Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  At five o’clock, a very damp Liutprand was finally admitted into the grounds of the Great Palace and he was taken to his lodgings, a draughty and barren stone house. The house was without water, and the wine that was left for him was flavoured with pitch and pine resin, which was disgusting to his taste.

  For two days Liutprand was left to stew in this manner. On the third day he was led into a conference with Leo, the emperor’s brother and chief advisor, and the two men bickered over the question of titles. Liutprand insisted that in their discussions, Otto, his master, must be referred to as a fellow emperor (basileus). Leo said this would not be possible, and that Otto would have to settle for being called a king (rex). Liutprand objected strenuously. Leo accused him of trying to stir up trouble.

  The next day, Liutprand was led into the octagonal throne room for an audience with the emperor. Here, for the first time, he caught sight of the Pale Death of the Saracens. Liutprand recorded his impressions of the emperor’s appearance:

  He is a monstrosity of a man, a dwarf, fat-headed and with tiny mole’s eyes. A short, broad, thick beard disfigures him, half going grey and disgraced by a neck scarcely an inch long, which is pig-like by reason of the big close bristles on his beard. In colour he is like an Ethiopian and, as the poet says, ‘you would not like to meet him in the dark’.

  Nicephorus, for his part, gave Liutprand a severe dressing down.

  ‘It was our duty and our desire,’ he began icily, ‘to give you a courteous and magnificent reception. But that has been rendered impossible by the impious behaviour of your master.’ The emperor then unleashed a tirade against Otto for attacking his allies in Italy, and concluded by accusing Liutprand of being a spy. The two men debated fruitlessly for an hour, until the emperor called a halt to their argument.

  ‘It is past seven o’clock,’ he said wearily, ‘and there is a church procession which I must attend.’

  Liutprand joined the emperor’s entourage as it proceeded in a stately manner from the palace to the Hagia Sophia. Both sides of the road were lined with men carrying shields and spears. Liutprand was directed to sit on a platform near the choral singers. The adulation of the emperor was, to him, a ridiculous spectacle.

  As Nicephorus, like some crawling monster, walked along, the singers began to cry out in adulation: ‘Behold the morning star approaches: the day star rises: in his eyes the sun’s rays are reflected: Nicephorus our prince, the pale death of the Saracens!’

  After the service, Liutprand was invited to dine with the emperor, but he was given a place of low status at the table and served food that was prepared with olive oil and garum. As Liutprand choked his way through his meal, the emperor taunted him from the far end of the table, mocking the strength of Otto’s armies.

  Provoked beyond endurance, and ignoring further attempts to silence him, Liutprand rose to his feet.

  ‘When we are angry,’ he cried, ‘we can find nothing more insulting to say than “You Roman!” For us, in the word “Roman” is comprehended every form of lowness, timidity, avarice, luxury, falsehood and vice.’

  The exchange had a chilling effect on the dinner. Nicephorus ordered Liutprand’s table be removed and for him to be escorted back to his lodgings. Too much had been said in anger. An imperial marriage was off the agenda.

  Liutprand was held for another four miserable months in his ‘hated abode’ before being allowed to depart. He bade Constantinople a bitter farewell, ‘that once most rich and flourishing, now half-starved, perjured, lying, wily, greedy, rapacious, avaricious, vainglorious city’. As he left, customs officials confiscated the five lengths of purple silk he had bought in the city to adorn his church. He was given no compensation.

  LIUTPRAND had caught Nicephorus at a bad time. The emperor’s reign, which had started out so promisingly, was teetering badly. Tax increases had been levied to fund his war plans, and a grain shortage had inflated bread prices, which led to protests in the streets. While making his procession through the city, two women had thrown bricks at him from a rooftop. The women had been arrested and executed, which only deepened public anger. On another procession, Nicephorus had been assaulted by an angry mob, who lobbed rocks and insults at him, while his personal guard protected him with their shields.

  Beset by rumours of plots and uprisings, the emperor turned the Bucoleon Palace into a citadel, fortified with battlements. But his most dangerous enemy lay within the palace complex.

  LIKE EVERYONE else in the city, Empress Theophano had grown weary of her unpleasant, older husband, and so she formed a secret alliance with John Tzimisces, his former lieutenant. Tzimisces could hardly have been more different from his taciturn uncle: he was a charming and good-looking young officer, with dark blond hair and blue eyes, who had served Nicephorus well on the battlefront. But for some reason the emperor had become displeased with his nephew, and had banished him to Anatolia.

  Theophano persuaded Nicephorus that he had treated his nephew unjustly. Nicephorus relented and lifted the banishment, so long as Tzimisces agreed to stay in his family home in Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus. Perhaps Nicephorus suspected something was up between his wife and his former lieutenant. Tzimisces was soon making secret nightly excursions by boat across the strait to a corner of the palace where Theophano waited under cover of darkness. The lovers hatched a plot against Nicephorus. Whether Theophano or Tzimisces was the chief instigator is not known.

  THE NIGHT OF 10 DECEMBER was bitterly cold and windy; snow was blowing about the palace grounds. Nicephorus entered his bedchamber, read for a while, then donned his long hairshirt, lay down on a bearskin on the floor and fell asleep. At around eleven, Tzimisces crossed the choppy waters of the strait in a rowboat with three associates. A rope was dropped from Theophano’s window and the assassins climbed up into the palace. A eunuch led them to Nicephorus’s bedchamber. They drew their swords and silently entered the room.

  The four men were momentarily taken aback to find the bed unoccupied, but then the snoring figure of Nicephorus was discovered on the floor. After a few hard kicks the emperor woke up and stared at his assassins. The first sword blow landed across the brow of his head. The accomplices dragged the semi-conscious emperor to John Tzimisces, who now sat on the imperial bed.

  ‘Tell me,’ he shouted, ‘was it not me who made you emperor? Why then did you send me into exile? I am a man of nobler birth than you. Who will save you now?’

  Tzimisces then tore out clumps of Nicephorus’s hair and beard. The other assassins hit him with their sword handles until one of them thrust his curved blade into the emperor’s back and ran it through him. Nicephorus’s head was cut off and the rest of his body thrown out the window.

  John Tzimisces’s men ran out into the snow-covered streets of the city, shouting ‘Hail John! Augustus of the Romans!’

  The Varangians, the emperor’s Viking bodyguard, heard the tumult, picked up their axes and rushed to the gates of the Bucoleon. As they tried to force open the iron gates, they looked up and saw one of the assassins holding the emperor’s severed head from the palace window. All the Varangians could do now was shrug: they were too late.

  John Tzimisces strode into the golden octagonal throne room, sat down, pulled on the emperor’s purple boots and immediately got to work.

  IF THEOPHANO WAS a co-conspirator in her husband’s assassination, it availed her nothing. She was now a roadblock to her lover’s ambitions. John Tzimisces came to the Hagia Sophia to receive the imperial diadem, but the Patriarch objected, refusing to lay the crown upon the head of an assassin with bloodstained hands. In reply, Tzimisces said it was not he, but his accomplices, who had delivered the deathblows to Nicephorus. And in any case, they were only acting on the orders of the empress, who instigated the whole thing. The Patriarch insisted that Tzimisces atone for his sins by publicly denouncing his accomplices and by tearing up certain decrees that had been laid down against the church by Nicephorus. Tzimisces readily agreed to all this and was crowned on
Christmas Day 969.

  For her treachery, Theophano was sent into a miserable exile on the island of Proti in the Sea of Marmara. At some point she escaped and slipped back into the city, where she came to the Hagia Sophia and demanded asylum. Basil, the court chamberlain, was sent to persuade her to return to exile. In her fury, she lashed out, punching Basil hard in the head, leaving the marks of her knuckles on his temple. Theophano had to be dragged from the Hagia Sophia and sent away into a final exile in the distant province of Armenia.

  Nicephorus’s headless body lay in the courtyard all day in the snow. Then his remains were collected and carted to the Church of the Holy Apostles, where they were laid in a coffin. His tomb was inscribed with the words: You conquered all but a woman.

  The Golden Fork

  DESPITE THE BLOODY MEANS by which he had ascended to the throne, John Tzimisces became a popular and effective ruler. He strengthened his legitimacy by marrying Theodora, a born-to-the-purple princess.

  Shortly afterwards, John Tzimisces sent a message to Rome, asking Otto to revisit the idea of an imperial marriage between the eastern Roman empire and the Holy Roman empire of the west. His letter was warmly received, and so Tzimisces sent a young bride named Theophanu to Germany, to be married to Otto’s son, the seventeen-year old Otto II.*

  Theophanu arrived in Rome in 972, accompanied by a large entourage of servants and heavy treasure chests laden with extravagant gifts. She was just thirteen, barely a teenager, entering a strange land to marry someone she had never met and whose language she couldn’t speak, but the dignity of her bearing and her elegant clothes deeply impressed the Germans and Italians of Otto’s court.

  Then there was some confusion when the Germans realised the bejewelled girl before them was an impostor. Theophanu was not the purple-born princess that Otto had been expecting, but John Tzimisces’s niece. Some of Otto’s advisors recommended he call off the marriage and send her back to Constantinople, but Otto thought better of it; he was pleased with Theophanu and the wedding went ahead as planned.

  THEOPHANU AND HER SHORT, red-headed husband Prince Otto the Younger were married by the pope in St Peter’s Basilica on 14 April 972. They arrived at the wedding banquet and were seated together in the place of honour. A plate of food was laid in front of her and then Theophanu did something completely unexpected: she produced a little doubled-pronged golden implement, and used it to scoop up her food and bring it to her mouth.

  The raucous wedding banqueters were shocked. No one in Otto’s court had ever contemplated such a thing. In Constantinople, use of the table fork had been commonplace for centuries, but in the west, even at a royal table, food was consumed noisily and with the hands. Some of the revellers at the wedding saw at once that the use of such an implement would avoid unnecessary mess across the table and on the clothes. Others saw the fork as a symbol of effete eastern decadence. St Peter Damian of Italy would later denounce it as an ungodly implement.

  Theophanu’s daily bath was also controversial, a practice that made her appear pristine and ethereal, compared to the pungent westerners in Otto’s court. This, too, was seen in some quarters as conceited and unchristian. But that was just the isolated grumbling of a few malcontents. By and large, Theophanu’s Byzantine glamour simply dazzled the coarse Germans. Frankish celebrations became more refined, and probably much less fun.

  A YEAR AFTER THE WEDDING, the old emperor Otto the Great died and Theophanu’s husband was crowned Otto II, holy Roman emperor of the west. Theophanu became empress and co-ruler. Otto was happy to leave much of the business of government to her, and with each passing year her influence grew, eclipsing that of her mother-in-law, Adelheid. She and her husband appear to have genuinely been fond of each other, and had five children.

  After eleven years of marriage, Otto died at the age of twenty-eight of a sudden illness and was buried in St Peter’s Basilica. Their three-year-old son was crowned Otto III, with Theophanu ruling as empress-regent until the boy came of age. She reigned successfully until her death in 991, still only in her thirties. Theophanu was buried in Cologne in the monastery of St Pantaleon, the saint whose relics she had brought with her from Constantinople. Her sarcophagus is still there today.

  Even the most chauvinistic commentators of the time had to concede that Theophanu had governed cleverly and prudently. A German chronicler concluded that although she was ‘of the fragile sex, her modesty, conviction, and manner of life were outstanding, which is rare in Byzantium’.

  Theophanu had, for better or worse, given upper-class Germans and Italians a taste for luxurious clothes and food. But her longest-lasting legacy is the introduction of the fork to the tables of western Europe. In the eleventh century, Italians discovered the joys of pasta, which could not be eaten with the hands without making a splattering mess. Then they realised that linguine could be consumed effortlessly if impaled and twirled around a fork.

  Which is why, whenever you pick up pasta with a fork, you enact, in a very small way, a symbolic union of Rome with Constantinople, and a reunion of the eastern and western empires.

  Varangians

  IN THE HAGIA SOPHIA, on the parapet of the upper gallery, Joe and I see some Scandinavian runes scratched into the marble. The markings trace back to the ninth century and are only faintly visible today. They look like little stick figures. Translated, they say: Halfdan carved these runes. We’re looking at medieval graffiti, etched a thousand years ago by a bored Viking.

  For several days Joe and I refer to ourselves in the third person as ‘Halfdan’, as in, ‘Halfdan hungry’, ‘Halfdan kill bear for supper’ and ‘Halfdan tired. Halfdan want to go back to room and watch Turkish TV now’.

  Halfdan’s runes in the Hagia Sophia.

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  Halfdan was a soldier of the Varangian Guard, the emperor’s elite bodyguard, composed of Viking warriors from Scandinavia and Russia.* The Varangians, with their tall frames, reddish-blond hair and beards, were a novelty on the streets of Constantinople. In the imperial army they stood out like bears in the company of wolves. Strolling along the Mese, they formed an impressive sight in their blue tunics and scarlet cloaks, their double-bladed axes slung over their shoulders.

  The Varangians were entrusted with the personal security of the emperor, and required to swear an oath of loyalty to him. All too often they would, like poor Halfdan, be required to silently stand guard and keep watch as the emperor participated in stultifyingly elaborate ceremonies. In battle they would be held back until the critical moment, when they would charge forward, axes swinging left and right, scattering the emperor’s enemies. Off-duty, the Varangians were free to get as drunk as they liked. They became notorious in Constantinople for their Viking revelries. People called them ‘the emperor’s winebags’, although not, presumably, to their faces.

  Varangians had served in the palace since 874, when a treaty between Byzantium and Kievan Rus’ required the northerners to send a contingent of warriors for the imperial army. The excellent pay attracted more ambitious warriors from Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Russia and England. Emperors quickly saw the benefit of having these tall Vikings in their service – as foreigners they were removed from dynastic palace politics, and were ultimately more trustworthy than local soldiers. Varangians were indulged by the emperor and even allowed to plunder his belongings after his death.

  The Vikings who joined the Varangian Guard came to Constantinople in search of adventure, fame and treasure. As foreigners in a strange land, they formed a close brotherhood and kept something of their ancestral Viking code of honour. In 1034, a contingent of Varangians was wintering in Thrace when one of their number attempted to rape a local woman. In desperation, she snatched his dagger and stabbed him through the heart. When the Varangians learnt of the circumstances of his death, they came to the Thracian woman to honour her and give her all of their disgraced comrade’s possessions. Then they threw away his body without burial.

  A VARANGIAN, if
he survived his tour of duty, could look forward to returning to his faraway village in Scandinavia with a sack of gold, a silken cloak and a set of impressive battle scars. Great value, too, was set upon the stories they brought back with them from the fabulous metropolis they called Miklagard, the big city.

  The most famous of the Varangians ever to come to Constantinople was Harald Hardrada, whose adventurous nature carried him across the world and whose name resounds in the sagas of Iceland.

  EVEN AT FIFTEEN, Harald was hungry for glory. When his older brother Olaf called for allies to help him win back the throne of Norway, Harald rallied six hundred men to the cause. The battle was lost and Olaf was killed. Harald escaped with some of his men to a farmhouse, where he nursed his wounds through the winter.

  In the summer Harald and his friends resolved to leave Norway and seek their fortune in the wider world. They rode through the back roads over the mountains towards Sweden.

  ‘Who knows,’ Harald sang to himself as he rode on his horse, ‘my name may yet become renowned far and wide.’

  Harald met up with more fugitives from King Olaf’s army. They found longboats and sailed across the Baltic Sea, into the lands of Kievan Rus’. Harald was warmly welcomed in Novgorod by Grand Prince Yaroslav, who made him a captain in his army.

  After seven years of fighting for Yaroslav, Harald and his men agreed it was time to venture south and try their luck in Miklagard, the great city of the Romans. They sailed their longboats southward, along the Dneiper to the Black Sea and then into the Bosphorus. And in 1034, Harald Sigurdsson, who had never in his life set foot in any settlement larger than a village, found himself in the glittering metropolis of Constantinople.