CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Artifice of Eternity

The Ottoman Empire, 30 May 1453.

8 am

THOUSANDS OF OTTOMAN soldiers now stormed through the gaps in the walls while their comrades atop the towers cheered them on, giddy with victory.

Like the Crusaders 250 years before them, Mehmed’s soldiers trod through the streets of the outer suburbs warily, until they realised there was no one left to oppose them. Weeks of pent-up frustration exploded from these men, creating a shockwave of violence that rippled out onto the city. The locals had taunted and cursed the Ottomans for weeks from the safety of the land walls. Now, to their horror, they found the invaders at their door, wild with greed and hungry for vengeance.

Each house was, in turn, ransacked and stripped of its gold, jewellery and tapestries. Women and men who fought back were the first to be cut down, followed by small children and the elderly, who were of no use to the invaders. Old men were dragged by their white hair into the street, where their throats were cut. Nuns were taken from their convents and raped or sold into slavery. Fist-fights broke out among the invaders for the most beautiful girls. Some women chose to hurl themselves into wells, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.

Guttural screams of naked panic rang out through the streets. The men posted to the sea walls heard the strange, awful din and ran to their homes to find their families either dead or abducted. Prince Orhan the pretender tried to pass himself off at the harbour as a Greek-speaking local, but was recognised by a Turkish soldier and beheaded.

Barbaro, from aboard his ship, witnessed the unfolding horror: ‘The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm, and the corpses of Turks and Christians were thrown into the Dardanelles, where they floated out to sea like melons along a canal.’

He escaped the maelstrom of violence just in time; after several agonising delays, his galleon was able to slip past the Ottoman navy into the Sea of Marmara, bound for home. Giacomo Tetaldi, a Florentine merchant, threw off his clothes, leapt into the water, swam out to a Venetian ship and, to his great relief, was hauled on board. The departure of the Italian galleons was of no interest to the sultan’s navy anyway; the Turkish sailors were rushing to the shore to claim their share of the loot.

As the sultan’s men plundered their way through the outer suburbs, the cry went up along the Mese that the city was lost. People who had slept through the night ran out to see what the commotion was about, only to run into the blades of Ottoman soldiers. Frantic citizens bolted from their homes with children in their arms, and streamed down to the harbour, hoping to find passage on a ship. But the gates of the sea walls had been locked and barred by the emperor’s men in a futile attempt to compel citizens to stay and fight.

A GREAT MANY FAMILIES, remembering the apocalyptic prophecies, fled to the Hagia Sophia for sanctuary. It was foretold that in the End of Days, before the return of Christ, the demonic hordes would swarm into God’s city, but they would be stopped short outside the great church by an Angel of the Lord, who would strike down the unbelievers with a blazing sword. Thousands of panic-stricken citizens now grasped at this slender thread of hope, and so within an hour, every part of the Hagia Sophia was filled and the doors barred shut. As the rays of the morning sun streamed through the upper windows, the priests began to intone a matins service; men, women and children sang and offered their most urgent prayers for one last time inside that candle-lit, incense-clouded space. How many of them truly expected to be delivered by God’s Avenging Angel, we cannot know.

A party of Janissaries were the first of the invaders to reach the Hagia Sophia. They ran hard, believing that untold riches awaited them inside. The turbaned warriors charged into the courtyard, up through the outer narthex and began to hack at the heavy doors with axes, each blow eliciting a scream of terror from the worshippers inside. The door timbers cracked, splintered and crashed, and the Janissaries rushed inside, ready to snatch every treasure they could find.

The slaughter was minimal; by now the bloodlust of the conquerors had been overtaken by a pragmatic scramble for plunder. The chalice, the candelabras and the emperor’s chair were all quickly seized. Soldiers began to hack apart the altar screen for its precious metals.

The next treasures to be seized were the worshippers themselves. Again, the sultan’s men fought each other for the most beautiful women. The old and infirm were put to the sword; the rest gathered up as slaves or hostages. Some groups were led back to the Ottoman camps outside the walls. Others were brought down to the Golden Horn, to be shipped off to the slave markets of Cairo.

In less than an hour, every item of value in the Hagia Sophia that could be carried or dismantled was extracted from the church. A group of Janissaries found the tomb of Enrico Dandolo and ransacked it for treasure. Finding nothing valuable, they threw the Doge’s bones onto the streets for the dogs.

Midday

MEHMED THE CONQUEROR did not immediately follow his men into the city, waiting outside the walls until he received confirmation that the emperor was dead. At noon the sultan mounted his white stallion, followed by his entourage. He passed through the Charisian Gate onto the blood-streaked streets of the conquered city.

Mehmed was in a sombre mood, seemingly humbled by his victory. He led his entourage down the Mese, witnessing pitiful scenes of dead and dying people. Ottoman banners hung from many windows, to indicate the house and its property had been claimed. The sultan rode into the Forum of Constantine, where the toppled colossus of the city’s founding emperor lay impassively. At the end of the Mese, the great hulking form of the Hagia Sophia came into view. Mehmed dismounted and bowed down before the church, sprinkling a handful of dirt over his turban as a sign of humility before God.

Inside the church, he saw one of his men hacking away at the marble floor. Enraged, Mehmed struck at the soldier with the flat of his sword.

‘Content yourself with the loot and the prisoners!’ he shouted at the scurrying soldier. ‘The buildings belong to me!’

Mehmed looked up at the great dome, spun around, and then directed his imam to climb into the pulpit and proclaim the Muslim creed: There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.

Stepping out of the ravaged church, Mehmed crossed the Augustaeum to the ruined Great Palace of the Caesars. It was a forlorn sight, long since uninhabitable. As the sultan wandered through the ruined chambers, he quoted the melancholic lines of an unknown Persian poet:

 

       The spider weaves the curtains in the Palace of the Caesars;

       The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.

And with that, the Roman empire was gone forever.

Megadux and Grand Vizier

THE GRAND DUKE Lucas Notaras was held under guard in his home. Soon enough the sultan came to see him. Mehmed bluntly told Notaras that he and Constantine must accept the moral responsibility for the mass slaughter, because they had refused to surrender the city to him.

‘Sire,’ Notaras replied, ‘neither I nor the emperor had the power to make the people of this city surrender. And why should we want to give up, when we have been receiving letters from your people, urging us to fight on?’

Mehmed knew at once that Notaras was talking about Halil Pasha.

Three days later, the grand vizier was thrown into a dungeon, and then executed as a traitor. Halil’s money was confiscated by the treasury and his friends were forbidden to mourn for him.

Mehmed considered bringing Lucas Notaras into his court to govern Constantinople, but thought better of it, and had him executed, along with his family.

MEHMED RETURNED temporarily to the comforts of his palace in Edirne to plan the rebuilding of his conquered city. By the time he left, almost the entire Christian population of Constantinople was gone, either enslaved or in exile. For six whole months, the once-great metropolis lay quiet, an empty vessel. Ducas, a Byzantine historian, captured the eerie bleakness: ‘The city was desolate, lying dead, naked, soundless, having neither form nor beauty.’

Then Mehmed sent his labourers to repair the city. The walls were restored, and the Hagia Sophia was reconsecrated as a mosque and renamed the Ayasofya. Tall minaret towers sprouted up from its four corner points, which only enhanced its majesty. The mosaics and frescoes inside were mostly covered in whitewash.

Constantinople was renamed Istanbul. It’s not clear where the name comes from; it could be a rough reworking of ‘Constantinople’, or it could derive from a Turkish interpretation of the Greek phrase eis ten polin, ‘to the city’, a common response to the question ‘where are you going?’

If the city was to recover and thrive under Ottoman rule, then it needed to maintain something of its multicultural flavour. Mehmed appointed the anti-unionist monk Gennadius as Patriarch of Constantinople, and established a Jewish grand rabbi in the city. Genoese traders were encouraged to return to Galata. Muslim and Christian subjects of the sultanate were relocated from the Balkans and Anatolia to repopulate the city. Mehmed’s Christian slaves were settled in a neighbourhood named Fener, near Blachernae, where a tiny population of Orthodox ‘Romans’ endures to this day.

Old trading routes were reopened and Istanbul began to recover its wealth and confidence. Mehmed established a university, and invited Arab scientists, architects and artists to live and work in the city. The shape of the skyline changed and sharpened as dozens of tall minarets poked up into the sky. In 1478 a census recorded a population of eighty thousand in the city. At the end of the century, Constantinople was again the biggest city in Europe.

Russians vs Ottomans

ON OUR LAST full day in Istanbul, Joe and I catch a tram to the Grand Bazaar to buy trinkets for home. The air is filled with the sounds of spruikers and the scent of spice and ground coffee. We see countless shops selling necklaces, rings and bracelets with evil eyes to ward off bad luck, a tradition that has endured in the city since Roman times. An aged black cat curls around my leg; her back leg performs a little arthritic kick when she walks. Her coat is glossy but when I pat her, I feel the bony skeleton underneath.

In a shop window I spy a set of chess pieces on a marbled board. It’s the most beautiful chess set I have ever seen, so I buy it. The hand-painted pieces are styled as Orthodox Russians and Ottoman Turks. The Russian castle piece is a little crimson Kremlin; for the Turks it’s a cream-and-caramel campaign tent.

Outside the Bazaar, a cold drizzle has settled in, so Joe and I go to a café to wait it out. I order a Turkish coffee, Joe has a small glass of apple tea. I can’t resist the urge to pull out the chess pieces to study their intricate details more closely. Then I set up the chessboard on the table for a game. Joe likes the look of the Ottoman pieces so I get to be the Russians. I win the first two games. In the third I make a few dumb moves and he checkmates me. He looks at me quizzically, suspecting I’ve thrown the match, but I haven’t. I never do. A few years back I bought the board game Risk at his urging. I won the first few games, and then Joe began winning and hasn’t lost a game since. At first he was a bad winner, crowing to his mother and his friends; then as he racked up bigger and bigger victories, he became more generous and advised me on where I’d gone wrong.

The Burnt Column, Istanbul.

Creative Commons/Vladimir Menkov

It’s really pouring down now and shoppers outside are dashing into the luxury brand-name shops of Divanyolu Street for shelter. Joe is hunched over the board, his eyes darting about, trying to compute all the permutations of his next move. His apple tea is getting cold.

I stare out the window, and a little further along the way, I see what appears to be an ugly industrial chimney mounted on a crude pedestal of stone bricks. I check my street map and realise it is no such thing.

‘You see that tower?’ I say, excitedly.

‘Yep,’ Joe seems glad for the distraction.

‘The Turks call it the Burnt Column. But do you know what it really is?’

He just looks at me patiently. He’s getting used to my rhetorical tricks.

‘That, Joe, is the Column of Constantine.’

THE COLUMN IS AS OLD as the imperial city, unveiled the very same day that Constantine’s New Rome was founded seventeen centuries ago. If Constantinople has a birthplace, it is here, at the base of this burnt tower. Once among the city’s most impressive monuments, today it’s a blackened ruin of its former self, like a tree trunk after a forest fire.

Yet it is still upright, still on its feet.

Local shoppers and tourists stream past it like they would a homeless man, ignoring its still, spectral presence.

Joe glances at the column and back at me.

‘You know,’ I say, suddenly enthused, ‘if we could somehow burrow our way under that column’s pedestal, we might find the most precious Roman talisman of all . . . an object of incredible mythic power. You could write the plot of an Indiana Jones movie around it.’

‘Oh yeah? What is it?’

‘It’s a little wooden statue called the Palladium.’

Palladium

THE PALLADIUM WAS a metre-long wooden effigy of the Greek goddess Pallas. According to Greek mythology, the statue was carved by a sorrowful Athena, full of regret for having killed Pallas, her stepmother. Zeus picked up the statue and hurled it down to Earth as a gift for the people of Troy.

The Trojans revered the Palladium, and came to believe this little statue would keep their city safe, so long as it remained inside Troy. But one night, at the climax of the Trojan Wars, two Greek warriors crept into the Trojan citadel and stole the Palladium, leaving the city unprotected and open to attack. Only then was it possible for the Greeks to take the city through the famous ruse of the Trojan Horse.

Sometime after the fall of Troy, it was said that the Palladium was smuggled into the fledgling city of Rome, where it was safeguarded for centuries in the Temple of Vesta. The Palladium worked the same protective magic on the city of Rome, keeping it inviolate and free to extend its dominion over the whole world. It bolstered Rome’s self-assurance and its belief in its exceptional destiny. When Constantine the Great made plans for his new capital in the east, he wanted to transfuse something of that prestige into Constantinople’s bloodstream.

ON MONDAY 4 NOVEMBER 328, Constantine led a procession through the streets of New Rome into an oval-shaped forum named in his honour. The transformation of Byzantium into an imperial capital had been rushed to meet Constantine’s deadlines, and so the new city had all the cracks and imperfections of a shoddy renovation. But within this ceremonial space the emperor could survey the scene with satisfaction: the new Forum of Constantine was splendid to the eye, paved with marble and ringed with elegant colonnades and beautiful classical statues.

The centrepiece of the forum was an impressively tall column supporting a colossal statue of – who else? – Constantine himself. Creating this monument had been no small task. Since a suitable column could not be found anywhere nearby, the emperor’s workers improvised by constructing a tall stone tower and cladding it with curved bands of porphyry, the purpled marble associated with imperial authority. The colossus of Constantine at the apex of the column, splendid as it was, was also a bit of a mish-mash. There was no time to build it up from scratch, so a suitably gigantic statue of Apollo was located elsewhere and the head lopped off, replaced by a newly carved likeness of the emperor, crowned by a nimbus of golden metal spikes that caught the radiance of the late-afternoon sun.

Constantine formally dedicated the city as the new Roman capital with a mix of pagan and Christian rites. At the emperor’s side was Praetextus, the high priest of Rome, who had brought with him, at Constantine’s request, the Palladium. At a particularly auspicious moment the wooden effigy was buried at the foot of Constantine’s column where it could not be easily stolen. Precious Christian relics – twelve baskets of crumbs left over from the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the legendary axe used by Noah to construct his Ark – were also buried under the column for safekeeping.

A pious inscription at the base of the monument bound the might of Rome to the God of the Christians: O Christ, ruler and master of the world, to You now I dedicate this subject city, and these sceptres and the might of Rome.

THE COLUMN OF CONSTANTINE remained in place for centuries, the statue at the top and the Palladium buried underneath like a dirty, pagan secret. But as the eastern Roman empire entered its long decline, the column began to deteriorate correspondingly.

In 1106, a severe storm toppled the statue of Constantine, sending it crashing into the forum below. Emperor Manuel Comnenus, who may have felt uncomfortable with its pagan overtones, replaced the statue with a simple, pious cross.

In 1204, the rampaging Crusaders tore away the bronze bands that held the porphyry outer shell in place. After the Ottoman conquest, Mehmed had the cross taken down, but the monument was otherwise left alone. A fire in 1779 left the column blackened and scorched.

For all we know, that little wooden totem is still buried at the foot of the burnt column, under that rocky pedestal, in the heart of downtown Istanbul.

The Third Rome

MEHMED’S DREAM was not so very different from that of a Roman emperor: to establish a universal empire under one rule and one faith. He adopted the title of ‘Fetih’, conqueror, and as his court settled into their new imperial capital of Istanbul, they abandoned the simple, egalitarian habits they had maintained from their days as nomadic warriors. As Mehmed grew older, he was transfigured from a lean warrior into a fattened, bejewelled monarch, increasingly distant from his subjects. He became more reliant on a large bureaucracy, which inevitably adopted longstanding Roman habits of administration.

In 1480 Mehmed commissioned a portrait from the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. In it, his lips are pursed, his eyes vague and unfocused. He looks like a man who has attained his heart’s desire and is still unhappy.

public domain

Portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror in his later years, by Gentile Bellini.

The Sultan was pleased to award himself another new title: ‘Kayser-i Rûm’, Caesar of the Romans. Soon enough there would be other claimants for the title of Kaysar, Kaiser or Czar.

ZOE PALAEOLOGUS, the niece of the last emperor, was only a child when Constantinople fell. Her family brought her to Corfu and then Rome, where she came under the pope’s protection. Zoe was educated as a Catholic and her name was Latinised to Sophia.

In 1472, Pope Paul II, hoping to improve his influence with the Russian Orthodox church, arranged a marriage between Sophia and the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III. The marriage was performed by proxy in St Peter’s Basilica, with an ambassador standing in for the prince.

The next day Sophia embarked on the long journey to meet her new husband. Accompanied by a large entourage, she travelled north through Italy and Germany to the port of Lübeck, where a ship carried her across the Baltic Sea to Tallinn. From there she was transported overland to Novgorod, and then at last to Moscow, where she arrived in time for the first winter snow.

Sophia was warmly received by Ivan, who dedicated several palaces and gardens to her, and she soon settled into her new life in Russia. The pope’s ambitions were thwarted; Sophia walked away from Catholicism and returned to her Orthodox roots. Like other transplanted Byzantine princesses before her, Sophia brought a touch of sophistication to her new palace. She introduced elaborate Roman ceremonies to Ivan’s court, and encouraged her husband to think of himself as the rightful successor to the Roman throne. There was a certain logic to it: Ivan was now the most powerful Orthodox ruler in the world, married to the last emperor’s niece.

An Orthodox monk later sent a letter to Sophia’s son, Vasilli II, which began with a dramatic flourish: ‘Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Czardom.’ Ivan’s successors would thereafter adopt the imperial title of Czar of Muscovy: the Third Rome.

The Immortal City of the Imagination

THE LONG STORY of the Roman empire comes to a close with those two elegiac lines of Persian poetry uttered by Mehmed in the Great Palace. A doctor might have said the patient suffered a violent death, at the end of an unnaturally long life and a painful decline. But the disembodied presence of Byzantium haunted the world it left behind; it became a ghost empire, still influencing the course of events, like an impulse from the subconscious.

In Constantinople’s final, turbulent century, even as its leaders drove the empire to extinction, somehow, heroically, the city experienced a resurgence of culture and ideas, like a final burst of light from a dying star. As the outside world became too horrible to contemplate, the Orthodox church turned inward, venturing deeper into mysticism. Priests adopted an intense style of prayer known as hesychasm, taken from a Greek word meaning ‘to keep stillness’. Hesychasm was not unlike Buddhist meditation; it required breath control and constant repetition of a mantra, the Jesus prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, the sinner’ – to help the worshipper withdraw from the noise and clutter of the outside world. Then, once a state of utter stillness had been reached, the mind would be opened to the uncreated light of God. In such moments, the worshipper might be flooded with ecstasy, although the church cautioned against seeking ecstasy for its own sake. This was an undeniably powerful form of theosis, union with the divine, realised in the most personal manner possible.

MEANWHILE, in other corners of the city during that last desperate century, scholars were marching steadily in the other direction, away from mysticism and towards a revival of reason, inspired by the writings of Aristotle and by other ancient texts. These scholars were no less Christian for all their love of pagan wisdom, believing enlightenment could be arrived at through rational thought. In the past, the term hellene had been used to describe the ancient Greek pagans, to hold them slightly at a distance from their own identity as Christian Romans. But in these last decades, there was a greater willingness among scholars in Constantinople to embrace their Hellenic heritage.

The classic works of ancient Greece had always been present in Constantinople, never quite forgotten, not even in its Dark Age, when the city was fighting for its life against the Persians and the armies of the Prophet. The torch of classical culture kept burning in Constantinople; its statues adorned its public places, and its manuscripts were kept safe in the city’s monasteries and universities.

As the empire began to recover in the ninth century, the classics enjoyed a resurgence. Anyone pursuing higher education in Constantinople was taught to read ancient Greek and instructed in the works of the classical historians, poets and philosophers. In the Alexiad, Anna Comnena refers to Homer simply as ‘the Poet’, and just assumes her readers are as well acquainted with his work as she is.

Orthodox scholars struggled to reconcile the knowledge of the ancient world with their faith. Christian thought was more precious to them than pagan wisdom, but still, the elegance and insight of classical writing kept tugging at their sleeves. It was easy enough, then, to divide Christian and pagan wisdom into two distinct spheres. Pagan wisdom was deemed to be ‘Outer Learning’, the stuff of the created world, such as geometry, mathematics and history – paganism could do no harm here. Christian wisdom was the ‘Inner Learning’, the place reserved for the contemplation of the eternal. Pagan logic was excluded from this inner sanctum of thought. The only aspects of God that could be known were those that had been revealed through the scriptures. Anything beyond that was deemed to be profoundly mysterious, and beyond human comprehension.

Then, as the empire slid into its final decline, the church was convulsed in a bitter dispute over hesychasm. In 1337, an astronomer and a mathematician named Barlaam publicly ridiculed the Hesychasts as ‘navel-gazers’ (omphalopsychoi), for their practice of focusing on their navels during meditation. Barlaam argued that the presence of God could never be directly encountered, as the hesychasts claimed, but could only be deduced by our God-given powers of reason.

Barlaam’s argument was attacked by a hesychast from Mount Athos named Gregory of Palamas, who insisted that Barlaam had it backwards: to him, trying to grapple with the uncreated light of God through the crude and puny tool of reason was absurd, like a spider attempting to capture the sun in its web. God, he said, could be experienced through prayer and meditation, but He could never be ‘understood’.

The church came down hard on Gregory’s side and Barlaam the rationalist monk was condemned as a heretic. Realising there was no longer any place for him in Constantinople, he left the city for the court of Robert the Wise in Naples, where a rebirth of interest in classical wisdom was already underway.

Italian and Byzantine scholars were already tentatively reaching out towards each other. Europeans were slowly rediscovering the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Thucydides, and they soon realised the only place that still held these invaluable Greek manuscripts was Constantinople. The Byzantines, for their part, could see the empire crumbling away under their feet, and that the Orthodox church was turning its back on Outer Wisdom. They began to understand that a better life might be waiting for them in the vibrant, humanist courts of Florence, Venice and Rome.

In Italy, Barlaam converted to Catholicism, and befriended three scholars who would go on to become the key literary instigators of the Italian Renaissance: Paul of Perugia, Boccaccio and the poet Petrarch. All three were very anxious to be introduced to the ancient Greek works that Barlaam knew so intimately.

WHEN CONSTANTINOPLE fell in 1453, another wave of influential scholars stuffed their bags with classical manuscripts and fled the city forever. As they infiltrated the Italian courts, the educated easterners taught their willing hosts how to read Greek, and helped translate the classics into Latin or into the Italian vernacular. By 1487, the Byzantine population of Venice was said to number close to four thousand, which led the local cardinal to remark that Venice had become ‘almost another Byzantium’.

While it’s not quite true that the Renaissance was ignited by Byzantine exiles, it’s certainly true that the partnership between Italian and Byzantine scholars gave fuel to a flickering fire, and stoked it into a roaring blaze.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE changed the world in other ways that could hardly have been foreseen at the time. Ottoman control of the region disrupted the spice trade between western Europe and Asia. Although the Turks were prepared to tolerate Christian traders, it was deemed in the west that the overland route was now too dangerous and difficult. And so Portuguese navigators began to search for a new sea route to India and China.

In 1486, Bartholomew Diaz sailed south, down the west African coast, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, bringing a European-made galleon into the Indian Ocean for the first time. In 1497, Vasco de Gama sailed all the way from Lisbon to Calcutta, completely bypassing the Ottoman world.

Thirty-three years after the fall of Constantinople, a Genoese explorer named Cristoforo Colombo appeared before the Spanish court, asking for financial support to find another route to Japan and China by sailing west, across the unknown waters of the Atlantic. In this way, the death of Constantinople was a catalyst for the European Age of Exploration, and for the conquest of the Americas.

THE REPUTATION OF the eastern Roman empire suffered in the centuries after its death. Enthusiastic scholars of the Enlightenment had little interest in the history of a dead medieval theocracy. Edward Gibbon disdained the ‘Byzantine Empire’ as effete and superstitious, unworthy of the Roman name. The hostility persisted into the nineteenth century, leading one historian – in a book titled, unpromisingly, A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne – to pompously dismiss eleven centuries of Byzantine civilisation:

 

The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilisation so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet ‘mean’ may be so emphatically applied . . . The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.

European interest in Byzantium revived in the twentieth century, but historians knew they were cutting across the grain of centuries of western prejudice.

William Butler Yeats, a poet well attuned to Byzantine mysticism, dreamt of visiting the ghost empire of Constantinople. With two sublime poems, ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, he invited the English-speaking world to see the empire afresh, uncluttered by western European prejudice. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ was written when Yeats was sixty-eight and feeling like ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’. To him, the dream of Byzantium seemed to promise entry into an immortal realm of shimmering mosaics, clockwork birds and drowsy emperors:

 

       And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

       To the holy city of Byzantium.

       O sages standing in God’s holy fire

       As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

       Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

       And be the singing-masters of my soul.

       Consume my heart away; sick with desire

       And fastened to a dying animal

       It knows not what it is; and gather me

       Into the artifice of eternity.

As an Irishman living outside the borders of the British empire, Yeats was perhaps better able to see past the martial music of the ancient Romans and appreciate the lustre of distant Constantinople. Speaking of the poem in a BBC broadcast, Yeats reminded listeners that, ‘When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation and the source of its spiritual philosophy.’

IN 2004, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM of New York launched a blockbuster show titled Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261–1557, which displayed countless gilded icons, frescoes, silks, manuscripts, caskets and amulets from the final centuries of the eastern Roman empire. In a metropolis driven by steroidal capitalism, the still, sacred aura of Byzantine art left visitors dazzled and unsettled.

The exhibition’s catalogue was prefaced with a blessing from Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who noted the atmosphere of ‘bright sadness’ that pervades the art of the empire’s final years. He concluded with a prayer that people ‘may find faith in higher values and ideals than those that are being offered by the world marketplace’.

‘Fat chance,’ wrote the New Yorker critic. ‘I came away,’ he wrote, ‘with a chilly sense of having been warned.’

TODAY BARTHOLOMEW lives in a walled compound in the district of Fener in Istanbul. The Turkish government doesn’t recognise his title of Ecumenical Patriarch, only acknowledging him as the leader of the ethnic Greek minority known as the Rum or ‘Romans’ that once dominated this precinct of the city. As Turkey becomes increasingly torn between modernity and Islamism, more and more Greeks have chosen to pack up and leave Fener. The multi-ethnic flavour of the city that prevailed through the Ottoman era is fast disappearing. More families leave every year and Istanbul’s ‘Roman’ population is now close to extinction.

AT THE AIRPORT, Joe and I queue to check our bags in, surrounded by backlit billboards for tech companies and financial services offering ‘innovative solutions’. ‘Innovation’ has been a popular buzzword since the internet boom of the nineties. In the western world it’s seen as a positive good, promising creativity, novelty and disruption. To the Byzantines, an innovation was a paltry thing, an embarrassment, like a cheap modern extension to a grand old house. Innovation, to them, was the enemy of the eternal, the perfect. In the struggle for and against icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, each side accused the other of introducing a shameful innovation to religious life. They maintained their aversion to innovation right up until the Turks dragged a giant cannon to their walls.

August 2015

IT IS A YEAR-AND-A-HALF since Joe and I journeyed to Istanbul. My son is now a lanky sixteen-year-old and he’s as tall as me. He has a guitar. He’s into the Pixies and the Strokes and Nirvana and Japanese noodles and Chinese barbecue duck and comedians on YouTube. He doesn’t smoke dope because it’s lame. He’s learning to speak Mandarin and receives praise for his accent. He still wants to be an architect.

This month I have had to leave my family in Australia to make a radio series in Iceland. On my way home, I take a two-day stopover in Paris. I’m alone, and lonely, so I wander around the city aimlessly, allowing myself to be drawn down any street on a whim. On this warm summer evening I find myself outside the entrance of a modest Orthodox church on the Rue Jean de Beauvais. I assume it will be closed or deserted on a Thursday evening, but as I push open the door my senses are confronted with light, music and incense.

Inside I see twenty to thirty worshippers. Most are kneeling on the long carpets that run from the altar to the back of the room. The women wear headscarves and the men prostrate themselves on the floor towards the altar. It would be easy to mistake this place for a mosque if it weren’t for all the Christian imagery. I feel like I’ve intruded on the rituals of a secret society.

I stand at the back, trying to observe unobtrusively. Then I notice the room is divided along gender lines and I am on the women’s side. I shift over to the other side as surreptitiously as I can manage. No one is paying me the slightest attention anyway; the congregation are intensely focused on their worship.

Three aged priests, bent under the weight of their heavy robes, lead the service. Their rich voices are joined by two cantors in plain clothes at the side of the altar. The liturgy is entirely musical. The voices of the cantors soar up and swoop down through the eastern scales with assurance. One cantor, dressed in a jogging suit, looks bored, like he’s only here to please his mother. The other cantor wears a crisp, white shirt; he seems more devoted to the music.

Here there is both taxis and theosis. I entered the church feeling footsore and irritable. After ten minutes or so I am cool and calm, and I begin to daydream. My eyes wander down to the floor and there it is, emblazoned on the carpet runner: the insignia of the double-headed eagle under a single crown. One talon clutches a sword, the other holds a globe. After all these years, the ghost empire still makes its claim, even here, to dominion over the upstart land of the Franks. The double-headed eagle, representing the unity of the eastern and western empires, still awaits its resurrection in Constantinople, the capital of a universal empire.