Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  Another complicating factor is the movement for Kurdish independence, which Erdoğan sees as a threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity. And there’s also the lingering question of whether Turkey will ever join the European Union. Since taking power, Erdoğan has changed his position on the EU, from strong support to outright hostility. He hints that the EU hasn’t already admitted Turkey because it can’t bear the thought of opening its borders to nearly seventy-five million Muslims. Erdoğan, it seems, has come to see the EU as Christendom in modern clothing.

  KEEPING TRACK of the connections between the players in the Deep State conspiracy theories requires a detective’s pinboard, photos, thumbtacks and plenty of string. When contemplating the complexity of this tangled web of self-interested conspirators, the word ‘byzantine’ unconsciously comes to mind. Historians of Byzantium resent the term ‘byzantine’ when it’s used to denote something absurdly bureaucratic and arcane, seeing it as a slur arising from centuries of western prejudice.

  Still, on this day, with reports of government forces cracking down on protestors on the city streets, we hear a distant echo of the ghost empire, of a massacre perpetrated here by Justinian nearly fifteen hundred years ago.

  Nika

  IT ALL BEGAN WITH a failed execution. On 10 January 532, Eudaemon, the prefect of Constantinople, passed a death sentence on seven violent criminals, partisans from the Blue and Green factions. On the appointed day, however, the scaffold collapsed and two men, a Blue and a Green, fell to the ground, still alive. They were picked up by a group of sympathetic monks who rowed them across the Golden Horn to the Church of St Laurentius, where the condemned men were given asylum.

  The leaders of the rival factions met and agreed to a temporary alliance. They demanded the emperor let their men go free – surely the miracle at the scaffold was a sign that God required clemency in this case. Justinian refused to budge and posted guards at the doors of St Laurentius to prevent the men from escaping.

  Three days later, when Justinian took his seat in the imperial box at the Hippodrome, he was heckled and abused from the stands. The mood in the stadium darkened, and at the end of the day’s events, both factions united in a steady chant of Ni-ka! Ni-ka! Ni-ka! – ‘victory’ or, more ominously, ‘conquest’.

  That night an angry mob formed outside the city prison. They overpowered the guards and opened the cells, freeing every inmate. Revelling in its success, the mob moved on to the city’s central square, the Augustaeum, where they set fire to the Chalke Gate at the entrance to the Great Palace. The flames leapt up and caught the wind, and the inferno spread across the Square, engulfing the Senate House, the Church of Holy Wisdom and another church behind it, the Hagia Irene. The ancient classical statues that adorned the Baths of Zeuxippos were smashed and destroyed.

  Justinian refused to be panicked and ordered the next day’s races to proceed as scheduled, hoping the excitement would distract the crowd. Instead the factions rioted and set alight the northern end of the Hippodrome. The faction leaders ratcheted up their demands, insisting the emperor sack his three unpopular officials: John the Cappadocian, Tribonian the quaestor and Eudaemon the prefect. Justinian buckled to their demands, but his concession failed to quell the rioting. Justinian concluded the real instigators of the uprising were his enemies in the senate, who were paying the factions to continue the chaos.

  Justinian lost all control and for three days the city was given over to the mob, which burnt and ransacked its way along the Mese to the Forum of Constantine. The Great Palace complex was partially destroyed. The palace guards, the Excubitors and the Scholarians, refused to help. Justinian and Theodora were now in great danger.

  The next day, the emperor fronted the crowd at the Hippodrome and offered a general amnesty for the three days of mayhem. He swore on a copy of the Gospels that he would keep his word, but was greeted with jeers. Meanwhile, in the Forum of Constantine, a crowd raised up an aristocrat named Hypatius – nephew of the late emperor Anastasius – and crowned him with a golden chain.

  Under siege in his own palace, a badly rattled Justinian lost his nerve. He said he thought the best course of action would be to leave the city. Each one of his ministers agreed.

  AND THEN THEODORA SPOKE UP, in a speech that rings down through the ages. Looking at the court, the empress said that although it was against convention for a woman to speak in a man’s council, the situation was serious enough to break with the formalities. Turning to her husband, she appealed to him to stay and fight – and die, if need be:

  For one who has reigned, it is intolerable to be a fugitive. May

  I never be deprived of this purple robe. And may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me ‘Empress’.

  Theodora now gestured towards the balcony:

  If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; there is the sea, and here are the boats. Yet reflect for a moment whether, once you have escaped to a place of safety, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death.

  As for me, I agree with the ancient saying that the royal purple is a good burial shroud.

  It was Theodora’s greatest performance. Her speech shamed her husband and shifted the mood of the room towards a counterstrike against the factions. Theodora and Justinian would prevail or die together.

  Mosaic of Theodora, Church of St Vitale, Ravenna.

  Creative Commons/Petar Milošević

  Meanwhile, just across the square in the Hippodrome, a rumour coursed through the stands that the emperor had already fled the city. Hypatius, who had thus far been a fearful conscript to the top job, now confidently took the imperial seat at the Hippodrome, and accepted the raucous acclamation of the crowd.

  JUSTINIAN PLANNED to defeat his enemies through the oldest of Roman strategies – divide and conquer. The emperor wasn’t able to rely on the loyalties of the palace guard, who were hanging back, waiting to see how things turned out. So Justinian turned to the military man who remained squarely in his corner: Belisarius. The general had just returned to Constantinople from the Persian front to accept the role of army commander-in-chief. Belisarius was joined by another loyal commander, Mundus, who commanded a force of fifteen hundred battle-hardened Thracian and Herulian mercenaries, men with no connections to either of the Hippodrome’s factions.

  As he prepared to strike, Justinian sent a palace eunuch named Narses into the Hippodrome with pouches of gold to bribe the leaders of the Blues. Narses met them in the stands and reminded them of Justinian’s longstanding partiality to their faction. Then he pointed across the stadium to the imperial box, and asked if they were likely to prosper under the reign of Hypatius, a well-known ally of the Greens.

  For a moment, there was some confusion as the Blues considered moving their supporters out of the Hippodrome. Meanwhile, Belisarius was leading his men across the rubble of the Augustaeum to the southeastern entrance of the stadium. They gathered in the shadows of the gate, largely unnoticed amid the tumult and revelry in the stands.

  On his signal, Belisarius’s men unsheathed their swords and charged into the crowd. At the same time, another contingent of soldiers, led by Mundus, entered through a gate on the opposite side, and fifty thousand rioters were pressed in a tight space between two battalions of hacking and slashing mercenaries. Thousands were trampled underfoot in the panic, as people frantically pushed their way from one side to the other to avoid the carnage. Hypatius looked down from the imperial box, as screams of terror melded with the groans of the wounded and dying. Blood gathered in muddy pools on the dirt floor of the Hippodrome, and ran out through the colonnades into the marble square outside.

  Procopius estimated the dead at thirty thousand; other contemporary writers placed the figure as high as fifty thousand. Overall, the slaughter amounted to something like a tenth of the population of the biggest city in the world.

  Hypatius was arrested and brought to the palace. Justinian hesitated before pronouncing sentence on a man
he’d known for most of his life, well aware that Hypatius had never really been a conspirator and had been carried along by the real plotters. As the emperor pondered his decision, Theodora intervened, reminding him that if he spared Hypatius, another conspiracy would inevitably form around him. Justinian reluctantly agreed and Hypatius was beheaded, his body tossed into the Sea of Marmara. The senators who had supported the riots were exiled and their property confiscated. Feeling under no obligation to honour his earlier commitment made under duress, Justinian reinstated John of Cappadocia as his chief minister. The power of the Blues and Greens was sharply curtailed. Justinian and Theodora had re-established their authority, atop a mountain of corpses.

  Inner Radiance

  CONSTANTINOPLE was quiet at last, with the peace of the exhausted battlefield. Justinian surveyed the ruins of his blackened and blood-streaked Augustaeum and, typically, saw a great opportunity. A grand redesign of the city square would go some way to healing the horror of the atrocity in the Hippodrome. A reassertion of imperial majesty would encourage his people to see him as a builder, not a tyrant.

  To the south-east of the Augustaeum, Justinian ordered the construction of a new, smaller senate building inside the palace grounds, befitting its diminished status. The main entrance to the palace, the Chalke Gate, would be restored and lavishly clad in marble and mosaics. On the southern end, he ordered the rebuilding of the Baths of Zeuxippus. But his grandest ambitions were reserved for the area north of the square, on the burnt-out ruins of the second Hagia Sophia. (The first church of that name had been destroyed by rioters more than a century earlier.)

  Six weeks after the massacre, workers began clearing the rubble and digging the foundations for a third Hagia Sophia, which would dwarf its predecessors in every respect. Justinian’s instructions to his architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, were simple: design the greatest building in the world and do it quickly. Absolutely no expense was spared in the creation of a church of surpassing magnificence. Construction materials were shipped into Constantinople from all over the empire: green marble from Thessaly, black stone from the Bosphorus, and porphyry of imperial purple from Egypt. Ten thousand labourers were conscripted to complete the job as quickly as possible.

  Anthemius and Isidore’s design was ingenious: they conceived the new Hagia Sophia as a mountain of interlocking domes, dominated by a gigantic central dome that would hover like the canopy of heaven over a vast, open interior space. Once constructed, this central dome was greeted with gasps of amazement: Anthemius and Isidore had taken the principle of the load-bearing arch and rotated it 180 degrees to create the biggest dome in the world, a feat no architect would equal for a thousand years.

  Work on the Hagia Sophia was completed in five years and ten months, a dramatically short period that was taken to be a miracle in itself.* Justinian came to inspect his new church before its inauguration in 537. As he stood under the breathtaking dome, he boasted, ‘Solomon, I have outdone you.’

  THE CITIZENS OF CONSTANTINOPLE gazed in wonderment at the scale of the new Hagia Sophia. They marvelled at the intricacies of its craftwork and the harmony of its proportions. ‘It exults in an indescribable beauty,’ sighed Procopius. The interior was lovely beyond belief: the interplay of golden light as it streamed through the upper windows onto the green, purple and white marble reminded him of a meadow blooming with flowers.

  The creation of the Hagia Sophia was a kind of victory, a triumph of the celestial over the mundane, the truest act of theosis. It was the point in the city where the thick curtain separating heaven and earth became gossamer thin. Justinian’s great church brought an unalloyed joy to the people of the city and made them surer of the glories of the afterlife. The magnanimity of the Hagia Sophia inspired a similar generosity of spirit in those within it. Procopius saw how the church lifted the spirits of those who entered it, how, ‘when present in the church men rejoice in what they see, and when they leave it, they take proud delight in conversing about it’.

  But the work had been undertaken in haste, and there was no getting round the fact that there were visible flaws in the building, which had to be fixed over time. In 558 an earthquake caused the central dome to collapse. The replacement was designed by Isidore’s nephew, who made the dome higher and rounder, and thus more stable. He fixed the rim of the dome to four pendentives, triangular dome segments that caught the weight of the dome and distributed the load effectively from the centre to the four corner pillars.

  The Hagia Sophia and the Hippodrome, adjacent to each other, became the great complementary theatres of Constantinople, where the emperor and his people could act out different aspects of themselves. The pleasures of this life were played out in one, the joys of the afterlife were contemplated in the other.

  Plan of the Hagia Sophia.

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  A Vast Harmony

  THE HAGIA SOPHIA served as a Christian house of worship for nine centuries, then as a mosque for another five. Today it’s a museum, and Joe and I are lined up at the ticket gate. As we wait in the queue, we overhear two elderly Texan ladies arguing behind us. They’re not enjoying their stay.

  ‘Let it go, Pearl.’

  ‘Well, Ah thought he was rude.’

  ‘Ah said, let it go.’

  We purchase two tickets stamped with Ayasofya Müzesi, and turn to face the entrance of the great church. We pass into the inner narthex through a grand rectangular portal once reserved for the ingress of the emperor. Legend has it that the heavy timber doors were crafted from timbers salvaged from the wreck of Noah’s Ark.

  Then we’re inside the cavernous nave of the church. Joe breaks into a broad smile. Like all great buildings, the Hagia Sophia seems at one moment to be completely indifferent to your tiny existence, and in another, to be like a great big present made just for you.

  An English author named Robert Hichens came to visit the great church a century ago. He arrived in a foul mood, frazzled by the noise and dirt of Istanbul. Once inside the church, his irritability fell away and he suddenly found himself ‘in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was conscious at once of a perfect satisfaction’. As he gazed upwards, he felt, he said, ‘both possessed and released’. This, I find, is no exaggeration. As Joe and I step under the great golden dome, an electric tingle rises from the middle of my spine to the top of my head. I have a sudden certainty that I am in the most beautiful building that has ever been made.

  The threadbare grandeur of the Hagia Sophia inspires awe and affection at the same time. So many of its tessellated gold tiles have been lost or stolen; only a few of its mosaics are visible. The marbled floors are uneven, worn down over the centuries by the countless footsteps of worshippers, pilgrims and sightseers. For all that, it is a thrilling, heavenly space.

  The ‘Splendid Door’ carved with Indian motifs, brought to the Hagia Sophia from an ancient temple in Tarsus, Asia Minor.

  Richard Fidler

  Standing under the great dome, I have the impression that it is somehow, impossibly, holding up the whole building. Light streams through the upper windows and is reflected and refracted on the mosaic tiles of gold and glass, suffusing the interior with a warm golden glow. To the Romans, it seemed the glow was miraculous, ‘not illuminated from outside by the sun, rather that the radiance was created from within itself’. The Muslim conquerors of the city could only agree; today the dome is inscribed with Arabic script: Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth.

  Seraphim

  THE GLITTERING MOSAICS of the Hagia Sophia seem, at first, curiously flat and jaunty, lacking coherent lines of perspective. Then you notice they do indeed have a kind of perspective, only it’s weirdly inverted. Buildings and figures are shaped not to recede into the distance, but to enlarge. The pedestal under the Virgin’s throne and other box-like objects are wedge-shaped. The vanishing points don’t lie somewhere on the horizon within the image, but outside it,
within the eye of the viewer. When looking at these pictures, it helps if you imagine a conical field of vision, where the tip of the cone touches your eyeball and widens as the image deepens. The overall effect, like everything else in the church, is quite magical and otherworldly.

  JUST BELOW THE RIM OF THE DOME, I see four huge, feathered creatures looming over us. Pairs of heavy blue wings, projecting up, down and sideways, surround their disembodied faces. A guide tells me they’re archangels, but they look like no angels I’ve ever seen before. They remind me of monsters from Greek mythology.

  The creatures in the four mosaics represent the seraphim, the highest in the hierarchy of angels and the protectors of the throne of heaven. In Hebrew, the name seraphim translates as ‘the burning ones’. Their strange likenesses are drawn from the Book of Isaiah, where they appear to Isaiah in a terrifying vision.

  Seraph from Hagia Sophia.

  Creative Commons/Andrew Gould

  The prophet sees the six-winged creatures flying around the throne of God, shrieking Holy! Holy! Holy!, and is overcome with trembling fear and a sense of his own worthlessness. Then one of the seraphim swoops down to show him ‘a burning coal in his hand, which he had picked up with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your guilt is taken away and your sin is forgiven”.’

  THE IMAGES OF THE SERAPHIM in Justinian’s great church are altogether more startling than the handsome golden-haired angels we’ve become accustomed to. Angels, we’re discovering on this trip, are not quite what we think they are.

  In Rome, at the beginning of our journey, I had pointed to what I thought was an angel on the Arch of Septimius Severus, a monument that dates back well before Christianisation.