Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  Porphyry and Ash

  Peter Sandham

  © Peter Sandham 2019

  Peter Sandham has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Thomson Fleming

  This edition published in 2020 by Sharpe Books

  For Atika

  Table of Contents

  A note on names

  Map: Constantinople, 1452

  Prologue.

  Part I: Nimbus

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  Part II: Athanor

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII.

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII.

  XXXIV.

  XXXV.

  Author’s note

  A note on names

  The term ‘Byzantine’ only came into use about a hundred years after the Eastern Roman Empire fell. Being such a long-lasting, multi-ethnic empire, which preserved Romano-Hellenistic culture alongside its fervent Christianity, the complex issue of identity and nomenclature would take – and indeed has taken – expert scholars many lengthy academic papers to explore.

  So, while acknowledging here that the residents of medieval Constantinople would have referred to themselves both as Romaioi (Romans) and Hellenes (Greeks), in my writing I use ‘Byzantines’ because although it is somewhat anachronistic, it encompasses all the disparate strands of that empire into a single, recognizable term. Similarly, a ‘Greek’ in the following pages refers to someone of the Greek church or a Greek speaker rather than an ethno-nationalist identity.

  Several forms of address may be unfamiliar to some readers: kyr is the medieval Greek equivalent of Sir or Lord. The Italian equivalent was messer. Kyria is simply the female form of kyr, and despoina has the same meaning as kyria but was usually reserved for higher status women such as the wife of a despot or a court princess.

  Map: Constantinople, 1452

  “Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.”

  Petrarch

  Prologue.

  A n observer in the mid-fifteenth century, unrolling the map and eyeing its parti-coloured patchwork of chaotic states, might well have shared the poet Petrarch’s despair at the long ‘dark ages’ that had ensued from the sack of Imperial Rome.

  In the west, the great kingdom of France, inspired by martyred Joan of Arc, continued its century-long war with England. Nor was peace to be found in the east, where conflicts raged across Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. On the Italian penninsula, the merchants of Venice, Genoa and Florence, with their long-established trading republics and equally long-established feuds, brought regular employment to rampaging companies of mercenary knights.

  Thinned by plague, wearied with bloodshed, religiously divided between the Latin church of Rome and the Greek of Constantinople, Christendom lay precarious to outside attack – and alarmingly the wheel of history appeared to be coming back around.

  For while the barbarian sack of Rome, a thousand years before, had snuffed out a candle of civilisation, there had at least been two burning at the time. Byzantium – the eastern Roman empire, centred at Constantinople – had survived the Goths and continued to thrive.

  Yet our medieval map gazer could not fail but notice the sorry state Byzantium now lay in, nor be unaware that the cause of its decline stemmed from within Christendom’s borders. It had been the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, who in 1204 diverted the fourth crusade to pillage Constantinople and briefly placed a Latin upon the imperial porphyry throne.

  That act might have won a constellation of trading bases for Venice around the Aegean Sea, but it had also left Byzantium a sickly rump of empire, increasingly beset by a new, ambitious power that wielded the banner of Islam: the Turks.

  Founded by Osman, about a hundred years after Dandolo’s Latin crusaders had burned Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks first conquered Anatolia, then crossed the Dardanelles to seize Bulgaria.

  By 1452, Sultan Mehmed, Osman’s ambitious young descendant, had taken the throne and set his sights firmly upon shattering Christendom’s eastern bulwark and conquering the so-called second Rome: Constantinople. And if Rome should fall again, what new age of darkness and dense gloom would descend across the continent this time?

  Part I: Nimbus

  I.

  N ow the girl is really burning. Earlier, the forked tongues of yellow flame had crept up the logs to tickle at her legs, but now she is mauled to the waist by great orange and red claws of fire.

  He wants to do something to help her. She is not even twenty, and pretty if you can look past the bruises. He wants to sweep aside the smoking faggots, cut loose the bonds lashing her arms to the stake and lead her somehow past the ranks of gleeful soldiers and the mocking Rouen crowd. He wants to get her to safety.

  But he is only twelve.

  He is only twelve, and weak, and in the employ of her executioner, so instead he tosses another stick onto the pyre and watches it hiss and spit like a riled snake.

  The girl’s eyes remain fixed on the crucifix held on a pole before her face as she tries to keep in her pain behind clenched teeth, but the fire soon grows too much and she howls a sudden bellow of agony that sends the whole crowd a pace back in shock.

  Her head lolls forward, she begins to chant scripture, and her eyes are no longer fixed on the cross but boring, terribly, into his own.

  John Grant woke with a shudder and a gasp - as he had most mornings for the twenty-one years that nightmare had dogged him. There were others, plenty of others, but none had the same power to leave his mattress as sweat soaked as that memory.

  He lay for a moment gazing upwards while he mastered his breathing and the night phantoms went back to their daylight hideaways.

  The roof above was the endless arch of heaven, only now starting to lighten from indigo as the sun came up. Instead of a soaked mattress, the hard, dry boards of a ship’s forecastle lay under him.

  A carrack, yes, he remembered now. He was on a carrack, bobbing in the fresh salt spray, far, far to the east of Rouen, of France, of Lombardy and all the sins of the past.

  This was the time to lie in the sun and marvel at the iridescent, crystalline waters; to feel the gentle, lemon-crisp breeze and gaze at the hazy silhouette of Marmara Island drifting lazily by. This was the time to recall the uncomplicated joy of merely being alive and shrug off haunted memories as the spring snake sheds its cracked skin; to leave behind what had been and think only of what might lie ahead and be better.

  Then later that morning the cry went up and through coastal fog, thick as a dalmatic, the great city of Constantinople emerged to port and the low foothills of Asia to the steerboard side.

  At first they were no more than dark shadows upon the shroud, sombre phantoms drifting towards one another like the clashing Cyanean Rocks, but as Grant stood gazing from the deck, structures began to take shape – a wormy ribbon of seawall, the dark smudge of a watch tower, the hazy vestige of roof tiles among the treeline and above it all, perched in domed majesty like an enormous bird of prey, Hagia Sophia, the large
st church in all of Christendom.

  The boat glided between the two continents, then rounded the acropolis point where the ancient promontory of the city jutted into the Bosporus and separated the Golden Horn from the Marmara Sea.

  The manouvre disturbed a shoal of tunny fish, and suddenly the waters before the bow glistened with their silvery scales as they bolted from the creaming wave.

  ‘Fish are like the devil,’ a deckhand told Grant as he peered into the depths where the fish had vanished. ‘You see them in one place then they appear somewhere else. You can never predict where.’

  Grant nodded with a smile and many months later he would think back on this comment and realise it was true also of human affections.

  The ship drove a furrow of foam towards Pera, Constantinople’s miniature reflection across the Golden Horn.

  Pera had been a Genoese concession for nearly two hundred years and, like Genoa, trade was its lifeblood. The harbour where Grant stepped ashore was a throng of boats loading and unloading cargos of every imaginable variety; bales of silk, rolls of carpet, white cones of sugar glimmering like snow; baskets mounded with saffron, with cloves, with cardamom, powdered mahleb or Malabar pepper.

  It teemed with life: the holler of barter, the banging and crashing of stevedores, the slap of oars and jangle of rigging, the howl of circling gulls and rattle of carts upon its cobbled streets.

  The dockside air hung heavy with the smell of the morning’s haul of bonito, and beyond it lay the dark labyrinth of the market where everything from cinnabar to cinnamon was bought and sold in a cacophony of tongues.

  This jabber blended into a souq patois that, like many of the local dishes on sale, contained a dash of Greek, a spot of Zeneize, a word of French and a spicing of new discoveries from the Fertile Crescent.

  A voice bellowed somewhere ahead, answered by another like the mating cries of woodland creatures, and Grant felt as disorientated as one lost in an unfamiliar forest.

  He turned a corner and caught in his nostrils the sizzling of butter, cuttlefish and onions as seppie in zimino was prepared.

  The smell proved to come from a stall where a man sat grinding madder root to make crimson ink. His shop front was hung with drying bags of crushed hawthorn bark, boiled in water and wine, while at the rear the ink maker was carefully adding the finishing touch of iron salt to a batch over a fire.

  It was the ink maker’s wife who had cooked up the sudden and welcome taste of Genoa in this exotic place, and it was from her that Grant learned how to reach the palazzo of the podesta.

  He made himself known to the guard at the entrance gate and was led to a room on the first floor where the walls were bright with frescos depicting the republic’s glory days: a tumbling seascape of a galley bearing its precious cargo home through a storm; the Venetian fortress at Tenedos besieged by a Genoese fleet; Lamba Doria taking the surrender at Curzola and setting Genoa on its golden age.

  All three were pictures representing a Genoa he did not recognise from the city he had recently departed. They lacked the vagrant-filled streets, the mangy dogs and under-fed children, the cloying lack of hope and pride that had haunted the claustrophobic caruggi for some time now.

  Out in the Genoese colonies, Grant supposed, it was easy to pretend you still represented a significant power and play the great game of empires with Venetian and Byzantine rivals. It was a conjuring trick to paint pictures of glory on your walls and dupe the mind into forgetting the disaster of Portofino and the subsequent decades of decay.

  Being Scottish, Grant was detached from that pain, but he could see how for men like the podesta – old enough to remember better times and proud of what Genoa had once meant to the world – the cold reality of her decline was a truth the mind could not fully bear. Like Medusa, such things could only be faced in a dulled, distorted reflection.

  ‘John! It is you!’ There was shock on Podesta Maruffo’s face and something else that Grant could not quite grasp before the expression changed into a practiced, warm smile. ‘It’s been too long! Such a surprise!’

  ‘A pleasant one, I hope. You don’t seem overcome with joy. Do you owe me money? If so, it’s long forgotten.’ Grant grinned and offered a hand, but Maruffo ignored it and threw his arms around the other man’s shoulders in a firm embrace.

  Baldassare Maruffo was just as Grant remembered him. Silvering, backcombed hair, a neat salt-and-pepper beard, sparkling eyes and a smile as crooked as a clipped coin. ‘Ha! I always pay my debts,’ said Maruffo. ‘No, it’s just so... so unexpected. You sent no word ahead.’

  ‘I had to leave Genoa in a hurry, Baldo. There wasn’t time to send ahead.’

  Maruffo winked. ‘Say no more. That way I shall be telling fewer lies when they ask if I have seen you.’

  ‘You’ve landed on your feet I see,’ said Grant with a nod about the room. ‘A podesta! No more sleeping on forest floors wondering when the enemy might appear. Now it’s silk sheets and servants at your beck and call.’

  ‘Well, the enemy is a little more perfumed these days and the battlefields are gilded audience rooms instead of boggy fields, but it is no less vicious, let me tell you,’ said Maruffo. He took a seat and gestured to another. ‘At least in the field the enemy blades tended to come only from in front. But enough of my problems, tell me the goings on back home.’

  ‘Things hardly change,’ Grant said. ‘The peace in Italy appears to be holding, which is in part what brings me out here. Peace is dandy for others, but it just means unemployment to the likes of us.’

  ‘Ah, worry not, those condottieri can’t keep still enough to have you idle for long; a good contract will appear in time. Take my advice, John, don’t go looking for work here. This isn’t Italy. There’s work for swords, I will not deny it, but the men taking on such contracts are chasing fool’s gold.’

  Grant gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘We don’t all live in palaces, old friend, or drink wine supplied by the Doge of Genoa. Some of us need to work to live.’

  Maruffo rose from his chair. ‘Come then, let’s drink some of Campofregoso’s wine, and I will educate you a little on this dirty corner of the world.’

  Grant followed the podesta into the adjoining room. There were no grand frescos here, just plain panelled walls and a window. Maruffo took the seat at the table’s head and gestured Grant to the place on his right.

  ‘Constantinople is an island, John, enclosed by an Ottoman sea. And what the sea wants, it eventually takes. The Moslems have desired the city since they first set eyes on it. The Red Apple, they call it, but despite centuries of trying they’ve got nowhere near plucking it, and that has only made them hungrier.’

  ‘Smells like a war,’ said Grant.

  Maruffo filled their cups. ‘A siege,’ he said.

  ‘And where does Genoa sit in all this? Surely Pera’s threatened too.’

  ‘Now that,’ said Maruffo, rubbing his forehead wearily, ‘is the great question of our time!’ He rose from the table and paced to the window with its view of the narrow stretch of water and the spires beyond. ‘Emperor Constantine understands that his best hope lies in forging a Christian alliance, so he appealed to the Holy Father in Rome and upset a great many of his own people by agreeing to unify the Greek Church into the Latin faith. He hopes that will bring a crusader army east. But it appears religion is not so effective a battle cry as it once was. So now Constantine’s trying a new ploy. He whispers “trade” into the ears of Venice and Genoa and when he does so, he speaks the only language they understand.’

  ‘Well, that’s no word of a lie,’ Grant said, ‘but surely Genoa and Venice don’t want a tussle with the Turk, they’ve too much to lose.’

  Maruffo took a swig from his cup and nodded. ‘They would risk much, it’s true, but if you offer men enough reward then they will always accept a risk. That’s what Constantine is doing at present – haggling over how much reward it will take.’

  ‘And what reward’s Genoa hoping for?’ said Grant. �
��You’ve Pera, you’ve Lesbos and Chios and the Crimean ports all perched on the Turk’s front step, and you do a brisk trade with both sides I’ll wager. A war would jeopardize all of that.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Maruffo said. ‘Which is why I’ve gained so many grey hairs since last you saw me! We can’t afford to provoke the sultan into a wider war, but if Constantine were to win without our help, he might, in his dissatisfaction with us, remove Genoa’s Pera trading concession, and that would bankrupt the republic. For every silver stavraton that trades in the markets across the strait, six trade here in tiny Pera. The disparity has been noted, you may be sure.’

  Maruffo fell into silence. His thoughtful gaze remained fixed for some time on the wine jug. Then his head jerked up and his attention returned to Grant. ‘Constantine is desperately hiring mercenaries. I get a dozen men a week through here; all the waifs and strays of the Mediterranean: Cretans, Cypriots, Rhodians and of course Genoese. Mostly Genoese. All of them heading across the water to throw their lives away in hope of winning a splendid victory and everlasting fame and fortune. I presume you’ve not come on a similar quest.’

  Grant stayed silent.

  Maruffo sighed and shook his head. ‘Imagine a ship, John, an old trading balinger that’s done the run from Genoa to Cyprus for generations. It’s seen out many a storm in its day, but time has left its timbers rotten and vulnerable. Now, you could sign on with its crew and maybe you make it to port and earn your coin, but maybe the next storm is bigger and splits the rotten hull and the sea pours in on you. This sort of opportunity is best left to the foolhardy. Better to sit on the harbourside and wait for another boat.’

  Maruffo rose from his seat. ‘Come. I’m to attend a council at Blachernae Palace this morning; ride over with me and see for yourself how things stand. If afterwards you’re not convinced this fight is for fools and glory hunters, I’ll mark you a lost cause.’