (1493).

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  A Second Firmament

  A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, Constantinople was the greatest and richest city in Europe. It dwarfed its rivals in size, splendour and sophistication. The city contained half a million souls, more than ten times the population of London or Paris. At a time when western Europe was ensnared in a dark age of poverty and illiteracy, the people of Constantinople enjoyed the pleasures of the metropolis: they bought exotic goods in the marketplaces of the city’s great marbled squares and cheered for their teams at the Hippodrome, the world’s biggest stadium. Students attended universities and law academies. There were schools for female education and hospitals with women doctors. The city’s libraries conserved precious manuscripts by Greek and Latin authors, ancient works of philosophy, mathematics and literature that had been lost or destroyed elsewhere.

  Constantinople was the greatest wonder of its age. It was an imperial capital, an emporium, a shrine and a fortress. Venetian merchants arriving after a long sea voyage would see the gold and copper domes of the skyline appear out of the Bosphorus fog like a hallucination. First-time visitors were stunned by the monumental scale and beauty of the city. They reacted like European peasants arriving by boat into Manhattan, not quite believing the impossible metropolis looming in front of them.

  Traders came to Constantinople from all over Europe, from Asia and Africa. Russian galleys cruised down from the Black Sea, laden with fish, honey, beeswax and caviar. Amber was brought from the shores of the Baltic Sea to be exchanged for gold or silk. Spices from China and India were carried overland into the city and sold on to western Europe.

  Constantinople was a holy city; its majestic churches and monasteries housed the most important sacred relics of Christendom – the crown of thorns, fragments of the True Cross, the bones of the apostles and a portrait of Christ believed to have been painted from life by St Luke himself. Pilgrims came to Constantinople by the old Roman road, down through Thrace. Passing through the Charisian Gate in the land walls, the pilgrim would push his way through the crowds on the Mese, the city’s broad central avenue, passing shops, colonnaded squares paved with marble, and tenement blocks. Beggars and prostitutes would loiter in doorways while a holy fool, smeared with grime and filth, displayed the scars of his mortification to jeering children. The crowds on the Mese would part for a procession of chanting priests parading a wooden icon, followed by a train of ecstatic believers hoping to catch a glimpse of the icon weeping miraculous tears or dripping blood.

  The emperor’s procession among his people would bring city traffic to a standstill. Heralds with dragon banners would appear, strewing flowers on the path ahead, followed by an entourage of imperial guardsmen, clerics and ministers. The voices of a choir would then lift up and sing, ‘Behold the Morning Star! In his eyes, the rays of the sun are reflected!’ Finally the emperor would appear, swathed in crimson and gold silk, his feet clad in the distinctive thigh-high purple boots reserved for the occupant of the throne.

  Columns of Constantinople.

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  THE CITY WAS ALMOST supernaturally beautiful. Visitors from western Europe could find nothing on Earth to compare it to, describing it in their letters as ‘the all-golden city’, ‘a second firmament’.

  Constantinople was created to invite such comparisons. Its emperors, bishops and architects were attempting to build nothing less than a mirror of heaven, reaching for something they called theosis, union with the divine, a state of ecstatic oneness with the Holy Spirit. In this way, the magnificence of their city became an expression of their moral virtue.

  This longing for theosis reached a kind of perfection in the Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, constructed with astonishing speed in fewer than six years. When completed, the Hagia Sophia became the supreme expression of Byzantine genius, blending art and technology into a seamless whole in order to flood the senses with wonder and pleasure.

  Court and church ritual in Constantinople was extraordinarily complex and correct. A Russian pilgrim who witnessed an imperial coronation described the painstakingly slow procession of the uncrowned emperor to the throne:

  During this time, the cantors intoned a most beautiful and astonishing chant, surpassing understanding. The imperial cortege advanced so slowly that it took three hours from the great door to the platform bearing the throne . . . Ascending the platform, the Emperor put on the imperial purple and the imperial diadem and the crenated crown . . . Who can describe the beauty of it all?

  OUTSIDE THE HAGIA SOPHIA, under a domed shelter, stood the Milion, the golden milestone that measured the distances from Constantinople to the faraway cities claimed by the empire. All roads, it seemed, led to this New Rome, to this singular place, the heart of God’s empire on Earth.

  The city’s glittering reputation extended in all directions for as far as it was possible for any one person to travel in a lifetime. Serbs, Bulgarians and Russians called it Tsarigrad, ‘The City of the Caesars’. In medieval China it was known as Fu-Lin, a city of fantastical creatures and enormous granite walls. Viking warriors who had served as mercenaries in the emperor’s Varangian Guard returned to their little villages in Iceland and Norway with tales of the distant, golden city they called Miklagard, ‘The Big City’. Their stories of Constantinople became the dream architecture of the mythical realm of Asgard, the heavenly walled city where Odin, the king of the gods, dwelt. Stories of Constantinople invaded the dreams of people who would never live to see it. Its sacred rites and architecture were so heavenly, they could dazzle whole nations into the faith.

  ‘We cannot forget that beauty’

  PRINCE VLADIMIR OF KIEV was the ruler of a Slavic people who worshipped many gods. One day in 987 AD, he told his court that he and his people should no longer be pagan. But, he wondered, should they adopt Judaism, Christianity or Islam? Vladimir sent his best men to distant parts of the world to determine the one true religion of God.

  Envoys were sen
t to the Muslims. When they returned, they told Prince Vladimir that there was no gladness among these people.

  ‘Drinking alcohol is prohibited to them,’ they told him. ‘This might be too burdensome for our people.’

  Vladimir had heard enough: ‘Drinking is the joy of all Russia. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’

  Next Vladimir called in representatives of the Jews and asked them where their homeland was.

  ‘Jerusalem,’ they replied.

  ‘If God were truly with the Jews,’ he replied, ‘He wouldn’t have scattered them from their homeland. Would you wish the same fate for us?’ he asked. And with a wave of his hand he dismissed them.

  Then Vladimir received a message from the envoys he’d sent to the Christians of Constantinople. In their letter they struggled to express how moved they were by what they’d seen in the Hagia Sophia:

  We knew not whether we were in heaven, or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it to you, only this we know: that God dwells there among humans, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.

  And so Vladimir was baptised into the Christian faith, and in return he was given the Emperor’s sister as a bride. Which is how the Russian people came to be Orthodox Christians.

  Another version of the story claims it was Emperor Basil II who approached Vladimir first, asking for military aid against a rival to the throne. Vladimir agreed, but demanded in return the hand of Anna, Basil’s sister. Vladimir’s conversion therefore was simply a necessary pre-condition for the marriage. In the first story the Russians arrive at Christianity through the eerie beauty of the Orthodox rite; in the other version it’s a simple matter of political expediency. But in Constantinople, the spiritual, the aesthetic and the political were often fused together. The city was a showcase of both Orthodox Christianity and Roman power, designed to enthral people into the faith, and to cement their allegiance to the empire at the same time.