Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  Typically, the Christian Romans credited the invention of Greek fire not to their own human ingenuity but to divine favour. They preferred to think of themselves as righteous and pious, rather than clever and resourceful. And if they were clever and resourceful, that was surely a sign of God’s favour too.

  The destruction of the Arab transports was a stunning victory, witnessed by many on the city walls, and an unmistakable sign that the Blessed Virgin had come to the aid of her people at last. The larger part of the Arab fleet was still intact, but the spectacle had shocked and demoralised Maslama’s men. Their ships withdrew to safer positions upstream, and a disappointed Maslama resumed his post at the Theodosian Walls.

  THE WARMER MONTHS faded into autumn and the news came to Constantinople that Caliph Sulayman had dropped dead in Ramla at the age of forty-three.* This, too, was seen by the Romans as an encouraging sign from God. Then a brutal winter descended on Constantinople, the coldest anyone could remember.

  Maslama’s men suffered badly as they shivered in their flimsy tents outside the walls. Disease ran through the camps, and the Arab soldiers were forced to eat their camels, horses and donkeys. The winter snow came early and lay on the ground for three months. As the ground became hard and frozen, the invaders found they could no longer bury their dead, and had to throw their corpses into the Marmara.

  Arab sources record that it was at this time that Leo reopened negotiations with Maslama. Leo was still being coy, holding out hope that he might yet surrender the city to end the siege.

  According to these sources, Leo’s correspondence with Maslama went something like this: ‘If I am to surrender my city to you, I must persuade my people that all further resistance is futile.’

  ‘How can I help you to persuade your people of this?’

  ‘If you were to burn your remaining grain supplies, it would signal to my people that you are preparing for an all-out attack . . . that you are so completely confident of success, you can afford to destroy your supplies.’

  The Arab histories record, implausibly, that Maslama did indeed burn his grain supplies.* Leo did not open the gates, and left Maslama and his starving men still stranded outside the walls.

  Byzantine accounts say nothing of this episode and the story sounds preposterous, but historians have struggled to understand why the Arabs would fabricate such a tale, given that it paints their leadership in such a poor light. Perhaps the point of the Arab account was to shift the blame for the debacle entirely onto Maslama, or perhaps it’s simply one of those fables of medieval trickery that the Arabs enjoyed so much, a tale intended to illustrate a larger truth about Leo’s cunning and treachery.

  UMAR, THE NEW CALIPH, shocked by the reports he was receiving, sent a new armada of nearly eight hundred ships, stocked with food supplies and weaponry, for the beleaguered Maslama. The Arab ships entered the Bosphorus, but the crews were made up almost entirely of Christian Egyptian galley slaves, and when they caught sight of Constantinople they defected en masse to the Romans, rowing over to the sea walls with their supplies, shouting ‘Long live the Emperor!’

  The Egyptian Christians were only too eager to tell Leo everything they knew of the positions of the Arab fleet. Leo sent out another squadron of dromons to destroy it with Greek fire. The cargo of the relief ships was plundered and brought into the city. Maslama had been counting on those supplies to get his army through the coming months. Instead, his own relief ships had resupplied the city, while his army continued to starve.

  The caliph sent another reserve army to meet up with Maslama. But the Romans were tipped off. The emperor despatched a platoon of soldiers and officers, who slipped across the Bosphorus, and ambushed the relief army on the road to Nicomedia.

  Maslama was agonising over whether he should break off the siege when Tervel’s Bulgarian horsemen descended once again on his exhausted, sick and hungry troops. In what must have been a pitiful, bloody sight, an estimated 22,000 men were slaughtered.

  And with that, Caliph Umar ordered an end to the siege and a complete withdrawal of all the Arab land and sea forces. But more tribulations were in store for what was left of the caliph’s navy: as the fleet set out on its return voyage, it was hit by a storm on the Sea of Marmara. Dozens of ships were lost, but the fleet pressed on. Another storm struck them off the coast of Rhodes and more ships were destroyed.

  There was still a final blow to come: as the remainder of the caliph’s ships passed warily through the Aegean Sea, the volcanic island of Thera erupted, sending a shower of sizzling ashes onto the decks and sails of the fleet. Of the 2600 ships that had left the Arab coastal ports to conquer Constantinople, only five returned.

  ‘HOW CAN THAT story possibly be true?’

  Joe is shaking his head. We’re on the ferry to Kadıköy, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, not far from where Maslama’s defeated army crossed back into Asia Minor. In Roman times, Kadıköy was the city of Chalcedon.

  ‘Well, it’s something that happened thirteen centuries ago. There are two Roman accounts of the siege, but they were written a century later. The Arab histories were compiled long after the event too, but all the accounts pretty much agree on the basic details: the Umayyad Arabs came in great numbers by land and by sea, and they put the city to siege for thirteen months, but Leo outfoxed the invaders, who were also let down by a horrible streak of bad luck. Both sides also thought that God had intervened decisively; what else could explain the horrible ordeal the Arabs went through?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s just bad luck.’

  ‘They didn’t believe in bad luck. The Arabs saw it as punishment for their own arrogance and pride, a sin the Prophet had warned against many times.’

  THE DEPARTURE of the Arab forces was greeted with wild joy and gratitude on the streets of Constantinople. The end of the siege coincided with the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Roman victory was ascribed to her divine intervention.

  All the Christian lands to the west of Constantinople owed the city a great debt. The shield of Constantinople had absorbed the hammer blows of Islamic power and kept them safe from the caliph’s conquering armies. In some parallel universe, there is a moment when Leo opens the gates of Constantinople, and the caliphate incorporates all of Europe into the House of Islam. But, as it happened, the shield of Constantinople enabled a feeble and fragmented Christian Europe to survive, stabilise and eventually thrive.

  Arab self-confidence was momentarily chastened, and the focus and enthusiasm of the caliphate shifted to the richer, more dynamic societies of the east, where its interaction with Indian and Persian cultures would inspire a golden age of Arab science and literature.

  Europe, cut off from the cultural riches of the east, became a lonely backwater.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Uncreated Light

  The empire in 1025, at its greatest extent in the medieval era.

  Bucoleon

  OUR HOTEL IS IN A RENOVATED nineteenth-century building in an older district between the Hagia Sophia and the Sea of Marmara. The streets are narrow and cramped, lined with three- and four-storey buildings, tourist shops and restaurants with laminated menus in English and German. There is a railway line a few blocks away, with houses and apartments pushed up together on both sides of the tracks. A thousand years ago, this was the emperor’s polo field.

  This whole area is built on the site of what was once the Great Palace: the empire’s administrative nerve centre, a complex of pavilions and terraces that ran from the Augustaeum down to the sea walls. This was the home of Constantine, Justinian and Heraclius.

  On most days, hundreds of staff members and courtiers would scuttle between the colonnaded pavilions. The Magnaura Palace served as the meeting place for the senate. The imperial family entertained their guests at the lavish Banquet Hall of the Nineteen Couches, where they dined like the ancient Romans. Emperors held court in the Chrysotriklinos, the marble-panelled octagonal throne room. The four hundred men of the palac
e guards were housed in two sets of barracks, while the imperial family slept in the perfumed halls of the Palace of Daphne.

  The polo field, the Tzykanisterion, occupied an open, grassy space between the hall of the palace guards and the sea walls. Polo, like chess, was a game imported from Persia and adapted to local rules. Two teams competed on horseback to lob a leather ball into the opposing team’s goal, using sticks with little nets on the end. Byzantine polo was played hard and fast: Alexius I Comnene was badly injured in one bout, Alexander III died on the field from a heart attack.

  TODAY, IN THIS RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT, nearly every visible sign of the Great Palace has been obliterated, aside from one lonely ruin, which Joe and I are trying to find. We cross the railway bridge and thread our way through some narrow lanes down to Kennedy Caddesi, the waterside motorway that follows the contours of the old sea walls. We walk for a block to a small park and look up. High up on a wall, we see an unremarkable set of three marble-framed doorways, set in a crumbling wall of Roman bricks. In Justinian’s time, these porticos opened out onto the marbled balcony of the Bucoleon Palace. On summer nights, he and Theodora would have passed through these doors to admire the moonlit view of the Sea of Marmara. But today these three frames are all that’s left of the Bucoleon Palace; the other ruins were demolished in the nineteenth century to make way for the railway line.

  As we gaze at the porticos, I try to conjure up the lost grandeur of what was once the most beautiful palace in Europe, but it’s not really working and I feel a bit silly and defeated. I can see Joe’s wondering why we’ve spent half an hour hiking through the back streets of Istanbul just to look at some vine-entangled frames beside a roaring motorway.

  Later that day we stop to stare at what appears to be the façade of a ruined Byzantine building, a three-storied set of brick arches. Was this also part of the imperial palace? A local guy stands next to me, sipping coffee, also staring at the ruin.

  ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. It must have been a great building. Maybe a palace?’ I reply.

  ‘A great palace. Yes, a great palace. But . . .’ he lowers his voice conspiratorially, ‘there is a more important palace nearby.’ He gestures at the shop behind us. ‘It is my carpet warehouse.’

  He grins at me good-naturedly and we both burst out laughing.

  THE GREAT PALACE didn’t die of Turkish neglect, but fell into disuse long before the Ottomans arrived. In its later centuries, the empire’s rulers preferred to live in the Blachernae Palace at the other end of the city. As the empire declined, there was barely enough gold to pay for the city’s defence, let alone for the upkeep of the Great Palace. When Sultan Mehmed II inspected his newly conquered city in 1453, he found the Great Palace in such an appalling state, he had most of it demolished.

  In the twentieth century, an archaeological excavation uncovered stunning Roman floor mosaics from the palace near the Blue Mosque, which are on display at Istanbul’s Mosaic Museum. The mosaics are dated to Justinian’s reign and contain dramatic scenes of conflict between natural and mythological creatures: a gryphon devouring a lizard, a lion fighting an elephant. Elsewhere a man milks a goat and a mare suckles its foal. Further archaeological discoveries have been made in the area, but so much of the Great Palace still lies undisturbed, like a ghostly mausoleum, under blocks of apartments, the railway line and the Blue Mosque.

  The Broken Icon

  VISITORS TO THE GREAT PALACE COMPLEX would enter through the Chalke Gate, a grand marble vestibule with heavy bronze doors, located in the south-east corner of the Augustaeum. Above the entrance to the Chalke Gate stood an icon of Christ the Pantocrator, the universal ruler.

  Reconstruction of the Chalke Gate (Antoine Helbert).

  Antoine Helbert

  One evening in 726, a team of soldiers appeared at the gate, and to the shock of the passersby in the square, they set to work pulling down the icon. A riot broke out and two of the soldiers were lynched. Word spread through Constantinople about the incident: what was the emperor thinking, removing a much-loved, holy object from his palace gate?

  Emperor Leo III had deftly led his people to a great victory against the might of the Arab empire in the 717 siege, but for all his success, Leo’s authority was clothed in only the thinnest fabric of legitimacy. He was still a usurper, and the Arabs were still strong.

  Leo tried to curry divine favour by issuing a new set of laws outlawing abortion and prescribing the death penalty for homosexuality. But even this was shown to have little effect when, two months later, the volcanic island of Thera blew its top, shrouding the whole region under a plume of ash and smoke. Leo concluded it was time to crack down on the worship of icons.

  THE VENERATION OF ICONS linked the empire to its pagan past; ancient Greeks and Romans had enjoyed portraying the gods in their art and sculpture. It was only natural that the manufacture of sacred likenesses should have been carried over into the Christian era. Nike was transmuted into an angel, Zeus into God the father. Jesus, with his nimbus of golden light, resembled Sol Invictus, the god of the unconquered sun.

  In the homes of Constantinople, the household icon of a saint would be spoken of with great respect and affection, like an honoured member of the family. These golden representations of wide-eyed saints and martyrs seemed to stare searchingly into the soul of the devotee. Women, in particular, treasured the direct access to the divine that icons brought into their daily lives, a relationship unmediated by priests, monks and bishops. Icons brought the stories of the Bible to the illiterate, delivering the full emotional power of the scriptures in a single moment.

  Icons appears to have been wholly uncontroversial until the rise of Islam forced a rethink. Muslims accused the Christians of pagan idolatry, of backsliding against the second commandment delivered to Moses, ‘You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them’.

  The ancient commandment could hardly have been clearer. And yet, in the eyes of Muslims and Jews, icon worship was proof the Romans had slipped back into their bad old habits of bowing down to stone and wooden idols. In 721, Yazid II banned Christian icons throughout the caliphate, a decree that may have shamed the Romans: were the Arab infidels forcing the Christians to do something they should have done anyway? Iconophiles or ‘icon lovers’ were quick to point out the difference between icon veneration – the paying of respect – and full-blown adoration or idolatry. But the eruption of Thera prompted the emperor to draw the line. In 726, Leo decreed that the crucifix, the image of Christ crucified, should be replaced everywhere by the simple cross. Furthermore, public icons in the city were to be destroyed or covered in whitewash.

  The attack on holy images, which was later dubbed ‘iconoclasm’, the breaking of icons, provoked an immediate and hostile reaction from the population. Theodore, the abbot of the monastery of Stoudios, was so incensed and distressed, he upbraided Leo to his face: ‘Your responsibility Emperor,’ he warned, ‘is with affairs of state and military matters. Give your mind to these, and leave the Church to its pastors and teachers.’

  Fortunately for Leo, the introduction of the new icon policy was followed by several years of Roman military success in the struggle against the Arabs, which allowed him to claim divine approval for the ban. But in 740, an earthquake shook Constantinople, an event predictably interpreted by iconophiles as a sign of God’s anger at the destruction of holy images. This constant taking of God’s emotional temperature, agonisingly reassessed after every military campaign or natural disaster, was exhausting and dispiriting. Iconoclasm was a self-inflicted wound on the empire that would be reopened again and again.

  LEO III DIED OF OEDEMA in June 741 and the throne passed on to his eldest son, crowned Constantine V. The new emperor made it known he would keep hammering away at the iconoclastic nail. Military success against the caliphat
e emboldened him to take matters a step further. In 753 Constantine V decreed that the veneration of icons would henceforth be regarded as a heresy, and he launched a persecution of the iconophiles: monasteries were destroyed, dissident monks and nuns were forced to renounce their vows and marry each other in mock ceremonies in the Hippodrome. Those who refused to renounce icons were tortured and blinded.

  In 766 Constantine rooted out a conspiracy against him by iconophile sympathisers within the palace. Everyone associated with the plot was beheaded, blinded or flogged. After that, he encountered no more conspiracies, but he had created deep divisions within the empire, and alienated church leaders outside the empire’s frontiers. In 775 Constantine was struck down with a fever while leading a campaign against the Bulgars. He died on the way back to Constantinople.

  CONSTANTINE V HAD BEEN a competent, if somewhat cruel, ruler, but the man’s name and reputation suffered greatly at the hands of Theophanes the Confessor, the chief historian of this period and an ardent iconophile. Other Constantines would have phrases like ‘the Great’ or ‘Born in the Purple’ chiselled after their names; Constantine V, however, is remembered as Constantine Copronymus – ‘Constantine the Shit-Named’, after iconophiles spread a spiteful rumour that the emperor had disgraced himself as a baby by defecating in the baptismal font at his christening.