Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  ABRAM WAS A FAVOURITE of Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews. The meaning of his name was ‘exalted father’, but Abram despaired because he was 85 years old and had not been blessed with children.

  One night, Yahweh appeared to him in a dream. Yahweh led Abram outside his mudbrick house into the cool evening air and showed him all the stars shimmering in the night sky. Then Yahweh said to him, ‘Count the stars, if you can. For that is how numerous your offspring shall be.’

  Yahweh invited Abram to make a blood sacrifice. Abram slaughtered a calf, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon in turn, and suddenly he was plunged into a terrifying darkness.

  The voice of Yahweh again came into his mind. Yahweh told Abram that his descendants would have to suffer four hundred years of slavery, but they would one day inherit all the lands stretching from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates River.

  Abram awoke from the dream and turned to his wife Sarai.

  ‘Yahweh has promised me I shall have as many offspring as there are stars in the sky,’ he said, his face full of wonder.

  But Sarai was seventy-five years old. She clutched at the loose skin on her face and at her breast.

  ‘Look at me, Abram,’ she said. ‘Everyone can see I am now too old to bear children.’

  Then Sarai called for Hagar, her Egyptian handmaiden.

  ‘Go, sleep with my slave,’ she said to Abram, bitterly. ‘Perhaps I can build a family through her.’

  So Abram took Hagar as his concubine. Soon she became pregnant. Sarai watched Hagar and her swelling belly with a jealous eye. Sarai believed her slave had become proud, and this made Hagar hateful to her eye. Sarai confronted Hagar and accused her of nursing a secret contempt. Hagar began to fear for her life and fled into the desert.

  After some time Hagar stopped to rest at a lonely spring, where an angel found her.

  ‘Hagar,’ the angel asked, ‘where have you come from, and where are you going?’

  ‘I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai,’ she replied.

  ‘Go back to your mistress and submit to her. Do as I say and you will have more offspring, so many you will not be able to count them all.’

  The angel then told Hagar she would give birth to a son. ‘His name will be Ishmael’ (which means ‘God has listened’).

  And then the angel offered Hagar a warning. ‘Ishmael will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. He will live in hostility towards all his brothers.’

  Hagar did as the angel told her to. She returned to the house and in time she gave birth to a son. Abram named him Ishmael.

  Ten years passed. Abram was now ninety-nine years old.

  Yahweh came to him in a dream once more. ‘No longer will you be called Abram; from this day your name will be Abraham’ (which means ‘Father of a Multitude’).

  Yahweh repeated his promise, that Abraham would be the father of many nations.

  ‘In return,’ Yahweh said, ‘you and all your descendants must keep a new covenant with me: a covenant of the flesh.

  ‘Every male among you must be circumcised. Every one of them: you, your sons, your slaves. This will be proof that you have kept your covenant with me.’

  Then Yahweh told Abraham that his wife Sarai would have a new name too. ‘From this time she must be called Sarah, and she will now bear a son by you. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings will come from her.’

  Abraham bowed with his head to the ground and began to laugh.

  ‘How can a son be born to a man who is a hundred years old?’ he asked. ‘And, I might add, how will Sarah, who is ninety, even bear such a child? And what of my son Ishmael? Why can’t he live under your blessing?’

  Yahweh’s presence shone in Abraham’s mind like the blazing sun. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I tell you that Sarah will have a son and you will call him Isaac. I will establish this everlasting covenant through him, and his descendants.’

  Abraham listened and said nothing.

  Yahweh said, ‘As for Ishmael, I have heard you, and yes, I will bless him too. I will make him the father of twelve princes and make him into a great nation. But my covenant will be with the descendants of Isaac.’

  And when Yahweh finished speaking he floated up into the sky.

  THAT SAME DAY, Abraham, along with his son Ishmael and every other male in the house, was circumcised with a knife, just as Yahweh had instructed.

  A year later, Sarah gave birth to their much longed-for son, Isaac.

  Abraham was, by now, a hundred years old.

  Isaac grew out of infancy and a feast was held to celebrate his weaning. At the feast, Sarah saw that Ishmael was making fun of her little Isaac and she became enraged.

  ‘Abraham,’ she whispered, ‘get rid of that slave girl and her son. That Ishmael will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.’

  Abraham was torn, because Ishmael was his son as much as Isaac.

  But then Yahweh came to him and told him, ‘Listen to Sarah and do as she asks. Do not worry. I will protect Ishmael and make a nation from him too, because he is your son.’

  At dawn the next morning, Abraham gave Hagar some bread and a skin of water. He placed Ishmael on her shoulder and sent them away.

  Hagar and Ishmael wandered into the desert of Beersheba, and Abraham never saw them again.

  IT WAS NO STRETCH AT ALL for Christian scholars to recognise the conquering Arabs as the long-lost descendants of Hagar and Ishmael, having come out of the wilderness to seek their birthright. And that portrayal of Ishmael as a ‘wild donkey of a man’ with his ‘hand set against everyone’ . . . well, did that not perfectly describe this strange horde of believers, clutching scimitars atop their camels?

  Then a more disturbing thought: if the desert warriors were indeed the children of Ishmael, then the Arabs could, like the Jews, claim an ancient bloodline descending from Abraham, something that Roman Christians could not do.

  The Fallen Colossus

  AFTER THE DEATH OF HERACLIUS, Constantinople was thrown into turmoil. His funeral was followed by a complicated power struggle between the emperor’s unpopular widow Martina and the branch of the family related to Heraclius’s first wife. A few months later, Martina and her son Heraclonus were exiled to Rhodes, and Constans, the eleven-year-old grandson of Heraclius, became sole emperor. The Roman empire was by now greatly diminished, covering not much more than lower Thrace, Asia Minor, Armenia, North Africa and isolated fragments of Italy. Constans II ruled for twenty-seven years in the shadow of the ever-growing caliphate.

  Meanwhile, the Arabs set up effective governments in the former Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The caliphate now had control of major port cities on the eastern Mediterranean coast, but the Roman navy continued to dominate the shipping lanes.

  The new governor of Syria was an aggressive general named Mu’awiya, who saw at once the need for the Arabs to have a Mediterranean fleet of their own. Mu’awiya approached Caliph Uthman for permission to embark on a major shipbuilding program. Uthman agreed and Mu’awiya set up dockyards along the Syrian coast.

  After just two years, Mu’awiya had built an impressive fleet of ships, manned by Christian sailors and Arab marines. In 649 he launched a naval attack on Cyprus and won a quick victory. The following year he set his sights on the island of Rhodes, an important Roman trading post between Constantinople and Alexandria.

  RHODES HAD BECOME FAMOUS in the ancient world for its glorious Colossus, a thirty-two-metre-tall bronze statue of the Greek sun god Helios.* The statue was constructed to celebrate the victory of Rhodes over the king of Cyprus, and completed in 280 BC. The sight of the massive statue by the entrance of the harbour was by all accounts astonishing, and it was hailed in ancient times as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

  The Colossus stood upright for just fifty-six years, until it was toppled by an earthquake in 226 BC. The superstitious Greeks never tried to re-erect it, acceptin
g its downfall as the will of the gods. The fallen colossus became a popular destination for sightseers in the ancient world. Pliny the Elder wrote that ‘even lying on the ground it is a marvel. Few people can make their arms meet round the thumb of the figure, and the fingers are larger than most statues’.

  Rhodes was easily captured by Mu’awiya’s navy in 653. The colossus was either an abomination or an irrelevance to Mu’awiya, and so the bronze ruins were dismantled and sold for scrap to a Jewish merchant from Edessa. Nine hundred camels were needed to carry it away. The bronze was taken to Syria and melted down into coins. It was a moment of decay, and renewal: the Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the ancient world, atomised into thousands of particles and dispersed into the medieval world.

  TWO YEARS LATER, the new Arab navy won a smashing victory over a much larger Roman fleet in a clash that became known as the Battle of the Masts. Emperor Constans was present at the battle and lucky to escape with his life. He fled to Sicily for his own safety. Five hundred of his dromons were sunk, along with Roman naval domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

  Mu’awiya became caliph in 661 and he shifted the Arab capital to Damascus. Seven years later, Constans was killed in Syracuse by his bath attendant, who struck him over the head with a soap-dish. The Romans believed it was God’s punishment for having abandoned Constantinople.

  Colossus of Rhodes.

  public domain

  Garum

  ONE OF THE MANY blessings conferred on Constantinople, even in its darkest years, was the ready supply of fish in the waters of the Golden Horn. The ancient custom of catching and grilling fish on the wharves of the harbour continues to this day. And so at lunchtime, Joe and I catch the tram down to Eminonu on the Golden Horn to grab a fish sandwich from one of the famous fish-sandwich boats of Istanbul. Bobbing in the tide, next to the Galata Bridge, we see a row of gaudy timber galleons. On deck, the men are cooking fish fillets on sizzling hot plates, making conversation, and shouting instructions to each other.

  We order from the dockside counter. The woman calls out the order over her shoulder; behind her, on the boat, a kitchen worker stuffs a grilled fish into half a baguette, along with salad, onion and lemon juice. He wraps it in paper and tosses it across the water to the counter.

  Joe and I pull up a couple of stools and sit down to eat, alongside dozens of Istanbullus on their lunch break. The sandwich is very cheap at just five Turkish lira apiece, but it’s surprisingly bland, and the fish is so bony it’s almost inedible. We decide to discard our half-eaten sandwiches and fill up on a couple of big Turkish pretzels instead. Later I discover the fish is not, in fact, freshly caught from the polluted waters of the Bosphorus, which is probably just as well, but imported Norwegian mackerel.

  The plentiful supply of fish in a protected harbour helped Constantinople withstand long sieges that would have broken other cities. Aside from fish, the people of Constantinople ate a mostly vegetarian diet of carrots, leeks, mushrooms, onions and spinach.

  Olives, cheese and eggs played a large part in the diet of lower-class people, while wealthier citizens enjoyed expensive meats such as pork, lamb and poultry, as well as oranges, lemons, pomegranates and apples. Caviar was so plentiful and cheap it could be enjoyed by anyone. Spiced wines were popular; Liutprand of Cremona complained in his letters of the ‘resinated wine’ served at the emperor’s table, which sounds a lot like retsina, the white wine flavoured with pine resin served in Greek restaurants today.

  Liutprand also sarcastically recorded in his journal that the emperor had sent him a ‘wonderful gift’, a roasted baby goat ‘proudly stuffed with garlic, leeks and onions and smothered in garum’. It was the garum that bothered him the most: a pungent fish sauce that the Romans sprinkled on nearly every dish to enliven otherwise bland food. Western visitors often reviled garum’s fishy aroma, but ambassadors to the imperial court had little choice but to eat it up with a grin.

  This is how garum was made: fish blood and intestines were salted, smashed up and placed in a vat to ferment in the sun. After several months a clear liquid, the garum, would rise to the top. A closely woven basket filter was lowered into the vessel to strain the garum, and to leave the remaining ‘feculence’ behind. The product was probably similar to the fish sauce that gives Vietnamese food its delicious pungency.

  Byzantine fishermen from an illuminated manuscript, the Madrid Skylitzes.

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  THE ARAB CONQUESTS changed the way the Romans ate and drank. The loss of Egypt cut off the grain supply that had once fed their empire. It was replaced in Constantinople by a yeasty northern wheat grain that rose into a loaf when baked. The loss of Syria forced people in Constantinople to do without olive oil for some time, so food was increasingly boiled, not fried. Houses had to be lit with candles instead of oil lamps.

  In ancient times, wealthy Romans had dined while reclining on couches; food was served by slaves and eaten with the fingers. From the seventh century, the Romans began to sit at tables. The end of the spoon was sharpened into a spear to pick up food. In time, a second prong was added and the fork became commonplace at the table, alongside the knife.

  Personal hygiene changed too. Luxurious Roman bath houses had been the pleasure palaces of everyday people in the ancient world, but in the seventh century, Christian suspicion of the flesh led the church to frown upon public bathing and the use of Constantinople’s Baths of Zeuxippus fell away. In time the complex was given over to military use, then one part of the bath house was converted to a prison, the other to a silk factory. The easy sensuality of the ancient world dimmed and then winked out altogether.

  THE LOSS OF LAND, income and people made the seventh century a dark age for the eastern Roman empire. The society became poorer and more militarised, and the influence of the cultured senatorial class began to recede and disappear. Fewer histories were written, and culture became the preserve of a relatively small group of people within the clergy.

  Under repeated assaults, the empire withdrew behind its high walls. The old Roman swagger retreated into a fearful defensiveness. The empire would one day recover, reconquer and enjoy a glorious efflorescence, but in seventh-century Constantinople, such a future was barely conceivable, as people went about their lives to a dismal drumbeat of war, plague and violence.

  Slit-Nose

  IN 669, A FEAST WAS HELD in Constantinople to celebrate the birth of a son and heir to the Emperor Constantine IV and his consort Anastasia. The little prince had a fine pedigree: he was the great-great-grandson of Heraclius and his parents named him Justinian, in the hope that he might some day match the achievements of the first Justinian, conqueror, lawgiver and builder of the Hagia Sophia.

  Young Justinian received a classical education, in the expectation he would become a just and wise ruler. The boy was twelve when his father nominated him as his co-emperor. Two uncles were also raised to deputy-emperor status, which presented Justinian’s father with a dilemma: how could he ensure that these men would not overthrow his son after his death?

  The solution he hit upon was to have their noses slit. Emperors were required to be free of all visible imperfections; nose-slitting made both men too ugly, too disfigured to entertain any hope of stealing the throne from the boy. The mutilation was cruel, but considered essential for the stability of the empire.

  Constantine IV died four years later and his son was crowned Justinian II at just sixteen years old. Despite his youth, the new Justinian acted like he had no time to lose. First he sent an army to drive the Arabs out of Armenia. The Caliph Abd al-Malik, distracted by internal divisions, was forced to come to terms. A jubilant Justinian II then sent his soldiers north into Thrace where they defeated the Bulgars of Macedonia and took back the city of Thessalonica. Justinian II entered the city in triumph.

  Success emboldened Justinian II to move some pieces around the imperial chessboard; he uprooted the Slavs of Thrace and the Christians of Cyprus and ordered their populatio
ns to be shifted to a town in Anatolia he renamed Justinianopolis. Five years after the forced deportation, Justinian II drew on this population of sullen, dislocated Slavs to create a new 30,000-strong army. Now he was ready to attack the Arabs once again

  His first strike against the Arabs was successful. Then it all fell apart. The new Slavic army had no love for the Roman cause or for the young emperor who had uprooted their families so ruthlessly, so the Arabs had no difficulty bribing them to swap sides. Two-thirds of Justinian II’s troops slipped across enemy lines and turned on the Roman army. The Roman forces broke apart and Justinian II was forced to flee across the Sea of Marmara back to Constantinople.

  Stung badly by his first major defeat, he lashed out, ordering the wives and children of the defecting Slavs be put to death. The Slavs who had stayed loyal were punished anyway for the treachery of their countrymen. The senior general of the campaign, Leontius, was summoned to Constantinople, given a dressing down by the emperor and thrown into prison.

  Still seething, Justinian II launched a crackdown on a range of religious practices that he deemed unorthodox. He convened a new ecumenical council to create new church law, but Pope Sergius in Rome was angered by the council’s new rules and refused to accept them. Justinian II sent soldiers to Rome to place the pope under arrest, but the pope’s men refused to let the arresting officers come anywhere near him. Justinian II had given an order that he could not enforce, a dangerous moment for any ruler. It was also a sign of the empire’s waning influence in Italy.

  Public opinion within Constantinople soured on the young emperor. His ambitious building program had obliged him to raise taxes and prosecute evaders, which deepened resentment among the wealthy and the poor alike. He tried to mollify the aristocracy by freeing the scapegoat Leontius from his prison cell, and soon enough a group of dissident senators gathered in secret at the general’s house. Everyone agreed they were sick to death of the bumptious young emperor. He had to go.