Library of Gold

by Gayle Lynds

  Six years later the survivors of the Byzantine royal family escaped as the Ottoman Turks invaded Morea, the rich Greek Peloponnese peninsula ruled by the emperor’s heir and nephew, Thomas Paleologus. Accompanying Thomas on the small Venetian galley were his wife and children—two young sons and a daughter, Zoë, about twelve years old. She would play a critical role in the Library of Gold.

  They made their way to Italy, where Pius II took them under the papal wing, and the Vatican provided a palace and stipend. The pope had a vital political and religious goal—to enthrone Thomas at a recaptured Constantinople. Thomas and his family were Greek Orthodox, but they had promptly converted to Roman Catholic once they reached Italy. If the pope succeeded, Thomas would rule over a Christian New Byzantium, Western in outlook, uniting Catholic and Orthodox—and under the religious control of Rome.

  The Venetians, who were making fortunes in trade with the Ottoman Turks, were less than happy about it. When Pius tried twice to mount a Fifth Crusade, this time against Constantinople, the Venetians dithered. Finally they delayed their fleet so long that the last attempted attack fell apart, and the pope died.

  The next pope, Paul II, feinted. He looked east again, but this time his target was the widowed Ivan III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, soon to be called Ivan the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church had long flourished in Moscow. Hoping to acquire Ivan as a military ally against the Turks, as well as his consent for the Union of Churches, the pope offered Zoë’s hand in marriage in 1472. She was now about twenty years old.

  Moscow was the strongest of the Russian states and the fastest growing power of the times, although it was still under the Muslim yoke. Ivan accepted the proposal, and the royal pair married in Moscow before the year was out. Zoë took the name Sophia.

  We know Sophia traveled with a large retinue by land and sea to Moscow. Her arrival was accompanied by Italians and Greeks, who settled there, too, and became influential, even rebuilding the Kremlin in a Russian-Italianate style. This is the point where the legend begins.

  According to several commentators, Sophia brought with her to Moscow priceless illuminated manuscripts from the Byzantine imperial collection. “The chronicles mention 100 carts loaded with 300 boxes with rare books arriving in Moscow,” according to Alexandra Vinogradskaya, writing in The Russian Culture Navigator. Another version is this: “The princess arrived in Moscow with a dowry of 70 carts, carrying hundreds of trunks, which contained the heritage of early cultures—the library collected by the Byzantine emperors,” explains Nikolay Khinsky on WhereRussia.com, the Russian National Tourist site for International Travelers.

  What is undisputed is that Sophia did bring the Ivory Throne of the Byzantine emperors on which Russian monarchs were crowned ever after, as well as the double-headed eagle, the imperial symbol of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years, which became the Kremlin’s for nearly another five hundred years. She introduced the grand court traditions of Byzantium, too, including ceremonial etiquette and costume. Even before the wedding, Ivan had assumed the title of czar—Caesar—and then added grozny, “formidable,” a reverential adjective common in Byzantine autocracy, since the sovereign was considered the earthly image of God and empowered with all His sacred and judicial powers.

  Since Sophia carried so much of Byzantium with her, it is very possible illuminated manuscripts were among her gifts. As Deb Brown, bibliographer and research services librarian for Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks, wrote me: “There seems to be nothing in the (published) contemporary sources that testifies to books in Zoë/Sophia’s possession, but I’m not convinced that she did not carry books with her. The silence of sources has to be weighed against the nature of the sources, which are few and concerned with matters of state and monies, not much else. There are plenty of indications that she was literate and well-educated.”

  Ultimately the Vatican’s geopolitical gamesmanship partially succeeded. Sophia was the one who persuaded Ivan III in 1478 to challenge the Golden Horde. “When the customary messengers came from the Tatar Khan demanding the usual tribute, Ivan threw the edict on the ground, stamped and spat on it, and killed all the ambassadors save one, whom he sent back to his master,” according to Gilbert Grosvenor in National Geographic magazine. Over time his armies beat back Khan Ahmed’s soldiers, and Moscow was never seriously threatened by them again. One of the longest-reigning Russian rulers, Ivan tripled his territory and laid the foundations of state, based largely on the autocratic rule of Byzantium.

  Where the Vatican failed was that the Chair of Peter was not unified with the throne of Constantine—upon her arrival in Moscow, Sophia had promptly endorsed Orthodoxy again.

  The Library of Gold would have passed from Sophia and Ivan to their son Vasily III, and from him to his son Ivan IV. In 1547 at the young age of seventeen, Ivan IV outwitted Kremlin plots and crowned himself “Czar of All Russia.” Eventually he, too, became known as Grozny—Ivan the Terrible—infamous ever since for his cruelty, slaughters of entire cities, and pleasure in torture. At the same time, a hundred years before Peter the Great was credited with doing so, Ivan opened Russia to the West. He frequently corresponded with European monarchs, including Elizabeth I of England, exchanged diplomats, and nurtured international trade. He not only extended Russia to the Pacific Ocean, but he also introduced the printing press to Russia.

  “How many Oriental manuscripts does the monarch have?” asks Khinsky, referring to testimony describing Ivan the Terrible’s library. “Up to 800. Some he has bought, some he has received as gifts. Most of the manuscripts are Greek, but many are Latin. The Latin I’ve seen include histories by Livius, De Republica by Cicero, stories about emperors by Suetonius. These manuscripts are written on thin parchment and bound in gold.”

  From his letters we know Ivan was familiar with the Bible, the Apocrypha, the Chronographs, which dealt with world history, and tales from The Iliad. He received books as presents from foreign envoys and visitors, had books written, and ordered others to be copied into Russian for his use.

  “Historians know about the existence of the library because Ivan the Terrible instructed scribes to translate the books into Russian,” says an article in The Times. “According to legend, the library once filled three halls and was so valued by Ivan the Terrible that he built a vault to protect [the books] from the fires that regularly swept Moscow.” But the vault, allegedly hidden under the Kremlin, might also have been the result of Ivan’s mental instability and growing paranoia.

  News of the library spread across Europe. “The Germans, English, and Italians made many attempts to persuade the Russian czar to sell the treasure,” writes Vinogradskaya. “But a man of considerable literary talent himself, Ivan the Terrible was an eager collector of rare books and fully aware of the high value of his collection. He refused to sell anything.”

  Ivan was also fascinated by spies and assassins, and used them frequently. His top spy and security chief had instant access to his bedchambers through one of the tunnels under the Kremlin. And Ivan created the feared Oprichniki, his clandestine personal armed force, who conducted espionage and assassinations. Chillingly, they dressed completely in black and rode black horses.

  Begun in the 1100s and added to over the centuries, the tangled, endless underground tunnels were originally intended as escape routes, to give access to water if the Kremlin was besieged, and to move comfortably from one building to another during the harsh Russian winter. Reaching depths of twelve stories, the tunnels contain streams, dungeons, and secret chambers.

  “Legend has it that all his [Ivan’s] gold was hidden in one tunnel,” writes Khinsky, “paintings and icons in another, and manuscripts from the Byzantine library in another. All the hiding places were carefully bricked up.” Salt is a good preservative, and apparently natural salt basements have been found in Moscow’s netherworld.

  After reading his will in the morning and calling for his chess set in the afternoon, Ivan died in 1584. The will, which might have list
ed his library, mysteriously vanished. When his body was exhumed in 1963, traces of both mercury and arsenic were discovered, but not at high enough levels for the cause of death to have been poisoning, although it’s a popular belief he was indeed poisoned.

  According to Khinsky, sixteen years after the monarch’s death, a Vatican envoy arrived to find out what had happened to the library. Old archives and book depositories were searched, and exploration parties sent out to dig. “The existence of the library is first mentioned in documents from the period of Peter the Great’s rule, which began in 1682,” according to Hamilton of the Los Angeles Times.

  Ivan was the last known owner of the Library of Gold. “Historians, archaeologists, Peter the Great, and even the Vatican have searched fruitlessly for the missing library for hundreds of years,” says The Times. In the seventeenth century most of the oldest tunnels were already out of use and forgotten, and the passage of time has made the hunt increasingly difficult because of weakened fortifications, landslides, flooding, and incomplete maps.

  “The Kremlin is the dwelling of phantoms,” wrote the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in the early nineteenth century. “It feels as though the underground sounds born there were coming from the grave.”

  It’s not surprising that this vital collection of books, perhaps the most important to survive in history, remains the subject of gripping interest. In the course of various explorations, the sprawling mass of subterranean tunnels has yielded very old treasures, including a hidden arsenal of Ivan the Terrible’s weapons, the czarina’s chambers where Peter the Great spent his childhood, the city’s largest silver coin hoard, gold jewelry, documents, and precious tableware and dishes, many of which have been put on public display. The Archaeology Museum is the site of some of these unique finds.

  “Fear me, Giant Sewer Rodents, for I Am Vadim, Lord of the Underground!” is the title of an article written by Erin Arvedlund in Outside magazine about Vadim Mikhailov and his eager band of subterranean explorers—the Diggers of the Underground Planet. Their dream is to find the Library of Gold. Instead they have turned up skeletons, mutant fish, fugitives, clouds of noxious gas, ugly grass, albino cockroaches, and an underground pond once used as a site of mass suicides. On a more helpful note, they also discovered 250 kilograms of radioactive material under Moscow State University, which perhaps explains the long anecdotal history of illness, hair loss, and infertility among its students and faculty. The government removed the material.

  An eighty-seven-year-old Moscow pensioner, Apollos Ivanov, who had been an engineer in the Kremlin and studied the underground structures of Moscow, believed the Library of Gold was in one of the branches that stood above an extensive catacomb network, which he had seen. He revealed his secret to the mayor in 1997, who quickly authorized the hunt. Many were convinced the missing collection would be unearthed at last. Ivanov had gone blind, and according to legend, anyone coming close to discovering the library lost his sight. But Ivanov was wrong, and the library remains missing.

  The pursuit continues enthusiastically today, with new searchers bringing increasingly modern equipment. After all, the magnificent royal library of the Byzantine Empire was the last hope of the long-ago Western world, rich with the wisdom and lost knowledge of the ancients, and unrivaled today even by the Vatican Library. To think the Library of Gold, the crème de la literary crème, may lie sleeping quietly in Moscow’s mysterious underworld is irresistible.

  Literary Treasures the Library of Gold could Contain

  This book is fiction, of course, but all the historical references and anecdotes are either factual or based on fact. For instance, the Emperor Trajan did erect the awe-inspiring monument to his successful wars, Trajan’s Column, between two peaceful galleries of Rome’s library, which he also built. And Cassius Dio Cocceianus, a Roman administrator and great historian, wrote Romaika, the most important history of the last years of the Roman Republic and early Empire. It encompassed eighty books, but only volumes thirty-six through sixty survive. If Cassius Dio wrote about Trajan’s Column, I postulate the story would have appeared in book seventy-seven.

  At the same time all of this is true: Julius Caesar did receive a list of conspirators planning to assassinate him—but never read it. Hannibal did rampage across Rome’s countryside, destroying everything except Fabius’s properties. As a result, Fabius had his hands full with a near-mutinous Rome. And in his send-up play The Clouds, Aristophanes does depict the revered philosopher Socrates as a clown teaching students how to scam their way out of debt.

  The one major exception is the volume I call The Book of Spies. However, since Ivan the Terrible had books created and was intrigued by spies and assassins, it’s possible he would have ordered such a work compiled.

  History is available to us only through oral tradition and the written word. What was lost over the millennia from war, fires, looting, wanton destruction, deliberate obliteration, and censorship is tragic. Our history is the history of lost books. If I could have my wish, the Library of Gold would exist, would be discovered, and not only would the lost books I name in the novel be found in it, but at least the work of these early six would, too:

  Sappho (c. 610 B.C. to c. 570 B.C.) was the lauded Greek poet whose life is recounted in myths based upon her lyrical and passionate love verses. The pinnacle of female accomplishment in poetry, her surviving work was collected and published in nine books sometime in the third or second century B.C., but by the eighth or nine century A.D. it was represented only by quotations in other authors’ works.

  Classical Athens had three great tragic playwrights, all contemporaries—Aeschylus (525 or 524 B.C. to 456 or 455 B.C.), Sophocles (c. 495 B.C. to 406 B.C.), and Euripides (480 B.C. to 406 B.C.). The father of modern drama, Aeschylus wrote more than eighty plays, lifting the art of tragedy with poetry and fresh theatrical power. He introduced a second actor on stage—thus giving birth to dialogue, dramatic conflict, and dramatized plot. The Athenians had the only copy of his Complete Works and loaned it for copying to Alexandria, where Ptolemy III had other ideas—he ordered it left untranscribed and not returned. Scholars flocked. Centuries passed. Then the Alexandria libraries burned, and the scrolls died in flames. Only seven of Aeschylus’s plays have survived.

  The author of 123 plays, including Oedipus Rex, Sophocles used scenery, increased the size of the chorus, and introduced a third actor, significantly widening the scope and complexity of theater. Sophocles said he showed men as they ought to be, while his younger contemporary, Euripides, showed them as they were. Only seven of Sophocles’ plays survive.

  Dressing kings as beggars and showing women as intelligent and complex, Euripides used traditional stories to display humanity and ethics. He wrote more than ninety plays, which were remarkable for realistically reflecting his era. Reading them would tell us much about Athens. Only eighteen survive.

  Confucius (551 B.C. to 479 B.C.) was venerated over the centuries for his wisdom and his revolutionary idea that humaneness was central to how we should treat one another. He wrote “Six Works”: The Book of Poetry, The Book of Rituals, The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, and The Spring and Autumn Annals, which formed a full curriculum of education. But the perfection of his vision is incomplete, since The Book of Music has disappeared.

  The first Roman emperor, Augustus (63 B.C. to A.D. 14), was one of the globe’s finest administrative geniuses, reorganizing, transforming, and enlarging the reeling Roman Republic into a powerhouse empire with easy communications, thousands of miles of paved roads, and flourishing tourism and trade. A cultured man, he supported the arts and wrote many works. Most have vanished. A particular tragedy is the loss of his thirteen-volume My Autobiography, perhaps containing the inside views of the man who oversaw and directed one of the world’s greatest civilizations during a long and critical period of history.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  For the Library of Gold

  Around the Kremlin: The Mos
cow Kremlin, Its Monuments, and Works of Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967.

  Arvedlund, Erin. “Fear Me, Giant Sewer Rodents, for I Am Vadim, Lord of the Underground!” Outside magazine, September 1997.

  Backhouse, Janet. The Illuminated Page: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Painting. London: The British Library, 1993.

  Basbanes, Nicholas A. A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.

  “Blind Man ‘Has Key to Tsar’s Secret Library.’” The Times, September 17, 1997.

  Canfora, Luciano. The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  Cockburn, Andrew. “The Judas Gospel,” National Geographic, May 2006.

  Ehrlich, Eugene. Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  Grosvenor, Gilbert H. “Young Russia: Land of Unlimited Possibilities,” National Geographic, November 1914.

  de Hamel, Christopher. The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illustration: History and Techniques. London: The British Library, 2001.

  Hamilton, Masha. “Kremlin Tunnels: The Secret of Moscow’s Underworld,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1989.

  Holmes, Charles W. “Unsolved Mystery: What Happened to Ivan the Terrible’s Library?” Cox News Service, October 31, 1997.

  Holmes, Hannah. “Spelunking: And Please, No Flash Pictures of the Blob.” Outside magazine, March 1995.

  Ilinitsky, Andrei. “Mysteries Under Moscow,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1997.

  Kelly, Stuart. The Book of Lost Books. New York: Random House, 2005.