Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  In other cases, mockery was the chosen weapon:

  The name of Leo the Sixth has been dignified with the title of philosopher; and the union of the prince and the sage… would indeed constitute the perfection of human nature. But the claims of Leo are far short of this ideal excellence. Did he reduce his passions and appetites under the dominion of reason? His life was spent in the pomp of the palace, in the society of his wives and concubines; and even the clemency which he showed, and the peace which he strove to preserve, must be imputed to the softness and indolence of his character. Did he subdue his prejudices, and those of his subjects? His mind was tinged with the most puerile superstition; the influence of the clergy and the errors of the people were consecrated by his laws; and the oracles of Leo, which reveal in prophetic style, the fates of the empire, are founded on the arts of astrology and divination. If we still inquire the reason of his sage appellation, it can only be replied, that [he] was less ignorant than the greater part of his contemporaries in church and state.

  Gibbon had run into a crisis in the writing of The Decline and Fall. After forty-seven chapters he had only reached the end of the sixth century, and he had nearly nine more centuries to cover. He desperately needed to change the pace, and chapter 48 was his vehicle for doing so. Rhetorically, it was magnificent; but as even his admirers admit, ‘historically, it was the weakest section’.11

  The onslaught of the Enlightenment all but obliterated the earlier school of Byzantine scholarship which had been started in Italy by academic refugees from Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century; and the rehabilitation of the Byzantine Empire as a worthy subject of study has occupied the best part of the last 200 years. The first steps towards greater discrimination were taken in Germany, by Winckelmann and others. In Britain, the art historian John Ruskin (1819–1900) made a powerful case for the originality of Byzantine art, especially in The Stones of Venice (1851–3); and the work of his older contemporary George Finlay (1799–1875) re-created a historical continuum which links the revered world of ancient Greece both with Byzantium and with the newly independent Greek kingdom of his own day.12 As Finlay demonstrated, the Empire died twice: once at the hands of Western crusaders, who seized Constantinople between 1204 (the perverted Fourth Crusade) and 1261, and the second time at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. In its terminal phase, the Empire shrivelled in almost botanical style, having repeatedly flowered and borne its fruit. Eventually, reduced to the confines of the single city, it was ready, like the last living twig on an ancient stump, to perish.

  In the twentieth century, three scholarly names stand out. J. B. Bury (1861–1927), an Irishman, is often credited with the revival of Byzantine studies in Britain. Editor both of Gibbon and of the Cambridge Ancient History, he held chairs at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Cambridge. A brilliant Hellenist, he wrote extensively on Classical Greek, Roman and Byzantine subjects.13 Professor Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000), an eccentric gentleman scholar, claimed to have been Bury’s ‘first and only student’ at Cambridge. He was conversant with an astonishing array of languages, including, reputedly, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Russian and Bulgarian, and in the title of an influential early work he bravely linked ‘Byzantine’ with ‘Civilisation’.14 In his History of the Crusades (3 vols., 1951–4), he constantly battled the self-centred prejudices of the ‘West’, preferring to believe that the Easterners were guardians of Europe’s culture and refinement, and Westerners the barbarians.15 ‘There never was a greater crime against humanity’, he wrote, ‘than the Fourth Crusade.’16 Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001), a Russian-born Oxonian, displayed similar inclinations. His work was notable for revealing that the Byzantine Commonwealth had been a multinational community of faith, and that its legacy was still alive among the Eastern Slavs.17

  Once Byzantine Studies were established in the academic world,18 the next task was to raise awareness among the public at large. In this regard, Judith Herrin, a professor from King’s College, London, relates the sort of incident that turns other historians green with envy:

  One afternoon… two workmen knocked on my door in [London University]. They were doing repairs… and had often passed my door with its notice: ‘Professor of Byzantine History’. Together, they decided to stop by and ask me ‘What is Byzantine history?’ They thought that it had something to do with Turkey. And so I found myself trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots… They thanked me warmly, said how curious it was, this Byzantium, and asked why didn’t I write about it for them?19

  Those two builders were in the same position as 99 per cent of the population, including 98 per cent of educated Westerners.

  Another distinguished Byzantinist, meanwhile, had been applying herself to some of the basic questions. ‘For most historians,’ Professor Averil Cameron begins, ‘Byzantium is an absence.’20 Her answer to ‘What was Byzantium?’ sounds very straightforward: ‘Byzantium is the modern name given to the state and society ruled almost continuously from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the dedication of the city by the Emperor Constantine in AD 330 until its sack by the Ottomans under the young Mehmed (‘The Conqueror’) in 1453.’ 21 ‘But Byzantium is hard to grasp,’ she continues, ‘and “the Byzantines” even more so.’22 Her perception that Byzantine history began in AD 330 is not shared by everyone. Many scholars put the transition from Roman to Byzantine significantly later, either with Justinian or with Heraclius or even with Leo III (r. 717–41). It is common practice nowadays to use the framework of five Byzantine dynasties: the Heraclian (610–717), the Isaurian (717–867), the Macedonian (867–1081), the Comnenian (1081–1258) and the Palaeologan (1258–1453).

  In answer to ‘Who were the Byzantines?’ Professor Cameron is intent on dispelling misconceptions:

  The Byzantines were not a ‘people’ in any ethnic sense. If we consider only Anatolia, the population had been thoroughly mixed for many centuries. Nor did an education in classicising Greek, which was normal for Christians and pagans alike when Constantinople was founded, and which continued to be the badge of culture in Byzantium, carry any ethnic implications. In this sense, advancement in Byzantium was open to anyone who was able to obtain the education in the first place.23

  Under ‘Attitudes to Byzantium’, Cameron quotes a well-known academic reference work with dismay. ‘The term “Byzantine”, its editors pronounce, ‘is a) something extremely complicated, b) inflexible, or c) carried on by underhand means.’24 Non-expert reactions are little better:

  In the western public consciousness mention of Byzantium attracts two main responses: either it is still thought of as irrelevant or backward, the precursor of the Ottoman Empire and somehow implicated in the political and religious problems of the contemporary Balkans, or else it seems in some mysterious way powerfully attractive, associated as it is with icons and spirituality or with the revival of religion in post-Communist Europe. Each of these responses reveals the persistence of deep-seated stereotypes, and neither does justice to Byzantium or the Byzantines as they actually existed.25

  Progress, in other words, is slow.

  In 2008–9, the Royal Academy in London staged an epoch-making exhibition in collaboration with the Benaki Museum in Athens, and entitled simply Byzantium. It contained 350 objects, many of stunning beauty. The magnificent catalogue was assembled by 100 contributors.26 Reviewers, as if rediscovering a forgotten truth, wrote of ‘the intensity of sacred art’. The president of the Academy enthused about the ‘huge crowds’, which surged past half a million.27 The biggest wonder was that nothing like it had been staged before.

  The book Professor Herrin promised to the builders appeared shortly before the exhibition, after five years’ preparation. In her introduction to what she calls ‘a different history of Byzantium’, Herrin talks appetizingly of ‘an image of opaque duplicity’, and of ‘a mystery’ associated with this ‘lost world’. In her conclusi
ons, she appeals for Byzantium to be ‘saved from its negative stereotype’. The chapter headings include items such as ‘The Largest City in Christendom’, ‘The Ravenna Mosaics’, ‘The Bulwark against Islam’, ‘Icons’, ‘Greek Fire’, ‘Eunuchs’ and ‘Basil II, the Bulgar-slayer’. In addition to scenes from Constantinople, the illustrations show Mount Athos and Mount Sinai, Cappadocia, the Fourth Armenia, Moscow, Sicily, Greece, Venice and Muslim Córdoba. This may not be what the average reader expects. Least expected of all was the headline of one of the book’s enthusiastic reviews: ‘Brilliant, Beautiful and Byzantine’. These were not adjectives that would have naturally been associated with the subject fifty years earlier.28

  Fortunately, awareness of Byzantium is not quite so limited in other parts of Europe. Educated Russians, for example, conscious of the Orthodox tradition, are very aware of their debt. ‘We have taken over the best parts of our national culture from Tsargrad,’ a Professor Granovsky once exclaimed,29 using the old Russian name for Constantinople. Even in Catholic countries, where people are generally less sympathetic, the response is unlikely to be a blank stare. In April 1962 a young historian from Oxford was travelling across Poland with a group of British students, almost all of them totally devoid of any knowledge of the country’s history. As their train approached Warsaw, the tall outline of a huge, ugly building appeared on the horizon. Unbeknown to the student-traveller it was the much-hated Palace of Culture which Joseph Stalin had donated to the Polish capital a dozen years earlier. Braving the language barrier, a gentleman in the compartment pointed through the window to explain what the building was. He tried in Polish; he tried in German; he tried in Russian; all to no avail. But then he found the one word that conveyed his meaning. ‘Byzancjum,’ he cried with a broad Eureka grin. ‘To jest Byzancjum’ (‘This is Byzantium’).30

  Every scrap of knowledge leads inexorably to the day when the real, the historic Byzantium ceased to exist. ‘The one thing we think we know is that the Byzantines were doomed.’31 When Constantinople was founded, the Roman Empire had stretched from the Atlantic to the bounds of Persia, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Sahara. Together with China and the Gupta Empire in India, it was one of the largest political states in the world, and it is all too easy to imagine that its subsequent career followed a steady, monotonous, uninterrupted downwards slide. Yet Doomsday did occur in the spring of 1453. The Ottoman Turks had been camping on the Asian shore of the Bosporus for over a century. The Roman Empire, once covering the whole of the ‘known world’, had shrunk to the bounds of the Theodosian Walls:

  The impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night… On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour…

  But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam…

  The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries:

  ‘The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor…’

  Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The [166th] Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared.

  Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque:

  ‘The muezzin ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan or public invitation… The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the namaz of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. “The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch song on the towers of Afrasiab.” ’32

  One thousand, one hundred and twenty-three years had passed since the refounding of the city by the Emperor Constantine: 2,211 years since the Megarans had laid the first stone.

  III

  Describing or summarizing Europe’s greatest ‘vanished kingdom’ is almost too much to contemplate. Like European history in general, the story is too long, too rich and too complex; and if Orhan Pamuk is typical of his compatriots, it is virtually forgotten among the Byzantines’ most immediate successors. Despite their hard-won achievements, professional historians struggle with the enormity of their task. Summary evocations are perhaps best left to poets, especially to one who was once the pupil of J. B. Bury:

  The unpurged images of day recede;

  The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;

  Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song

  After great cathedral gong;

  A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

  All that man is,

  All mere complexities,

  The fury and the mire of human veins.

  Before me floats an image, man or shade,

  Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

  For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

  May unwind the winding path;

  A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

  Breathless mouths may summon;

  I hail the superhuman;

  I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

  Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

  More miracle than bird or handiwork,

  Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

  Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

  Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

  In glory of changeless metal

  Common bird or petal

  And all complexities of mire or blood.

  At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

  Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

  Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

  Where blood-begotten spirits come

  And all complexities of fury leave,

  Dying into a dance,

  An agony of trance,

  An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

  Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

  Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

  The golden smithies of the Emperor!

  Marbles of the dancing floor

  Break bitter furies of complexity,

  Those images that yet

  Fresh images beget,

  That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.33

  7

  Borussia

  Watery Land of the Prusai

  (1230–1945)

  I

  Kaliningrad is the most westerly city of the Russian Federation. Capital of the surrounding autonomous oblast or ‘administrative district’, it was named in Soviet times after one of S
talin’s many disreputable henchmen, Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), sometime president of the USSR. It lies on the Pregolya river, 30 miles from the Baltic coast and the ex-Soviet naval base of Baltiysk. The city centre, which straddles a number of islands, was extensively damaged during the Second World War, and the ruins of its historic buildings were long left uncleared by the controlling Soviet military. Now, restored to civilian rule, Kaliningrad possesses the full infrastructure of a modern, developing city: an international airport, a direct rail link to Moscow, a business park, an industrial zone and a university. Its ex-Soviet population of 430,000 consists almost entirely of Russian-speakers drawn from all the former Soviet republics.1

  Thanks to wartime devastation, grandiose plans were drawn up in 1945 to design ‘a Russian and socialist city’ worthy of ‘our Soviet Man, victor and creator… of a new, progressive culture’. The chief architect, Dmitri Navalikhan, assumed that building would start from a tabula rasa, that is, on a site from which all traces of the past had been erased; the style was to be a ‘New Brutalism’. In practice, nothing so ambitious proved possible. Navalikhan’s plans still lie in the Moscow archives, the object of art historians’ curiosity.2 When rebuilding did start, attempts were made to demonstrate that Kaliningrad was an ancient Russian city returning to its roots. The first statue to be erected, in 1946, was to the eighteenth-century soldier Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, whose father had briefly served as governor of the city during the Seven Years War. Only then was the main street, the Leninskiy Prospekt, laid out from the railway station to the city centre, and lined with statues of Lenin, Stalin, Kalinin, Kutuzov and Pushkin.