Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  WITHIN THE IMPERIAL PALACE lived the most enigmatic figure in the city, the emperor himself, who sat at the summit of church and state. In Constantinople, the emperor assumed the title totius orbis imperator, ‘Commander of the Whole World’. In ancient times, Roman emperors had styled themselves as the first among equals. But with the passing of the centuries, they began to bolster their authority by swathing themselves in mystery. Court ceremonies became more formal and elaborate. Emperors wore make-up and donned robes embroidered with precious jewels, and required visitors to prostrate themselves in their presence.

  The Diplomat and the Singing Tree

  IN 949, A VENETIAN GALLEY pulled into the Golden Horn, carrying an Italian diplomat, Liutprand of Cremona, the representative of King Berengar of Italy. Liutprand stepped ashore, presented his credentials and requested an audience with the emperor.

  Liutprand was admitted to the palace through the Chalke Gate near the Hippodrome, and led through a marbled vestibule into the palace complex. Soon he was brought to the Chrysotriklinos, the ‘golden reception hall’, where two eunuchs hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him into the throne room.

  As he entered the glittering octagonal room, Liutprand was amazed to see a gilded bronze tree, its branches filled with mechanical singing birds, each emitting birdsong according to its species. Liutprand was carried closer to the massive throne and saw another mechanical wonder: at the base of the throne were two gilded lions with automated tails that struck the ground, and mouths that roared as they opened and closed. He looked up and there on the throne was the emperor, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, adorned in brocaded purple vestments, glittering with jewels. Liutprand dropped to the ground and prostrated himself three times, as required by protocol.

  When Liutprand raised his head he saw Constantine’s throne had somehow shot up some nine metres from the floor, raising the emperor almost as high as the palace ceiling. The emperor had also, somehow, changed his robe.

  Conversation over such a great distance was awkward. After a short while a courtier indicated it was time to leave and Liutprand respectfully withdrew. He was quartered within the palace and his belongings were brought up from his ship. Liutprand was somewhat embarrassed that Berengar had given him no gifts to present to the emperor, only a letter that he knew was ‘full of lies’. So he thought it best to hand over his personal gifts to the emperor as though they had come from Berengar, including nine armoured breastplates, seven embossed gilded shields, several precious cups and four child-eunuch slaves.

  The emperor was well pleased with these gifts and invited Liutprand to join him at a feast in the Palace of the Nineteen Couches, adjacent to the Hippodrome, where the imperial family could eat and drink with their guests while reclining on couches in the style of the ancient Romans. Liutprand witnessed more automated wonders at the feast, as golden trays of food and wine were lowered mechanically from the ceiling to the table.

  Coin of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

  public domain

  IN ALL, THERE WERE NINETY-NINE emperors in Constantinople from the city’s founding in 330 to the final siege of 1453, as well as several empresses who ruled in partnership with their husbands or governed as regents over their young sons. A very small number of empresses ruled alone, straining against every convention in a male-dominated society that would otherwise have relegated them to the women’s quarters of the palace or a convent cell. In this long chain of rulers we see every human variation of what happens when an individual and great power intersect.

  An emperor was much more than a political leader – he was a spiritual figurehead, God’s regent on Earth. Imperial princes were taught in their lessons that Jesus came into the world during the reign of the first emperor, Augustus, and that surely this was no coincidence. Clearly it was the will of God that Roman emperors should serve as Christ’s representative on Earth, in the interregnum between the crucifixion and the Second Coming.

  And yet, for all that, something of the soul of the old Roman republic still remained in Constantinople. As in ancient times, emperors had to be mindful they governed on behalf of the senate and the people. An emperor who strayed too far from public opinion might end up torn to pieces in the Hippodrome.

  The Flickering Lamp

  HEAVENLY CITIES, doomed emperors, robotic trees, Crusaders, saints, floating nuns and the ever-looming apocalypse – it was this rich stew of stories that had brought me to Istanbul with Joe. Our common enjoyment of history was a source of quiet and deep joy to me. It wasn’t hard to infect him with the history bug. Even as a small boy Joe was looking to place himself in the great long stream of events and people, needing to understand what had taken place before his entry into the world. The long, long story of the ancient Romans appealed to him as much as me.

  For some reason, men and boys tend to talk more freely side by side, rather than face to face, so when Joe was little, I often took him on long walks with me. On these walks, he would pepper me with questions about the Nazis and the Industrial Revolution. By the time he was twelve we’d moved on to the Russo–Japanese War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Knowing the shape of these stories gave him a confidence that was hard for him to find in the classroom. Despite his evident brightness, Joe struggled in his first years of school. He was oddly reluctant to learn how to write. When required to do so in class he would often scrawl out his letters in mirror form, from right to left. He flipped letters, words and phrases around on the page, and he started to fall behind. A mild form of dyslexia was identified and overcome.

  While he was alienated from the written word, Joe developed the compensatory interrogative skills that are common in dyslexic children and adults – he set about drawing down everything I knew from my reading. I was stronger on the history than the science, but I took all of Joe’s questions seriously. In doing so I was trying to emulate my own dad, who had patiently absorbed my own boyish inquiries and always tried to give me his best answer.

  A love of history can sometimes come across as a distraction from the more urgent business of the here and now. But without a grasp of the flow of events that have carried us to the present day, we are all a bit untethered from our place in time and space, condemned to live in an eternal present. A child’s interest in history is a particularly lovely thing because it arises from some larger philosophical questions pertaining to life’s deepest mysteries: how did we come to be here? History also offers us a defence against the sickly sweet temptations of nostalgia, the conviction that in times past things were simpler, people nobler and children more obedient.

  Edward Gibbon, author of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, joked that the discipline of history was ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. For me, history has always seemed like a trove of riches, an everlasting storehouse of stories that will never, ever be depleted. This thought has been my shield against boredom and melancholy.

  Winston Churchill absorbed and wrote history to fend off his black dog, the depressive episodes that sapped his energy and robbed him of his usual joie de vivre. Churchill understood the value of placing yourself in the timeline of world events, noting that ‘the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward’. History offered him ballast for his restless soul, even if its insights were imprecise. In his eulogy for Neville Chamberlain to the House of Commons, he likened it to a lantern: ‘History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.’

  For anyone wanting to follow the trail of the Romans, the flickering lamp must travel a long way through time and space. And as we trace their path through the centuries, they evolve beyond recognition several times over.

  The History of the Romans in Five Paragraphs

  WE GLIMPSE THEM FIRST in their tribal origins as farmers, squatting on Palatine Hill, muttering prayers in th
e rain to Jupiter. There are seven legendary kings. Then the monarchy is overthrown for a republic and the lamp starts to gleam. The battle-ready Romans defeat the other tribes of Latium. Then they conquer the Etruscans to their north and the Greek colonies in the south, and the whole of the Italian peninsula is under their dominion.

  As they become more powerful and prosperous they adopt the sophisticated clothes, habits and culture of the Greeks. The conquest of Sicily is the opening round of a fight to the death with Carthage, a rival power on the North African coast. In revenge, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crosses the Alps with soldiers and elephants and the Romans are almost finished. But they hang on, regroup and push back. Carthage is completely annihilated and Roman dominion expands across the Mediterranean, creating tensions over land and power that fracture the republic. Civil wars break out repeatedly but resolve nothing.

  The lamp now casts a dazzling light on a generation of famous Romans: the dictator Julius Caesar, the general Pompey Magnus, the lawyer and orator Cicero, and the doomed lovers Marc Antony and Cleopatra. All of them are overshadowed by the towering figure of Octavian, who keeps the outward forms of the republic but kills its spirit, gathering up its most important offices for himself and assuming the title of ‘Imperator’ – commander. Octavian brings decades of civil war to an end and is awarded the title ‘Augustus’ or ‘Revered One’ by a grateful senate. Augustus is followed by a string of degenerate emperors: Tiberius, Caligula, Nero. Then the empire reaches a dizzying apogee under the rule of the Five Good Emperors, and Roman dominion extends ever further, from Yorkshire to Mesopotamia.

  Then come fifty years of war and chaos. Twenty-six emperors take the throne and almost all are murdered or die in battle. We see the empire break into two, then three, pieces. The Emperor Diocletian puts it back together but in a different shape. Christianity emerges as a persecuted minority cult within the empire, first among slaves, then soldiers and senior officials. An emperor named Constantine adopts Christianity and shifts the capital east to Byzantium, which is remade as Constantinople.

  The city of Rome declines, and is sacked by barbarians. Twice. The last western emperor resigns in humiliation, but the Roman name and legacy is conserved in the east. The lamplight slowly changes colour, as the Romans evolve into Greek-speaking Christians in Constantinople. The empire flourishes, and then falters, as the insurgent Muslim armies arrive at the gate. After several cycles of conquest, plague and defeat, the empire recovers its strength for another three glorious centuries, until Constantinople is wrecked by the western Crusaders. In 1453, the lamp draws deeply on the last of its fuel, for one last burst of light, and then it is extinguished forever.

  HERE, SURELY, was a story big enough to fill the imagination of a history-besotted fourteen-year-old and his father. In Jewish and Aboriginal culture there are longstanding coming-of-age ceremonies to mark a child’s entry into incipient adulthood. No such traditions exist for Anglo-Irish Australians, so I hatched a plan: Joe and I would go on a history road-trip from Rome to the New Rome in Istanbul, and we would conclude this father–son adventure at the site of the epic death of the eastern Roman empire by walking the full length of the legendary land walls, from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn.

  It has since been explained to me that the bar mitzvah is not so much for the benefit of the kid, but for the parents, to ease them into accepting that their child is no longer a helpless infant and will, in due course, be leaving the nest. This went some way to explain the zeal with which I planned this coming-of-age adventure with Joe. It would be as much for my benefit as for his.

  Joe has a curious mind, an eye for the big picture, and an even temperament; I knew he’d make a good travelling companion. I selfishly wanted to enjoy a month imagining the ancient and medieval world with him before he was old enough to go out into the world on his own, without me.

  This plan for a father–son escapade took some explaining to my wife Khym and my daughter Emma, who wanted to know, quite rightly, why they weren’t invited. I explained that fathers and sons should have at least one adventure together on their own, and that I was fully supportive of a similar mother–daughter adventure should they care to undertake one. I thereby managed to assuage their misgivings, if not my own guilt, for getting on a plane without them.

  THREE GREAT emperors dominate the story of early Byzantium: Constantine, Justinian and Heraclius. Each knew what it was like to stand at the summit of world power. All three had controversial marriages marked by murder, incest and unmistakable passion. And all of them lived long enough to suffer terrible loss. But it is the first of the three emperors who looms largest, who shifted the direction of the whole world decisively and forever.

  To tell the story of Constantine and the birth of New Rome, Joe and I began in old Rome, in a courtyard designed by Michelangelo, to find the man who gave his name to the Queen of Cities.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rome to Byzantium

  The Roman empire in 330 AD, at the founding of Constantinople.

  Colossus

  THE BOY LOOKS UP at the massive head propped up on a pedestal against the wall. Joe and I are standing among the dismembered bits and pieces of a colossal statue of Constantine the Great, in the courtyard of Rome’s Capitoline Museum. The head, made of white marble, is two-and-a-half metres tall, big enough to crush a Volkswagen. The face is not conventionally handsome – the aquiline nose juts out crudely, as does the cleft chin – but it is noble, imperial, the expression distant and serene. Next to the head is Constantine’s gigantic, muscular upper arm; on the other side, a hand with an outstretched finger pointing piously to heaven. Who is the god invoked here? The god of the Christians or Constantine himself?

  Colossus of Constantine, Capitoline Museum, Rome.

  Richard Fidler

  In its original form, this colossus of Constantine sat on a throne and was as tall as a four-storey building, a hulking presence crafted to impress everyday Romans with the great leader’s accomplishments. Colossal barely covers it: Constantine the Great is among the most truly transformative human beings who ever walked the Earth. Historians place him in the company of Jesus, the Buddha and Muhammad. We are, all of us, still living with the consequences of what this man said and did 1700 years ago.

  His name means ‘constant’ or ‘steadfast’, and Constantine was certainly capable of holding to a course of action, year after year, patiently grinding down his rivals until he became the most powerful man in the world. He was the outstanding military leader of his time and, to some extent, an old-fashioned Roman general: a man of hard, relentless application to the task at hand. But once he mounted the throne, Constantine revealed himself more fully as an audacious and visionary leader.

  Constantine will forever be remembered for two achievements: the foundation of Constantinople, New Rome, which endures today as Istanbul, and his promotion of Christianity from minority eastern cult to the majority religion of the Roman empire, a move that shifted the future direction of the world morally, politically and spiritually. Constantine is why the provinces of Europe and eventually the Americas would eventually form themselves into the self-described Christian nation states that endure today. For this, he was made a saint by the Church, ranked alongside the apostles of Jesus. But although he was a great man, he could not be said to be a good man.

  CONSTANTINE WAS THE SON of low-born parents. His father was an army officer nicknamed Constantius Chlorus – ‘Constantius the Pale’ – for his light complexion. Strong, ambitious and intelligent, Constantius Chlorus gravitated towards other talented young officers and became part of a generation of hard-as-nails generals from Illyria who won their positions on merit and pulled the empire out of its third-century death spiral.

  One night, in a tavern in Bithynia, Constantius Chlorus met a young barmaid named Helena. They noticed they were wearing the same silver bracelet, which inclined them to think the gods had brought them together. Helena became his consort and followed him on campa
ign. In 272 their son Constantine was born in the garrison town of Naissus in modern-day Serbia.

  Constantius Chlorus was promoted to become the emperor’s personal bodyguard, and in 282, he was appointed governor of Dalmatia. His star rose ever higher two years later when Diocletian, an old colleague from the imperial guard, became emperor.

  Diocletian’s accession to the throne marked the end of a protracted crisis for an empire weakened by civil war, foreign invasions and economic instability. The new emperor began a program of root-and-branch reform, but soon came to realise the job had become too big for one man. So he decreed there would now be two emperors, each with the title of Augustus. Diocletian would rule over the richer, more populous eastern provinces from the city of Nicomedia in Asia Minor. The western half would be managed from Milan by his friend Maximian, a general fiercely loyal to Diocletian.

  Soon afterwards, Diocletian divided the imperial tasks once again. A sub-emperor, given the title of ‘Caesar’, would now support each Augustus. This system would come to be known as the tetrarchy, the rule of four.

  In 289 Constantius Chlorus divorced Helena to marry Maximian’s daughter, Theodora, smoothing the way for his appointment as Caesar of the west. Helena and her teenage son Constantine were sent east to Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia. Constantine would not see his father again for another twelve years.

  The Four Emperors of Diocletian’s Tetrarchy.