Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The time had come to decide who the new emperor of Constantinople would be. Boniface of Montferrat expected to win, but Doge Dandolo once again managed to skew events. Voting as a bloc, the Venetians threw their support behind Baldwin of Flanders, who was seen as a more biddable creature than Boniface. And so, on 16 May 1204, Baldwin was acclaimed as the first Latin emperor of Constantinople in the Hagia Sophia. In his hands was placed a ruby the size of an apple.

  The mass exodus had driven Constantinople’s population down to a tenth of its former size. But the city’s conquest was greeted with indifference in the west; there was no rush to colonise the imperial lands. The Franks were unable to repopulate the city, and with half the houses destroyed by fire, whole neighbourhoods were never rebuilt. The natural world began to reassert itself within the city walls. Vegetation and foliage grew in newly cleared spaces. Weeds rose up to waist height in the great forums of Theodosius and Constantine.

  THE LATIN EMPIRE of Constantinople was a doomed enterprise, destined to last for just fifty-seven years. Byzantine rule would be restored in the thirteenth century, but the damage was done. In time, as more and more imperial territory fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, the terrible irony of the Fourth Crusade was revealed: the Crusaders had not just failed to retake Jerusalem, they had wrecked Christendom’s biggest city, and destroyed a European bulwark against Islam.

  The foundations were laid for centuries of Orthodox bitterness against the Catholic west.

  The Four Horses

  VENICE EMERGED as the true beneficiary of the Fourth Crusade. Venetian raiders helped themselves to Constantinople’s plentiful array of statues from the ancient world, including the famous team of gilt-bronze horses known as the Quadriga. The statues of the Quadriga had stood majestically over the starting posts of the Hippodrome for centuries. Together the four horses formed a stunning expression of equine muscle and movement, each one twisting its neck and raising its foreleg, anticipating the charge down the track.

  The Quadriga was too big a prize for the Venetians to ignore. The four statues were pulled off their mountings in the Hippodrome and dragged through the streets down to the Golden Horn, where the heads were sawn from the bodies to allow them to be properly packed and transported. The pieces were hauled onto a ship bound for Venice, and installed triumphantly above the front porch of St Mark’s Basilica. The horses were given collars to conceal the place where their heads had been rebonded. The Quadriga remained atop St Mark’s for five centuries, until it was taken down and brought inside to protect it from acid rain. The Quadriga you see above St Mark’s today is a fibreglass replica.

  The Quadriga, now in the Museum of St Mark’s Basilica, Venice.

  Creative Commons/Tteske

  The porphyry statue of the four tetrarchs – Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus – embedded into a corner of the basilica is also a treasure stolen from Constantinople. The marble cladding and the columns at the doorway of the church once adorned the palaces and public places of the imperial city.

  Once you know this of Venice, you can never see St Mark’s in quite the same way. It looks less like a work of holy inspiration and more like a magpie’s nest of plunder, a monument to a shameless act of theft.

  DOGE ENRICO DANDOLO finally expired in 1205, just a year after the sack of Constantinople. At his request, he was buried in the Hagia Sophia, which the conquerors remade as a Catholic place of worship. His bones lay there undisturbed for more than two centuries until the final conquest of the city by the Ottoman Turks. The sultan’s troops raided the church and Dandolo’s tomb was destroyed. The modest plaque I saw that day in the eastern gallery of the great church was created by Italian stonemasons in the nineteenth century to honour his memory.

  Which is why, my son, the Hagia Sophia still honours the name of the wiliest enemy the Queen of Cities ever had.

  CHAPTER NINE

  End of Days

  The empire in exile, 1250.

  The Golden Gate

  TAXIS MOVE AT an astonishing clip along Istanbul’s freeways. My body is cramped with tension as I prepare to assume the brace position and I wonder how I’ll be able to live with myself if Joe is injured, or worse, in a crash.

  The driver is in a garrulous mood. He wants to talk about the Australian soccer team.

  ‘I have seen your team. They are not so good.’

  Joe is amused and can only agree with the driver. ‘So, what’s the Turkish team like?’ he asks.

  The driver grimaces and rotates his flattened hand to make the ‘so-so’ gesture. I just want him to keep both hands on the wheel.

  I should ask him to slow down, but every car, it seems, is skating along at the same speed on this motorway, which borders the Sea of Marmara. Joe is now daydreaming, untroubled by the taxi velocity; he looks out the window and points to an armada of Russian oil tankers rolling through the morning haze towards the Dardanelles.

  The upside of Istanbul’s live-free-or-die motorways is that you tend to arrive where you want to go pretty sharpish, and so, a mere twelve minutes after we’ve caught our cab from Sultanahmet, we’re at our destination, a little park that’s more of a traffic island on the water’s edge. In the middle of this patch of green is a broken slab of parapet wall, abutting a medieval tower. This marks the southernmost point of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople. From here the walls march inland, following the contours of the landscape for 5.6 kilometres, all the way to the Golden Horn.

  The Theodosian Walls at the Sea of Marmara.

  Richard Fidler

  Our plan on this day is to walk the entire length of these ancient stone and brick walls, to follow their path through the backstreets of Istanbul from sea to shining sea. To see and touch these walls and to take in their colossal strength is to feel the past made concrete. The colours and shapes of the ghost empire come sharply into focus here.

  Turning our backs on the Marmara, Joe and I shoulder our backpacks and set off. We follow the course of the inner wall into a slum. The walls aren’t really presented as a destination zone for tourists, so the area hasn’t been prettied up and signposted. Istanbul has pragmatically chosen to simply ignore the Roman walls wherever possible, to build around them and, where necessary, punch a hole through them to allow traffic to pass.

  We see some makeshift cabins, made from milk crates and tarpaulins, pressed up against the inner wall. The old timber houses across the street sag and lean precariously; some mangy dogs fight half-heartedly over a plastic bag. Joe has never seen a slum before and is worried we’re intruding. But there are slums and there are slums and this is fine; we see no public squalor or drug use, there is no threat of violence. People go about their business.

  Théophile Gautier, a French writer, came to Istanbul in 1852 and wrote of his own trek along the walls, an experience scarcely different from our own:

  We plunged boldly into a labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes of the purest Turkish character. As we advanced, the scene became more lonely; the dogs, growing more savage at each stage of our progress, glared sullenly at us and followed growling at our heels. The wooden houses, discoloured and dilapidated, with their crumbling lattices and floors out of line, looked like collapsed chicken coops.

  ‘Look, Dad,’ Joe says as he runs his hand along the wall, ‘Roman brickwork.’

  He’s right: there are rows of granite blocks, alternating with long stripes of narrow red bricks. It’s the same kind of ancient wall you might see in North Africa or Yorkshire. There’s a remarkable uniformity to the Roman world; they tended to build the same things the same way wherever they went.

  JOE AND I FOLLOW the line of the inner wall and pass through a stone archway into a medieval fortress: an open grassy space, ringed with towers and battlements. We pay some Turkish lira to an old unshaven man at the gate and enter. We have the place all to ourselves. This fortress was built by the Romans and then redesigned by the Ottomans into Yedikule (pronounced ‘Yeh-diku-leh’): the Fortres
s of the Seven Towers. Today it’s a derelict space.

  On the far wall I notice a set of three bricked-in arches, with a few broken stones next to it. The arches are unmarked, so it takes me a moment to realise what we’re looking at.

  ‘Oh man. This is the Golden Gate of Constantinople, Joe.’

  The Golden Gate at Yedikule.

  Richard Fidler

  This nondescript slab is all that remains of the Porta Aurea, the Golden Gate of the Caesars, the majestic, ceremonial portal into Constantinople. Passage through this central arch was reserved for imperial coronations and triumphal entries.

  A thousand years ago, the Golden Gate was clad in polished white marble, with heavy bronze doors panelled with gold sheets. A gilded dedication was inscribed in the stonework above the arch to Theodosius, the emperor who ‘brought a golden age and built the gate from gold’. Heraclius entered the city here with the True Cross in 628, in a procession led by four Persian elephants.

  As the frontiers receded, and the empire shrank to little more than a single embattled city, the Golden Gate had to be sealed up and converted into a citadel. Today the gate is an achingly forlorn sight. There will be no more elephants passing through this arch.

  We wander around the fortress of Yedikule in silence. Joe enters one of the cylindrical stone towers and finds a mattress and a couple of empty beer cans.

  Inside a tower at Yedikule.

  Richard Fidler

  The Recovery of Constantinople

  BROKEN, friendless and severed from its ancient capital, the eastern Roman empire really should have died after 1204. Constantinople’s fall seemed to echo the disastrous sack of Rome in the fifth century, which presaged the collapse of the western empire.

  But the Roman empire of the east refused to die. Although its power had been shattered at the centre, courts-in-exile sprouted up in Nicaea, in Epirus and in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast. The exiles regrouped, lit their candles and waited for the hated Crusader regime to collapse under the weight of its own incompetence.

  In Constantinople, the Crusaders surveyed the city they had won, but were at a loss to know what to do with it. Hard-handed soldiers who had run nothing bigger in their lives than their muddy feudal estates in northern France, they were ill-prepared to run a foreign metropolis in crisis. The new rulers distrusted the palace bureaucrats they’d inherited (with good reason) and dispensed with their services, thereby depriving the government of administrative experience and institutional memory. The Crusaders had no understanding of shipping or commerce, so they deferred to the Venetians in their court, who cannibalised the city’s trade revenue, starving the treasury of income. Their weak and unhappy rule was made weaker by constant, grinding warfare with the Bulgarians, and with the undigested segments of the empire they had consumed.

  The first Crusader emperor, Baldwin I, reigned for just one year before he was captured and killed by the Bulgarians. Boniface of Montferrat was killed in battle two years later. Baldwin II was the longest serving of the colonial Latin emperors of Constantinople, but he could do nothing to stop the city’s wealth draining away like water down a plughole. In desperation, he pawned the city’s most precious holy relic, the Crown of Thorns – believed to have been worn by Christ on the cross – to a Venetian merchant in exchange for 13,134 gold pieces.* Baldwin used the gold to buy himself an army, but was unable to do anything with it. As he sank further into debt to Venice, he plundered the last scraps of the city’s wealth, selling the lead roof tiles from the Great Palace. Rain came in and the elegant collection of palaces by the Sea of Marmara became derelict, a ghostly shell.

  The penniless Baldwin II petitioned Venice for another loan, and was forced to hand over his only son, Philip, as a guarantee for future repayment. In fewer than forty years, the Crusaders were reduced to pawning their own children for gold.

  MEANWHILE, THE EMPIRE in exile in Nicaea was steadily reclaiming scraps of imperial territory in Asia Minor and Thrace. The emperor-in-waiting Michael Palaeologus was ready to take back the capital. His forces were small, but popular opinion in the city was on his side. Michael was planning for a long, hard campaign when Constantinople just fell into his lap.

  Michael had sent one of his generals, Alexius Strategopulus, on a reconnaissance mission to study the condition of the city’s defences. The general and his men were riding through a nearby village when they stopped to talk to a group of sympathetic local farmers. The farmers mentioned that Constantinople was, at that moment, undefended: most of the Latin garrison and the Venetian fleet were away on campaign.

  On the night of 24 July 1261, the general’s informants slipped into the city. They crept up to a postern gate, killed the sentries on duty, and unbolted the gate. Strategopulus and his men rushed inside and seized control of the Blachernae Palace.

  Baldwin II was awakened from his slumber by the sounds of fighting. He looked out the window and was astonished to see Michael’s soldiers inside the palace grounds. Baldwin was defenceless. Leaving his crown and sceptre behind, he ran down to the Golden Horn on foot and escaped the city in a Venetian ship. The throne of the Caesars was vacant.

  Three weeks later, Michael Palaeologus entered the city on foot through the Golden Gate, carrying himself more like a holy man than an emperor. Michael was greeted by a throng of leaping, rejoicing Romans, scarcely able to believe the happy turn of events. He was brought to the Hagia Sophia, and crowned as Michael VIII, Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans.

  The Coming of the Ottomans

  MICHAEL VIII was the first emperor of the Palaeologi, the final imperial dynasty. He began to pick up what remained of his empire and put it back on its feet: commissioning repairs to the Theodosian Walls, refurbishing the Hagia Sophia and sponsoring the reconstruction of a mosque that had been torched by the Crusaders.

  Michael struggled to revive the flattened economy. The wharves along the Golden Horn still attracted trading ships, but the treasury could extract almost no revenue from them; Venice and Genoa were exempt from local taxes, and no decree from the emperor could force them to pay. In return for naval support, Michael ceded the neighbourhood of Galata to the Genoese, who later built a fortified tower on the north shore of the Golden Horn.

  It was fortunate for Michael that the Seljuk Turks were unable to take advantage of the empire’s weakness at this time. The Sultanate of Rum was completely unprepared for the arrival of the Mongols and their warlord Genghis Khan. In 1245 the Mongols swooped down on the Seljuk army near Köse Dagh, and completely shattered it. The Seljuks never recovered.

  MICHAEL’S SON AND SUCCESSOR, Andronicus II, tried to repair Constantinople’s budget problems by dismantling the imperial fleet of eighty ships, which left the empire even more dependent on Venice and Genoa for protection. The vulnerability of the city was painfully apparent. Lacking a sizeable army or navy, successive emperors hoped to shore up the city’s defences by playing their enemies off against each other with a mixture of bribery and intrigue.

  But the world was changing around them. After the destruction of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, Asia Minor became a lawless province, a patchwork of small fiefdoms. Bands of fanatical Muslim warriors, known as ghazis, wandered the countryside. Over time, they naturally gravitated to the one remaining Turkish principality, the realm of the Ottomans.

  The Ottomans had come to Asia Minor from the city of Merv in Central Asia. They took their name from their founder Osman Bey, who declared independence from the Seljuks in 1299. Like the Arabs of the seventh century, the Ottomans were clear-eyed warriors in a power vacuum, fired with the power of Islam and ready to be rapidly propelled towards greatness.

  The Ottomans established a small kingdom on the north-west edge of Anatolia, where they were able to observe the Romans from a short distance and study the manner in which a great civilisation carries itself. Their ranks swollen with zealous ghazi warriors, they put the Anatolian city of Prusa to siege for seven years, before they broke through in 1326, and remade it a
s Bursa, the new Ottoman capital. Capturing Bursa opened up the rest of Asia Minor: Nicaea was won in 1331, Nicomedia in 1337, remade as the Ottoman cities of Iznik and Izmit.

  AS OTTOMAN POWER FLOURISHED, Constantinople shrank further in its own skin. The empire suffered further losses under the long, miserable reign of John V Palaeologus. John was just eight when he succeeded his father to the throne. A civil war then broke out between supporters of his designated regent, John Cantacuzenus, and his mother, Anna of Savoy. Anna needed gold for troops, so she pawned the imperial crown jewels to Venice for 30,000 ducats. It was a sign of the times.

  In 1347, a court historian came to Constantinople to attend an imperial wedding and noted the sad state of affairs: the silverware was gone, replaced by cups made of pewter and clay, the jewels were glass and the gold was painted leather.

  ‘To such a degree,’ he wrote, ‘the ancient prosperity and brilliance of the Roman empire had fallen, entirely gone out and perished.’

  The empire’s miseries were further compounded when the Black Death came again to Constantinople, killing a third to half of the population. The plague left people fearful and chastened. The sparse population was now far too small to fill out the capital, and the Queen of Cities devolved into a loose collection of suburbs, separated by vineyards and wheatfields.

  CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT once again in the 1350s, between John V Palaeologus and his co-emperor John Cantacuzenus. John V called on the Serbs for help, whereas Cantacuzenus enlisted the support of the Ottoman army, who crossed the Dardanelles and set foot in Europe for the first time. When the walls of Gallipoli were brought to the ground by an earthquake, the Ottomans occupied the city and declared it to be the evident will of Allah that they should do so. In 1362 they seized the ancient city of Adrianople in Thrace and renamed it Edirne. Sultan Murad I made it his new European capital. Constantinople was now surrounded by the Ottomans on all sides.