A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (14 page)

To get a sense of how these fittings would have appeared in a church at the time I had only a short walk to see their most monumental setting, in Hagia Sophia, ‘Holy Wisdom', for a thousand years the largest church in Christendom and one of the greatest structures to survive from antiquity. Built in only five years following the Nika riots, a factional dispute between chariot-racing supporters in which a previous church on the site had been burnt and Justinian had nearly been overthrown, it reflects an emperor intent on reasserting his authority at a time when he was also planning to use the power of the Church to expand his empire in the west. The huge size of Hagia Sophia reflects the congregational nature of Christianity, its greatest distinction from the religions that preceded it – despite their scale, the temples of pagan antiquity were exclusive in nature, restricted to a priesthood and a few others. The model for the early churches in Rome were the largest existing buildings designed for gatherings of people, the law-courts or ‘basilicas', the basis for the colonnaded church design represented in the wreck cargo, but Justinian's architects also took inspiration from the one great temple of ancient Rome that did not fit that plan, the second-century
AD
Pantheon – creating in Hagia Sophia a similar domed structure that was to serve as the model for many subsequent churches in the eastern orthodox tradition as well as for mosques. When it was finished, Hagia Sophia was like no other church seen before, clad in a veneer of polished white marble and gilding that made it shimmer across the Bosporus and visible from far out at sea, a beacon to Justinian's relationship with divinity and the synthesis between emperor and God that was meant to secure dominion for Byzantium over all of the lands that his generals could conquer.

The ambo of Hagia Sophia was damaged in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, when the Crusaders were persuaded to sack Constantinople – the greatest city in Christendom – on their way to the Holy Land, and it then disappeared after the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople
in 1453 and converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Nevertheless, much of the marble interior of the church survives, including many examples of Proconnesian and Thessalian marble together, as seen in the Church Wreck. Their most remarkable use is on the floor of the nave, where slabs of Proconnesian marble were deliberately laid with the veins in the stone aligned to look like waves, and divided by bands of Thessalian marble to represent rivers. The appearance of the ambo on this floor was described by Paul the Silentiary, a court official charged with maintaining silence in the Imperial palace, in a poem in Homeric hexameters recited to Justinian in 562 when the church was re-consecrated following the partial collapse of the dome:

As an island rises amidst the waves of the sea, adorned with cornfields, and vineyards, and blossoming meadows, and wooded heights, while the travellers who sail by are gladdened by it and are soothed of the anxieties and exertions of the sea; so in the midst of the boundless temple rises upright the tower-like ambo of stone adorned with its meadows of marble, wrought with the beauty of the craftsman's art.

I had seen a similar use of the veins in marble in the sixth-century Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, the port city on the Adriatic that had been the capital of the Ostrogoths in Italy and became the Byzantine capital in the west after Belisarius captured it in 540. The Proconnesian columns in the nave had been cut from the quarry with the veins running horizontally so that their undulations seem to follow the rhythm of the arches above, giving a sense of being at sea just as on the floor of Hagia Sophia. That same church has a beautiful mosaic above the altar showing a bejewelled cross in a circle, identical in design to the encircled cross on the Church Wreck screen fragment, and on either side a verdant landscape of trees and animals – the ‘blossoming meadows' of Paul the Silentiary – with the division between the viewer and the landscape not being a marble screen but a line of lambs. That made me think of the ambo as a demarcation not just between the congregation on the one side and the priests and Imperial entourage on the other – from the late sixth century the emperors were crowned on the ambo – but also between the earthly and the heavenly, allowing the viewer to look above the ambo and see images that ‘gladden the travellers' and were central to their faith. The Christian
fittings in Hagia Sophia from the time of Justinian may be long gone, but that sense of a sacred space still survives strongly today, with the minbar for the imam in place of the ambo, and high above that on either side of a tenth-century mosaic of the Virgin Mary and Jesus the huge calligraphic roundels hung in the nineteenth century to represent Muhammad and Allah.

Another church in Ravenna that brilliantly represents the role of Christianity under Justinian is the Basilica of San Vitale. In 534, the year after Belisarius took Carthage from the Vandals, the Ostrogoth Queen Amalasuntha in Ravenna wrote to Justinian to thank him for sending her marble:

Delighting to receive from your Piety some of those treasures of which the heavenly bounty has made you partaker, we send the bearer of the present letter to receive those marbles and other necessaries … All our adornments, furnished by you, redound to your glory. It is fitting that by your assistance should shine resplendent that Roman world which the love of your Serenity renders illustrious.

The letter was recorded by Cassiodorus, secretary to Amalasuntha's father, Theodoric the Great, who had established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy and ruled it as a vassal of the Byzantine emperor, maintaining Roman law and culture – he had been educated in Constantinople – and instituting a major programme of building in Ravenna. His daughter Amalasuntha, versed in Latin, Greek and philosophy, ‘endowed with wisdom and regard for justice to the highest degree', according to Procopius, ruled as regent for her young son from the end of Theodoric's reign in 526 to her murder in 535, the event that spurred Justinian to invade Italy. Theodoric had been tolerant of the Latin Church in Rome, followers of the same Nicene creed as the Byzantine Church, and he himself had churches built in Ravenna – most famously the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo – but they were for the Arian creed of Christianity that was followed by the Goths, and it is therefore unlikely that the ‘marbles' sent by Justinian to Amalasuntha would have included fittings for the Nicene liturgy such as those found in the Marzamemi wreck.

Having written an ‘official' history of Amalasuntha in
The Gothic Wars
, in which he attributes her murder to Gothic nobles disaffected
by her warmth towards Justinian– clearly evidenced in the language of her letter – in the
Secret History
Procopius presents an alternative version in which Justinian's wife Theodora was behind the murder, ‘considering that the woman was of noble birth and a queen, and very comely to look upon and exceedingly quick at contriving ways and means for whatever she wanted' – in other words, she was jealous and did not think there was room for both of them should Amalasuntha move to Constantinople. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is Theodora, and not Amalasuntha, who stares out from the mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale. The church was begun during the final years of Ostrogothic rule and the mosaics that make it famous were a private commission completed in 546–56, but everything we know about Justinian suggests that the imagery reflects his worldview; they may have been copied in part from mosaics that once adorned Hagia Sophia.

He and Theodora gaze with striking immediacy, their features portrait-like and individualised, set against a backdrop of vivid gold that serves to emphasise the Imperial aura and is less evocative of ancient Rome and more of the icons of later eastern tradition. Justinian is shown on the north side of the apse in a crown and purple robe, surrounded by clergy and soldiers and administrators, one of them probably Belisarius; Theodora faces him from the opposite side of the apse, with her own entourage. Christian imagery abounds, including a large Chi-Rho on one of the soldier's shields, a priest holding a bejewelled codex of the Gospels, and Justinian himself with a golden basket for the bread of the Eucharist, and Theodora with the vessel for wine. They are subordinate to the image of Christ at the back of the apse, a much larger figure flanked by angels above an orb representing universal dominion, but Christ too is shown in Imperial purple and is offering a crown that appears to be directed towards Justinian, as if appointing him regent on earth – an impression enhanced by the haloes behind Justinian and Theodora, perpetuating the concept of Imperial divinity that would have been familiar from pre-Christian Rome when the emperor was worshipped as a god. Viewed from the nave, the mosaics of San Vitale can be transposed in the mind's eye to the church of Hagia Sophia, allowing us to populate the ‘island of the sea' in Paul the Silentiary's poem – the ambo where Justinian would have faced the congregation just as in the mosaic, earthbound and yet occupying a sacred space from which he could project a unitary
message of Church and State as he sent his ‘Army of Christ' on their mission to re-establish Imperial authority on the old Roman world in the west.

This message is also seen in one of Justinian's other great legacies, the
Codex Justinianus
, a compendium of Roman law in which the dedication on the first page associates Christ with his name and his victories:
In Nomine Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Imperator Caesar Flavius Iustinianus Alamannicus Gothicus Francicus Germanicus Anticus Alanicus Vandalicus Africanus Pius …
‘In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Emperor Caesar Flavius Justinianus, conqueror of the Alemanni, the Goths, the Franks, the Germans, the Antes, the Alans, the Vandals, the Africans, pious…' The first law in the codex, reiterating a decree of the emperor Theodosius in the late fourth century, was the most important:

We desire that all peoples subject to Our benign Empire shall live under the same religion that the Divine Peter, the Apostle, gave to the Romans, and … we should believe that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit constitute a single Deity, endowed with equal majesty, and united in the Holy Trinity. We order all those who follow this law to assume the name of Catholic Christians …

This version of the Christian faith, called ‘Nicene' in the codex, was first established by a Council at Nicaea near Constantinople in 325 and remains the basis for Catholic doctrine to this day. The need for Justinian to assert it so strongly resulted from the numerous divergent views that had developed in the two centuries since that Council, with increasingly rarefied debate about the nature of divinity. Monophysites believed that Jesus had only one nature, the divine; Arians, taking their name from a theologian in Egypt in the early fourth century, that Christ did not always exist but was begotten by God the Father. The Goths and Vandals of the west were largely Arian and this gave Justinian a strong impetus for conquest, which in turn explains the need by Justinian and his officials to impose a single version of the liturgy based on Nicene Christianity and thus the highly standardised marble furniture seen in the Church Wreck – something that worshippers would associate not only with the new liturgy but also with Imperial power.

These theological debates influenced the developing iconography of Christianity, for which the decorative elements in the Church Wreck provide fascinating evidence. The crosses carved into the ambo, of the ‘Latin' form with splayed ends and the longer lower arm below the crossbeam, had only become common at the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century; most of the Christian carvings in the catacombs of Rome, an early place for worship and burial, were covert symbols such as the Chi-Rho and the IX, representing the first two letters of Christ and of Jesus Christ respectively and both found on the wreck panels as well. The depiction of Christ on the cross only began to appear commonly in the sixth century, with the Monophysites having objected to the image of a body that they saw as solely divine and other Christians also being uncomfortable with the idea. Crucifixion was still a form of execution in late antiquity and the tension between the cross as an image of day-to-day suffering and punishment and of Jesus' sacrifice would have been more immediate than in subsequent centuries.

Another use of the cross symbolically, as a military banner, had begun with the vision said to have been experienced by Constantine in 312 before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the victory over his rival Maxentius that led to Constantine becoming sole emperor. This vision could have been a later fiction, but it may have been a cross-shaped optical phenomenon known as a ‘sun dog' on the horizon. Whatever the truth of the story, it was the beginning of a history that saw the cross being carried by crusaders and conquistadores and many others, in an association between Christianity and conquest that had its first major expression in the wars of Justinian in the sixth century.

… these very mountains are cut asunder to yield us a thousand different marbles, promontories are thrown open to the sea, and the face of Nature is being everywhere reduced to a level. We now carry away the barriers that were destined for the separation of one nation from another; we construct ships for the transport of our marbles; and, amid the waves, the most boisterous element of Nature, we convey the summits of the mountains to and fro …

This passage is from the
Natural History
of Pliny the Elder, who devoted a chapter to marmoris, a term used in antiquity for many
types of decorative and structural stone rather than just the geological definition of marble today as metamorphic limestone or dolomite. The Mediterranean region abounds in these stones, from the famous white marble of Carrara in Italy to the coloured marbles of Greece and Asia Minor. The expansion of the Roman world in the second and first centuries
BC
gave access to new sources of stone, including the beautiful honey-coloured marble of Chemtou in Tunisia and the porphyry and granites of Egypt.