A History of the World (39 page)

Sailing from Byzantium

Here is how it finished. There were fourteen miles of wall protecting Constantinople, said to be the greatest city in Christendom. But inside the walls, among the multicoloured churches, the ancient Roman monuments and spacious squares, there were now so few people living that parts of the city had been turned back into farmland. In the 500s, this had been the largest city in the Western world, with half a million inhabitants. By the 1200s there were still four hundred thousand people there, and its wealth awed observers. The French Crusader Geoffroi de Villehardouin spoke of ‘those high ramparts and the strong towers . . . the splendid palaces and the soaring churches’. The Crusaders, he said, ‘never thought that there could be so rich and powerful a place on earth’. Not long afterwards, a Muslim merchant called Abdullah reported that it took a whole morning to cross Constantinople from side to side, and that it had almost one hundred thousand churches.
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Yet by 1453, for Constantinople’s last stand, to man those walls the last emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus had only around seven thousand able-bodied men left.

Confronting him was a vast army under the command of a sharp-nosed, cruel and brilliant young Turkish sultan, Mehmet II. He had
already confounded the defenders by dragging his ships overland on rollers so that the city, encircled on two sides by water and on one side by land – where its famous walls were strongest – was effectively throttled. Mehmet had about a hundred thousand battle-hardened troops and excellent cannon, designed for him by a German engineer. He had already taken all the surrounding towns and forts, impaling any survivors in full view of Constantinople’s defenders. Every desperate appeal for help from the Christian rulers of Europe had gone unanswered. A lunar eclipse, the slipping of the most precious icon as it was being carried through the streets, a violent thunderstorm, a thick fog and a strange red glow in the sky had already convinced many that God had deserted what had once been the greatest Christian city in the world. The tolling of bells and the processing of icons continued, however, as the desperate Byzantines called for help.

Now, the eleventh Emperor Constantine told his commanders they must be ready to die for faith, country, king and family. He reminded them that they were the descendants of Greek and Roman heroes. Into the vast Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, hundreds of priests and monks, nuns and ordinary people, gathered to celebrate vespers for the very last time.

In the early hours of Tuesday 29 May 1453, Turkish trumpets and drums sounded, and the attack began. Wave after wave of soldiers flung themselves at the cannon-damaged walls. Eventually, moving in perfect formation, the Christian-born slaves who had been transformed into janissaries, the faithful crack troops of Mehmet’s army, began to overwhelm the desperate defenders. The Turks poured through the gaps, calmly killing as they came. In Hagia Sophia, priests continued celebrating mass even as the attackers forced their way through its great doors, stabbing and spearing the worshippers until they reached the altar, and the priests themselves, who died worshipping as the last service ended. Constantine, determined not to be taken prisoner, is said to have stripped off all his imperial insignia, the purple and the eagles, and thrown himself with his sword into the middle of the fiercest fighting, where he was quickly hacked to death.

The Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire was one of the great success stories of the Mediterranean world; but it is remembered mostly
for how it ended. It was long considered a large and impressive failure, to one side of the main thrust of European history.

What do most of us know of Byzantium? We have a vague impression of glitter and decadence; as the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats had it,

We may be aware of the titanic walls, parts of which still stand, around the centre of today’s bustling Istanbul, and of the strange art the Byzantines produced. It is a culture of mosaics and carved ivory, of heavy-eyed emperors and saints and solemn angels. Art historians tell us it led to the better-known altarpieces of the Renaissance, and its connection with the Christian Orthodox icons of Russia and Bulgaria is clear: the first great icon-painting of Russian history, still revered today in Moscow, was actually executed in Constantinople. But it seems somehow outside the mainstream of European art, a ghostly figure half-hidden in theological thickets and historical tangles. And that is true of Byzantium itself.

Even the naming is slippery. ‘Byzantion’ was the name of the old Greek city that Constantine took over and planned as the new centre of the Roman Empire. Following a Graeco-Roman tradition of rulers naming cities after themselves (as with Alexandria), he called it Constantinople. Its citizens called themselves Byzantines to distinguish themselves from Western Romans, but also sometimes
Romani
(‘Romans’ in Latin) because they also claimed to inherit the best of old Rome. We tend to talk about the Byzantine Empire. As noted earlier, awestruck Norsemen called the place Miklagard, ‘Great City’; it was also known in Greek as the City of God. Today it is Istanbul. But whatever we call it, this was, as its modern chronicler John Julius Norwich reminds us, a remarkably long-lived human society. Founded by Constantine in May 330 and falling to the Ottomans in May 1453, it lasted for 1,123 years and eighteen days. That is, roughly the same timespan as distances today’s British from the England of Alfred the Great, the Saxons and the Danes. If Byzantium was a ‘failure’ or ‘outside the mainstream’, it was a remarkably persistent failure.

The Victorian historians’ contempt for it cast a long shadow. Norwich quotes W.E.H. Lecky, writing in 1869, who considered the
Byzantine Empire ‘without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed . . . a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides’.
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Why such anger about Byzantium? Perhaps it is the historian’s love of tidiness. Byzantium does not slot neatly into the narrative of a steady Western march to enlightenment. It has not endowed modern mankind with useful science or much original literature – though it had some wonderfully vivid and scandalous historians of its own. And of course, it ended badly.

But the main reason for the blanketing of Byzantium under layers of condescension and neglect is the centrality of religion to its civilization. For this was a culture more saturated in religious fervour and theological argument than any other in the history of the Mediterranean world. Though founded by a Roman emperor who wanted to impose Christianity on his subjects, it was only gradually that it became a real hub of the Christian world. Even as its jaw-droppingly beautiful and radical Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was being created under the emperor Justinian – it was consecrated in 537, and its world-famous dome now protects a mosque – the city housed many pagan shrines and statues to Roman gods. In law, military and engineering know-how, entertainments, learning and finance, Byzantium was the hinge between the classical and the Christian medieval worlds. But it was a creaky, slow-moving hinge.

The Byzantines were almost always fighting – the waves of nomad warriors arriving from the east, then the Muslim conquerors pressing through their rich eastern flanks; and, often, rival Christian kingdoms to the west and north as well. At its greatest extent, the empire embraced southern Italy, the Balkans, most of modern Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, as well as the Crimea at the northern edge of the Black Sea. At its peak it attracted immigrants from across Europe and Asia to work and fight on its behalf, including Italians, the Vikings who became the Varangian Guard, and dispossessed Anglo-Saxons who had lost their homes after the Norman conquest of 1066. Long before the great walls fell, Constantinople had shrunk to little more than a city-state, with tiny patches of land outside.

But Byzantium’s real conflict, which also never stopped, was about the true nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the correct
way to worship. Different beliefs about Christ’s nature, the authority of the pope and the bishops, and many lesser matters radically, and tragically, divided the Byzantines and their Christian enemies.

We often find it hard to take such arguments seriously. But the problem may be ours; for Christians of the time, these were urgent and personal questions. When Constantine summoned all the Christian bishops to that great summit at Nicaea in 325 to discuss the views of Arius, the debate was about whether Christ shared the same divine substance as God or (as Arius and followers thought) was a lesser entity than God. This was no mere squabble, since if the Arians were right, then Christ’s offer of salvation through faith in him was seriously questionable. It was a matter of life and death, no less. Arianism was condemned, though it survived and spread in popularity among many northern peoples. After this came other fierce arguments. Many were about the rituals and words used in church services, and later on about whether the pope in Rome or the Patriarch in Constantinople was the true leader of all Christians. Throughout, brilliant theologians, monks living in monasteries or as hermits, and bullish bishops from outlying churches would test one another and attract substantial popular followings.

The spirituality of Byzantium was transmitted through long music-accompanied services, the air laden with incense, in splendid golden churches that must have stunned and awed the worshippers. Western churches learned from them about how to delight – even drench – the senses. Today, the best way of getting some idea of what they must have been like is to attend a Russian service in one of the Orthodox churches in Moscow or Kiev. But Byzantine spirituality brought with it a fatal political consequence, because it cut off this Eastern, Greek-speaking Christian centre from the Rome-led, Latin and Western European world. The rise and sudden expansion of Islam sliced off Byzantium’s eastern provinces – today’s Turkey – and turned the city into an outpost of Christianity. Italians, French, Germans and Spaniards tended to regard Byzantium’s version of Christianity as outlandish and heretical; and so long as the Byzantines abhorred papal authority, ‘Christendom’ did not really exist there.

At times this led Western Christians to attack their Eastern rivals directly. Most infamously, in 1202–4, the so-called Fourth Crusade
went veering wildly off course, and under its Venetian leadership sacked Constantinople itself.

The pope had ordered yet another attempt to seize back Jerusalem from the Saracens. The Crusaders, under French leadership, had decided upon a novel plan. Influenced by the ambitious plans of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, who had recently died, in 1199, they decided to attack via Egypt. To do that, they needed a great fleet to transport them there; only Venice, with its ship factory at the Arsenale, could provide one. The Venetians were led at the time by a blind doge in his eighties, Enrico Dandolo, who drove a very hard bargain, and then announced he would join the crusade himself. But when the time came, far fewer Frankish Crusaders turned up than expected, and without the money to pay for their Venetian ships. Dandolo again drove a hard bargain: they must stop en route and take back a Balkan town that the Venetians had lost. This they did. But there they came across a deposed young Byzantine emperor, who asked for their help, in return for a reward, in getting his throne back from his uncle. At this point, the story gets murky. The Venetians had never wanted to attack Egypt anyway, since they had good trading relations there. But as trading rivals and Latin Christians, they loathed the Byzantines. (It may have been after a fight in Constantinople many years before that Dandolo lost his sight.) So yet again, they postponed fighting the Saracens and turned towards Byzantium instead. It would prove an awesome decision.

It was not particularly difficult for the combined Venetian and Frankish forces to defeat the Byzantine usurper and place his nephew in power, though it involved a bold attack on the famous walls from the unexpected, seaward side. But it proved much harder to get the money the young emperor had promised. He had also offered to place the Byzantine Church under the pope’s authority. This rash promise, the aggressive behaviour of the Crusaders, the huge cost of paying off the Venetians, then a series of disastrous fires, all made the new emperor very unpopular in his city. He was duly murdered by another usurper, and the only way the Franks and Venetians could recoup their money was by means of a second attack. Dandolo, by now quite likely in his nineties, had heroically led his troops from the front in the first attack. Now, as the Venetians tied the masts of their boats together to create platforms from which to assault the walls, he decided to go for
broke. Rather than simply looting the place, he would oust the Byzantine rulers entirely and make the city a puppet state under Venetian control.

The attack was successful, but what followed was horrific: a three-day orgy of burning, rape and looting which destroyed much of the classical inheritance of Constantinople. One Byzantine observer described the sacking of the great church itself as both a physical rape and a spiritual one: ‘A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place . . . nor was there any mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God.’ John Julius Norwich argues that this sack of Constantinople, which saw all its accumulated learning go up in flames and its treasures taken back to Europe, may have been the single biggest such loss in history: ‘Western civilization suffered a loss greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century or the burning of the library of Alexandria by the soldiers of the Prophet in the seventh.’
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