Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  ‘We’re putting into the Senatorial Dock,’ he said flatly.

  Certainly, we were going straight past the place where I’d seen all the activity. Still shouting orders I couldn’t understand, the Captain was pointing to some other landing place round a bend in the shore.

  For the hundredth time that day, Martin reached up to make sure his hat was in place. Hair as red as his doesn’t long survive a thirtieth birthday, and I knew Martin was approaching that age faster than he wanted.

  ‘Our things’, he added, ‘will still need to clear customs, but it shouldn’t be as searching as I expected.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to keep my voice neutral, ‘let us be grateful for that.’

  Martin had warned me how the Greeks like to check everything when you land, and even try to levy duties on your personal effects. I hadn’t liked the thought of that. If we could avoid it, I’d not object to a little change of plan.

  I looked again towards the shore which was approaching fast. With the crowds behind us, we were putting into a small landing faced with blue marble and overlooked by buildings of restrained grandeur. Leading up to the main city, there was a wide avenue lined with trees.

  Following Martin’s glance to the landing place, I could see a small, though very fat man dressed in a robe with a purple border. Beardless, of indeterminate age, he seemed to be wearing a wig – or perhaps it was a full head of hair dyed black. It was hard to see the details at that distance or in that terrible glare of sunlight. A secretary stood beside him, his face cast down. Behind him, at a respectful distance, stood various retainers, some of them armed.

  ‘That’s not the Permanent Legate, or his people,’ Martin hissed, his grip tightening on the rail. ‘It’s a Gloriosus. There’s a really senior official waiting to greet you. You only see people of that status come down to greet foreign ambassadors.’

  My stomach turned over. The scared speculations I had pushed out of my mind on that hasty, midnight rush down the Tiber came crawling back. With the shore getting closer and closer, I felt like a man who falls from a high window and sees the ground rushing towards him. Even if I’d dared to ask, would the Captain have turned back?

  I wanted to say something reassuring to Martin. All I did was reach out to him under cover of the rail. He took my hand in his. It was cold and sweaty, but firmer than my own. We stood close together as the ship covered the last hundred yards or so.

  ‘He’ll be expecting our total deference,’ Martin whispered with a slight nod at the official. ‘You address him as “Your Magnificence”.’

  I had a speech rehearsed for the Permanent Legate’s agent. I had a variation ready just in case the Lord Silas should deign to meet us in person. I had nothing prepared for this.

  It might be a mistake, I told myself again and again. The Permanent Legate’s people might be waiting at one of the general docks. Perhaps an ambassador’s ship was even now being inspected by those customs men, and there’d be red faces all round. But I thought it best to assume that the traffic-control people in the city knew what they were doing, so I put an open smile on to my face and made a gentle bow in the official’s direction. He bowed in response, touching his forehead in the Eastern manner.

  As the oars swung suddenly upright and we coasted the last few yards into dock, I glanced up again at the inner wall. I could now see that those dark projections I hadn’t been able to make out were iron gibbets. There must have been dozens of these clustered round the Senatorial Dock. Each held a corpse in various stages of decay.

  The corpses looked sightlessly down at me, twisted in their death agonies, blackened by the sun. Some were naked. Others had shreds of clothing that scavengers and the shifting winds hadn’t yet torn away. Here and there, though faded, I could make out the purple border of the senatorial classes.

  Martin cleared his throat, directing my attention to the open mouth and outstretched arms of the official.

  ‘Executed traitors,’ he whispered again with a momentary glance at the gibbets. ‘You should pretend not to notice them.’

  As I stepped ashore, the official hurried forward to embrace me.

  ‘Greetings, Alaric of Britain,’ he called in a voice that might have been a woman’s but for its great power. His flabby, painted jowls shook with the force of his greeting. ‘I bid you welcome after your journey from the Old Rome to the New. Welcome, Alaric, welcome to the City of Caesar!

  ‘I am Theophanes, and I represent the Master of the Offices himself. In the name of His Glorious Excellency, and in the name of the Great Augustus whose benevolence shines upon us as a second sun, I bid you welcome. Yes, young and most beautiful Alaric, I bid you a fond welcome.’

  Theophanes must have seen my furtive look beyond him to the jumble of attendants. He continued:

  ‘His Excellency the Permanent Legate is sadly indisposed. Rather than send down a subordinate from the Legation, he took up our suggestion of an official greeting. It was no less than we could offer for a scholar of such pre-eminent qualities as yourself.’

  He paused and put a slight emphasis on the elaboration of the flattery: ‘A scholar whose qualities are no stranger to the city – though we were unprepared for such personal beauty to be so artlessly combined with youth and learning. Please regard me throughout your stay as entirely at your service.’

  His face creased into a smile and he spread his arms as if about to begin a declamation: ‘All that you require for your mission – all that you may desire for your convenience – you will look to me to provide.’

  He spoke in good Latin, though with an accent that wasn’t quite Greek. I answered in my best Greek, praising the Emperor for his forethought in all matters and thanking Theophanes for his own eminent goodness of heart.

  So there was no mistake. I was indeed the object of this fuss. The Emperor’s most senior Minister had taken an interest. He had sent one of his own most senior officials to greet me.

  As we drew back from our second kiss and were about to begin a new round of mutual flattery, the breeze shifted. The perfume that hung like a suffocating fog round Theophanes gave way to a smell of death from the gibbets above our heads. I resisted the urge to gag at the sudden stench and controlled my features. In a moment, the breeze shifted again and the smell of ropes and tarpaulins filled the air.

  We moved towards the litters placed for our service, and the armed men lined up into a guard of honour. Behind me, I could hear Martin giving subdued but curt orders for the unloading of our luggage. The customs officials who’d been hovering behind Theophanes and his entourage had given up hope of inspecting this and were dispersing.

  That ship had been our home for what seemed an age. I never looked back to it.

  2

  Oh, but this will never do! The ancient poets may have opened in the middle of things, working backwards and forwards as they felt inspired. You can do that when writing a diary. I seem, however, to have begun a regular chapter in the history of my life. One day soon, when I’m gone to a place condemnation cannot reach, I like to think Bede will take this up and further practise his Greek. I’ll need to do a great deal better than I have to explain myself.

  Let us, then, leave things as they were on the Senatorial Dock – no one left frozen there is likely, I think, to complain – and go back to the real beginning of the story.

  That was a month earlier in Rome, where I’d now been living for a year, and life was sweet. It was the morning after the Feast of Saint Rubellus, and the bodies of some of those who hadn’t recovered from their stupor had not yet been taken away by their next of kin. Fortunately, the Lombards were on the prowl again, and there were fewer pilgrims than usual. I was making my way down to the financial markets. The fortune I was hoping to make on some Cornish tin had taken an interesting turn, and I needed a meeting with my associates. I was so busy keeping my new shoes from getting blood on them that the monk’s greeting took me by surprise.

  ‘His Excellency the Dispensator would be glad of th
e citizen Alaric’s company,’ he said, looking down at me. If he was trying for a grand effect, it didn’t work. As he spoke, the heap of rubble on which he was standing gave way, and his last word ended in a squawk as he landed at my feet.

  I could have laughed – especially at the dull sound of the corpse that broke his fall – but didn’t. As you might imagine from his name, the Dispensator’s job was to oversee the Papal charity that bound people materially to the Church. In fact, he had for some time been doing rather more than this. Now he was sinking deeper into his illness, poor old Pope Boniface signed whatever the Dispensator put before him, and did whatever he was advised. The Dispensator ran the Church. The Church ran Rome. If he wanted me now, my time was his.

  So, having sent my slave on to the financial district with my excuses, I found myself for the first time since Christmas in the Lateran Palace.

  ‘I can find my own way in, many thanks,’ I said to the monk. He was plainly glad of the chance to go and get cleaned up before anyone saw him.

  I turned left out of the lush beauty of the main hall and made as if for the Papal apartments. Then I took another left turn down an unlit corridor and found myself in the decidedly unlush waiting room outside the Dispensator’s office. I nodded to the clerical monk who kept order and walked past the various supplicants who waited there in silence.

  After a while of sitting alone in the office, I heard the door open behind me from an inner room. With a rustle of linen and his usual dry cough, the Dispensator was with me.

  ‘Do feel free to remain seated,’ he said in a tone that barely hinted at my impertinence. I twisted round and smiled at him. Paying no attention to this, he paused before one of the overstuffed filing racks that had lately taken up what little room was left in the office. He raised his hand to a sheaf of documents but thought better of taking anything out. He sat himself on his side of the desk and looked intently at his manicured nails.

  ‘I must thank you, Alaric,’ he began, ‘for having come so promptly. I appreciate that you have much else to occupy you at the moment. But it is on a matter of the highest importance that I have called you here.’

  He fell silent as another clerical monk shuffled into the room with more papers. He picked up one of the larger sheets of papyrus and read its contents with slow deliberation. At last, he signed it and rolled it up and sealed it.

  ‘Get this to a courier at once,’ he said. ‘I want it on the first packet out of Ostia. Do not send it overland via Ravenna,’ he added, a finger raised for emphasis.

  The clerk bowed silently and left the room.

  While he was reading, I had a good look at the Dispensator. He was even thinner than at our last meeting. The weatherbeaten look his face had taken on gave him still more the appearance of a dried stick. But he was wearing a very nice robe, of a cut I hadn’t seen before. For a moment I thought of asking for the name of his tailor, but decided not to push my welcome.

  As the door closed and we were alone again, he continued. ‘You may be aware that it is now twenty years since the Spanish King abandoned the damnable heresy of Arianism that his barbarian ancestors introduced into the country. He and his successors have been ever since firm in the true Orthodox Faith of Nicaea.’

  I was vaguely aware of the fact. But whether Christ was One with the Father or merely of the Father had never much troubled me. Nor was I much concerned what view any of the barbarians who’d planted themselves in the old Western Provinces took of the matter. When both parties to an argument scream incomprehensible formulae at each other, and threaten any observers with hellfire unless they fully agree with one against the other, the time is for men of sense to make their excuses.

  But I knew it was the Dispensator’s duty to stand up for Nicaea. For all that it had started as an argument among Greeks, the Roman Church had for centuries been defending the Creed of Nicaea against anyone who presumed to doubt it. This had raised troubles in the West where most barbarians had – accidentally – converted to the wrong side. More importantly, the further argument over the Single or Double Nature of Christ had turned the Greek and other Eastern Churches upside down, and kept them from uniting against Rome. So I nodded and tried to look interested.

  ‘You will be aware then’, he continued, ‘that an insignificant but vocal minority in Spain have persisted in the darkness of heresy. The secular authorities have exhausted all the loving care at their disposal to win them over. Here in Rome, therefore, we have arranged one last meeting between the Orthodox and the spokesmen of heresy. These latter are to attend under a flag of truce. They may yet be brought over without need of a truly disruptive severity.’

  ‘And you want me to go to Spain’, I broke in, ‘to complete the work you began there of dishing out bribes to, or gathering dirt on, the Arian bishops?’

  I thought this an inspired stab. A Spanish trip would have fitted my Cornish plans, and a mission for the Church would have been a fine cover. Mainly, though, I just wanted for once to break through that smooth, bureaucratic exterior.

  No such luck. The Dispensator gave me a withering look and went on with his exposition.

  ‘Our problem’, he said, ‘is that one of the leaders of the Arian party – I do not, by the way, think “Bishop” an appropriate title for a heretic – is a person of some pretence to learning. He has raised questions regarding the procedural regularity of the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, and of the authorised Latin translation of their Acts. In particular, he notes that the Holy Ghost is said in the Creed to proceed only from the Father and not from the Father and Son. Making use of this alleged ambiguity, he denies that the Creed truly expresses what we have always taken it to mean.

  ‘These questions must have been raised at least once in the past three centuries, and doubtless fully answered. Sadly, neither we nor the Spanish Church have been able to find any discussion useful to our purposes.’

  That must have been embarrassing, I thought. Forget theology – this was politics. If you’re English, you’ll be used to the fact that our churchmen look directly to Rome. Our secular authorities aren’t up to much at the best of times, and only get attention out of politeness or when something is wanted. It was different back then in the French and Spanish Churches. Of course, they accepted the spiritual primacy of Rome but they looked to their local kings much as they had to the Emperor when there was still one in the West.

  This annoyed Rome like nothing else. Its ambition was to be Omnium Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput – the Mother and Head of all the Churches of the world. From the Pope down, the words hung on every pair of lips in the Lateran.

  Now it was faced with an admission that it couldn’t flatten some heretical Goth on the meaning of the Creed. Yes, most embarrassing.

  But the Dispensator hadn’t paused to give me time for a gloat. He put down the lead seal he’d been toying with and looked straight at me.

  ‘I therefore need someone competent in theology and in Greek’, he said, ‘to travel to Constantinople to consult the libraries and the religious scholars of that city.’

  Well, you could have buggered me with a bargepole and I’d not have noticed. I think my mouth fell open. I sat for a while looking at him and trying to gather some reply.

  ‘According to what I’ve picked up on the Exchange,’ I said at last, ‘the Danube frontier has collapsed and Slavs are pouring into the Balkans. The Persians have invaded Mesopotamia and may already be in Syria. The Exarch of Africa is in revolt against the Emperor, and his people have taken Egypt. These are all converging on Constantinople and it’s an open bet who will get there first. Whoever does get there will find an emperor who is incompetent for every purpose but murdering anyone who might have some ready cash to steal, or who may have given one of his statues a funny look.

  ‘I’ll not deny, My Lord Dispensator, you have some right to my services. But you’ll need to try a lot harder to get me into that shambles. The two of us may have agreed that certain events here and outside Ravenna nev
er took place last year. I hardly think Emperor Phocas considers himself bound by our agreement.’

  The Dispensator gave me one of his bleak smiles and motioned me back into my seat.

  ‘Of course, Aelric,’ he said – as ever, when he needed my services badly enough, with a failed attempt at pronouncing my real name – ‘I have no means to compel you to do anything. You are a free agent. Our rule is one of persuasion and love, not of force. But do consider that you came here with Father – but I correct myself! with Saint – Maximin to gather books for the mission library in Canterbury. Now, think of the great libraries of Constantinople. Think of the entry to these that the Church could obtain for you. I can offer you all the learning of the ages – books the like of which haven’t been in Rome for a hundred years or more.

  ‘And you will be under the full protection of the Church,’ he added, ‘and our Permanent Legate in the City will watch over you at all times.’

  ‘So,’ I asked, trying to ignore the thought of those libraries, ‘why not get His Excellency the Permanent Legate to do your research? Isn’t it for that sort of thing that he gets paid?’

  ‘No, Alaric,’ came the reply. ‘The Lord Silas has many excellences, and comes from one of the very best families in Rome. But his Greek is not sufficient for our purpose. And we do not think a local agent would be appropriate.’

  So it was the usual nepotistic stitch-up. The best job in the Church, short of a really juicy bishopric, and it had gone to another duffer who had to transact all business in the Imperial capital – a few formal occasions apart, where Latin was still used – through an interpreter.

  ‘What makes you suppose I’m any better as a scholar?’ I asked again.

  The Dispensator’s smile broadened till it bordered on the grotesque.