Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The last of the Roman emperors was dead.

  The King under the Mountain

  THERE WAS ONCE a young herdsman who lived in the north of England, near the Roman wall of Hadrian, where he tended his goats. One day he realised one of his goats was missing. As he searched the hills for his lost animal, he stepped on some bracken, which snapped under his feet, and he fell into the hidden entrance of a cave.

  The young man found his way through a dark tunnel into a large chamber illuminated with a strange golden glow. There he was astonished to see a dozen knights, dressed in chain mail, standing solemnly around a catafalque. Upon the catafalque lay the body of a man with a crown upon his head, holding a shining sword. His eyes were closed and his beard was very long, so long that it trailed onto the cavern floor. Into the timbers of the catafalque was carved the legend: Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus. Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.

  The herdsman swallowed his fear and asked the knights who they were and what they were doing.

  ‘We keep watch over the once and future king,’ they said. ‘He is King Arthur of the Britons, who was struck down in battle many, many years ago.’

  ‘How can he be the future king if he is dead?’ asked the herdsman.

  ‘He is not dead,’ they said. ‘He is asleep.’

  ‘When will he awake?’

  ‘He will awaken in Britain’s darkest hour, when he will take up Excalibur once more and save Britain from her enemies.’

  When the herdsman emerged from the cave, he saw that his beard had turned white and his body had become stooped and he had somehow become an old man.

  The legend of the sleeping King Arthur is the one of many ‘King in the Mountain’ folktales. The stories all follow the same contours: the heroic leader is struck down in battle by his enemies, but is carried away at the moment of death to a hidden place, under the earth, where he lies sleeping, awaiting the call to save his people once again. Charlemagne was said to be resting underground somewhere near Salzburg. Frederick Barbarossa was believed to be asleep under the Kyffhäuser Mountains. Such legends are comforting to a people grieving over a lost leader, or the passing of a golden age.

  INEVITABLY, a similar legend grew up around the tragic end of Constantine XI, like briars around a crypt. It was said among the exiled Romans of Constantinople that in the moment of his death, the doomed emperor was turned into marble by a merciful angel, and then sealed up within a secret underground tomb somewhere underneath the Golden Gate.

  And there he lies in suspended animation, awaiting the call to return in glory, resume his ancient throne and restore the lost city to his people.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Artifice of Eternity

  The Ottoman Empire, 30 May 1453.

  8 am

  THOUSANDS OF OTTOMAN soldiers now stormed through the gaps in the walls while their comrades atop the towers cheered them on, giddy with victory.

  Like the Crusaders 250 years before them, Mehmed’s soldiers trod through the streets of the outer suburbs warily, until they realised there was no one left to oppose them. Weeks of pent-up frustration exploded from these men, creating a shockwave of violence that rippled out onto the city. The locals had taunted and cursed the Ottomans for weeks from the safety of the land walls. Now, to their horror, they found the invaders at their door, wild with greed and hungry for vengeance.

  Each house was, in turn, ransacked and stripped of its gold, jewellery and tapestries. Women and men who fought back were the first to be cut down, followed by small children and the elderly, who were of no use to the invaders. Old men were dragged by their white hair into the street, where their throats were cut. Nuns were taken from their convents and raped or sold into slavery. Fist-fights broke out among the invaders for the most beautiful girls. Some women chose to hurl themselves into wells, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.

  Guttural screams of naked panic rang out through the streets. The men posted to the sea walls heard the strange, awful din and ran to their homes to find their families either dead or abducted. Prince Orhan the pretender tried to pass himself off at the harbour as a Greek-speaking local, but was recognised by a Turkish soldier and beheaded.

  Barbaro, from aboard his ship, witnessed the unfolding horror: ‘The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm, and the corpses of Turks and Christians were thrown into the Dardanelles, where they floated out to sea like melons along a canal.’

  He escaped the maelstrom of violence just in time; after several agonising delays, his galleon was able to slip past the Ottoman navy into the Sea of Marmara, bound for home. Giacomo Tetaldi, a Florentine merchant, threw off his clothes, leapt into the water, swam out to a Venetian ship and, to his great relief, was hauled on board. The departure of the Italian galleons was of no interest to the sultan’s navy anyway; the Turkish sailors were rushing to the shore to claim their share of the loot.

  As the sultan’s men plundered their way through the outer suburbs, the cry went up along the Mese that the city was lost. People who had slept through the night ran out to see what the commotion was about, only to run into the blades of Ottoman soldiers. Frantic citizens bolted from their homes with children in their arms, and streamed down to the harbour, hoping to find passage on a ship. But the gates of the sea walls had been locked and barred by the emperor’s men in a futile attempt to compel citizens to stay and fight.

  A GREAT MANY FAMILIES, remembering the apocalyptic prophecies, fled to the Hagia Sophia for sanctuary. It was foretold that in the End of Days, before the return of Christ, the demonic hordes would swarm into God’s city, but they would be stopped short outside the great church by an Angel of the Lord, who would strike down the unbelievers with a blazing sword. Thousands of panic-stricken citizens now grasped at this slender thread of hope, and so within an hour, every part of the Hagia Sophia was filled and the doors barred shut. As the rays of the morning sun streamed through the upper windows, the priests began to intone a matins service; men, women and children sang and offered their most urgent prayers for one last time inside that candle-lit, incense-clouded space. How many of them truly expected to be delivered by God’s Avenging Angel, we cannot know.

  A party of Janissaries were the first of the invaders to reach the Hagia Sophia. They ran hard, believing that untold riches awaited them inside. The turbaned warriors charged into the courtyard, up through the outer narthex and began to hack at the heavy doors with axes, each blow eliciting a scream of terror from the worshippers inside. The door timbers cracked, splintered and crashed, and the Janissaries rushed inside, ready to snatch every treasure they could find.

  The slaughter was minimal; by now the bloodlust of the conquerors had been overtaken by a pragmatic scramble for plunder. The chalice, the candelabras and the emperor’s chair were all quickly seized. Soldiers began to hack apart the altar screen for its precious metals.

  The next treasures to be seized were the worshippers themselves. Again, the sultan’s men fought each other for the most beautiful women. The old and infirm were put to the sword; the rest gathered up as slaves or hostages. Some groups were led back to the Ottoman camps outside the walls. Others were brought down to the Golden Horn, to be shipped off to the slave markets of Cairo.

  In less than an hour, every item of value in the Hagia Sophia that could be carried or dismantled was extracted from the church. A group of Janissaries found the tomb of Enrico Dandolo and ransacked it for treasure. Finding nothing valuable, they threw the Doge’s bones onto the streets for the dogs.

  Midday

  MEHMED THE CONQUEROR did not immediately follow his men into the city, waiting outside the walls until he received confirmation that the emperor was dead. At noon the sultan mounted his white stallion, followed by his entourage. He passed through the Charisian Gate onto the blood-streaked streets of the conquered city.

  Mehmed was in a sombre mood, seemingly humbled by his victory. He led his entourage
down the Mese, witnessing pitiful scenes of dead and dying people. Ottoman banners hung from many windows, to indicate the house and its property had been claimed. The sultan rode into the Forum of Constantine, where the toppled colossus of the city’s founding emperor lay impassively. At the end of the Mese, the great hulking form of the Hagia Sophia came into view. Mehmed dismounted and bowed down before the church, sprinkling a handful of dirt over his turban as a sign of humility before God.

  Inside the church, he saw one of his men hacking away at the marble floor. Enraged, Mehmed struck at the soldier with the flat of his sword.

  ‘Content yourself with the loot and the prisoners!’ he shouted at the scurrying soldier. ‘The buildings belong to me!’

  Mehmed looked up at the great dome, spun around, and then directed his imam to climb into the pulpit and proclaim the Muslim creed: There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.

  Stepping out of the ravaged church, Mehmed crossed the Augustaeum to the ruined Great Palace of the Caesars. It was a forlorn sight, long since uninhabitable. As the sultan wandered through the ruined chambers, he quoted the melancholic lines of an unknown Persian poet:

  The spider weaves the curtains in the Palace of the Caesars;

  The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.

  And with that, the Roman empire was gone forever.

  Megadux and Grand Vizier

  THE GRAND DUKE Lucas Notaras was held under guard in his home. Soon enough the sultan came to see him. Mehmed bluntly told Notaras that he and Constantine must accept the moral responsibility for the mass slaughter, because they had refused to surrender the city to him.

  ‘Sire,’ Notaras replied, ‘neither I nor the emperor had the power to make the people of this city surrender. And why should we want to give up, when we have been receiving letters from your people, urging us to fight on?’

  Mehmed knew at once that Notaras was talking about Halil Pasha.

  Three days later, the grand vizier was thrown into a dungeon, and then executed as a traitor. Halil’s money was confiscated by the treasury and his friends were forbidden to mourn for him.

  Mehmed considered bringing Lucas Notaras into his court to govern Constantinople, but thought better of it, and had him executed, along with his family.

  MEHMED RETURNED temporarily to the comforts of his palace in Edirne to plan the rebuilding of his conquered city. By the time he left, almost the entire Christian population of Constantinople was gone, either enslaved or in exile. For six whole months, the once-great metropolis lay quiet, an empty vessel. Ducas, a Byzantine historian, captured the eerie bleakness: ‘The city was desolate, lying dead, naked, soundless, having neither form nor beauty.’

  Then Mehmed sent his labourers to repair the city. The walls were restored, and the Hagia Sophia was reconsecrated as a mosque and renamed the Ayasofya. Tall minaret towers sprouted up from its four corner points, which only enhanced its majesty. The mosaics and frescoes inside were mostly covered in whitewash.

  Constantinople was renamed Istanbul. It’s not clear where the name comes from; it could be a rough reworking of ‘Constantinople’, or it could derive from a Turkish interpretation of the Greek phrase eis ten polin, ‘to the city’, a common response to the question ‘where are you going?’

  If the city was to recover and thrive under Ottoman rule, then it needed to maintain something of its multicultural flavour. Mehmed appointed the anti-unionist monk Gennadius as Patriarch of Constantinople, and established a Jewish grand rabbi in the city. Genoese traders were encouraged to return to Galata. Muslim and Christian subjects of the sultanate were relocated from the Balkans and Anatolia to repopulate the city. Mehmed’s Christian slaves were settled in a neighbourhood named Fener, near Blachernae, where a tiny population of Orthodox ‘Romans’ endures to this day.

  Old trading routes were reopened and Istanbul began to recover its wealth and confidence. Mehmed established a university, and invited Arab scientists, architects and artists to live and work in the city. The shape of the skyline changed and sharpened as dozens of tall minarets poked up into the sky. In 1478 a census recorded a population of eighty thousand in the city. At the end of the century, Constantinople was again the biggest city in Europe.

  Russians vs Ottomans

  ON OUR LAST full day in Istanbul, Joe and I catch a tram to the Grand Bazaar to buy trinkets for home. The air is filled with the sounds of spruikers and the scent of spice and ground coffee. We see countless shops selling necklaces, rings and bracelets with evil eyes to ward off bad luck, a tradition that has endured in the city since Roman times. An aged black cat curls around my leg; her back leg performs a little arthritic kick when she walks. Her coat is glossy but when I pat her, I feel the bony skeleton underneath.

  In a shop window I spy a set of chess pieces on a marbled board. It’s the most beautiful chess set I have ever seen, so I buy it. The hand-painted pieces are styled as Orthodox Russians and Ottoman Turks. The Russian castle piece is a little crimson Kremlin; for the Turks it’s a cream-and-caramel campaign tent.

  Outside the Bazaar, a cold drizzle has settled in, so Joe and I go to a café to wait it out. I order a Turkish coffee, Joe has a small glass of apple tea. I can’t resist the urge to pull out the chess pieces to study their intricate details more closely. Then I set up the chessboard on the table for a game. Joe likes the look of the Ottoman pieces so I get to be the Russians. I win the first two games. In the third I make a few dumb moves and he checkmates me. He looks at me quizzically, suspecting I’ve thrown the match, but I haven’t. I never do. A few years back I bought the board game Risk at his urging. I won the first few games, and then Joe began winning and hasn’t lost a game since. At first he was a bad winner, crowing to his mother and his friends; then as he racked up bigger and bigger victories, he became more generous and advised me on where I’d gone wrong.

  The Burnt Column, Istanbul.

  Creative Commons/Vladimir Menkov

  It’s really pouring down now and shoppers outside are dashing into the luxury brand-name shops of Divanyolu Street for shelter. Joe is hunched over the board, his eyes darting about, trying to compute all the permutations of his next move. His apple tea is getting cold.

  I stare out the window, and a little further along the way, I see what appears to be an ugly industrial chimney mounted on a crude pedestal of stone bricks. I check my street map and realise it is no such thing.

  ‘You see that tower?’ I say, excitedly.

  ‘Yep,’ Joe seems glad for the distraction.

  ‘The Turks call it the Burnt Column. But do you know what it really is?’

  He just looks at me patiently. He’s getting used to my rhetorical tricks.

  ‘That, Joe, is the Column of Constantine.’

  THE COLUMN IS AS OLD as the imperial city, unveiled the very same day that Constantine’s New Rome was founded seventeen centuries ago. If Constantinople has a birthplace, it is here, at the base of this burnt tower. Once among the city’s most impressive monuments, today it’s a blackened ruin of its former self, like a tree trunk after a forest fire.

  Yet it is still upright, still on its feet.

  Local shoppers and tourists stream past it like they would a homeless man, ignoring its still, spectral presence.

  Joe glances at the column and back at me.

  ‘You know,’ I say, suddenly enthused, ‘if we could somehow burrow our way under that column’s pedestal, we might find the most precious Roman talisman of all . . . an object of incredible mythic power. You could write the plot of an Indiana Jones movie around it.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a little wooden statue called the Palladium.’

  Palladium

  THE PALLADIUM WAS a metre-long wooden effigy of the Greek goddess Pallas. According to Greek mythology, the statue was carved by a sorrowful Athena, full of regret for having killed Pallas, her stepmother. Zeus picked up the statue and hurled it down to Earth as a gift for the
people of Troy.

  The Trojans revered the Palladium, and came to believe this little statue would keep their city safe, so long as it remained inside Troy. But one night, at the climax of the Trojan Wars, two Greek warriors crept into the Trojan citadel and stole the Palladium, leaving the city unprotected and open to attack. Only then was it possible for the Greeks to take the city through the famous ruse of the Trojan Horse.

  Sometime after the fall of Troy, it was said that the Palladium was smuggled into the fledgling city of Rome, where it was safeguarded for centuries in the Temple of Vesta. The Palladium worked the same protective magic on the city of Rome, keeping it inviolate and free to extend its dominion over the whole world. It bolstered Rome’s self-assurance and its belief in its exceptional destiny. When Constantine the Great made plans for his new capital in the east, he wanted to transfuse something of that prestige into Constantinople’s bloodstream.

  ON MONDAY 4 NOVEMBER 328, Constantine led a procession through the streets of New Rome into an oval-shaped forum named in his honour. The transformation of Byzantium into an imperial capital had been rushed to meet Constantine’s deadlines, and so the new city had all the cracks and imperfections of a shoddy renovation. But within this ceremonial space the emperor could survey the scene with satisfaction: the new Forum of Constantine was splendid to the eye, paved with marble and ringed with elegant colonnades and beautiful classical statues.

  The centrepiece of the forum was an impressively tall column supporting a colossal statue of – who else? – Constantine himself. Creating this monument had been no small task. Since a suitable column could not be found anywhere nearby, the emperor’s workers improvised by constructing a tall stone tower and cladding it with curved bands of porphyry, the purpled marble associated with imperial authority. The colossus of Constantine at the apex of the column, splendid as it was, was also a bit of a mish-mash. There was no time to build it up from scratch, so a suitably gigantic statue of Apollo was located elsewhere and the head lopped off, replaced by a newly carved likeness of the emperor, crowned by a nimbus of golden metal spikes that caught the radiance of the late-afternoon sun.