God's Gold (32 page)

Like modern Turkey, Constantinople lived for today but grounded its political institutions and social habits firmly in the past. Thus, the hippodrome wasn't a museum in the modern sense but a museum of the mind, a place where emperors and citizens were subtly brainwashed into believing they were worthy successors of Rome with no reason to feel inferior. The recovery of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem was a coup for Justinian, a divine reminder from God that Christianity was the chosen successor to the Judaism of the Old Testament. The new world religion fully appreciated the legacy. As the cradle of the Bible, Palestine was in imperial favor, reinvented as the Holy Land. Pilgrimage to the biblical sites was encouraged, popular itineraries went on sale, and the concept of tourism was invented.

Some five centuries old, the Temple treasure of Jerusalem was a terrific showcase for Justinian's city. Back in England I had pondered long and hard about the destiny of the Jewish loot in Constantinople: Where was it kept? Was it publicly exhibited? How long did it remain in the capital? After being paraded in the hippodrome, surely it would have been logical to keep it in this “museum.”

The answer would have been straightforward if the reign of Justinian had been rational. So far Justinian has appeared to be a defender of the Catholic faith and a strong leader willing to make tough military decisions. However, the man was also a psychopath who could compete with Nero or Caligula for moments of mental instability.

Justinian has gone down in history as a master builder who made King Herod look like small fry. In Constantinople, he built Saint Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, and filled the city with endless marbles and monuments. Across the empire he threw buckets of gold at new cities like Justiniana Prima in modern Serbia, refortified old towns, constructed new ports, and erected places of worship in a quest for immortality.

So much for the official party political line. In truth, the modern image of Justinian is of an insecure and selfish egomaniac who not only bankrupted the treasury, but also heralded the end of classical antiquity, a world that had endured for over a thousand years. His reign was saturated with scandal from the moment he married a former prostitute. Theodora, the daughter of Acacius, a keeper of wild beasts in the amphitheater of Constantinople, had a shocking reputation. In the sanctimonious words of Procopius, “On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through…she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid” (
Secret History
9).

An embittered Procopius chronicled the life of Justinian and Theodora blow by sordid blow. The same courtier who had so faithfully recorded the great deeds of the Byzantine army against the Arian Vandals returned home to Constantinople angry and disillusioned. Of course, he could do little physically or politically to counter the emperor's erosion of imperial and family values. So, with feathered nib dipped in poisoned ink he composed his
Secret History,
a work that could never be aired during Justinian's lifetime without costing the historian his life. The chance survival of this work is a unique counterbalance to Procopius's formal documentation and an amazing window into the social life of one of the greatest epochs of antiquity. Procopius clearly detested his paymaster and did not hold back the punches.

The truth about Justinian probably lies somewhere between the two extremes of the
Wars'
trumpet blowing and the
Secret History
's venom. Certainly, Theodora calmed down after marriage, reinventing herself as
an ancient Eva Perón. The ex-prostitute turned empress founded the Convent of Repentance for reformed prostitutes and was renowned for sheltering monks in her own palace. Theodora was also the champion behind a successful campaign to end Monophysite Christian persecution. No doubt Procopius had good reason to denounce Justinian and his wife, but we must beware of accepting the full details of their scandalous life verbatim.

However, there is no smoke without fire and Justinian epitomized the ultimate Early Byzantine identity crisis with good reason. First of all, like New Rome in terms of succession he had no real ancestral claim to the throne because his uncle, Justin I, was by birth an uneducated soldier in the palace guard who started life as an Illyrian peasant. However he shuffled the pack, in the dead of night Justinian knew full well he was not of noble birth and was in many respects an imposter. This background explains his eccentric and unstable behavior. Procopius accused Justinian and his low-class wife, Theodora, of ruling like vampires, sucking the life out of the empire:

Justinian was accused of ruling the empire through corruption, selling positions of power to the highest bidder, and enforcing his will through a web of spies. His personal neuroses extended to the enemy without, and the emperor stripped the treasury coffers to finance his colossal fortifications building program. Certainly, the Sasanian war drums beating in Persia were a very serious threat to western ways, but Justinian built fortifications as if they alone would protect him from his internal demons, the emperor depleting the treasury's entire gold reserve.

What makes it hard to second-guess Justinian's behavior, and thus the fate of the Temple treasure under his control, is his unpredictability. General Belisarius, you might presume, would have become a great celebrity back in Constantinople. After all, he was honored with a triumph. Not so. Justinian fancied that Belisarius held imperial ambitions and was a threat to the throne. He also accused him of hiding most of the loot seized from the Vandals. Whipped into a frenzy by Theodora, Justinian was riddled with jealousy at Belisarius's success.

So the battle-weary general who had put his life on the line for the empire ended up under house arrest, the ultimate humiliation. To make matters worse, Belisarius had to contend with his wife pursuing a string of public affairs that made him the talk of the town and the butt of endless jokes. Procopius tells us that Belisarius was a broken man, certain he would be assassinated: “Accompanied by this dread, he entered his home and sat down alone upon his couch. His spirit broken, he failed even to remember the time when he was a man; sweating, dizzy and trembling, he counted himself lost; devoured by slavish fears and mortal worry, he was completely emasculated” (
Secret History
4).

Justinian was not a man of clear logic, and I seriously doubted that he would have left the divine power of the Jewish candelabrum, Table, and trumpets on public display in the hippodrome after the triumph of AD 534. God's gold was too precious. Some very peculiar archaeological evidence in Istanbul's suburban district of Saraçhane also hinted at a different reality. There, in AD 526, craftsmen were putting the final touches on one of the greatest churches in Christendom, the Church of Saint Polyeuktos, named after a soldier martyred for his Christian faith at Melitone in eastern Turkey in AD 251, and perhaps best known from Pierre Corneille's play
Polyeucte
(1642) and an opera by Charles Gounod (1878).

Of the thousands of churches that sprang up across the Mediterranean between the fourth and seventh centuries, the Church of Saint Polyeuktos was unique. Its construction was sponsored entirely from the deep pockets of one of the most formidable women of the Byzantine world, Princess Anicia Juliana (AD 462–528). Juliana was the
greatest heiress of her age, a woman of great distinction. Her mother was descended from the emperor Theodosius the Great and her father, Flavius Anicius Olybrius, traced his lineage back to notables who had fought Hannibal seven centuries earlier, and briefly served as emperor of the West. Juliana's own husband had even been offered the throne, but refused the honor.

The Church of Saint Polyeuktos was built inside three years, from AD 524 to 527, and lay along the processional route, the Mese, running from the Forum of Theodosius to the hippodrome and palace. In 1960, bulldozers developing Istanbul's new city hall bit into the side of the church by chance. The structure was subsequently excavated over six years from 1964 by Professor Martin Harrison of Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Nezih Firatli of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

By 1964, hundreds of ancient churches had been uncovered by eager archaeologists the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, but Saint Polyeuktos turned out to be unique. The church measures just under 560 square feet and is arranged around the usual central nave and side aisles. Its brick barrel-vaulted passageways and crypt with marble floor—which no doubt once held the bones of Polyeuktos—proved remarkably well preserved.

If the church's layout was of standard plan, the originality and scale of decoration blew the archaeologists away. Over ten thousand pieces of marble came to light, imported from across the civilized world: red porphyry from Egypt, green porphyry from the Peloponnese, yellow
giallo antico
from Tunisia, green
verde antico
from Thessaly, black marble flecked with white from the Pyrenees, purplish marble streaked with gray and white from Bilecik in Bithynia and, of course, abundant local Proconnesian marble from the Sea of Marmara.

Offset against this marble rainbow was extremely elaborate inlay: serrated leaves of mother-of-pearl and strips of yellow glass coated with gold leaf. New styles of columns appeared for the first time, decorated with squares of amethyst framed by green glass triangles and gold strips, a futuristic departure from Roman ideals. If the precious stones made
Princess Juliana's church gleam, the quality of the architectural sculpture set new standards for ecclesiastical structures. With their wealth of experience, Professor Harrison and his team had never seen anything approaching the underdrilled lattice and strap-work sculpture. Exuberant vegetation, especially vine leaves, had been cut so delicately that it was virtually detached from its background. Elsewhere, painted peacocks were rendered realistically in the round. Four types of “basket” capitals, another Byzantine innovation, complemented a dazzling range of stylized plants and palmettes. For novelty, variety, abundance, and technical quality, nothing like this had ever come to light before.

What made Princess Juliana tackle an innovative project that left all previous church design schemes in its wake? The church is believed to have once annexed her palace, still undiscovered. Does this explain the glory of Saint Polyeuktos? What statement was Juliana trying to make?

These unanswered questions played on my mind as I cut through an arch of the aqueduct built by the emperor Valens in AD 375. Where freshwater once flowed into the heart of Constantinople, the aqueduct's arches now support the Bahceli Kafeterya café and a host of fizzy drink refreshments. Trucks and taxis dart through the arch, hardly pausing to gauge its dangerously narrow hips. Today, the district between the Forum of Theodosius and the Church of Saint Polyeuktos houses the core of Istanbul University. Students rushed to class past the Blue King Disco and Bar and specialist music shops stocking exotic ouds, eleven-stringed large-bodied stringed instruments with short stems, very similar to the European lute.

The key to Saint Polyeuktos is a vivid Greek poem discovered inside the church. The first forty-one lines were carved around stone grape vines and peacock sculptures extending along the church's nave before proceeding into the narthex and courtyard. The poem, preserved in full in the eleventh-century Palatine Anthology, praises Princess Juliana's royal descent and the miraculous quality of her new church. One section of the immortal dedication reads:

The princess evidently wanted to blow her own trumpet, but surely claiming to have “surpassed the wisdom of renowned Solomon” was not just arrogant but blasphemous? Why would a god-fearing Christian claim such celebrity? The plot thickens even more when the unit of measurement with which the Church of Saint Polyeuktos was laid out enters the equation. Princess Juliana boldly and bizarrely rejected contemporary architectural standards. Not for her the Greek, Roman, or Byzantine foot.

Instead, she resurrected an ancient legacy based not just on the biblical cubit but the royal cubit King Solomon used to build the First Temple of Jerusalem. This is an outstanding revelation; none of the thousands of Early Christian churches recorded as far afield as Israel and France dared follow in Solomon's footsteps. The cubit traditionally measured the length of a man's forearm, from his elbow to clenched fist, and was the principal unit of linear measurement in the Bible. Using the royal cubit of 1.7 feet, the Church of Saint Polyeuktos measured precisely 100 royal cubits (169 x 170 feet). A sanctuary that probably overlay the crypt spanned exactly 20 cubits square: the exact dimensions of the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple.

Given this biblical emulation, the church's decorative scheme no longer seems eccentric. Its rich vegetation simply mimics I Kings 6:29: “Round all the walls of the house he carved figures of cherubim, palmtrees, and open flowers.” Only here winged cherubim were replaced by peacocks, symbols of Byzantine empresses and royalty.