WHEN ROME SLOWLY BEGAN to convert to Christianity, the ensuing ecumenical wars for the empire’s soul led to high-ranking clergymen often conspiring to have their rivals exiled, pressuring emperors to intercede on their behalf and stamp out dangerous heresies, thus ensuring the empire’s stability. Socrates Scholasticus (c.380–c.439) relates how, acting under the influence of Bishop Lucius of Alexandria, the Emperor Valens exiled Macarius the Elder and Macarius the Younger to an island off the coast of the Nile inhabited solely by pagans. Disconnected from their communities and fellow worshippers, it was thought the monks would be forced to abandon their faith, a wish that was irremediably dashed when the Macariuses instead converted the island’s entire population to the teachings of Christ. While bishops vied with one another and the Constantinian Church acquired a lust for gold and bureaucracy, purging all forms of anti-authoritarian thought from their liturgy, monastic communities sprang up all along the Nitrian Desert, in Lower Egypt. It is interesting to note here that while exile from the civilized world was considered a most horrible fate in Greek and Roman society, the Christian world instead taught that to remove oneself from the world’s concerns was to attain a level of spiritual purity unavailable to those mired in the corrupting influences of everyday life.
The isolation of these communities afforded the Desert Fathers and Mothers, early-third-century Christian hermits who lived in the deserts of northern Egypt, the opportunity to retreat from the increasingly complex, violent and disordered world around them and to devote themselves to God, building upon foundations laid out by earlier mystics such as Saint Anthony of Egypt and Saint Pachomius. The Egyptian desert — which abounded in what Abba Andrew dubbed the three things most appropriate for a monk, “exile, poverty and endurance in silence” — would also eventually welcome the long-maligned Nestorius (c.386–450). Following Nestorius’s defeat at the Council of Ephesus in 431, when his proposition that Christ’s human and divine natures were separate was denounced as irredeemably heretical, Emperor Theodosius II banished him to Hibis in Egypt’s Western Desert, nevertheless probably ensuring the spread of his teachings to the east, which they did, first to Persia and then on to India and China. Elsewhere, Saint Patrick converted Ireland, alongside Saint Columba, the founder of Iona Abbey, while Saint Aidan established Lindisfarne Priory off the coast of Northumberland. Islands, once home to inconvenient orators and political rivals, became safe havens for the servants of God, where exile, like in the Ramayana, transformed into a form of religious asceticism, a means to purify oneself. Of course, merely withdrawing from the world provided no certainty of instant holiness, as the Desert Father Abba Lucius recognized: “One day Abba Longinus questioned Abba Lucius about three thoughts, saying first, ‘I want to go into exile.’ The old man said to him, ‘If you cannot control your tongue, you will not be an exile anywhere. Therefore control your tongue here, and you will be an exile.’”
The world the Desert Fathers and Mothers had known would be forever changed by the early Muslim conquests of the seventh century, and not long after Tariq ibn Ziyad (670–719) conquered the rock that now bears his name, the notion of exile would be again revisited by Abd al-Rahman I (731–88), an Umayyad prince from Syria, with whom the rich tradition of exilic writing in Spain arguably begins. Among the high-ranking survivors of the Abbasid slaughter of the Umayyads in 750, Abd al-Rahman spent several years roaming the cities of North Africa before amassing a small army, landing in al-Andalus and conquering Córdoba, which he made his capital, much to the chagrin of the Abbasid ruler in Baghdad, who reigned, if only nominally, as caliph over the entire Muslim world. Abd al-Rahman’s most famous poem, or rather the most famous poem attributed to him, is “The Palm Tree”, which takes as its subject a tree that, like the new Emir of Córdoba, has “sprung from soil” in which he is a “stranger”, becoming a memento of Abd al-Rahman’s lost homeland in Syria, which by then was ruled by his enemies.
Although Islam expanded its territory rapidly in the first three centuries of its existence, it would not ultimately retain many of its farthest outposts. While al-Andalus — or Muslim Spain — would last roughly from 711 to the fall of Granada in 1491, Siqilliyat, or the Emirate of Sicily, proved even more short-lived (831–1091). This might explain why, in the words of the Italian writer Giuseppe Quatriglio (1922–2017), many of the works of the Siculo-Arab poets we know are imbued with “the pain of eternal exile from Sicily”. Ibn Hamdis (1056–1133) was born halfway through the Norman conquest of Sicily, and after the fall of Syracuse he relocated to Sfax in North Africa, before eventually making his way to al-Andalus, drawn by the reputation of its rulers as indefatigable patrons of the arts. It was during this period of exile in al-Andalus that Ibn Hamdis’s Sicily finally fell to the Norman invaders for good. In one of the most complete fragments of his work still extant, Ibn Hamdis imagines Siqilliyat as a lost “paradise”, the land of his “youth’s mad joys”, which has now become a “desert” he cannot bring himself to “bear witness to”.
During the Tang Dynasty in China (620–905), exile was likely the most popular of the “five punishments”, which included death by decapitation, a long sentence of hard labour or a beating with either a thin or a thick rod, compared to which banishment to remote, barbarous regions of the empire seemed like a far easier choice. Much like Ovid, the poet Bai Juyi (772–846) got himself in trouble at the Tang court over some controversial poems, which, as he explains in his preface to his poem “The Song of the Lute”, led to him being “demoted to deputy governor and exiled to Jiujiang”. The poem begins as Bai Juyi sees a friend off at the river, at which point he hears the sound of a lute being played by a woman, and, since finding refined music in distant provinces was uncommon, it reminds him of his old life in the sophisticated capital. With echoes of the interactions between Scheherazade and Shahryar in The Thousand and One Nights, Bai Juyi begins to ask the female musician a series of questions about her life, to which she answers:
My brother was drafted and my Madam died.
An evening passed, and when morning came my beauty was gone.
My door became desolate and horses seldom came,
and as I was getting old I married a merchant.
My merchant cared more about profit than being with me.
A month ago he went to Fuliang to buy tea.
Although the source of their loneliness is different, they are “both exiled to the edge of this world”, and finally brought together by the sound of music, which is minutely described throughout the course of the poem.
While the Tang Dynasty’s central government banished unpopular officials, the power to exile even the most influential citizens lay in the hands of Florence’s masses, thereby truly earning its sobriquet as the “Athens of the Middle Ages”. Failed wars, economic instability and unpopularity could easily get Florence’s leaders exiled from their own city. In fact, a spell in exile caused by one’s political allegiances occurred so often in Renaissance Italy that one had to have a sense of humour about it, as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) clearly did. In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli gives us an anecdote involving two of the city’s most famous sons, Rinaldo degli Albizzi (1370–1442) and Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), the patriarchs of two of Florence’s most powerful families, who played an exilic game of cat and mouse with one another for much of their lives. “In 1435,” Machiavelli tells us, “while Rinaldo degli Albizzi was in exile from Florence and scheming to start a war against the Florentines in the hope of returning home and chasing out Cosimo de’ Medici, he sent this message to Medici: ‘The hen is hatching her eggs.’ Cosimo’s reply was: ‘Tell him she’ll have a hard time hatching them outside the nest.’” Indeed, it was Cosimo the Elder who had the final laugh, given that, due to Cosimo’s political perspicacity, Rinaldo’s plot to have Florence invaded by Filippo Maria Visconti, the Duke of Milan, came to naught and Rinaldo never saw his native city again.
Long before Machiavelli’s time, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), another great Florentine, was chased out of his city, an episode from which we can perhaps draw most meaning by reading a few cantos situated roughly halfway through his Paradiso. Although Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory and heaven throughout The Divine Comedy is studded with characters who appear incapable of speaking in anything but riddles, the poet is finally met by one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida, a warrior who was knighted during the Second Crusade (1147–49), and who, unlike anyone else in Dante’s epic, does not mince his words. Cacciaguida tells Dante that his beloved Florence has been corrupted. Once a sturdy, honourable republic, its institutions have been polluted by the internecine warfare caused by greedy, competing clans — like the Albizzi and the Medici — who continually plotted and schemed to undermine the city’s government to the detriment of its citizens’ welfare. Before long, Cacciaguida warns his descendant that his own banishment won’t be long in coming: “So you are destined to depart from Florence”, he tells him, “You shall leave everything most dearly loved” and “You shall discover how salty is the savour / Of someone else’s bread”. Of course, luckily for Alighieri, this is paradise, where hope reigns supreme, and Cacciaguida tells his descendant that those who have exiled him will eventually be exiled themselves.
Some, of course, are fated to be exiled before they are even born, and the Byzantine poet Michael Marullus (1453–1500) was certainly one of them. Marullus was still inside his mother’s womb as Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405–53) led the last desperate effort to keep the walls of the old imperial capital of Constantinople from being breached. An aristocrat with links to the former ruling family, Marullus came of age amidst the ashes of the Byzantine world, which had endured for 1,000 years after the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Growing up in the maritime Republic of Ragusa, an old Venetian vassal state, Marullus later moved to Italy, where he spent periods of time in Ancona, Padua, Venice and Naples. Aged seventeen, he took up arms as a mercenary and headed off to fight the Ottomans in the Black Sea region; but upon his return to Italy years later, he began to write poetry and forged a number of friendships with some of the peninsula’s most distinguished inhabitants, including Pico della Mirandola and Sandro Botticelli, who painted his portrait. Regardless of where his dromomania led him, however, Marullus always betrayed his true roots by signing each poem with the word Constantinopolitanus.
There is no better statement of this exiled Greek poet’s life and ideas than his “De exilio suo” — “On His Own Exile” — an intensely self-conscious lyric, apparently written while Marullus was serving as a mercenary, which contains some hard truths about life away from one’s homeland:
True, all dignity of birth and family is cast off
As soon as you step on foreign land an exile.
Nobility and virtuous lineage, a house which gleams
With ancient honours — these are no help now.
Although Marullus acknowledges the loss of his world, he is obsessed with the warlike spirit he believes is necessary in order to reconquer it, a sentiment which shows its pagan roots in the line: “Liberty cannot be preserved except by our native Mars.” Centuries ahead of his time — his belief in the need for violent rebellion would be proved right by the Greek War of Independence three centuries later — Marullus was nevertheless born astride two ages, although one could safely say that his death was squarely medieval. Attempting to cross the River Cecina atop his horse, Marullus drowned at the age of forty-seven, with a copy of Lucretius’s De rerum natura stuffed in his pocket. Although praised by Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), Marullus’s poems may well have been lost to us had it not been for the efforts of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who translated his poems into Italian in 1938, a fortunate turn given that Marullus’s books hadn’t been reprinted since the sixteenth century.