Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  Glistening in the gold and jewels that had been her midwife's fee, she came over to stand by him. The wily, courageous wife that an aspirant to Empire would need: absolutely. He could just see her in purple, as elegant as any lady in Byzantium and as deadly.

  His mother had hoped for grandchildren, and now she had at least two he would never dare to bring to her.

  Asherah leaned her head against his arm. As always, she knew his mind.

  “I have told you,” she said, “that I have no ambition to be Basilissa. The days of Queen Esther are gone for good. And can you imagine it? A Jewish Basilissa with a goddess-child in the Great Palace? The Bosphorus would rise and drown the city!”

  Leo laughed helplessly at the irony. “I have all the Empire a man could want. Right here.”

  Psellus and his puppets had drawn their line in the earth, forbidding their enemies to cross it. To protect what little they clutched, much though it seemed to them, they had abandoned all that lay beyond it—a far greater share.

  They had thrown this land away. Leo would take up its care and cherish it. He would not be an Emperor. Instead, he would rule here by influence and example, first among equals. Had he not thought that he had strayed into a ballad? Henceforward, ballads might be written about him.

  “Then,” said Asherah, “I suggest we get as many people as we can under cover of some kind. We will, naturally, open our courtyards to those who have no home, if they will consent...”

  To take bread from the hands of Jews? They had never refused before. If Asherah would not be Basilissa, she would be this land's provider, giving of herself and her wealth without stint. And she laugheth at the time to come. He was her husband; it was right for him to use such words to praise her. In days to come, he suspected the people watching her would take them up.

  They all were shards, all these people, washed up upon this shore, powerless by themselves, but capable of combining into a pattern that spelled life for as long as they could keep it.

  “We need to get Binah home.”

  At the sound of her name, the infant laughed and raised a hand to the golden butterflies that gleamed in Asherah's hair.

  Leo also put out a hand, pulling one of the ornaments free. His wife widened her eyes at him: this was hardly the place for such a liberty. At home, perhaps, in the luxurious quiet of their bedroom, but here?

  “These could cause too much wonder,” he said quietly. Perhaps they should save out a few as part of Binah's dowry, if, indeed, her mother meant her to live as a human child. But the rest of them were too-visible reminders of the ancient treasure that still lay below, however hidden, and that might lure people out to test the goodwill of a goddess whose temper, as always, was uncertain.

  “Quickly,” Joachim urged them. “We can tell anyone who thinks he saw them that it was just a trick of the light.”

  Asherah took the butterfly he held from him. “There is no need,” she agreed, “to bury them in the earth again. Or hide them in a strongbox.”

  She showed the ornament to her daughter, who laughed again and waved her hand. Then, she raised it to her lips. It trembled on her fingertips, then rose into the air, followed by the others, as, one by one, she kissed them back into life. Like a living halo, they circled mother and child once, then rose into the sky, just as the last of the sunlight faded.

  Again, Joachim's voice rose, his daughter's echoing it in translation. “...who kept us alive, sustained us, and permitted us to reach this joyous festival.”

  Joy? It would do to start with, Leo thought. Tonight, he would offer thanks and see that his people were fed. Tomorrow, there was work to be done.

  Drawing his family with him, Leo climbed out of the pit and stepped forward into the rest of his life.

  Author's note

  Shards of Empire was inspired by my 1990 trip to Turkey. That, in turn, was inspired by a long-time fascination with the Near East that has, at various times, provoked me into studying the Arab Revolt (I carefully did not mention T. E. Lawrence during my stay in Turkey, however), writing a fantasy trilogy set in an alternative Egypto-Byzantine universe (Byzantium's Crown, The Woman of Flowers, Queensblade), and setting out—so far, more's the pity, only in research and writing—from Byzantium along the ancient Silk Roads (Silk Roads and Shadows) into Central Asia, the site of several others of my books and collaborations (Imperial Lady and Empire of the Eagle, written with Andre Norton).

  While in Cappadocia, I examined the millstones closing off the caves from the upper world, leaned backward out an air conduit, examined the depth of a grain bin, then asked my guide, “How would you attack one of these places?”

  He had only himself to blame for such a question from the “lady novelist” placed in his care by the American Embassy, after all: he should never have told me the story of how the underground cities are allegedly joined by tunnels and connected to an as-yet-undiscovered central city—but I'm glad he did.

  “I do hope,” said Dr. Toni Cross, a classicist who is married to a Turkish economist and who directs American Research in Turkey (ARIT) in Ankara, “that this isn't going to be one of those books about the terrible Turks.” All I can say is that it would be a very poor return on their hospitality if I did that. As John Keegan says, it is difficult to share a border with the steppe because you must confront wave after wave of predatory horsepeople.

  But if horsepeople took away wealth, I took away memories of an unforgettable trip, my pictures of the caves, and this story. I even have my own physical shards: a chunk of fool's gold I picked up on the mound at Gordion that's commonly referred to as Midas's tomb, and a sharp-edged fragment of obsidian I grubbed out of an earth road across from the Salt Lake.

  In keeping with Clausewitz's aphorism about the “fog of war,” a great deal of dispute still exists over the August 1071 battle of Manzikert in Eastern Turkey. Most contemporary European scholars accept August 19 as the date, while almost all modern Turkish scholars conclude that it occurred on August 26. As was the case at the time, people still debate the abilities before, during, and after the battle of Romanus IV Diogenes, yet another in the procession of imperial military husbands who propped up a throne that had deteriorated rather markedly since the glory days (about 1025) of Basil the Bulgar-Slayer; the role played by Romanus's Norman mercenaries, who withdrew to sit the battle out, the family factions in Constantinople, chiefly those of Caesar John Ducas, and his son Andronicus Ducas, who withdrew at the worst possible moment at Manzikert; and the role played by historian, politician, and (to this more-than-skeptical critic) time-server Michael Psellus.

  Since I am not, by any stretch of even the most charitable imagination, a Byzantine scholar, I shall simply refer readers to standard works on the period, such as those by Vryonis and Ostrogorsky, and restrict myself to creating story, rather than popular history. I must express my gratitude to Harvard University's Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., for its hospitality and forbearance, especially Dr. Irene Vaslev and Mark Zapatka.

  In its day, the battle of Manzikert was regarded as crucial. Not only was it, as has been said in another context, a day that would live in infamy, it was the “dreadful day” from which Byzantium never recovered. An Emperor of the Romans had been taken, for the first time since the emperor Valerian surrendered to Shapur I of Persia in 270. Manzikert was even more of a debacle for Byzantium than the battle of Adrianople in 378, in which Valens, emperor in the East, died fighting the Goths (shortly after the death in 363 of Julian the Apostate while on campaign in Persia).

  Runciman points out in his History of the Crusades that “the Byzantines themselves had no illusions about it ... Again and again their historians refer to that dreadful day.” Because of the vulnerability of Asia Minor now to the Dar al-Islam, a balance of power in that area was shattered. With Byzantium now more vulnerable than ever to the forces of Islam, western rulers—and clerics—saw opportunity and provocation for the Crusades, which received further impetus when M
ichael VII, Romanus IV's immediate successor, appealed to Rome for help. La Chanson de Roland, with its ferocious opposition between pagan and Christian, jihad versus Church Militant, also dates from about this time.

  The first of the Crusades reached Constantinople, by then under the rule of the capable and wily Alexius Comnenus, who figures briefly but notably in this story as well. He was able to withstand and circumvent the Westerners (as readers will see in a subsequent book of mine): other Emperors were far from that fortunate; and ultimately, even before the Turks took it in 1453, Constantinople was sacked by the forces of the Christian West.

  What I hope in this explanation to do is convey some sense of the overlays of history in the area. Now, as then, Turkey is a gateway through which many peoples have passed and which many nations have fought to hold. Take, for example, the city of Amasya. It is a pretty town, used in the Ottoman Empire to house dissident nobles. Romanus passed through it in his attempts to regain his Empire. And it was old then. A visitor to this town can see the layers upon layers of history: an Ottoman house stands by a railroad and tunnel that could probably date from the time of Ataturk. Above the tunnel, Pontic tombs stare out blankly as a muezzin—not a tape—calls today's Faithful to prayer.

  I quite recognize that the task is as presumptuous as it was exciting, and I would like, for the benefit of readers whom I hope may be as fascinated by the Near East as I, to cite some of the sources I used.

  For the reader who simply wants a “scorecard,” Alfred Friendly's popularization, That Dreadful Day: The Battle of Manzikert, 1071 (Hutchinson, London, 1981), will provide a start and some useful bibliographical material.

  Thereafter, matters grow more complicated. First, the primary texts from the period. Chief among them for me were Fourteen Byzantine Rulers: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus, translated and with an introduction by E. R. A. Sewter, Penguin Books, and Anna Comnena's Alexiad, translated by A. S. Daws as well as by Professor Sewter. Dr. Harry Turtledove was kind enough to allow me to use his manuscript translation of Michael Attaleiates, a partisan of Romanus who wrote an eyewitness account and whose will provides interesting insights into Byzantine private life. I have made him a friend to Leo Ducas, and I hope he would not have minded too much breaking in an aristocratic recruit.

  Helping to explain the players, who are every bit as complicated as the Julio-Claudians in the West, is Demetrios Polemis’ The Doukai: A Contribution to Byzantine Prosopography (University of London, 1968). Thereafter, I follow the histories, chief among them Speros Vyronis’ magisterial The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1971). Much of his research on the period, on Turks, and on Manzikert in particular appear in the following: “Nomadization and Islamization in Asia Minor,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29, 1975, and “The Internal History of Byzantium During the Time of Troubles, 1057-81,” which is drawn from Professor Vryonis’ doctoral dissertation at Harvard University.

  In regard to the people and their actual history, I apologize for grafting Leo and his parents onto the already turbulent Ducas family. I make no excuse for Andronicus Ducas’ conduct. I also admit that I've mishandled Michael Psellus. He is a superb writer and chronicler of the times, but nevertheless a self-satisfied and ambitious man for whom I conceived an extreme dislike; and his letter to the blinded Romanus is nothing short of vicious.

  Also alive at the time of Manzikert was Alexius Comnenus, who would become emperor in his own right. As pragmatic as he was able, he married Irene, daughter of Andronicus Ducas. Among his children was Anna Comnena, the historian and rebel who chronicled the coming of the western knights in the First Crusade. Even allowing for his daughter's adoration, Alexius was a remarkably capable and skilled ruler. As a sidenote, I learned that Alexius befriended the sons of Romanus IV Diogenes. One—and I discovered this after naming my own characters—was named Leo.

  For information on the Turkish tribes, there is the monumental work by Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns, which cites Ammianus Marcellinus on the Huns. I also used Rene Grousset's A History of Central Asia (Rutgers University Press) and S. R. Turnbull's The Mongols in the invaluable Osprey Men at Arms series, which also provided me with a volume on Byzantine armies. The story of the gulam who captured the Byzantine emperor is true. What happened next to him is my invention.

  For archeological materials, I am indebted to my visits to the Ethnological Museum of Ankara, which contains treasures from the excavations of Catal Höyuk, one of the oldest human habitations on earth, numerous carved Hittite arslans, and many goddess images, from stately figures of Cybele to the tremendously beautiful figures of the Mother Goddess such as we are more familiar with from the Willendorf Venus. In this context, I found Marija Gimbutas’ The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 B.C.; Myths and Cult Images (University of California Press, 1982), as fascinating as it is controversial. I consider Hagia Sophia (Turizm Yayinlari Ltd., 1985) by Erdem Yucel, director of the museum of Hagia Sophia, very helpful. Unfortunately, I lost a companion pamphlet about the cistern of Justinian and have only my own photographs and the account of Ms. Marta Grabien to remind me of the existence of the Medusa at the base of the pillar.

  Judaica plays a great role in Shards of Empire. From the medieval period, I drew The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, and also found helpful Elizabeth Revel Nehen's The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art (Pergamon Press). Most helpful to me was Joshua Starr's 1935 book, The Jews in the Byzantine Empire (Texte und Forschungen zur Byzantinisch-Neugraekischen Philologie). As an example of the kind of sidenote that occurs in the type of research one does for novels like Shards of Empire, I discovered that Starr was a student of Gershom Scholem, the Cabbalist scholar.

  Also helpful were The World History of the Jewish People (Medieval Period, Vol. II, London, 1966) edited by Cecil Roth, et al., and Robert S. Lopez's seminal 1945 article, “The Silk Industry and Byzantine Europe” (Speculum), which documents the role of the Jews in the silk trade. Scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York have assured me that I can safely push back the rug trade, which is still active in Cappadocia, into the late eleventh century. For a more recent history of the rugs that are called “Turkish,” I used Contemporary Hand-Made Turkish Carpets, by Ugur Ayyildiz (Turistik Yayinlari, Istanbul). Cappadocia, in particular Ürgup (Hagios Prokopios) and Göreme, is still a center for the rug trade, and I have the bills to prove it.

  Jewish trading families were well documented, both in the Empire and along the trade routes as far as Ch'ang-an, and a Jewish marriage contract from the second decade of the eleventh century survives. (See A History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Evelyne Patlagean's “Byzantium in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.")

  Cappadocia has long been a site of Christian habitation and prayer. St. Paul passed through it in his third journey, and, in the fourth century, it was associated with famous theologians such as St. Basil, “light of the Cappadocians, or rather of the world,” along with Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. Leo the Deacon mentions the cave dwellings in Cappadocia as being commonplace in the tenth century.

  Until relatively recently, the caves were inaccessible to the West. Paul Lucas, traveling at the orders of the Sun King, was the first European traveler to reach Cappadocia. In 1718, he published a highly colored account of his journey. Missionaries ventured into it in the nineteenth century, occasionally dying of exhaustion. The scholar Hans Rott visited the site in 1906, and Fr. Guillaume de Jerphanion, whose impressive work on the valleys, Une nouvelle province de l'art byzantin (Paris, 1925-1942), is still a classic, in 1907.

  Among the books I consulted on this fascinating and formerly inaccessible area were Caves of God: Cappadocia and Its Churches, by Spiro Kostof (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Lynn Rodley's Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia (Cambridge, 1985); Rowland J. Manston's 1958 typescript of “Notes on Rock-Cut Churches of Cap
padocia” (preserved in the Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks); Tenth-Century Metropolitan Art in Byzantine Cappadocia, by Ann Wharton Epstein (Dumbarton Oaks, 1986); and Fatih Cimok's Cappadocia (Istanbul).

  For the underground cities, I relied upon my own experience (the caves have been partially electrified, but exploration of them is incomplete) and on Omer Demir's Cappadocia, Cradle of History (Ankara, 1990). This is a charmingly quirky volume, which assigns to rooms in Derinkuyu an insane asylum, a church, and places for tying up prisoners. Demir speaks of the tunnels between cities and mentions the graves in the underground cities. He also mentions the discovery of the mummified body of a young girl in Ihlara Valley (Peristrema), one of the most remote of the Cappadocian monastic communities and cut by the Melendiz River to the depth of 150 meters, which is where I placed Father Meletios and his friends. The tunnel joining Ihlara with the underground cities is, of course, a figment of my imagination.

  I have taken considerable liberty with distances between Ihlara and the underground cities, the underground cities and Hagios Prokopios. It's known that a Turkish mount could cover 40 miles in a day and perhaps 60. The Cappadocian horses were good, but the Greeks rode, by and large, heavier than the Turks. Still, if you work on the assumption that Leo and his people rode flat out and the shortest way possible—and that it was a very hard ride (though hardly impossible for people like Asherah and her father, who were hardened by travel along the caravan routes), you can about make the distances work. Demir makes the correspondences between Derinkuyu ("deep well") and Malagobia ("difficult subsistence") and identifies Kaymakli with Enegobi. I was delighted to read Allen Varney's “Turkey's Underground Cities” (Dragon, #201, January 1994, pp. 16-23), and am indebted to John Bunnell, Barbara Young, and Dr. Esther Friesner for pointing it out to me. I should add that the city I chose to use in Shards of Empire was Derinkuyu.