God's Gold (33 page)

The relevance of the Church of Saint Polyeuktos to the Temple treasure is obvious. It was built as a replica of Solomon's Temple, so where would be more fitting to deposit the birthright of the Chosen People than in a temple fit for God? Did Saint Polyeuktos fit the bill? This enigma was a key reason behind my trip to Istanbul. Certainly,
the timing fits. In AD 532, the greatest church in Constantinople, Saint Sophia, had burned down. Justinian's new creation was commissioned from Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, theoretical engineers who designed a “wonderdome.” Saint Sophia, however, was only dedicated in 537. So for ten years Saint Polyeuktos was the largest and most sumptuous church in Constantinople.

Modern Saraçhane is today a vibrant hub of local politics and higher education. Machine-gun-toting police saunter in front of the town hall, its exquisite gardens landscaped with fountains and water pools tiled with blue swirling mosaics. Busts of civic dignitaries like Hizir Bey Çelebi, the first mayor of Istanbul in 1453, keep a beady eye on modern wheeling and dealing.

Across the road, ¸Sehzade Camii, the Mosque of the Prince, and its turban-topped Ottoman grave markers, weeps across the skyline. Even the graceful genius of Sinan, chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, cannot hide the structure's sadness. The mosque was commissioned by Süleyman the Magnificent in memory of his eldest son, Prince Mehmet, who died of smallpox in 1543.

Unfortunately, nothing magnificent about the Church of Saint Polyeuktos survives today, I discovered. The ruins, in fact, are an embarrassing eyesore. A fortune has been spent on a delightful park adjacent to the church. Old men mull over the good old times under shaded trees, as passing businessmen off to impress civil servants in the town hall present their shoes for a quick polish. Locals hawk tea next to the park's primeval “Stonehenge” sculpture. Students and nurses stride toward the Medical Park Hospital, but no one bothers with the Byzantine ruins, in desperate need of surgery.

Today the sagging green-mesh wire fencing surrounding Saint Polyeuktos has been cut open to facilitate a new use for one of Istanbul's most important monuments. The church has been transformed into a municipal garbage dump and, worse still, a latrine overflowing with human excrement. Princess Juliana's golden walls are now rendered black from tramps' night fires. In the West, historians speak in hushed tones about this amazing church and what it has taught us about the Byzan
tine world. The reality was a deep disappointment to me. The church has died an unflattering death; both Polyeuktos and Princess Juliana must surely be turning in their graves. I couldn't help but wonder if the monument would have been better protected if an Ottoman ruler had stuck a minaret over its walls.

However, the date and unique design of the Church of Saint Polyeuktos made it the prime candidate as the destination of God's gold in Constantinople. But one major dilemma troubled the theory: Justinian's hatred of the Princess Juliana. Both royals knew that his claim to the throne was ancestrally bogus. Justin I, his uncle, had been a nobody promoted above his station. Juliana had expected the throne to pass to her own son, the younger Olybrius, after the death of Anastasius in 518, and with time her profound contempt for Justinian became increasingly public. Did more than four generations of royal blood count for nothing?

Juliana was the emperor Justinian's bête noire, the Church of Saint Polyeuktos a dynastic statement immortalizing her family's noble lineage. When the emperor demanded a contribution from Juliana for the rebuilding of the Church of Saint Sophia, she cheerfully invited him to pop over to Saint Polyeuktos and help himself. On entering the church Justinian discovered that the princess had hammered her entire wealth into golden plaques coating the divine roof. A house of Christian worship could not be ransacked, even by an emperor, and Justinian knew he had been outfoxed. No wonder when the Church of Saint Sophia was finally dedicated in 537 he declared, “Solomon, I have vanquished thee.” In other words, his flashy new building outstripped Princess Juliana's.

The feisty aristocrat died in AD 528, and Justinian confiscated her church-palace after her son was implicated in a plot against the emperor and sent into exile. Under these circumstances would Justinian have housed the Temple treasure so far away from the seat of power? If not, was it put on public display in the hippodrome or thrown into his palace dungeon? Did the Temple treasure end up in Constantinople in the Church of Saint Polyeuktos, the hippodrome, or the imperial palace?

The hippodrome museum was certainly a likely candidate. Brilliant
bronze and marble masterpieces graced its central terrace, but none were royal treasures of such religious and symbolic sensitivity. This left one last alternative, Justinian's enormous terraced palace, which the emperor rebuilt from scratch after Constantinople went up in smoke during the Nika revolt of January AD 532. Over four days of rioting and anarchy, everything from the churches of Saint Sophia and Saint Irene to the Senate House and great porticoes of the city were reduced to ashes by bloodthirsty Blue and Green sports hooligans. Justinian's new palace stretched from the
kathisma
—royal box—in the hippodrome all the way down to the sea, a distance of more than half a mile.

A tantalizing clue to the riches once stored inside the palace lies in an obscure passage by Procopius. While painting a picture of Justinian's new building work after the fire, he described the Chalke (Bronze Gate), the palace's main entrance, where eight arches enclosed a miraculously decorated room:

If only this ceiling mosaic survived. In reality, almost nothing of Justinian's great palace exists amid the Ottoman ruins of Istanbul other than a few rooms of extremely fine mosaics. If it had, Procopius's allusions are sufficient to be sure that the scene would have included the actual presentation of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem to Justinian in
the hippodrome triumph of AD 534. This would have been Constantinople's equivalent of Rome's Arch of Titus. Instead, the site of the Chalke Gate is today covered by parklands between the Blue Mosque and the Church of Saint Sophia.

I walked over the original site of this forgotten legacy, but could not reconnect with antiquity. Istanbul had yielded all of its secrets and it was time to jump on another plane. Before disappearing, though, I had one final stop to make: I wanted to look through a window into the Byzantine past and collect my thoughts. Did the quest for the Temple treasure of Jerusalem draw to a close in central Istanbul? And if so, where was God's gold stored?

Down by the shore, several hundred feet east of Justinian's port, swallowed by modern urban sprawl, is a remarkably well preserved section of the Byzantine palace, seawall, and modern shacks joined together, its owners' washing flying in the wind. The ruins were deserted; I had them all to myself. Fallen leaves chased cars down the Kennedy Caddesi highway. Several hundred feet away the site of Justinian's private jetty is marked by a soaring white tower, an all-seeing eye overlooking the Sea of Marmara, its horizontal radar rotating monotonously. Next to the seawalls a Byzantine lighthouse reminded me, yet again, of modernity's debt to the past.

Exhausted from my travels, I sat on a wall and absorbed the scene confronting me. Eight arched windows with three of their windowsills intact framed the best-preserved surviving section of Justinian's sixth-century AD palace. These delightfully situated royal apartments once accommodated the emperor and his wayward wife. Here they whispered sweet nothings and plotted how to exploit the empire for ever greater riches. The seat of their power is today an exquisite spectacle. Romantic red creeper droops down the palace walls and swallows flitted from window to window. The red-brick veneer feels more medieval castle than Roman palace.

My reverie was all too soon rudely shattered by a black-and-white sheepdog snarling down from the right-hand window. His warning bark reminded me that my journey was incomplete. I had one final
stop to make. The treasure's journey had not ended in Istanbul at all. In describing the “treasures of the Jews” presented to Justinian during Belisarius's triumph of AD 534, Procopius emphatically reported an altogether different fate:

Justinian was a split personality controlling a city of paradoxes. He was lord of the Mediterranean, yet at the same time scared of his own shadow. The emperor saw plots and conspiracies all around him. Deeply respectful of his classical inheritance, and familiar with the destructive power of the Jewish treasure, no doubt Justinian's paranoia prevented him from putting it in his own palace, either near the hippodrome or in front of me by the seashore. So in all likelihood it did end up, after all, in the Church of Saint Polyeuktos, where the emperor was happy for it to wreak havoc on the House of Anicia Juliana. The subsequent relocation of the Temple treasure back to the Holy Land was also precisely the kind of quixotic behavior to be expected of Justinian. How ironic that the birthright ripped out of the heart of Jerusalem in AD 70 to travel the world should now end up where it started: back in Jerusalem.

The gun-toting Israeli army girls can hardly have been out of their teens. Behind amicable smiles and blue military security uniforms we exchanged pleasantries, as they methodically ransacked Abou George's rusting car. The towers of Jerusalem could be seen down the road in the morning dew. Ahead sprawled the unappetizing wasteland of the West Bank.

What would typically have taken Abou George, an Israeli Arab, several hours of pleading and negotiation, only took me three minutes. George would usually have been treated as suspicious until proven innocent. By contrast, I was virtually waved through, a jovial Westerner flashing a United Kingdom passport and conversing in basic Hebrew. What would the soldiers have thought if they knew the truth, that I was about to detonate a political explosion by exposing the fate of the two-thousand-year-old Temple treasure—Israel and Judaism's ultimate birthright—literally under their noses, less than thirteen miles from the Temple Mount?

The main road into Bethlehem's Manger Street, the traditional site of Jesus's birth, is today inaccessible. It wouldn't make any difference if you were a wise king, you would still not get through. A twenty-six-foot-high slab of concrete bars access, part of Israel's 140-mile-long security fence. Abou George took a detour, wiggling his car over potholes until he finally found a narrow gap in the concrete curtain.

We left the ghost town of Bethlehem behind and headed into the
wilderness of Judea. The flattened summit of the artificial hill of Herodium, King Herod's palace and mausoleum, loomed into sight. A stench of sewage swamped the air; mangy donkeys sniffed out blades of grass by the dusty road. This no-man's-land is inhospitable and uncomfortable. I wasn't ecstatic to be here, but the truth was just around the corner. My destination was the Arab village of Ubeidiya and the Monastery of Saint Theodosius. Why was I here, playing a dangerous game in the Hamas-controlled West Bank?

We left the Temple treasure with Justinian in sixth-century AD Constantinople. Procopius had revealed that an anonymous Jewish courtier had just spooked the Byzantine emperor with a worrying revelation: every civilization possessing the treasure since AD 70 had crumbled—the Jews of Israel, Rome, and finally the Vandals. Justinian, a great student of the enduring life force of antiquity, dispatched the golden candelabrum, Table of the Divine Presence, and silver trumpets back to the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem. The treasure had come home, but when and where?

The repatriation clearly took place before Justinian's death in AD 565, and can be narrowed down further to the date when Procopius of Caesarea, chronicler of Byzantium's wars with the barbarians, put down his pen in AD 554. The historian alleged the emperor's decision was a spontaneous decision made at the time of the triumph of AD 534. Allowing for Procopius's sense of drama, perhaps chronologically compressing several historical events, the most logical conclusion dates the relocation of the Temple treasure at between AD 535 and 554.

At this time the Holy Land was enjoying a golden age when emperors and aristocrats were pampering the biblical homeland. Religious circumstances had transformed a sleepy Roman backwater into a gold mine. Between AD 330 and 640 literally hundreds of churches and monasteries emerged across Palestine, boosting the local economy and the prosperity of society at large. Nobody typified this exuberance more than the empress Eudocia, who expended 20,480 pounds of gold (1.5 million gold coins) building churches in Palestine between AD 438 and 460, at a time when one person could live off two gold coins for a
year. Dozens of ecclesiastical buildings sprang up inside cities—at the latest count over 255 churches and 50 monasteries.

Even though ancient texts gloss over the precise movements of the treasure in Byzantine Palestine, only one place would have been sufficiently holy to house them: Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In AD 335, five years after founding Constantinople, Constantine the Great dedicated the Martyrium basilica at Golgotha, an Aramaic term meaning “place of a skull.” What would later become world renowned as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre straddled the holiest place on earth to Christianity, the traditional location of Christ's crucifixion (Rock of Calvary) and tomb (holy sepulchre).

The Church was appalled at the condition of the hallowed ground, which the Roman emperor Hadrian had polluted in AD 135 with a temple dedicated to Venus, goddess of love. Constantine tore down the temple's walls and healed its profaned soils with a Christian basilica, 192 feet long and 133 feet wide. A semicircular annex supported by a circle of columns, the Anastasis, would be added later. The basilica was surrounded by double porticoes and three gates faced the rising sun, opposite which was a dome crowned by twelve columns, symbolizing the apostles, surmounted by silver bowls.

The fourth century AD witnessed a new global phenomenon that would persist into the modern era—tourism. Rather than a cultural extravaganza, the Byzantine “grand tour” was a religious pilgrimage to the holy sites described in the Bible. Scrolls could be bought setting out itineraries, and safe hostels,
mansiones,
sprouted up every fifteen miles across the empire. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre swiftly gained a reputation as the epicenter of Christian pilgrimage. Here was the physical spot where Jesus was said to have been crucified, and where his tomb was located. Even more spectacular, however, pilgrims could gaze at the True Cross of Christ, which went on display after Helena (AD 248–329), the mother of Constantine the Great, found it rather conveniently lying between an inscription and two other crosses. Further attractions included the reed, sponge, and lance from the Crucifixion story inside the Chamber of Relics.

The True Cross was a huge sensation. Writing around AD 348, Cyril of Jerusalem confirmed that the “the holy wood of the cross, shown among us today…has already filled the entire world by means of those who in faith have been taking bits from it.” Wearing lockets containing fragments of the cross became the latest fashion. More often than not, zealous pilgrims, who had risked life and limb to get to Jerusalem, just couldn't resist biting off a bit of the relic when they were finally allowed to bow over it and kiss the gnarled wood.

In reality, the survival of an intact Roman Cross in the soils of Jerusalem is virtually impossible. The ground is neither waterlogged nor arid enough to create a sufficiently anaerobic environment. But this didn't matter. Belief is a state of mind, and the relic certainly served a crucial missionary role. Ironically, the arrival of the far older and historically authentic Temple relics was not met with any fanfare. On the contrary, Christianity had taken over three hundred years to break free from the shackles of Judaism and paganism and was not about to have its thunder stolen. The repatriation of the Jewish treasure to Jerusalem was a double-edged sword for the city's patriarchs, which reflected the very real muscle-flexing between Church and State. But the patriarchs adhered to Justinian's imperial prerogative and, if I'm right, quietly locked the Temple relics away in a deep recess of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

 

T
he West Bank's timeless landscape drifted passed my window. Goatherds and flocks idled by water cisterns, a vista frozen since biblical times. Across the fields terraced walls of stones built by Jewish farmers remain fossilized since the Roman era.

The Temple treasure of Jerusalem languished beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for seventy years, as untouched as this panorama. With its special status as the Holy Land, the flagship of early Christianity, Byzantine Palestine was initially insulated from the deep cracks starting to split the empire at large. But the end of antiquity was just over the horizon.

Justinian may have been a distinguished builder and resolute leader
who successfully reconquered Roman North Africa, but just like King Herod at the port of Caesarea, from where the Temple treasure was originally shipped to Rome, and now submerged thirty-three feet beneath the Mediterranean, he was powerless against Mother Nature. In mid-July AD 541 calamity struck the Byzantine Empire. Black rats boarded a ship at Pelusium in southern Sinai and headed for the harbor of Constantinople. The bubonic plague ravaged the city for four months, with 10,000 souls dropping like flies each day. The corpse administrators stopped counting when the dead numbered 230,000.

Once they had consumed the capital, the rats were on the move once more, jumping ship to export death as far and wide as Naples and Syria. In the great port cities, delirious merchants swore they saw headless Ethiopians sailing brass ships and maliciously spreading disease along the beaches. The leader of the Monophysite Syriac Church, John of Ephesus, moaned that in Palestine “all the inhabitants, like beautiful grapes, were trampled and squeezed dry without mercy.”

The Justinianic plague was a highly contagious evil of biblical proportions. If the vehicle of death was
Rattus rattus,
the bullet was the Nilotic flea,
Xenopsylla cheopis,
which could jump sixteen inches off the ground and induced hallucinations, fever, severe diarrhea, and eventually bubonic swelling in the groin, armpits, ears, and thighs. Weeping with pus, victims would end up in a deep coma and generally die after two or three days. The first great pandemic in history had a mortality rate of 78 percent, wiping out one-third of the entire Mediterranean population. After the initial rage, like a forest fire the plague reemerged every twelve years, eventually reaching Britain and Ireland in AD 664. Only in AD 750, after eighteen outbreaks, did the curse run out of steam.

The empire never had time to recover from this initial shock. Further hammer blows continued to rain down. From AD 547 to 548 a succession of apocalyptic curses struck the East. Violent earthquakes shook the coastal metropolises of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tripolis, and Ptolemais (Acre) in Palestine with such velocity that mountaintops fell into the sea. Tsunamis inundated maritime cities, and terrifying thunder and lightning crisscrossed the skies. In AD 556–557, a spear-shaped fire ap
peared in the heavens and in AD 610 a solar eclipse haunted earth.

With the empire on its sickbed, the Sasanian Persians, who had been knocking on the gates of the East for decades, finally launched an all-out attack. In AD 613, Persian forces under the command of Chosroes II, the self-styled king of kings, crushed Damascus and swept south into Palestine, just as Rome had done almost five and a half centuries earlier. According to Procopius, his predecessor, Chosroes I, had dreamed of getting his hands on the treasures of Palestine since AD 542: “And his purpose was to lead the army straight for Palestine, in order that he might plunder all their treasures and especially those of Jerusalem. For he had it from hearsay that this was an especially goodly land and peopled by wealthy inhabitants” (
Wars
2.20.18–19).

Most of the province willingly bowed down to the King of Kings, and as the coastal cities of Caesarea, Apollonia, and Lod capitulated to his Sasanian forces, a historical marvel occurred for the first and last time. The region's Jews, united in celebration at the shackles of Christianity cast off after three hundred years, joined the ranks of a Persian force and its “Arab” confederates. For the first and last time in Middle Eastern history, Arab and Jew shared swords.

The Sasanian resolve hardened as Jerusalem came into view. Following a twenty-day siege in April AD 614, the holy city was sacked for three days. Those fit and able fled town. Widely respected holy men, such as John Moschus and Sophronius, fled by ship to Syria, while the thousands of monks minding their own business in the wilderness of Judea sought refuge in Arabia. The Holy Land was abandoned to the invaders.

In Jerusalem almost every ecclesiastical building was ransacked or burned down, its treasures looted. The Churches of Gethsemane and Eleona on the Mount of Olives were torn apart, as was the Church of Saint John the Baptist. The Persians ran through the streets, inflicting random destruction and decapitating priests. In the Convent of Saint Melania, 400 nuns were raped. Tens of thousands of Christians were sacrificed for the cause and 66,000 skilled workmen enslaved to Persia.

Antiochus Strategos, a monk from the monastery of Saint Sabas in Jerusalem, saw at first hand the bloodletting across the city in AD 614 and recalled the horrors in
The Sack of Jerusalem:

The invasion ceased as rapidly as it had started. Palestine was, in reality, no more than a launchpad for the ultimate goal, an assault on Egypt, now the richest province in the Byzantine Empire. The Sasanians returned home counting their booty and left their Jewish allies to mop up. After so many years of oppression and life as second-class citizens, the Jews reacted with grim ferocity. In Acre they set fire to a church, tortured the deacon, and burned Christian books of prayer. At Tyre they systematically destroyed churches, but ended up losing a war of attrition: every time a church fell, the inhabitants of Tyre decapitated 100 fettered Jews and threw their heads over the ramparts. The pile of headless dead was said to have numbered 2,000 by the time the Jews capitulated. The Sasanian commanders eventually lost patience with the Jews' wrath, crucifying many and seizing their property. Once again, the children of the Old Testament were expelled from the gates of Jerusalem.