Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  The church itself and its associated monastery were probably founded as long ago as the sixth or seventh century, but after a number of restorations both had fallen into disrepair by the early fourteenth century. The monastery is long gone. As the church survives it is almost entirely the creation of one man, a wealthy Byzantine Greek named Theodore Metochites, who paid for and oversaw the complete renovation of both church and monastery between the years 1316 and 1321. It was during those years that the Chora's mosaics were assembled and its frescoes rapidly painted onto the still-wet plaster.

  The Church of the Chora is the finest, most concentrated, and best-preserved example of Byzantine art surviving today. The Chora also reflects a startling new phase in the long history of Byzantine artistic expression. A thousand miles to the west, the Italian painter Giotto di Bondone — Metochites’ nearly exact contemporary—had just completed his own cycle of frescoes at the Arena Chapel in Padua. That work, Giotto's masterpiece, is now recognized as having inaugurated the artistic revolution of the Italian Renaissance. Taking the clear family resemblance between the two fresco cycles as a cue, art historians have suggested that they share a common humanist aesthetic, a new interest in the realistic portrayal of the human figure. Some have traced this interest back to Byzantium, to the period of innovation in Byzantine art that culminated in the Chora and that helped spark the artistic revolution to follow in the West.

  Byzantium in the era of Metochites’ lifetime was enjoying a renaissance of its own, one that prefigured its better-known Italian counterpart. The brilliant Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman, who died in 2000 at age ninety-seven, wrote a little gem of a book about it, The Last Byzantine Renaissance. Other historians usually call it the Paleologan Renaissance, Paleologos being the surname of the emperors whose dynasty ruled in the last two centuries of the empire's existence.

  There are obvious and important differences between the two renaissances of Italy and Byzantium. It's highly significant that we know Giotto's name but not that of any artist who participated in the Chora restoration, for which all recognition went solely to the wealthy patron, Metochites. Italians were shaking off the medieval worldview in a way that the Byzantines never would before time ran out on them.

  If Theodore Metochites had done nothing more than restore the Chora, his name would still be worthy of remembrance. But quite apart from his patronage, he is considered the founder of the Last Byzantine Renaissance. The leading intellectual of his time, Metochites was an impressively learned writer and philosopher as well as a powerful government official, serving as prime minister for nearly a quarter of a century under the Paleologan emperor Andronicus II.

  Like most Byzantine literati, by modern standards Metochites was a grotesque windbag. Even the normally verbose Byzantines generally found his classicizing Greek prose repetitive, self-aggrandizing, and often downright impenetrable. All of his writings survive except his letters, which were destroyed by fire in 1671, a loss that likely comes as a sneaky relief to those struggling to wade through his work today: dense commentaries on Aristotle, astronomical treatises, flaccid poems, tepid lives of saints, pompous orations, and above all reams and reams of miscellaneous essays on Greek history and literature.

  Yet, modern scholars have also discovered nuggets of originality and liberal open-mindedness, two qualities not usually held to be widespread among Byzantine writers. Metochites has even been called a humanist, and his literary interests have been seen as complementing the artistic values reflected in the Chora mosaics and frescoes. As with its Italian counterpart, the Last Byzantine Renaissance was a literary and intellectual movement as much as (or even more than) an artistic one, and both renaissances took their cues from the writings of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world.

  In his pious appreciation of the Chora's new artwork, Metochites was no more than lukewarmly conventional. By contrast, he waxed passionate and eloquent about the secular manuscripts, the classics of ancient Greek literature, with which he abundantly stocked the library of the Chora's monastery, making it the best in the city. It was his own personal collection, which he donated with the stipulation that it also serve as a public library. Metochites considered this to be a far more significant act of philanthropy on his part than any other, as he says explicitly in a long admonitory letter to the monks of the Chora: “For my sake,” he pleads in conclusion, “keep the storehouses of the best wealth, namely the priceless books, in safety,” preserving “these exquisite objects and treasures undiminished, as they will be much desired by men for all times to come.”

  When Andronicus II was overthrown by his rebellious grandson in 1328, Metochites found himself stripped of his power and wealth. After being briefly imprisoned and then exiled, in accordance with Byzantine retirement custom he himself entered the monastery of the Chora as a monk, taking the name Theoleptos. He died there a few years later, in his early sixties.

  Although the fate of these specific books is unknown, in a larger sense Metochites’ words could not have been more prophetic. Within a few decades, the West would begin its slow, halting rediscovery of ancient Greek literature, and the realization that these classic works were available only in Byzantium would lead men such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their successors to form an alliance with the Byzantine humanists who were Metochites’ intellectual heirs. Over the span of about a century, as the remnants of their empire crumbled around them, the partnership between these Byzantine teachers and their Italian students literally saved ancient Greek literature from destruction at the hands of the conquering Turks. The Byzantine contribution of the Greek classics allowed the promise of Renaissance humanism to be fulfilled, by letting the West reclaim the body of literature that makes up the foundation of Western civilization. How frightening it is to contemplate a world without these works, and how unsettling to make out the slenderness of the thread by which they dangled over the void.

  Chapter One

  Toward a Parting of the Ways

  ravel to Italy, and you'll find that Byzantium is never more than a stone's throw away. Even that short distance is closed, discreetly but persistently, when you step into the painting galleries, the museums, and especially the churches. In these places Byzantium swirls gently around you like a mist, muting the hum of German, American, and Japanese voices: in Venice's Basilica di San Marco, for example, built with the help of Byzantine artisans, modeled on Constantinople's long-lost Church of the Holy Apostles, and adorned with loot from Venice's conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade; or in San Vitale at Ravenna, where the famous mosaics of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his wife, the notorious stripper-turned-empress Theodora, each with their retinues, gaze limpidly at each other across fifteen yards of apse and as many centuries.

  Byzantium comes to life in the monuments of Italy as nowhere else in Europe, and in the monuments of Ravenna as nowhere else in Italy. Venice certainly has more of a Byzantine feel today, but it's the feel of a much later period, and anyway Venice's Byzantium is generally either lifted or copied. Ravenna's Byzantium is primal. Built long before the Venetians sank their first piling, its swampy environs more easily defensible than Rome, Ravenna in the early Middle Ages was the capital of the Byzantine administration in Italy.

  Then came the barbarians—Vandals, Goths, and others—whose turbulent arrival and usurpation of political power we know as “the fall of Rome.” Determined to reclaim the lost territory, in the middle of the sixth century Justinian carried out a ruthless and grueling Reconquest of Italy and other parts of the Western empire. Having completed the long war, he built San Vitale to celebrate his victory.

  A few minutes’ walk from San Vitale, mosaics in the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo offer a very different message from the bland, assertive gaze of the imperial couple and their retinues. Built by the Gothic king and statesman Theoderic the Great just before Justinian came to the throne, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo precedes San Vitale by a generation. It proclaims in the most buoyant terms the Goths’ a
rrival on the Roman scene. Two extended series of mosaics face each other on the church's long interior walls: a grand cityscape of Ravenna featuring Theoderic's palace on the south wall and a view of the nearby port of Classis on the north wall.

  The cityscape on the south wall once included portraits of Goths, members of Theoderic's Amal dynasty or other nobles; after the Reconquest, just as they had painstakingly rooted the Goths out of Italy, the Byzantines prised out and replaced the mosaic stones constituting the Gothic figures. A visitor today can clearly make out the dappled areas where the new stones, which don't quite match, were applied. On the edges of columns depicted next to the palace, between which billowing curtains replaced the original Gothic figures leaning against them, you can still see a few fingers: they are remains left by the revision, too delicately embedded to chip away from the mosaic columns, so that it looks as if the last of the Goths hide there behind them, waiting to spring out through the curtains. On the wall nearby, what appears to be a portrait of Theoderic has had his name excised from the legend and that of Justinian written in.

  Sant’Apollinare Nuovo reflected a widespread state of affairs in Europe at the time, a civilization really, but a clumpy one that scholars have given the name “sub-Roman”: the part-Roman, part-barbarian cluster of cultures, like the Goths, that arose in the West over the fragmented course of the fourth and fifth centuries. These yeasty little worlds were the earliest signs of the Western Europe to come, and appeared first in the former Roman colonies from Spain through Gaul to Germany and down into the Balkans, and then eventually in Italy itself.

  In Italy under the Goths, however, there wouldn't be time for the brew to ferment properly; the vessel would soon be shattered for good by Justinian's vain attempt to grab it back. Not only the Goths would suffer, for virtually the entire peninsula would be wrecked, its people deeply traumatized by what was theoretically their rescue.

  It was not the barbarian invasions at all, but the havoc of this brutal Byzantine Reconquest that ended the ancient world in the West.

  Yet, Theoderic's reign in Italy, which came right before the Reconquest, had an air of optimism. The early fifth century had been violent and unsettling in the West, with Roman rule petering out and the incoming barbarians taking over in uneasy partnership with the now rudderless Roman local elites: Vandals ending up in Africa, Visigoths in Spain, Franks in Gaul. Rome itself was twice laid open to barbarian armies, in 410 and again in 455. The crumbling of Roman power had led a Christian bishop and writer from Roman Africa, one Augustine of Hippo, to turn away from the earthly landscape and point his readers toward the City of God, whose pristine invulnerability stood in splendid contrast to Rome's decay. However, within a few short decades the West turned a corner.

  The year 476, later seen as the end of the empire in the West, in fact passed unremarked by contemporaries. The absence of imperial power had by then lost its fearsome aspect. In the last decade of the century, the Byzantines invited Theoderic—himself raised and more or less educated in Constantinople—to occupy Italy with his followers. The Goths set themselves up in an uneasy alliance with the old Roman senatorial elites, ruling Italy in the name of good government and of the “Roman” emperor in Byzantium.

  Procopius, the main Byzantine historian of this era, describes Theoderic as popular and dignified. The Gothic king, we are told, “was exceedingly careful to observe justice, he preserved the laws on a sure basis, he protected the land and kept it safe from the barbarians dwelling round about, and attained the highest possible degree of wisdom and manliness.” Though in time Theoderic himself could be considered “in name a tyrant,” Procopius goes on, “in fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning.”

  Procopius’ description hints at a few of the intriguing ambiguities that characterize this shifting world. What made a barbarian? A tyrant? A king? Indeed, an emperor? Byzantines and Italians would soon begin to come up with conflicting answers to such questions as they slowly went their separate ways. The long divergence—marked by tiny, imperceptible steps rather than huge, irrevocable ones—stretched over the whole thousand-year history of Byzantium.

  Boethius and Cassiodorus

  To start us on the path to this parting of the ways, we shall call on two learned Roman gentlemen of Theoderic's day, Boethius and Cassiodorus. Like double-faced Janus, the Roman god of arrivals and departures, each looks in two directions at once, harkening back to the fading world of antiquity and beckoning us forward into the emerging world of the Middle Ages.

  Modern scholars invariably introduce Boethius as “the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics.”∗ What this comes down to is that Boethius was the last Western European of cultural consequence to know Greek and Greek philosophy for a very long time. He wasn't the absolute last— there were a number of stragglers, certainly more than used to be thought—but he was the last heavyweight, at the very least until Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics rediscovered Aristotle starting in the twelfth century, some seven centuries later. Even then few if any Scholastics had Boethius’ knowledge of ancient Greek; knowledge on that level in the West would have to wait nearly a thousand years, for the Renaissance scholars of quattrocento Florence.†

  It isn't certain how Boethius learned his Greek, or where he learned it, though it's possible from hints in the sources that he studied in Athens or Alexandria, or both, as a young man. If so, it wasn't much longer that such sojourns, once standard practice for a vanishing Mediterranean-wide upper class, would be possible. Boethius’ father died when he was still a boy, and he was adopted by an older relative, Symmachus, a leading figure in Rome who also had strong ties to the literary culture of the Greek East. The refined Symmachus, it turns out, nursed an ambitious plan for restoring Italian familiarity with the Greek classics, and this may have been among his reasons for sponsoring his brilliant younger relative. Under Symmachus’ guidance, Boethius undertook the almost unbelievably audacious project not only of translating into Latin the entire works of Plato and Aristotle, with commentary, but also of reconciling their often divergent philosophical views. And he planned to do this in his spare time, since from the age of about twenty he was writing prodigiously as well as filling increasingly important political positions for Theoderic.

  Theoderic clearly valued Boethius’ wide-ranging intellect, making it part of plans he had for revitalizing higher Roman culture and fixing in place its Gothic veneer. But he also had worldly reasons for promoting Greek learning in Italy. Boethius’ learning had a practical side, and the king took full advantage of it in promoting his domestic and foreign prestige agendas: fulsomely flattering letters exist in which he asks Boethius to devise a tamper-proof system of weights and measures, to find a skilled harpist to send to Clovis, king of the Franks, and to come up with two timepieces, one a sundial and the other a water clock, as impressive gifts for Gundobad, king of the Burgundians. The letters present a pretty picture of peaceful coexistence, cooperation even, between the Roman senatorial class—of which Boethius was a member—and its new Gothic masters in Ravenna.

  There was, however, a dark side to this happy kingdom. Modern scholars have generally followed Procopius in portraying Theoderic as an enlightened and liberal ruler, at least until the last few years of his reign. In particular, they point to his religious tolerance, for he and his Goths were Arian Christians, and as such they were not in communion with the main body of the church.∗ The Goths had been converted during the fourth century, when Arianism had powerful support, especially among the imperial heirs of the dynasty of Constantine. Arianism was later declared heretical, but not before the Goths and most of the other German tribes had adopted it. In an age in which religious persecution was almost a matter of course, Theoderic's policy was one of “separate but equal.” In Ravenna today, next to Theoderic's Arian cathedral, visitors may find the charming Arian baptistery, where Goths received baptism, and which was built to balance the grander Or
thodox baptistery adjoining the city's main cathedral.

  The baptistery of the Orthodox was in fact the one used by the Romans. Since the church had not yet split along the lines that would later divide it, of Roman Catholic and Byzantine or Greek Orthodox, either term would do: catholic (“universal”) and orthodox (“right-believing”) were used freely in both Rome and Constantinople.

  It was now that the earliest cracks appeared in the edifice. From 484 to 519, when Boethius was growing up and beginning his service in Theoderic's government, the church underwent its first East-West schism. It arose when the pope excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople over the question of how to resolve another heresy, that of the Monophysites.† In Constantinople, the emperor sided with the patriarch, while in Rome the powers that be supported the pope, and so the whole controversy became highly political, alienating the remaining local Roman elites from the imperial government back in Constantinople.

  Theoderic, whose constitutional position was at best ambiguous, benefited from the schism, for their hostility to Constantinople made the Roman elites much more willing to cozy up to the Arian Goths. As long as Theoderic could play Rome and Constantinople against each other, his position between them was relatively secure. In 518, however, a humble soldier named Justin was acclaimed as emperor. From the start, the power behind Justin's throne was his nephew Peter Sabbatius, who promptly took the name Justinian, and who seems to have engineered his uncle's elevation. Determined to restore unity, Justinian took part personally in the negotiations to end the schism, and his efforts bore fruit the following year. With pope and patriarch once more in communion, Theoderic suddenly found himself on shaky ground.