Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The conspirators enlisted the backing of the Blues faction from the Hippodrome. Even Callinicus, the Patriarch of Constantinople, agreed to turn a blind eye.

  On the agreed night, a group of senators and military leaders met at Leontius’s house and acclaimed him as emperor. Leontius then led his followers to the Praetorium, the Constantinople jail, where they freed all of Justinian’s political prisoners. Agents of the rebellion took to the streets, shouting, Christians! Come to the Hagia Sophia! Sleepy citizens were roused from their beds, anxious to see what was going on. A crowd gathered at the great church and began shouting abusive slogans directed at the emperor. Leontius arrived at the Hagia Sophia accompanied by the Patriarch Callinicus, who gave the uprising his blessing. Someone in the crowd spat an old Roman curse at the emperor: Let the bones of Justinian be dug up! The rebellious mood turned murderous.

  At dawn the crowd surged over to the Hippodrome. A delegation of soldiers was sent to seize the emperor. Justinian was dragged out of the palace and across the Augustaeum and flung onto the floor of the Hippodrome. Leontius, now in the imperial box, looked down on him. The howling mob, revelling in the thrill of revolution, wanted blood. Leontius chose restraint: Justinian was still the legitimate ruler in the eyes of the world, and cutting his throat would set a dangerous precedent. But some form of permanent disqualification was required to keep Justinian from the throne.

  The solution was obvious. Justinian was held still, a knife was produced and, like his uncles before him, his nose was sliced away. Then his tongue was slit in two.

  Bloodied, disfigured and traumatised, the dethroned emperor was sent into exile. He was dumped into a boat, and taken out onto the Black Sea, towards the city of Cherson on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula.* He was, by now, twenty-six years old.

  IN CHERSON, Justinian nursed his wounds and brooded on his ordeal, in no way prepared to accept that his disfigurement had made him unfit to rule. In his mind he was still the rightful emperor, the descendant of the great Heraclius, chosen by God.

  Cherson was a small provincial city, and the presence of a dethroned emperor generated excitement among the locals. Despite his wounds, Justinian was still a figure of glamour and public curiosity, and as the tale of his cruel treatment spread, he became the object of considerable sympathy. A growing band of supporters met at his house, where he openly plotted his return to power. The local authorities, loyal to Leontius, pondered whether to send him back to Constantinople or to simply have him killed. As they deliberated, Justinian was tipped off and slipped out of town. He and his supporters headed north-east, into the Caucasus, to a place where he hoped and expected to find sanctuary: the land of the Khazars.

  The Khazars of Khazaria

  THE KHAZARS OF KHAZARIA are surely among the most intriguing peoples of the Middle Ages. Like the Huns and Avars, they were originally semi-nomadic horsemen from the steppes of Central Asia who settled along the western stretch of the Silk Road, roughly in the area of modern-day Ukraine. Sitting on the crossroads of Byzantium, Arabia and China, the Khazars traded silk, sable, wax, silverware, spices and honey. They herded sheep and cattle, and sold fish from the Volga River.

  In time, the Khazarian empire incorporated people from different races and religious traditions, welcoming Christians, Jews, Muslims and worshippers of the Mongol sky-god Tengri. Sometime in the ninth century, the Khazar nobility decided to convert to Judaism, which is astonishing, because unlike Muslims and Christians, Jews have rarely sought to convert other peoples. The Khazar legend of the conversion tells of Bulan, the Khagan of the Khazars, who summoned sages from the three great faiths to come to him and debate which was the best religion. The three sages argued for two days, and on the third day, the Khagan turned to the Christian priest.

  ‘What do you think, priest?’ he asked. ‘Which of the other two religions do you prefer?’

  ‘My lord,’ he replied, ‘the religion of the Israelites is better than that of the Muslims.’

  Then the Khagan of the Khazars turned to the Muslim imam and asked, ‘Which do you prefer, the religion of the Jews or the Christians?’

  ‘The religion of the Israelites is preferable,’ he replied.

  ‘Well,’ said the Khagan, ‘you have both admitted with your own mouths that the religion of the Jews is better. Therefore I choose the religion of Israel.’

  THE KHAZARS SPOKE a Turkic language, but after their conversion, their court documents were written in Hebrew. They cheekily issued coins with the legend ‘Moses is the messenger of God’, in imitation of the inscriptions on Muslim coins claiming that role for Muhammad. Although their Judaism set them apart from the great powers, it did, for a while, help them maintain a degree of independence from the Christian Romans and the Muslim caliphate. Both powers could tolerate a Jewish presence on their borders more readily than the religion of their rival.

  Situated on the crossroads of different cultures and different faiths, Khazaria was rich, pragmatic and tolerant, a natural haven for the desperate and persecuted, and an obvious refuge for the deposed Justinian, who hungered for vengeance.

  JUSTINIAN THE SLIT-NOSE and his band of followers arrived at the Khazar city of Doros, where they were warmly welcomed by Khagan Busir. The Khagan was happy to grant Justinian asylum, figuring it would be no bad thing to have a Roman emperor in his debt should Justinian ever return to power. The Khagan offered to bind them closer together by offering Justinian his sister’s hand in marriage, which was accepted. We can only wonder what misgivings the Khazar bride might have had on her wedding day as she stood next to her new husband, a mutilated Roman emperor preoccupied with black revenge. Nonetheless, it does seem that a genuine affection grew between them. Justinian gave his bride a new Roman name, the highest he could bestow: Theodora, after the wife of the first Justinian. The newlyweds were given a home by the Sea of Azov, where Justinian settled down and waited to see how many soldiers the Khagan was prepared to grant him.

  MEANWHILE IN CONSTANTINOPLE, the usurper Leontius crashed and burned. As Leontius struggled to hold his unhappy people together, Caliph Abd al-Malik sent an expedition to seize Carthage in North Africa. Leontius dispatched the imperial fleet to retake the city, but Arab reinforcements overwhelmed them, and the defeated fleet slunk back to Constantinople. North Africa was slipping out of the grasp of the Roman empire forever.

  On the voyage home, the worried Romans wondered aloud how much blame Leontius would heap on them when they arrived in Constantinople. Then it occurred to someone that the loss would be much easier to explain to the emperor if the emperor were one of them. A vice-admiral named Apsimar was put forward as their leader. When the fleet disembarked, Apsimar’s men bribed the guards at the Blachernae Gate to let them in. The rebels stormed the palace and Leontius was deposed. Now it was Leontius’s turn to suffer disfigurement; his nose and tongue were slit, and he was banished to a monastery in the city.

  The rebel leader Apsimar sat himself down on a very unsteady throne. He could claim no birthright and no real moral justification for seizing it. He was further troubled by the news from Cherson, that Justinian had escaped the city and was now the guest of the Khazars, and most likely plotting his return.

  Apsimar wrote to the Khazars, offering fantastic bribes and gifts in return for Justinian’s head. The Khagan, swayed by the prospect of gold today rather than a vague promise of gold tomorrow, sent a detachment of guards to Justinian’s house for his ‘protection’. Two men, Papatzys and Balgitzis, who were known to Justinian, were given orders to assassinate him.

  But Theodora had been tipped off. Pregnant with their first child, her loyalties were now with her husband. Justinian made the first move: he invited Papatzys over, and when they were alone, Justinian strangled him with a cord. Then he sent for Balgitzis and strangled him too.

  Justinian hastily farewelled Theodora and sent her back to her brother’s house. A fishing boat was found. Justinian and a few followers climbed aboard and sailed out once again o
nto the Black Sea. The little boat pulled ashore near Cherson, where he was still a wanted man. Justinian kept out of sight while two of his men slipped into town to fetch supplies, and to organise a bigger, more robust ship.

  The next day, Justinian and his band of supporters pushed out their new boat onto the Black Sea. After several hours the sky darkened and the seas began to churn. As the boat rolled and pitched on the stormy waves, the men on board began to fear for their lives. Justinian’s manservant reached out to him, and begged him to make a deal with God.

  ‘Promise Him you will be lenient with your enemies,’ the manservant shouted, ‘if God in his mercy will spare our lives through this storm.’

  Justinian glowered, rose to his feet and shook his fist at the blackened sky.

  ‘If I should spare a single one of them,’ he bellowed, ‘then may God drown me here!’

  THE STORM PASSED and the sailors piloted the ship into the mouth of the Danube, into the lands of the Bulgars. Justinian sent a message to Tervel, the Bulgar Khan, and a deal was struck: a promise of gold, land and a Caesar’s crown in return for fifteen thousand horsemen. After ten years of thwarted plans and near-escapes, Justinian the Slit-Nose had his army.

  Golden Nose

  IN THE SPRING OF 705, Justinian rode towards Constantinople at the head of fifteen thousand Bulgar horsemen. Intelligence of their impending arrival reached Apsimar, who sent an army to hold them off, but Justinian’s forces had taken a different path through Thrace, slipped past Apsimar’s men, and arrived at the foot of the Theodosian Walls unharmed. The Bulgars had brought no siege engines; Justinian had assured them that, as their rightful ruler, he was sure to be welcomed by his people, and that the gates would be flung open for him. But when Justinian arrived at the gate and appealed to the loyalty of the guards on the wall, they showered him with abuse and taunted him.

  As Justinian suffered their insults helplessly, the Khan’s men began to suspect they’d been sent on a fool’s errand. They were dangerously exposed at the walls: when Apsimar’s army returned, they could be outflanked, attacked from front and rear.

  Running out of time and desperate to find a way in, Justinian led a band of soldiers on a night-time expedition to the north-west corner of the outer wall, where the fortifications bulged out to wrap themselves around the Blachernae Palace. The former emperor was familiar with the workings of the palace, and uncovered a narrow water conduit. Wasting no time, Justinian dived into the pipe, followed by his men. They crawled through the filthy tunnel and emerged inside the city unopposed. Apsimar, unsure of the loyalty of his troops, bolted from the palace.

  It was a bloodless coup d’état. After an absence of ten years, the mutilated prince was once again the master of Constantinople.

  JUSTINIAN SENT HIS GUARDS to track down Leontius and Apsimar. The usurpers were arrested and dragged through the streets in chains. The crowd were encouraged to jeer and throw shit and rubbish at the two men as they were hauled onto the floor of the Hippodrome. As they looked up they saw a strange spectacle: there in the imperial box was the gleaming visage of Justinian II, wearing a solid gold prosthetic nose.*

  At Justinian’s command, Leontius and Apsimar were brought into the imperial box and made to kneel before him. The emperor placed a foot on the neck of each man, then sat back to enjoy the races. When the day’s events were over, Leontius and Apsimar were taken away and beheaded. Army officers loyal to Apsimar were arrested and executed, their bodies hung on a wall. The Patriarch Callinicus, who had joined the rebellion against Justinian all those years ago, was blinded and banished to a monastery in Rome.

  Tervel the Bulgar Khan was welcomed into the city and rewarded, as Justinian had promised, with gold and land, and honoured with the title of Caesar, making Tervel the first foreigner ever to receive the ancient title.

  Now it was time to reunite his family. He sent warships across the Black Sea to Khazaria to fetch his wife Theodora and their infant son Tiberius. Khagan Busir was only too happy to hand them over. The loyal Theodora was awarded the title of Augusta, and little Tiberius was crowned as co-emperor.

  THE SECOND REIGN OF JUSTINIAN II was as restless and as unhappy as the first. He reinstated a reign of terror against his enemies, real and perceived. Paul the Deacon records that the emperor would order an execution almost as often as he would use his hand to wipe his runny butchered nose.

  Regretting his decision to honour the deal with Tervel, Justinian sent an army to take back his lands, but his forces were routed. The new Arab caliph invaded Anatolia and tore away more Roman territory for himself. Then a revolt broke out in Cherson. Justinian sent an expedition to suppress the rebellion, but at Cherson, his army decided to join the rebellion instead, denouncing Justinian and acclaiming their general Bardanes as their emperor. Justinian, on his way to Armenia, turned around and raced to get back to Constantinople before Bardanes could take his throne from him, but he was too late. Bardanes and his men entered the palace and began a purge of Justinian’s supporters.

  Theodora saw what was coming. She took the hand of little Tiberius and fled to the Church of St Mary in a desperate bid for sanctuary. Two of Bardanes’s henchmen entered the church, where they found the terrified boy clinging with one arm to a leg of the altar table, and clutching a fragment of the True Cross in the other hand. Protective amulets had been strung around his neck. Theodora begged for mercy. One of the henchmen, Strouthos, seized the boy, took the True Cross from his hand and placed it on the altar table. He removed the amulets and placed them around his own neck. The boy was murdered in the doorway of the church. There is no record of what happened to Theodora.

  Justinian was intercepted outside Chalcedon and arrested. All of his men deserted him. His son was dead. A rebel bodyguard named Helias, whose family had been killed on Justinian’s orders, pushed through the crowd of soldiers and sliced off the emperor’s head with a dagger. The dynasty of the great Heraclius was terminated at the point of a sword.

  THE TALE OF JUSTINIAN THE SLIT-NOSE comes to us mostly through the Chronicle of Theophanes, an historical work compiled a century after Justinian’s death, from other sources that are now lost. The tale of the disfigured emperor hellbent on bloody vengeance has the qualities of a Greek tragedy and a 1970s horror movie. Theophanes had his own axes to grind, and there is no way to know how much of Justinian’s story is his own invention.

  I’m struck, as I tell Joe this story, by the undertow of hatred and violence in Constantinople at this time. Death demands more death, and a moral threshold is crossed. This is one of those moments in history when psychopathic leaders gain the upper hand, and the normal human sanctions against killing disappear: the Jacobin terror of revolutionary France, Indonesia’s year of living dangerously, the Kristallnacht of the Nazis, the Rwandan massacres. In such moments, death becomes as commonplace as eating and drinking. Passionless political killing mutates into casual murder for pleasure, and something unravels as the sight of helpless people invokes not pity, but its opposite, a kind of smiling contempt. The killing picks up momentum and corpses pile up until death has had its fill and can consume no more.

  The modern mind might shrink from metaphysical representations of evil, but in the medieval world, the real culprit behind the chaos was easily identified. Netherlandish Proverbs, a sixteenth-century work by Pieter Bruegel, is a sprawling portrait of a Flemish village swirling with anarchy. Within this topsy-turvy world Bruegel illustrates 112 separate proverbs of stupidity and wickedness: a man fills in a well after his calf has drowned in it, another man tries to shear a pig, two naked arses shit from a broken privy into the stream below, the blind are leading the blind, and a fool in a cap bangs his head against a brick wall. And in the centre of it all, seated on a wooden throne, is the author of this spiralling madness, the Devil himself: a fat woodland creature with buckshot eyes and two dead branches sprouting from his head.

  Detail: Netherlandish Proverbs, Pieter Bruegel.

  public domain/Wikimedia Common
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  Gog and Magog

  THE YEARS OF ARAB conquest were, for the Romans, an anxious time. Many Christians in their former provinces willingly converted to Islam, if only to avoid the jizya, the tax levied by the caliphate on non-Muslims. Those who stayed loyal to the faith looked for reassurance, or at least an explanation for why so much misfortune had been brought upon the Christian empire of the Romans.

  The hour was late. It was surely only a matter of time before the Arabs would focus their attention on Constantinople; the Queen of Cities was too great a prize to be ignored. The stakes were so very high because the fate of the city was linked to the fate of the universe itself. If Constantinople, the Christ-guarded city, was to be overrun by the Ishmaelites, then its destruction must inevitably trigger the apocalypse.

  To make sense of the horribly disordered world they now found themselves in, Roman scholars turned to the prophecies embedded in the scriptures, to Revelation, the hallucinatory endnote of the Bible. The author of Revelation, John of Patmos, prophesied that in the final convulsion of the apocalypse, there would be a war between Satan and the Heavenly City:

  When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth – Gog and Magog – and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.

  And they came up on the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, and fire came down from heaven and devoured them.

  The eyes of priests and scholars lit upon the mysterious names Gog and Magog. Who were these numberless hordes dwelling in the far reaches of the earth?

  They found a clue in the legend of the greatest general of the ancient world: Alexander the Great. Alexander had perished some three hundred years before the birth of Christ, but the tales of his conquests were told and retold, written and rewritten. A collection of stories of his exploits known as the Alexander Romance became wildly popular in the early Middle Ages, particularly in Constantinople. In these tales, Alexander enjoys fabulous adventures: he meets centaurs and sirens, travels to a city with twelve towers of gold and emerald, encounters an island with a fleshy surface that turns out to be a whale, which plunges into the depths, nearly drowning him.