Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  I left the Church of the Holy Sepulchre weirdly exhilarated. In the courtyard, an Australian–Israeli friend pointed to a ledge above the façade, under a window, where I could see a small ladder.

  The Immovable Ladder, Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  Creative Commons/Mark A Wilson

  ‘That ladder,’ he said, ‘has been there for more than two hundred years.’

  ‘Why would they leave a ladder there for that long?’

  ‘No one can move it,’ he replied.

  Some time in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman authorities became weary of the infighting among the Christians in Jerusalem, so they tried to broker a peace: different portions of the church were assigned to each denomination, dividing their rights and responsibilities. It was agreed that no one priest could do anything to the church without the consent of the other five groups. Sometime later, a stonemason left the little wooden ladder on the ledge, which couldn’t be moved without the express agreement of the six head priests.

  ‘And they couldn’t agree?’

  ‘They couldn’t agree. So it just had to stay there. Today they call it “The Immovable Ladder”. In the 1960s, the pope was asked about it and he said the ladder could only be moved at such time in the future when the Catholic and Orthodox churches are reunited.’

  ‘Wow.’

  My friend shrugged, as if to say, ‘That’s life in the Holy Land.’ Equally, it could have meant, ‘Those crazy Christians, what are you gonna do?’

  HELENA IS COMMEMORATED in the church with a chapel dedicated in her name. In the corner of the chapel is a chair, said to be the one she sat on as she supervised the digging of the Holy Sepulchre.

  Helena, the former tavern girl from Bithynia, died in 327 AD the most admired woman in the Roman empire. She was made a saint, and her feast day is celebrated in Constantinople on 21 May.

  He Who Walks before Me

  SECURE IN HIS THRONE, with every rival dead and his official church up and running, Constantine could direct his energies towards a new project: the construction of a new imperial capital. Constantine had been born in the Balkans and educated in Asia Minor; as a young man he had led campaigns in Mesopotamia and the north of Britain. The emperor could appreciate, like no other ruler since Hadrian, the sprawl and the complexity of the empire he had won.

  Rome itself was no longer a suitable capital, having lost much of its prestige and its strategic significance. Stranded halfway down the Italian peninsula, the old capital was isolated from the wealthy and cultured cities of the east, and too far from the military trouble spots on the Danube and the disputed border with Persia. Constantine had spent very little time in Rome and was free from any sentimental pangs about its historic role as the birthplace of the empire. In any case, the patrician families of Rome were too haughty and too attached to their pagan gods to be receptive to his new religion.

  So Constantine looked east for his new capital. The east was richer, more populous and more cultured than the lands of the west. For a while he seriously considered the site of ancient Troy in Asia Minor, but in 323 he settled on Byzantium.

  Byzantium, located on the point where Europe meets Asia at the entrance to the Black Sea, was perfect. It sat in an incomparable position, surrounded on three sides by water, and it possessed an excellent natural harbour, the Golden Horn, suitable for supply and trade.

  Constantine was now in his fifties and may have sensed he was running out of time, so he put his engineers, architects and labourers to work at a cracking pace. Large tracts of the old city were demolished. Statues, relics and marble columns were plundered from Greek cities nearby. A palace complex, a bath house and a new senate building began to rise on the point of the promontory. The existing Hippodrome was improved and enlarged.

  It was said that Constantine himself traced the boundaries of the first land walls with his spear. As the emperor strode ahead of his surveyors, one of them cried out, ‘How much further, Sire?’

  Constantine replied enigmatically, ‘Until He who walks before me stops walking.’

  THE EMPEROR NEEDED PEOPLE to fill his new streets, so he offered incentives for families to leave the old Rome on the Tiber for a better future in the new city in the east. The older, more established patrician families stayed put, but ambitious men and women with less impressive names made their way to the Bosphorus to try their luck.

  New Rome, despite its handsome veneer, was a shoddy piece of workmanship. Construction had been rushed to fit Constantine’s timelines and almost nothing of it survives today. But even if the new arrivals were tripping over gaps in the marble flagstones, they could still stroll down to Acropolis Point at the tip of the city’s promontory to take in the view of the sparkling waters, inhale the sea breeze and rejoice in the panorama of the city’s spectacular location.

  But as Constantinople was coming together, piece by piece, the imperial family fell apart. In 326, Crispus, the oldest son and presumptive heir, was brought before a court in the town of Pola. On Constantine’s orders Crispus was condemned to death and summarily executed. He was twenty-one years old. Soon afterwards, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife Fausta by suffocation in an overheated bath.

  Damnatio Memoriae

  BOTH EVENTS WERE unexplained, but they must have been linked.

  Crispus and Fausta were close in age and had lived side by side for many years in the palace. One history of these events, written a century later, assumes that Constantine was tricked into killing his son by Fausta so that one of her sons could inherit the throne. According to this explanation, Fausta had set Crispus up by proposing an affair. As Crispus fled the palace in a state of shock, Fausta went straight to the emperor and told him Crispus had propositioned her. Deranged with anger, Constantine ordered Crispus to be executed for disloyalty. When Crispus’s grandmother Helena discovered what had happened, she went to the emperor and scolded him for a fool for having been manipulated by his ambitious wife. Constantine retaliated by executing Fausta.

  Another intriguing and altogether more plausible explanation for the double executions has only recently been put forward, which centres on the method of Fausta’s execution. Historian David Woods noted that ‘death by hot bath’ was a punishment hitherto unknown to the Roman world. It was, however, sometimes recommended by ancient doctors as a means to induce a miscarriage. Perhaps Fausta and Crispus truly were lovers by mutual consent, and when she became pregnant, Constantine chose to have both of them killed. It was too dangerous for an emperor to be cuckolded by his own son.

  AFTER THEIR DEATHS, Constantine declared a damnatio memoriae on Crispus and Fausta; their names were scrubbed from all documents and deleted from all monuments. Crispus’s palace in Trier was demolished and a church was constructed in its place.

  Shortly afterwards Constantine threw himself into the completion of his new capital, perhaps to distract his mind from recent events. I picture him alone, in his new palace on the Bosphorus, trembling and clutching a coin bearing the image of his dead son. It’s also possible that a monstrously self-regarding creature like Constantine could put the whole incident behind him and move on.

  CONSTANTINE INAUGURATED his new capital in 328 with pagan rites and Christian prayers. Byzantium was renamed ‘New Rome’, but from the start, people preferred to call it ‘Constantinople’, the city of Constantine. All religions were tolerated in the new city, but the central places of worship were set aside for the Christians. Constantine sent emissaries to gather the remains of all twelve of Christ’s Apostles and inter them in a church, alongside a space reserved for his own sarcophagus. The message was clear: the emperor now meant the world to see him as the thirteenth Apostle.

  In a typically pragmatic move, Constantine postponed his baptism into the faith until he was on his deathbed. Baptism at the moment of death would leave his soul pristine, cleansed of every sin, ready to ascend into heaven. It was a way of gaming the system and a common enough practice in the early years of Christianity. Per
haps the murders of Crispus and Fausta were weighing on his mind. After his baptism he refused to wear the imperial purple and his servants dressed him in a robe of purest white. Constantine the Great died in the suburbs of Nicomedia at noon on 22 May 337. He was sixty-five years old and had reigned longer than any emperor since Augustus.

  The emperor’s body was brought to Constantinople in a golden coffin, enveloped in purple silk. Constantinople came to a halt for the funeral of the man who had given the city its name.

  CONSTANTINE RECKLESSLY bequeathed the empire to his three remaining sons from Fausta and two nephews, who were to divide the Roman lands among themselves. Constantine, of all people, must have known this could only ignite another round of murderous rivalries and fratricidal wars, which was exactly what happened. By 353 both nephews and two of the three sons were dead. The middle son, Constantius II, emerged as sole ruler of the entire Roman empire.

  WHEN JOE WAS ELEVEN, he and I spent an afternoon painting a wall on the family house. To help pass the time we listened to a history podcast that traced the life of Julius Caesar. We worked in silence as the narrator took us through Caesar’s ambitious early years, his abduction by pirates, the brilliant campaigns in Gaul and his rivalries with other great Romans of the age like Pompey and Cicero. We followed Caesar’s march on Rome and his affair with Cleopatra, and the idyll they shared aboard her flower-strewn royal barge as it cruised down the Nile.

  The sun was setting across our backyard as Caesar was being murdered on the floor of the senate. A wild-eyed senator steps forward and yanks at a corner of Caesar’s tunic. Caesar, unbelieving, cries, ‘Why, this is violence!’ Another senator lunges with a dagger, then another and another. Caesar is stabbed twenty-three times and he dies, pulling his blood-soaked toga over his head.

  As we packed up the paint tins, I wondered aloud if Julius Caesar had lived the most interesting life in the whole of human history, if he had seen and done more thrilling and unusual things than anyone else who ever lived. How would a life so rich with adventure compare to that of an Apollo astronaut, or Elizabeth I, or Alexander the Great?

  Three years later, we are in Istanbul talking about another great Roman dictator and I wonder what Joe makes of the life of Constantine, whose oversized likeness we had studied ten days earlier in Rome. Joe turns it around in his head.

  ‘It’s too big to judge,’ he says. ‘There are so many good and bad things. I don’t know. I can’t judge.’

  From the distance of seventeen centuries it is difficult to grasp Constantine’s true character. His court of flatterers have scrubbed the record clean of his moments of pettiness and foolishness, although there are hints that, like Caesar, Constantine used little tricks to conceal a bald patch. Both men possessed a ruthless will to power and an unshakeable egotism that drove them to hack and slash their way to the top. And yet, once they reached the summit of Roman power, they chose to become builders and renovators whose reforms endured for centuries after their deaths.

  It’s thought that Caesar drew his toga over his head in his last moments to conceal his shame at being brought down in such a sordid manner. Constantine’s death is shadowed by a greater shame for the crime he tried to conceal with a damnatio memoriae. His deathbed baptism implies that he feared that act of damnation would rebound on him.

  The Seven Sleepers

  NOW THAT ALL HIS RIVALS were dead, Constantius II discovered the empire was too big for one man to govern alone, so he reluctantly appointed his twenty-three-year-old cousin Julian as his deputy, whom he mistook for an innocuous scholar. Julian, however, bore a secret hatred against Constantius, whom he blamed for the murder of his father in the wave of dynastic violence that had followed Constantine’s death. Julian surprised everyone when he turned out to be a capable and resolute general. He was in the Balkans with his army, planning to march on Constantinople, when he received word that Constantius II had died of a fever, and that the soldiers were clamouring for him to accept the throne. For Julian this was proof that the gods were on his side.

  Julian had spent his youth wandering the Greek world, studying with the greatest pagan thinkers and philosophers of the day. While in Athens, it seems he secretly resolved to renounce Christianity and embrace the pagan gods of the ancient world. Now Julian the Apostate, as he came to be known, no longer felt the need to conceal his true inclinations, and set about restoring the old gods to the centre of Roman life. He purged the palace staff, introduced anti-Christian laws, and increased the powers of the senate. Whether he would have succeeded in permanently reorienting the trajectory of the empire back towards its pagan, republican traditions, we cannot know, because Julian was speared in battle against the Persians in 363, and died at the age of thirty-one. Jovian, his successor, quickly re-established Christianity as the empire’s preferred religion. The old gods were finished. Constantine’s legacy would endure after all.

  BY THE END OF THE fourth century, Constantinople’s status as an imperial capital was secure. The city’s skeletal frame had filled out with houses, granaries, theatres and bath houses. In 368, the emperor Valens completed the construction of an aqueduct to bring fresh water into Constantinople.* Crowds began to pack out the stands of the Hippodrome to roar their support for their chariot teams. The hundred-thousand-seat stadium became a natural forum for major public announcements and political rituals. Valens’s successor Theodosius imported a magnificent pagan obelisk from the great temple of Karnak in Egypt, and placed it on the central spina of the Hippodrome, where it still stands today, complete with a panel on its pedestal which shows Theodosius presenting a charioteer with the laurel of victory.

  Theodosius was the last emperor to rule an undivided Roman world. After his death in 395, his sons split the empire into two administrative halves, governed by an eastern emperor in Constantinople and a western emperor ruling from Milan. In time, Milan would prove to be too difficult to defend against the multiple threats to the empire, and the western emperor would relocate his court to Ravenna.

  A deeper change was settling into the Roman world. Christian leaders found their way into powerful roles in the empire’s establishment: bishops assumed the authority and prestige that senators once enjoyed, and monks replaced philosophers as the wise elders. As Christian power grew throughout the Roman lands, the faithful came to believe that something miraculous had taken place. Somehow the faith of a carpenter’s son from Galilee had changed the heart and soul of the world’s mightiest empire. When the Romans took a moment to look back, they were amazed at how far they’d come, how much they’d evolved in the century after Constantine’s death.

  It was this joyous sense of Christian achievement that gave rise to the legend of the Seven Sleepers, which told the tale of seven young men of Ephesus during the persecutions of Decius back in 250 AD.

  The seven, who were all Christians, refused to renounce the one true God and so they fled to a cave in the hills, where they fell asleep, exhausted. Their sleeping forms were discovered by the emperor’s soldiers, who cruelly decided to brick up the entrance to the cave, trapping them inside. The legend records that the seven slept for 180 years, until a shepherd broke down the wall and woke them.

  The seven young men rubbed the sleep from their eyes and stepped out of the cave. As they wandered down the hill towards Ephesus, they were astonished to hear church bells clanging and to see crosses on the city gates, and to hear the name of Jesus on everyone’s lips.

  The curious young men began to attract attention when they tried to pay for bread with coins that had not been seen for more than a century. A priest was fetched, who advised the seven that they had slept for 180 years, and that Christians were no longer persecuted and that even the emperor himself was a Christian. For the seven, it seemed like all that hatred had disappeared in the course of a single night, like a bad dream.

  But even as the priest was speaking, the seven seemed to age before his eyes. Their hair became white, their bodies stooped. Then they fell down and died, a
nd their bones disintegrated into dust.

  THE TALE OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS was retold in different forms over time. It appears in the Qur’an as the story of the ‘People of the Cave’, who are pious Muslims, escaping the persecution of the unbelievers, only they sleep for three hundred years. They, too, would have good reason to marvel at how their religion had prospered so greatly from such humble origins.

  The legend was still well known in seventeenth-century Europe, with John Donne making passing reference to it in his most perfect love poem, The Good Morrow:

  I wonder by my troth, what thou and I

  Did, till we lov’d? Were we not wean’d till then?

  But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?

  Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?

  The Seven Sleepers were recognised as saints by the Orthodox church. Their feast day is celebrated on 22 October.

  The Theodosian Walls

  ON THE FLIGHT from Rome to Istanbul, Joe and I look at a map of medieval Constantinople. I trace my finger in an arc across its land boundary.

  ‘This,’ I explain, ‘is something I want us to see in Istanbul, at least as much as I want to see the Hagia Sophia.’

  Joe nods. He already knows about the Theodosian Walls.

  CONSTANTINE HAD LAID OUT the first defensive perimeter guided by that unseen angel, but in the fifth century, the city’s rapidly growing population required new land to be opened up, and a new set of walls was constructed further west, allowing room for more houses, farms and orchards. Work began in the reign of Theodosius II, for whom the walls are named, but his Praetorian prefect Anthemius deserves the credit. The first structure was a single curtain wall, five metres thick, interspersed with ninety-six high towers. Nine years later, a protective outer circuit wall was added, also fortified with battlements and towers, and a high platform running between the inner and outer layers. Then a third line of defence was added: a brick-lined ditch, protected by another low wall to keep enemy siege towers at a distance.