City of God

by S. J. A. Turney

  Standing before Arnau now, Almerico Balbi was all of them. He was every pox-ridden degenerate of the doge’s fleet. Every man Arnau had seen kill soldiers on the walls. Every last one of them.

  With an incoherent bellow of rage, Arnau swung his mace. Balbi lifted a rich, ornate sword into its path and stared in horror as the heavy iron mace head simply snapped the blade and continued its swing unabated, smashing into the bicep of his sword arm, mashing muscle and breaking bone.

  Balbi was done for with the first wound.

  He fell back, screaming, broken sword falling away. Arnau refused to relent. Still snarling his hatred in the form of accusation and blame for everything the Venetians had done, interspersed with Bible verses of wrath and vengeance, he struck the fallen, beleaguered Venetian again and again.

  It was only when strong arms gripped him and pulled him upright that he realised Balbi had been dead for some time as the young Templar repeatedly pulped his remains with the gore-coated nightmare of a mace.

  He rose, shaking. A flash of memory struck him. A gore-coated mace. Sebastian with a caved-in forehead. He looked down at the weapon in his hand in horror, and then at the mashed mess that had been Balbi on the ground. With a grunt he cast away the mace, suddenly certain that his days of wielding such a weapon were most definitely at an end.

  Still shaking, he turned.

  De la Roche and de Charney had been the men who had pulled him off his victim. Both were lightly wounded. Ramon cradled what looked like a broken arm. Bochard stood at the back, eyes wide and staring, his squire keeping him still. The Venetians were all gone, either dead or fled into the radiating streets the moment their master had been turned into a pulp of nightmare.

  ‘It is over, Templar,’ de la Roche said, sword in one hand, shroud of the Saviour tightly wrapped in the other. ‘Be assured that this will be preserved for the good of all Christendom.’

  Arnau could not bring himself to answer. He was shaking uncontrollably. The wrath was gone, though, replaced with a hollow ache. He turned to Ramon.

  ‘A boat awaits us, Vallbona,’ the older brother said, wearily. ‘And I think Constantinople is lost to us. Time to go.’ He nodded at the two knights. ‘Go safe and God watch over you.’

  De Charney and de la Roche bowed in return, and Ramon gestured for Arnau to follow, turning back to the gate. The other two joined them. Arnau, shivering, coated in blood but with empty hands, staggered forward, exhausted eyes roving ahead of them.

  For just a moment, he thought he saw the face of Redwald the Waring amid the flow of humanity, a cloaked man beside him, and then the figure was gone, lost in the press.

  Without a further word, the fugitive populace leaving space around the wounded and gore-coated men, the four Templars passed beneath the Golden Gate, leaving the city for the first time in a year and walking wearily out to freedom.

  Epilogue

  Constantinople lay on the horizon, a lump jutting from the glittering, moon-swept waters of the Sea of Marmara. Lights twinkled and blazed, though the pall of black hanging above the city and blotting out the indigo sky made it clear that not all of those burning points of light were intentional.

  The city was dying.

  The Byzantine fisherman and his son who had agreed, for a good sum from Laskaris, to ferry them to somewhere safe, murmured to one another as they changed tack and started to run for the southern shore. They had seen no Venetian ships patrolling. The invaders had won, and knew that the city had no vessels left, so had recalled their ships.

  Bochard lay quietly in the boat, his head on a rolled-up mantle, his squire by his side, face full of concern.

  ‘What now?’ Arnau sighed, watching the city slip into the distance.

  ‘We make for Cyprus,’ Ramon yawned. ‘Wherever this fellow takes us, we secure a ship for the four of us. I still have a sizeable purse of money, and while Byzantium may have fallen, I’m sure its gold will still be good.’

  ‘And at Cyprus?’

  ‘We see that Bochard is taken care of and send word to Acre that he is there.’

  ‘But we don’t go to Acre?’ He tried to keep hope and relief from his tone as he spoke. He had been driven and excited about coming east to fight the enemies of all true Christendom, but had, instead, been forced to choose between Mother Church and what his soul said was right. Ramon had too, but in his usual pragmatic way he seemed to have dealt with the issue and coped. Arnau was not sure he had. What had happened in Constantinople had changed him in ways he had yet to truly measure, and had altered his perceptions entirely. He was beginning to understand how those men who lived with clear monochrome views like Bochard were too brittle, and snapped with a troubling wind, while men like Balthesar who had always allowed understanding and an open mind to drive him were perhaps the best men to represent the true faith.

  He would never be a Lütolf, no matter how pious the man had been, and he could never be so accepting of their role as Ramon. Perhaps, somewhere inside, he was turning into the old knight who had spent his early life as a Moorish mercenary before finding redemption.

  ‘I see little point,’ Ramon said, stretching. ‘The Crusade will clearly never leave for Egypt now. The Crusade is, in fact, over. The Franks and their dogs now have a new empire to settle instead. And it appears that we were of peripheral enough value in the first place that the grand master assigned us to escorting Bochard, keeping him out of the way. No, I think Rourell is where we are bound once more. Home, Vallbona. Home and peace and contemplation for a time.’

  Arnau nodded, peering off across the water. Peace. The word had a pleasant ring to it.

  It was about time they found some peace, although somehow he knew that God had something in store for him. Peace was unlikely to enshroud him for long.

  He turned his back on the fallen city and gazed west. Somewhere far out there lay home. He’d been excited to leave and head east into unknown lands and Saracen-filled deserts. Now, though, he’d had his fill of the East. No, Iberia was where he belonged.

  Home.

  He sighed, clutching Sebastian’s icon tight, and behind him an empire breathed its last.

  Historical Note

  The Crusaders’ sacking of Constantinople heralds one of the most critical turning points in history. Its importance is hard to overestimate. Firstly, there is the religious aspect. Until this point, while there had been schismatic differences between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, it might be said that they were not insurmountable. While they might have considered one another heretical, there was this sort of ‘wayward child’ or ‘difficult uncle’ aspect which meant that both sides felt that reconciliation was always a possibility. What happened in 1203–1204 and the consequent Latin occupation of the empire killed that off for all time. Thanks to those years, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have remained apart to this day.

  Furthermore, the history of crusading changed. After three great ventures to free the Holy Land from the grip of the Muslim peoples, the detour and dreadful acts of the Fourth Crusade meant that there would never again be a Crusade of the old sort. That is not to say that the Christians and their enemies would not be at odds. The ‘Northern’ Crusades pitted the Knights Teuton against the pagan and heretical lands around the Baltic. The Reconquista in Spain would only end with the capture of Granada in 1492. But after this there would never again be a great multinational, papal-led expedition to free Jerusalem from the hands of the Saracen. This was the end of the ‘great’ Crusades.

  Moreover, the damage the Crusaders inflicted over those years and during the succeeding regime essentially ruined Byzantium. While the ousted Byzantine empire, living in exile in Anatolia, would regain control of Constantinople a number of decades later, the damage had been done. Byzantium had still been the Roman empire. It had been the bulwark and bastion at the edge of Christendom, holding back the enemies of the West. The weakening of Byzantium by the Franks and Venetians left it in no real position to defy the Turks, who then steadily encro
ached upon the empire until the day the conqueror Mehmet finally overwhelmed the city for good in 1453 and ended the Roman empire after a pretty good run.

  One interesting aspect of this siege and sack was the looting. Records show just how bad it was, but physical evidence even more so. Just a cursory glance at Saint Mark’s cathedral in Venice will reveal the bronze horses stolen from the hippodrome in Constantinople, as well as a statue of the Roman tetrarchy moved to Venice. Marble, columns and mosaics in the basilica came from the sacking of Constantinople, and a visit to the basilica’s treasury will reveal many treasures stolen in 1204. Gold, gems, treasure, coin, artworks and anything of value was taken from the fallen city. Among these things, we know that relics were removed. The ones I have mentioned in this text are all noted in one source or another as being kept in Constantinople, and some of them disappear from the historical record during the sacking.

  Although the known history of the ‘Turin shroud’ only begins much later, there are tantalising hints of its earlier existence. It is noted in more than one source as being kept in Byzantine Constantinople, and the knight Robert de Clari, whose brother was one of those two knights who finally broke through the gate on that fateful day in April incidentally, wrote in his long chronicle of the Crusade that ‘there was the shroud in which Our Lord had been wrapped […] And none knows – neither Greek nor Frank – what became of that shroud when the city was taken.’ Better still, a letter from Theodoros Angelos to the Pope in the following year says: ‘The Venetians partitioned the treasures of gold, silver, and ivory while the French did the same with the relics of the saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which Our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after his death and before the resurrection. We know that the sacred objects are preserved by their predators in Venice, in France, and in other places, the sacred linen in Athens.’ One Otto de la Roche becomes Duke of Athens in the following months! Only twenty-five years later another de la Roche is recorded as a Templar master. The connections were just too good not to build into my story. Moreover, history puts the shroud in the hands of a de Charney in France in the following centuries. Although any Templar connection to the Venetian Almerico Balbi is my own invention, the Balbi were an important Venetian landowning family, and though Templar links in Venice are not well advertised, a certain area of the city was once given over to the Order. To create a small conspiracy involving these three was a fun fiction of mine built upon legend and odd known facts.

  The spear of Longinus and the crown of thorns were both recorded as being in the Mangana monastery. The great icon of the Virgin was kept in the Blachernae church and paraded around the city. It disappeared from the city more or less as I told it, though not with Bochard’s involvement. Truly, Constantinople was the city of a thousand relics, far richer in them than mere Rome. And the Templars have long held a reputation as collectors of relics. How much of this is truth and how much part of the endless mill of Templar rumour and legend will likely remain unknown, but remember that all of Christendom was obsessed with relics and their value, and the presence of a more important relic more or less guaranteed the expansion and prosperity of a city.

  This leads me to Bochard. I may be doing the man a disservice, I suppose, for Reynald Bochard is also a real historical figure. His time as Master of Cyprus is based upon the truth, ending in trapped Templars and huge bloodshed, following which even the Templars decided they couldn’t really hold the place they had inherited from Richard I, moving it on to the brother of the King of Jerusalem. I have exaggerated nothing there. Indeed, I may have played down how badly that ended. Bochard more or less disappears from history after Cyprus, but turning this otherwise unknown yet pivotal figure into a disaffected failure seeking redemption made sense. In truth, initially the part of relic hunting in this tale was just meant to be a side plot that made Bochard want to stay through the siege. It was only on unpicking the threads mentioned above that I knew it had to become more than just a minor part of the story. And you may have spotted perhaps some signs of PTSD in Bochard in the closing chapters after he shocks himself rigid. Recent academia has produced interesting works on the evidence of PTSD as an affliction as far back as Roman times. Bochard, then, I think we can label ill rather than mad or dangerous.

  So now you know about some of the characters: Bochard, de la Roche and de Charney. Let me tell you something of the future for the rest. We’ll start with what happens to the city. I’ve intimated that it never truly recovers. That perhaps makes it sound worse than it was. Though it had been permanently weakened, there were brief flowerings in which the city flourished. From 1204 the city remained in Latin hands, subject to the Church of Rome until 1261. The Byzantine emperors ruled in absentia from Nicaea, only retaking Constantinople half a century after their ousting.

  But what of the characters you’ve come to know? Well, in truth, little of it is good. Alexios Doukas did indeed flee the city on the night of the sacking through the Golden Gate, and his fate was not to die in the city. Moreover, Constantine Laskaris attended the meeting of nobles in the Haghia Sophia that night where, in the absence of Doukas, he was made emperor. He fought on for only hours before the Warings deserted him and he too was forced to flee the city. He would rule in exile, continuing to stand against the Latins, for almost a year. Theodoros also made it out that night, reaching Nicaea unharmed.

  Having fled, Alexios III Angelos went into exile where he, unbelievably, eventually ended up with Alexios V Doukas, marrying his daughter to the man. Angelos’s failures had not ended in Constantinople, though, for in the end, he blinded his son-in-law, Doukas, and fled approaching Crusaders once more. Hurrying hither and thither, Angelos eventually ended up being captured in battle by none other than Theodoros Laskaris, after which he was imprisoned in a monastery where he died. The blinded Alexios V Doukas (Mourzouphlos – ‘the monobrow’) was captured by the Latins eventually and taken back to Constantinople. There he remained the defiant hero he could have been, refusing to accept charges of treason and instead labelling the young pretender Alexios IV a traitor. He was thrown to his death from the column of Theodosius, a martyr to the end.

  It would be Michael Palaeologos who would recapture the city and become the next emperor to rule from Constantinople. Interestingly, he was the great grandson of Alexios III Angelos, but for those intervening years of exile in Nicaea building back to power, you might be interested to know that the dynasty of emperors were the Laskaris. Indeed, it was our very own Theodoros Laskaris who ruled in Nicaea from 1205 until 1222. His brother Constantine had ruled from the last days of the siege until 1205 when he died in battle against the Latins.

  I’ve done my best with locations. I am fairly familiar with most of them, though the more troublesome parts are the Golden Horn walls and the Blachernae. Little remains of the Golden Horn walls and the fragments left only give us tantalising glimpses of what they might have been like. As such, I have built my story from primary sources, secondary sources, maps and photos I have of the place, as well as the amazing ‘Byzantium 1200’ online project. I urge you to look the latter up, by the way. The Blachernae is even more troublesome, most of it having disappeared beneath shanty housing for centuries, and more recently even those shanty houses are disappearing to be replaced by modern buildings. I have walked much of the Blachernae, but its original form is very hard to discern now, barring fragments currently being reconstructed and odd pieces of terrace wall in gardens and car parks here and there. There may or may not have been a wall between it and the city. It might have been just a low boundary wall, combined with terracing. Or it may have been more. I have chosen to make it a solid defence, partially based on the fact that the emperors would hardly shut themselves up in the Blachernae with the Warings if it was not defensible. I have based it also partly on views from the 1493 Hartman Schedel map. The 1922 Pervititch plan shows a lesser wall enclosing the palace area, along the terrace line, which similarly fits. Sadly, the gate where the city’s fate was decided is now
covered with a padlocked door as part of a garage and not preserved as the significant monument it should be.

  Placing the Crusader camp was troublesome, since neither records nor archaeology traditionally identify its location, and so also was the bridge mentioned in the early stages of the siege. Moreover, the battle between the Crusaders and the Byzantine army near the Frankish camp that ended with the emperor leading his fleeing men back to the city is recorded as ending with the two sides facing each other over a wide watercourse, or ‘canal’, that fed the city. Such a channel no longer exists, and it seems extremely unlikely that it ever did. Although there are records of aqueducts running along the hillside near the Golden Horn, any watercourse feeding drinking water to the city outside the walls would be underground due to terrain and hygiene. Still, I did a certain amount of research into this, even consulting the amazingly clever archaeologist Kerim Altug in Istanbul, who sent me some incredibly useful texts that informed this book. Locating the Crusader camp was even more troublesome, but I pinned it down to Balci street near the Horn, north-west of the walls, courtesy of a recent find and associated article provided by the most excellent Twitter user and website ‘The Byzantine Legacy’. Other locations can still be visited, including the Bukoleon, the land walls and the Golden Gate. The church of Holy Apostles was destroyed following the Turkish conquest and the Fatih mosque built on the site. Similarly, while there is a Galata tower which is a tourist attraction, it is a later Genoese structure and not the one from this text. The base of the tower that held the chain is now the Yeralti mosque in Beyoglu.