14

‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die …

Like Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, Kipling’s poem ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’ is about the transitory nature of power.1 Power which at one time appears to be so absolute and permanent is inevitably destined to decline and disappear. The poem also catches the fact that the principal repository of such power is the city and that when new power emerges this will also seek to display itself in a similar manner.

In the two millennia between Persepolis and Germania a large number of cities were created for the specific purpose of proclaiming power through stone. They were usually the work of powerful rulers seeking to use these cities to endow their regimes with the grandeur, legitimacy and endurance intended as visible proofs of their attainments. Such cities have had a variety of forms and characteristics but certain of these frequently recur.

The most favoured architecture has certainly been of the classical type. The control and ordered severity to be found in this style has found echoes throughout the ages in the constant desire to give an aura of permanence to imperial endeavours. Dalrymple saw the architectural vocabulary of power as consisting of ‘great expanses of marble, a stripped-down classicism, a fondness for long colonnades and a love of Imperial heraldic devices’.² Both Persepolis and the unfinished Germania were in this classical form. Consciously or unconsciously, Hitler used the ancient world as his model and he found the severe neoclassical style of Troost ideal for giving architectural expression to this. In Europe the notion of ‘Translatio Imperii’ implies the idea of the renewal of the Roman Empire, so often considered to be the original or prototype empire, and this then imparts a legitimacy to the new or aspiring power. ‘Hitler wanted Ancient Rome and Speer did his best to provide it.’³ While this has, of course, been mainly the case with European and Middle Eastern empires, the capitals outside this cultural tradition have often developed styles which bear a remarkable similarity. While the architectural traditions are in each case very different, the same kind of severity and power is conveyed by the great walls of the Red Fort and the Forbidden City.

Mathematics, especially geometry, and cosmology have underlain the planning of many such cities and determined their precise locations. This was especially to be found in China where feng shui, geomancy, was used to ascertain with precision where everything should be and how it was to relate to everything else. Numbers and colours, also usually relating to the cosmic, were used in creating the correct ambience for the wielding of power and determining the exact centre from which this power needed to emanate. The same sort of ideas also underlay the configuration of other capitals. From the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City to the Bedchamber of Louis XIV in Versailles, mathematical principles were used to determine the precise location for the most effective exercise of supreme power. The Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven and Louis XIV was the Sun King, and similar attributes were bestowed on monarchs elsewhere and at other times. Whether the ultimate source of power was Heaven, the sun or God, the supreme source of worldly power was deemed to be in direct contact with it and to derive his own power and authority from it.

Although it was not available everywhere, stone was usually the preferred building material. This was most conveniently the local stone and so proximity to good workable building stone was often another factor influencing and even determining location. Among the most favoured stones have been the young red sandstone of northern India, the darker sandstones of the Guadarrama mountains of Spain and the limestone of Fars in Persia. Always especially prized has been marble which was used for the features of the most sacred and important sites. The walls of the divans of the Mughal emperors were faced in marble while in Fatehpur Sikri the most sacred site, the tomb of the saint, is in brilliant white marble. This white also denotes purity, another feature of power that at its strongest is, or appears to be, uncorrupted and devoted exclusively to the well-being of the state.

A further common characteristic is that from Darius’s Persepolis to Hitler’s Germania the powerful ruler often embarks on the building of a new capital city which will enshrine the nature of his own regime. Such rulers do not wish to be under the shadow of forebears, however illustrious they may have been. They wish to stamp their own particular character on their capitals, which will probably for this reason be given very different architectural styles from earlier ones. In this way, the capital is an assertion of what the regime intends to be and to do. The ‘seven cities’ of Delhi were built by different regimes, each of which attempted to stamp its own particular character on the city it built. The lavish architecture of Siri was totally different from what has been called the ‘stark cyclopean grandeur’ of Tughluqabad and the regimes which built them acted accordingly.

While the ruler’s direct relationship to ultimate celestial power is a powerful factor in determining the nature of his city, religion in the wider sense has also played an important role. The ancient Persians were Zoroastrians and Persepolis was surrounded by temples containing the eternal flame sacred to that religion. The stone tablets of the Great Kings maintain how it was invariably the god Ahuramazda who commanded or sanctioned certain courses of action. Later empires have sought similar legitimization through their own particular religions. The whole concept of the ‘Three Romes’ was both political and religious and in all three Christianity became virtually a partner of the state. In Byzantium the relationship between the basileus and the patriarch was a close one and this was passed on to Kievan and Muscovite Russia. At first sight the Kremlin looks more like a large group of churches than the heart of a powerful state and while it was by no means a theocracy, the territorial aims and acquisitions of Holy Russia were invariably accorded religious justification. This close relationship of state and Church is reflected in the close proximity of their buildings. Palaces lead into cathedrals with the tombs of the tsars in a manner which blurs any distinction between them.

During the twentieth century this role of religion was taken over by ideology and the ideologies of racism, nationalism and communism underpinned the quasi-imperial pretensions of both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. The great hall at the centre of the Germania project looked very much like a cathedral and the heart of the communist state was itself surrounded by churches.

The image of the autocratic ruler has frequently been incorporated into his capital. The image of himself which Ramesses II wanted to be seen was found in the many statues embellishing his kingdom. The face with the frown and the ‘sneer of cold command’ was of the pharaoh who was to be feared and respected by all. Many of the achievements the pharaoh claimed for himself, such as his heroic deeds in battle, do not appear actually to have taken place. Likewise Trajan’s column in Rome, which displays the military prowess of that most warlike of emperors, and the icons in Constantinople of the Holy Basileus with Christ were images of rulers as they wished their subjects to perceive them.

However, it was in many ways not so much the ruler himself as the created image, and the myths and commands associated with it, that his subjects were expected to fear and obey. If anyone still doubts my power, ‘Look on my buildings’, was the command of Timur. In this way the imperial city with its images of power itself became in many ways more representative of power than the emperor. Timur appears to have been a plainly dressed, even unimpressive, figure sitting in the midst of his architectural and artistic splendour. Similarly, the sense of power emanating from the grandeur of the ‘Sublime Porte’ was incomparably greater than that of the usually quite inadequate sultans, most of whom were rarely seen. The same could be said of the sense of power emanating from the great Red Fort in Delhi, the heart of Mughal power from the time of Shah Jehan. When the British arrived in 1803 the Great Mughal presented a pathetic figure, contrasting starkly with the splendour of his palace. This often applied most to the weaker successors of a great ruler who were not of the same calibre as their illustrious forebear. It applied markedly to the successors of both Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent and Aurangzeb. It also applied in a rather different way to the successors of Louis XIV. They proved so incapable of ruling the great state which had been bequeathed to them that later in the century of the Sun King’s death his grandson was beheaded on the guillotine.

While in the long term the great capital city proclaims the enduring character of the empire, its more immediate function is to overawe, even intimidate, those who see it. It is redolent of a power which they would be unwise to challenge and both Persepolis and Germania proclaimed this to the full. In Persepolis it was first encountered on the great stairway leading to the Throne Room above it. Bas-reliefs of the Persian guards and the subject peoples climbing up bearing tribute covered the walls of this stairway. Together with the statues of the Great King and Ahuramazda above, this is one of the earliest and finest examples of the display of ‘power in stone’ and the effect it was clearly intended to produce. The height factor was very often used to force all who approached the seat of power to look up while the bearer of the supreme power looked down on them.

In modern times, one of the most strident examples of intimidation was Hitler’s Reich Chancellery with what Sudjic called ‘the long march to the Leader’s desk’. The whole edifice was intended to display in an uncompromising manner the power of the Third Reich and its Führer. That this tactic was certainly a successful one is clear from the many encounters between Hitler and lesser rulers who had virtually given in to the demands made on them before even reaching the Leader’s desk. ‘New buildings are put up to strengthen our authority’, proclaimed Hitler. At first they certainly did this, until they were bombed out of existence by a combined air power greater than anything that Hitler was able to muster.

The same intimidation as the Great Stairway and the Reich Chancellery would certainly also have been found on entering the grand portals of the Forbidden City or on approaching the Divans of the Mughal Emperors. If not intimidation, at least awe is still experienced when proceeding along the ceremonial ways leading to centres of power such as Versailles and the Palace of the Viceroy, now the Presidential Palace, in Delhi.

The great power which was implied and displayed by these magnificent capital cities was basically intended to be seen, initially at least, from outside. The real power was exercised well away from the display. In the Red Fort, while the Diwan-i-Am was the stage for the display of power, the inner Diwan-i-Khas was where the power really lay. In the Forbidden City it was the ‘great within’, while the great red walls of the Kremlin swathed a centre of power which allowed little intrusion from outside.

The display of power was thus essentially extramural while its exercise was strictly intramural. The great empires were never known for their consensual government. Democracy, as understood in Ancient Greece, was something quite alien to them. The direction of power was down rather than up; it was imposed from above and the size and grandeur of its buildings was intended to be a clear demonstration, for those who might have wished to challenge it, that this was so.

The initial acquisition of control, and then its consolidation and extension, has invariably necessitated the use of force, and this can be costly in terms of both lives and resources. Consequently another function of the imperial capital has always been to instil in the conquered peoples the inevitability of their being within the sphere of this power and the impossibility of escaping from it. In the most successful empires the subject peoples will then be persuaded to exchange their role from that of free peoples to that of willing subjects. In this way internal peace is brought about by means of consent rather than by constant reliance on repression. The surplus resources of the state can then be used for other purposes such as the extension of territory or the further embellishment of the capital. If and when consent ceases to be given, even the splendour of the capital will not be sufficient to save the ruler or his dynasty. New ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’ will then become the inheritors of the fallen empire and new imperial states will attempt to create their own systems of control which inevitably require their own displays of power.

The stanza of Kipling’s poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter concludes:

But as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth

The Cities rise again.

At the present new buds are certainly putting forth with some vigour but it is yet to be seen what precisely will grow from them. However, whatever this may be it is certain that cities will continue to play a central role, as they have done in the past, both as the holders of power and as the symbols of it.