God's Gold (30 page)

So there was every reason to believe that the coin of Constans I found close to the palace's foundations may have been around for a very long time before being lost. Even if it did correctly date the foundations of the palace, this was no serious problem because the Vandals would have simply assumed control of a preexisting Late Roman imperial
palatium
before adding the audience chamber to the north.

But what of the palace's relative modest size, surely insufficiently grand for imperial use? Not so, however, if this structure was merely one part of a far larger edifice whose sprawling wings are today buried to the north or were destroyed in antiquity and recycled into later buildings in Tunis. Personally, this is my preferred interpretation but one that need not be exclusive. Back in London I eagerly met up with Professor Richard Hodges, director of excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Butrint in Albania and its triconch palace of comparable date. He is a world expert on Late Antiquity and his take on my “palace” was worth its weight in gold. I was also very keen to hear about the new mosaics and headless marble statue his team had just dug up in their forum. Butrint has become a byword for meticulous excavation and publication.

Hodges turned up in my offices at
Minerva
magazine in London's West End beaming, infectious with ideas and exciting schemes. We shot the breeze about his triconch palace and, very cautiously, I took him through my plans of Carthage's equivalent and a sequence of photos. Quite honestly, I was expecting my theory to be shot down on the basis of the “size matters” equation. After all, what survives in Carthage—the second-largest city of antiquity—is even smaller than at Butrint, a relatively minor provincial capital. However, I ended up tingling with excitement when he bestowed his blessing on my idea, pointing out that the walls of his palace were “tiddly” compared to the “colossal” foundations on Byrsa Hill. Then the bombshell: the Carthage palace may seem small but it was designed to go up, not out, perhaps to as many as three stories high. Of course; this made perfect sense. Byrsa
was honeycombed with endless ancient buildings of Phoenician, Punic, and Roman date. By Late Antiquity there was little room left to breathe other than upward. The Vandal palace, seat of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem, was the skyscraper of its day.

I breathed in the atmosphere of this ancient ruin, whose great legacy had been forgotten over the centuries, and imagined the spectacular impact that Jerusalem's Temple treasure would have had on the Vandal court. From AD 455 to 533 the candelabrum, Table of the Divine Presence, and trumpets illuminated this very building. But when the emperor Justinian's army marched on Carthage in 533, the Jewish spoils were nowhere to be found: they had seemingly vanished into thin air.

 

I
t was from the mighty port of Carthage that Gaiseric's expeditionary force against Rome sailed in AD 455; the victorious army returned by exactly the same route, only this time laden down with the emperor's wife and children, and “the Jewish vessels which Vespasian's son Titus had brought to Rome after the capture of Jerusalem,” in the words of Theophanes. Geographically, historically, architecturally, and archaeologically, the palatial structure on Byrsa Hill was the only place where the Vandals would have stored their riches. Just like Vespasian and Titus almost four hundred years earlier, Gaiseric would have divided the spoils into those to be converted into liquid capital and those worthy of being kept as crown jewels. Of humble origins, the Vandals had no dynastic claim to power. In such circumstances the barbarians would have eagerly assumed the Roman trappings of civilization. The Jewish treasure symbolized the heart of that mentality: empowerment through the possession of the crown jewels of vanquished cultures.

However, when Belisarius seized Gelimer's palace in AD 533, all of the Vandals' treasure had vanished. King Gelimer had moved the state treasures away and out of the reach of Byzantine hands. The main battle for North Africa didn't take place at Carthage but converged on Tricamarum, eighteen miles from the Vandal capital. Gelimer had fled west and assembled his troops, along with mercenary Moors, on the plain of Bulla Regia close to the border with modern Algeria.

Some eight hundred Vandals and fifty Romans died in the battle of Tricamarum, which also revealed Gelimer to be a total coward. As soon as the Byzantine army advanced, the Vandal king leaped on his horse without saying a word and fled down the road to Numidia. In the heat of battle the barbarians had no time to break camp before following suit, and it was at Tricamarum that the Byzantine army got its hands on a mountain of gold:

Even though Procopius very strongly confirms that the Vandal treasure contained riches looted from Roman lands, we find no reference to the crown jewels or Temple treasure, only gold coins and money. Frustratingly, God's gold was not among this windfall; the most important barbarian treasures had been spirited elsewhere.

King Gelimer had bolted westward. At Hippo Regius he headed inland, climbing the precipitous Papua Mountains to try and vanish among his Moorish tribal allies—much as Osama Bin Laden disappeared in 2003, vanishing amid the impenetrable mountains bordering Pakistan.

General Belisarius sent John the Armenian in hot pursuit of Gelimer, aided by a crack force of 200 commandos charged with capturing the Vandal king dead or alive. Meanwhile, a surprise awaited Belisarius's main army at Hippo Regius. Today this ancient town sits on the coast of eastern Algeria and typifies the source of North Africa's prosperity
in antiquity. As well as being a major harbor, some eight ancient roads converged on Hippo.

Iron and marble were mined nearby, but Hippo Regius was primarily a main exporter of the wheat tax shipped annually by the hundreds of tons to Rome. For this reason Hippo was the first city to be besieged by Gaiseric in AD 430; ironically, it would also be the last city a Vandal king would control before the Vandal state collapsed.

Against a backdrop of bathhouses, gleaming statues, a theater, and lavish mansions like the Villa of the Labyrinth—their floors adorned with spectacular mosaics of masks, singers, and wild animals—a rather special wooden ship rocking in the harbor of Hippo Regius cut an isolated and forlorn sight in December 533. On its deck stood a scribe called Boniface, a native of Libya entrusted with state secrets of the Vandal court. This man held the ultimate secret to the fate of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem in North Africa. Thus, according to Procopius:

As soon as the battle of Tricamarum had begun, Boniface duly planned his escape.

The scribe's well-formulated plans were destroyed by Mother Nature. Terrified of the Byzantine forces approaching the port, he resorted to seeking sanctuary in the town's church. In typical humanitarian fashion, Belisarius freed Boniface with an enormous handout plundered from this floating money chest. From Hippo it was a short sail back to Carthage where, under the long shadow of the palace on Byrsa Hill, the greatest treasures of the Vandals, including the Temple treasure of Jerusalem, finally made their way across another sea to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

WELCOME TO HELL
announced the banner unfurled outside Istanbul airport, an intimidating greeting awaiting the Swiss national football team's crucial game against Turkey on a mid-November evening in 2005. Already two goals down from the away leg, the Turks were rapaciously exploiting their home advantage. The affable Swiss were bombarded with eggs and cartons of milk on entering Galatasaray's stadium, while local fans drew their thumbs under their chins, maliciously promising to cut the players' throats should they win.

Next day the Turkish capital was in mourning. The national team gave away a penalty inside the first thirty seconds and went on to lose to European minnows, Switzerland, on aggregate, and drop out of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. A calamity.

Istanbul was fast freezing up, physically and emotionally. Icy winds blew across the Sea of Marmara, whipping around mosque domes and hundreds of ships bobbing at anchor in the Golden Horn, the greatest natural harbor in the world. V-shaped arcs of storks flew south to escape winter.

I was moving in the opposite direction, having just left the sunny shores of Tunisia. Winter was fast closing in and so was the end of my quest. But Constantinople, the Late Roman city built by the first Christian emperor, Constantine I (AD 311–337), held further secrets somewhere beneath its domes and kebab shops. The capital of the Later
Roman Empire was the last place where the Temple treasure of Jerusalem appeared in public before dropping off the pages of history.

By AD 534, Justinian I (AD 527–565), the most colorful ruler of Late Antiquity, had been on the throne for eight years. Not only was I certain that the menorah, trumpets, and Table of the Divine Presence passed into his personal possession, but I also had a theory—based on the discovery of some extraordinary Byzantine sculpture and poetry—about where he may have stored them: the Church of Saint Polyeuktos.

The return to town of the Byzantine Empire's new golden boy, General Belisarius, was met with great fanfare. North Africa and its rich olive groves were once again Roman, and Justinian's court historian, Procopius, reveals the emperor's eagerness to mark this great event for posterity:

Procopius seemed to think it was highly strange to resurrect the ritual of the triumph, a dead Roman custom. And why refer to Titus? The historian deliberately seemed to emphasize the historical link between the triumph of AD 71, the Temple treasure, and the loot captured from the floating treasure chest at Hippo Regius in AD 533. The streets of Istanbul held unsolved secrets and the hippodrome was the core of the mystery. If I could find it, I was confident of penetrating the mind of a dead emperor to ascertain the Temple treasure's fate under Justinian.

Outside my hotel, the morning light illuminated a poor Ukrainian ghetto filled with cold, industrious souls, their faces a pastiche of Russian and oriental features. Istanbul has always been a melting pot of cultures, a land and sea bridge where East meets West. Legend has it that the city was originally founded by Byzas of Megara around 660 BC, who lent his name to the city of Byzantium.

Byzantium was an unheralded backwater until the reign of Constantine the Great. The first Christian emperor needed a virgin capital fit for Jesus. Polluted by its bloodstained pagan altars and pantheon of gods, Rome was impure. Constantinople was consecrated on May 11, AD 330, and would remain the capital of a Late Roman and Byzantine Empire until the city fell to Sultan Mehmed II and the Ottoman Empire on May 29, 1453.

Constantinople was not only a clean slate for Christianity, it was also the spyglass for all that passed between the eastern and western Mediterranean. Here, the city could keep a beady eye on sea-lanes and land routes bridging Europe and Asia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The city's natural harbors were outstanding, blessed with perfect docking opportunities along the Sea of Marmara and within a confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. By AD 413, the city of Emperor Theodosius II had virtually doubled in size to five square miles, enclosing 250,000 citizens and monuments as impressive as any gracing Old Rome, including 14 churches, 14 palaces, 153 private baths, and 4,388 major houses.

The Russian Quarter is a concrete jungle of charmless boutiques peddling acrylic trousers and four-inch killer stilettos and boots adorned with myriad zips and straps. Up Ordu Caddesi Street I joined the daily grind of pedestrian traffic shuffling silently to work. I was unsure whether to blame the surreal hush of a city on the move on the weather or the hangover of a football defeat. My comrades and I passed Koska Helvacisi, a high-street wonderland founded in 1907 and stocked with a dizzying eleven varieties of Turkish delight stuffed with walnuts, coconut, hazelnut, and double pistachio. Later in Istanbul's Ottoman bazaars, I would see the same delights marketed as Turkish Viagra.

Unlike the streets of Rome—a living museum—Roman and Byzantine Constantinople rarely rears its head above the pavement. But opposite a dilapidated mosque, its facade brushed black by pollution, and Istanbul University's pink cement Faculty of Aquatic Sciences, stands a jigsaw of marble architecture quarried on the island of Proconnesus in the nearby Sea of Marmara. The emperor Theodosius's Forum, built in the late fourth century AD, is today reduced to a couple of large podiums, forgotten bases from a triumphal archway. On top, the upper sections of elegant column shafts have been gnawed away by the ravages of time. Curiously, their overall form is classically Roman, yet the decorative scheme is characteristically Byzantine. The carving is said to replicate peacock feather patterns, but looks more like the drip of giant tears.

Theodosius's Forum stood for over 150 years, and still attracted shoppers during the reign of the emperor Justinian, when the Temple treasure was in town. This marketplace was a major landmark along the Mese, the main arterial road that descended from the heart of Constantinople, the imperial palace and Church of Saint Sophia, west to the Golden Gate, and on to Thrace and the Balkans. Today the ruins are dwarfed by the main road, Anatolian gold jewelry boutiques, and kiosks offering freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. No one notices them. I walked on toward the center of ancient Constantinople.

Across the road in Beyazit Square the silent uphill commute continued. Street cleaners in glowing orange work suits swept up late autumnal leaves using old-fashioned witches' brooms and plastic pans cut out of oil cans. Constantinople would have approved: where Rome bought new and expensive, and discarded huge amounts of waste after a single use, the Early Byzantine Empire recyled everything from old stones to clay wine jars, whose broken sherds were refashioned into floor tiles and plaster temper.

Commuters quietly queuing for bread and
çay
(Turkish tea) shivered in the biting winter winds. On street curbs old men polished shoes from glass bottles filled with red, black, and brown dyes. A florist arranged wreaths on a cart, while a swarthy man grinned mischievously at me as
he sharpened his long knife and lighted rolls of charcoal to heat his kebab spit. Behind the smiling facade of Istanbul, however, is a more sinister world. Its backstreets offer a worrying array of rifles, pistols, and daggers, and for 15 Turkish lira you can also pick up
Intifada,
the video game.

 

A
fter skirting the emperor Justinian's ecclesiastical masterpiece, the Church of Saint Sophia in the heart of modern Istanbul, I made my way down by the shore. A cart laden with fresh fish rolled past the Byzantine seawalls and I followed its progress uphill. This was the original route leading from Justinian's port to the hippodrome, although the journey taken by General Belisarius and the Temple treasure in AD 534 would have been glorious and not sullied by the smell of tuna and cod. But the route was identical and would have taken less than thirty minutes to cover. The triumph of AD 534 would have been far more low-key than in AD 71. Constantinople had nothing like the population density of first-century Rome and Justinian was paranoid about his colleagues' potential power, so downgraded Belisarius's triumph to little more than a parade. Nevertheless, its symbolism was in many ways equally as important to Justinian as it had been to Vespasian.

Trucks bursting with refrigerators, televisions, and microwaves precariously roped together rumbled down to the port, while I mulled over the similarities and differences between Old and New Rome. Rome was a brilliantly progressive empire, always looking to the future, a trail-blazer in art, architecture, and politics. Thanks to endless television programs and films, we all know what the Romans did for us. But the Byzantine legacy from celebrities to wars, scandals, and art are hardly household names.

Constantinople, though, was far from a pale imitation of its older brother, but like all subsequent Mediterranean civilizations its achievements are completely dwarfed by the scale of Rome's brilliance. The Eternal City didn't just think big, it thought colossal. Compared to her, anything that followed would always look inferior. In many ways Constantinople was a bipolar place. In her preference for recycling old architecture into new monuments, New Rome was the original ecofriendly
society. The Byzantine state enjoyed vast wealth and could have commissioned spanking new monuments if it wished (and frequently did). Recycling is not about prosperity, it is a question of ideology, and the Byzantine Empire, in its respect for the built environment and earth's natural resources, has never been given the credit it deserves for this progressive legacy.

However, Justinian was also a tremendous patron, enabling Constantinople to produce extraordinary art and architecture. He popularized the dome, plucking the style from Roman bathhouses and temples like the Pantheon, for his flagship churches at Saint Sophia in the capital and as far and wide as Jerusalem and Ravenna, the former capital of the Later Roman Empire on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The stereotype of the dome as an Ottoman invention is myth. The gilded wall mosaics of Christ, the apostles, and New Testament scenes found in the Justinianic Church of Saint Sophia in Istanbul and Saint Catherine's monastery in the Sinai preserve the flavor of his lavish and innovative tastes. The alleys around Justinian's palace were also lively artisanal centers, where great craftsmen worked ivory and jewelry, engraved precious gems, and illuminated manuscripts. The emperor also introduced the highly lucrative and prestigious silkworm into Constantinople, converting the Baths of Zeuxippos alongside his palace into an imperial silk factory, where he could personally keep an eye on production.

Politically, modern Istanbul often feels like a tragicomedy, a hangover of the ancient Byzantine paradox. Society is progressive, yet strongly traditional. Turkey dreams of joining the money-spinning European Union; the West remains suspicious of her identity and ambitions. Many members are clearly terrified at the prospect of 63 million Muslims joining their club. The Cradle of Civilization is today trapped between East and West, geographically and socially. However, the country retains a healthy sense of humor over its geopolitics. Modern cartoons personify Turkey's current position in terms of an Ottoman man sitting backward on a donkey. The beast of burden moves slowly uphill, but his master faces in the opposite direction. Turkey is frustrated: she tries to embrace the West, yet is seen as backward thinking.

The emergence of this conflicted ideology can be blamed on Byzantine society. When he founded Constantinople, Constantine and his successors were besotted with Rome. Or rather, while simultaneously trying to escape her physical clutches, the new city needed to prove she was a worthy capital. Thus, New Rome—as she styled herself—also sat backward on a donkey. Politically this was the Roman Empire rekindled. Constantinople mimicked Rome geographically, claiming she too straddled seven hills. Even though the Early Byzantine Empire technically started with the relocation of Roman power to Asia Minor, her citizens still referred to their way of life as
romanitas.

Nowhere is this split personality better exemplified than in the hippodrome, where Belisarius and the triumph of AD 534 paid homage to the emperor and the people. The hippodrome had been built by the emperor Septimius Severus at the same time as he renovated the Circus Maximus in Rome. Both used the same architectural blueprint. What was initially a freestanding theater of fun for Rome became the people's parliament in later years. The Byzantine emperors needed a forum to control the populace, a convenient soap box from which to monitor the mob. The hippodrome was that place, and how better to manipulate its political will than by sugaring a pill.

The hippodrome was the all-seeing eye of an Orwellian Big Brother that had a serious ulterior motive. The state-sponsored chariot races whirling around the arena, and the rivalry between the Blue and Green teams, were entertainments that kept the masses sweet, as were the daily dole rations distributed to the poor from here. However, the hippodrome was also the epicenter of the religious and imperial ceremonies that shaped the annual calendar.

In reality, Constantinople's inferiority to Rome was obvious. So its emperors went to extraordinary lengths to justify its imperial right of succession. Not without reason was the eastern capital dubbed New Rome. First and foremost, Constantine created a physical barrier to control his people in the form of a mighty palace surrounding the arena. Along with the city walls, which defended Constantinople from the enemy without, in his sixth-century
Chronicle
John Malalas tells us that the
emperor's first major building program in New Rome was to renovate the hippodrome and establish a palace to protect the empire from the enemy within: