Constantine formally dedicated the city as the new Roman capital with a mix of pagan and Christian rites. At the emperor’s side was Praetextus, the high priest of Rome, who had brought with him, at Constantine’s request, the Palladium. At a particularly auspicious moment the wooden effigy was buried at the foot of Constantine’s column where it could not be easily stolen. Precious Christian relics – twelve baskets of crumbs left over from the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the legendary axe used by Noah to construct his Ark – were also buried under the column for safekeeping.
A pious inscription at the base of the monument bound the might of Rome to the God of the Christians: O Christ, ruler and master of the world, to You now I dedicate this subject city, and these sceptres and the might of Rome.
THE COLUMN OF CONSTANTINE remained in place for centuries, the statue at the top and the Palladium buried underneath like a dirty, pagan secret. But as the eastern Roman empire entered its long decline, the column began to deteriorate correspondingly.
In 1106, a severe storm toppled the statue of Constantine, sending it crashing into the forum below. Emperor Manuel Comnenus, who may have felt uncomfortable with its pagan overtones, replaced the statue with a simple, pious cross.
In 1204, the rampaging Crusaders tore away the bronze bands that held the porphyry outer shell in place. After the Ottoman conquest, Mehmed had the cross taken down, but the monument was otherwise left alone. A fire in 1779 left the column blackened and scorched.
For all we know, that little wooden totem is still buried at the foot of the burnt column, under that rocky pedestal, in the heart of downtown Istanbul.
The Third Rome
MEHMED’S DREAM was not so very different from that of a Roman emperor: to establish a universal empire under one rule and one faith. He adopted the title of ‘Fetih’, conqueror, and as his court settled into their new imperial capital of Istanbul, they abandoned the simple, egalitarian habits they had maintained from their days as nomadic warriors. As Mehmed grew older, he was transfigured from a lean warrior into a fattened, bejewelled monarch, increasingly distant from his subjects. He became more reliant on a large bureaucracy, which inevitably adopted longstanding Roman habits of administration.
In 1480 Mehmed commissioned a portrait from the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. In it, his lips are pursed, his eyes vague and unfocused. He looks like a man who has attained his heart’s desire and is still unhappy.
public domain
Portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror in his later years, by Gentile Bellini.
The Sultan was pleased to award himself another new title: ‘Kayser-i Rûm’, Caesar of the Romans. Soon enough there would be other claimants for the title of Kaysar, Kaiser or Czar.
ZOE PALAEOLOGUS, the niece of the last emperor, was only a child when Constantinople fell. Her family brought her to Corfu and then Rome, where she came under the pope’s protection. Zoe was educated as a Catholic and her name was Latinised to Sophia.
In 1472, Pope Paul II, hoping to improve his influence with the Russian Orthodox church, arranged a marriage between Sophia and the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III. The marriage was performed by proxy in St Peter’s Basilica, with an ambassador standing in for the prince.
The next day Sophia embarked on the long journey to meet her new husband. Accompanied by a large entourage, she travelled north through Italy and Germany to the port of Lübeck, where a ship carried her across the Baltic Sea to Tallinn. From there she was transported overland to Novgorod, and then at last to Moscow, where she arrived in time for the first winter snow.
Sophia was warmly received by Ivan, who dedicated several palaces and gardens to her, and she soon settled into her new life in Russia. The pope’s ambitions were thwarted; Sophia walked away from Catholicism and returned to her Orthodox roots. Like other transplanted Byzantine princesses before her, Sophia brought a touch of sophistication to her new palace. She introduced elaborate Roman ceremonies to Ivan’s court, and encouraged her husband to think of himself as the rightful successor to the Roman throne. There was a certain logic to it: Ivan was now the most powerful Orthodox ruler in the world, married to the last emperor’s niece.
An Orthodox monk later sent a letter to Sophia’s son, Vasilli II, which began with a dramatic flourish: ‘Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Czardom.’ Ivan’s successors would thereafter adopt the imperial title of Czar of Muscovy: the Third Rome.
The Immortal City of the Imagination
THE LONG STORY of the Roman empire comes to a close with those two elegiac lines of Persian poetry uttered by Mehmed in the Great Palace. A doctor might have said the patient suffered a violent death, at the end of an unnaturally long life and a painful decline. But the disembodied presence of Byzantium haunted the world it left behind; it became a ghost empire, still influencing the course of events, like an impulse from the subconscious.
In Constantinople’s final, turbulent century, even as its leaders drove the empire to extinction, somehow, heroically, the city experienced a resurgence of culture and ideas, like a final burst of light from a dying star. As the outside world became too horrible to contemplate, the Orthodox church turned inward, venturing deeper into mysticism. Priests adopted an intense style of prayer known as hesychasm, taken from a Greek word meaning ‘to keep stillness’. Hesychasm was not unlike Buddhist meditation; it required breath control and constant repetition of a mantra, the Jesus prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, the sinner’ – to help the worshipper withdraw from the noise and clutter of the outside world. Then, once a state of utter stillness had been reached, the mind would be opened to the uncreated light of God. In such moments, the worshipper might be flooded with ecstasy, although the church cautioned against seeking ecstasy for its own sake. This was an undeniably powerful form of theosis, union with the divine, realised in the most personal manner possible.
MEANWHILE, in other corners of the city during that last desperate century, scholars were marching steadily in the other direction, away from mysticism and towards a revival of reason, inspired by the writings of Aristotle and by other ancient texts. These scholars were no less Christian for all their love of pagan wisdom, believing enlightenment could be arrived at through rational thought. In the past, the term hellene had been used to describe the ancient Greek pagans, to hold them slightly at a distance from their own identity as Christian Romans. But in these last decades, there was a greater willingness among scholars in Constantinople to embrace their Hellenic heritage.
The classic works of ancient Greece had always been present in Constantinople, never quite forgotten, not even in its Dark Age, when the city was fighting for its life against the Persians and the armies of the Prophet. The torch of classical culture kept burning in Constantinople; its statues adorned its public places, and its manuscripts were kept safe in the city’s monasteries and universities.
As the empire began to recover in the ninth century, the classics enjoyed a resurgence. Anyone pursuing higher education in Constantinople was taught to read ancient Greek and instructed in the works of the classical historians, poets and philosophers. In the Alexiad, Anna Comnena refers to Homer simply as ‘the Poet’, and just assumes her readers are as well acquainted with his work as she is.
Orthodox scholars struggled to reconcile the knowledge of the ancient world with their faith. Christian thought was more precious to them than pagan wisdom, but still, the elegance and insight of classical writing kept tugging at their sleeves. It was easy enough, then, to divide Christian and pagan wisdom into two distinct spheres. Pagan wisdom was deemed to be ‘Outer Learning’, the stuff of the created world, such as geometry, mathematics and history – paganism could do no harm here. Christian wisdom was the ‘Inner Learning’, the place reserved for the contemplation of the eternal. Pagan logic was excluded from this inner sanctum of thought. The only aspects of God that could be known were those that had been revealed through
the scriptures. Anything beyond that was deemed to be profoundly mysterious, and beyond human comprehension.
Then, as the empire slid into its final decline, the church was convulsed in a bitter dispute over hesychasm. In 1337, an astronomer and a mathematician named Barlaam publicly ridiculed the Hesychasts as ‘navel-gazers’ (omphalopsychoi), for their practice of focusing on their navels during meditation. Barlaam argued that the presence of God could never be directly encountered, as the hesychasts claimed, but could only be deduced by our God-given powers of reason.
Barlaam’s argument was attacked by a hesychast from Mount Athos named Gregory of Palamas, who insisted that Barlaam had it backwards: to him, trying to grapple with the uncreated light of God through the crude and puny tool of reason was absurd, like a spider attempting to capture the sun in its web. God, he said, could be experienced through prayer and meditation, but He could never be ‘understood’.
The church came down hard on Gregory’s side and Barlaam the rationalist monk was condemned as a heretic. Realising there was no longer any place for him in Constantinople, he left the city for the court of Robert the Wise in Naples, where a rebirth of interest in classical wisdom was already underway.
Italian and Byzantine scholars were already tentatively reaching out towards each other. Europeans were slowly rediscovering the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Thucydides, and they soon realised the only place that still held these invaluable Greek manuscripts was Constantinople. The Byzantines, for their part, could see the empire crumbling away under their feet, and that the Orthodox church was turning its back on Outer Wisdom. They began to understand that a better life might be waiting for them in the vibrant, humanist courts of Florence, Venice and Rome.
In Italy, Barlaam converted to Catholicism, and befriended three scholars who would go on to become the key literary instigators of the Italian Renaissance: Paul of Perugia, Boccaccio and the poet Petrarch. All three were very anxious to be introduced to the ancient Greek works that Barlaam knew so intimately.
WHEN CONSTANTINOPLE fell in 1453, another wave of influential scholars stuffed their bags with classical manuscripts and fled the city forever. As they infiltrated the Italian courts, the educated easterners taught their willing hosts how to read Greek, and helped translate the classics into Latin or into the Italian vernacular. By 1487, the Byzantine population of Venice was said to number close to four thousand, which led the local cardinal to remark that Venice had become ‘almost another Byzantium’.
While it’s not quite true that the Renaissance was ignited by Byzantine exiles, it’s certainly true that the partnership between Italian and Byzantine scholars gave fuel to a flickering fire, and stoked it into a roaring blaze.
THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE changed the world in other ways that could hardly have been foreseen at the time. Ottoman control of the region disrupted the spice trade between western Europe and Asia. Although the Turks were prepared to tolerate Christian traders, it was deemed in the west that the overland route was now too dangerous and difficult. And so Portuguese navigators began to search for a new sea route to India and China.
In 1486, Bartholomew Diaz sailed south, down the west African coast, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, bringing a European-made galleon into the Indian Ocean for the first time. In 1497, Vasco de Gama sailed all the way from Lisbon to Calcutta, completely bypassing the Ottoman world.
Thirty-three years after the fall of Constantinople, a Genoese explorer named Cristoforo Colombo appeared before the Spanish court, asking for financial support to find another route to Japan and China by sailing west, across the unknown waters of the Atlantic. In this way, the death of Constantinople was a catalyst for the European Age of Exploration, and for the conquest of the Americas.
THE REPUTATION OF the eastern Roman empire suffered in the centuries after its death. Enthusiastic scholars of the Enlightenment had little interest in the history of a dead medieval theocracy. Edward Gibbon disdained the ‘Byzantine Empire’ as effete and superstitious, unworthy of the Roman name. The hostility persisted into the nineteenth century, leading one historian – in a book titled, unpromisingly, A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne – to pompously dismiss eleven centuries of Byzantine civilisation:
The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilisation so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet ‘mean’ may be so emphatically applied . . . The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.
European interest in Byzantium revived in the twentieth century, but historians knew they were cutting across the grain of centuries of western prejudice.
William Butler Yeats, a poet well attuned to Byzantine mysticism, dreamt of visiting the ghost empire of Constantinople. With two sublime poems, ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, he invited the English-speaking world to see the empire afresh, uncluttered by western European prejudice. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ was written when Yeats was sixty-eight and feeling like ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’. To him, the dream of Byzantium seemed to promise entry into an immortal realm of shimmering mosaics, clockwork birds and drowsy emperors:
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
As an Irishman living outside the borders of the British empire, Yeats was perhaps better able to see past the martial music of the ancient Romans and appreciate the lustre of distant Constantinople. Speaking of the poem in a BBC broadcast, Yeats reminded listeners that, ‘When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation and the source of its spiritual philosophy.’
IN 2004, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM of New York launched a blockbuster show titled Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261–1557, which displayed countless gilded icons, frescoes, silks, manuscripts, caskets and amulets from the final centuries of the eastern Roman empire. In a metropolis driven by steroidal capitalism, the still, sacred aura of Byzantine art left visitors dazzled and unsettled.
The exhibition’s catalogue was prefaced with a blessing from Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who noted the atmosphere of ‘bright sadness’ that pervades the art of the empire’s final years. He concluded with a prayer that people ‘may find faith in higher values and ideals than those that are being offered by the world marketplace’.
‘Fat chance,’ wrote the New Yorker critic. ‘I came away,’ he wrote, ‘with a chilly sense of having been warned.’
TODAY BARTHOLOMEW lives in a walled compound in the district of Fener in Istanbul. The Turkish government doesn’t recognise his title of Ecumenical Patriarch, only acknowledging him as the leader of the ethnic Greek minority known as the Rum or ‘Romans’ that once dominated this precinct of the city. As Turkey becomes increasingly torn between modernity and Islamism, more and more Greeks have chosen to pack up and leave Fener. The multi-ethnic flavour of the city that prevailed through the Ottoman era is fast disappearing. More families leave every year and Istanbul’s ‘Roman’ population is now close to extinction.
AT THE AIRPORT, Joe and I queue to check our bags in, surrounded by backlit billboards for tech companies and financial services offering ‘innovative solutions’. ‘Innovation’ has been a popular buzzword since the internet boo
m of the nineties. In the western world it’s seen as a positive good, promising creativity, novelty and disruption. To the Byzantines, an innovation was a paltry thing, an embarrassment, like a cheap modern extension to a grand old house. Innovation, to them, was the enemy of the eternal, the perfect. In the struggle for and against icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, each side accused the other of introducing a shameful innovation to religious life. They maintained their aversion to innovation right up until the Turks dragged a giant cannon to their walls.
August 2015
IT IS A YEAR-AND-A-HALF since Joe and I journeyed to Istanbul. My son is now a lanky sixteen-year-old and he’s as tall as me. He has a guitar. He’s into the Pixies and the Strokes and Nirvana and Japanese noodles and Chinese barbecue duck and comedians on YouTube. He doesn’t smoke dope because it’s lame. He’s learning to speak Mandarin and receives praise for his accent. He still wants to be an architect.
This month I have had to leave my family in Australia to make a radio series in Iceland. On my way home, I take a two-day stopover in Paris. I’m alone, and lonely, so I wander around the city aimlessly, allowing myself to be drawn down any street on a whim. On this warm summer evening I find myself outside the entrance of a modest Orthodox church on the Rue Jean de Beauvais. I assume it will be closed or deserted on a Thursday evening, but as I push open the door my senses are confronted with light, music and incense.
Inside I see twenty to thirty worshippers. Most are kneeling on the long carpets that run from the altar to the back of the room. The women wear headscarves and the men prostrate themselves on the floor towards the altar. It would be easy to mistake this place for a mosque if it weren’t for all the Christian imagery. I feel like I’ve intruded on the rituals of a secret society.
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