The Towers of Samarcand (The Mistra Chronicles)

by James Heneage

  So by the end of the fourteenth century, the Byzantine Empire had no money, no army, no navy and precious little territory. Constantinople was a city of fields and ruined palaces and its population had sunk to just fifty thousand. Meanwhile, a Turkic tribe from the Anatolian steppe had conquered most of its neighbouring tribes and crossed over to Europe in 1354. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, fourth in the line of Osman, had, by 1400, swept up to the Danube and as far south as the Peloponnese, thus surrounding Constantinople. In 1396, the West had sent a crusade to the aid of the city, an army that ‘could hold up the sky with its lances’. But the chivalry of Europe had jousted and feasted its way to the Danube only to be annihilated at the field of Nicopolis. Now Bayezid boasted that he would ‘water his horses at the altar of St Peter’s in Rome’ and it seemed that he might. The rebirth of wealth and culture that was taking place among the city states of Italy, the movement we know as ‘the Renaissance’, which would lead to the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and ultimately secure western global dominance, was under threat. All that stood in Bayezid’s way were the walls of Byzantium.

  In contrast to Constantinople, by 1400 the Byzantine Despotate of Mistra in the Greek Peloponnese was thriving. ‘Despot’ has bad connotations but the rulers of this tiny kingdom were usually the brothers or sons of the reigning Emperor and were good, cultured men. The Despotate had two main cities: Mistra, built in the twelfth century near the ancient site of Sparta, and Monemvasia. They were very different. Mistra was the home of the court and government, run by the Protostrator, a sort of prime minister. It was a place of music, culture and courtly love, a sort of Camelot. Monemvasia, meanwhile, was a rich seaport on the trade route between Venice and the east. Its main export was Malvasia wine, an expensive, sweet wine much favoured in the courts of Europe. In England, they called it Malmsey and the Duke of Clarence was said to have drowned in a butt of it. Monemvasia was ruled by an Archon, subservient to the Despot in Mistra but often in rebellion. In my Chronicles, the families of Laskaris and Mamonas hold the offices of Protostrator and Archon as indeed they did at the time. You can still visit the ruined Laskaris House in Mistra. Perhaps its most famous citizen, from early in the fifteenth century, was the philosopher Plethon, a disciple of Plato and a man of eccentric views, who advocated the return to a Hellenic, even Spartan, model of society.

  With or without help from their Spartan past, the Byzantines were no match for the vast forces that the Ottomans had at their disposal. Not only could Bayezid call on the Anatolian gazi tribes with their lethal composite bows, but the conquered Serbs provided him with heavy cavalry. The Ottomans also had the Devshirme, introduced by Bayezid’s father Murad I, by which Christian boys were forcibly taken from the villages of Eastern Europe to be trained as janissaries, the elite slave soldiers of the Ottoman army.

  What Bayezid didn’t have yet, however, were cannon large enough to bring down the walls of Constantinople. Invented centuries before in China, these weapons had first appeared on the battlefields of Europe at the siege of Algeciras in the Iberian peninsula. Two English knights brought the technology back with them and cannon were used, with only modest success, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. By 1400, there was an arms race to develop cannon big enough to make city walls redundant. They were ultimately to be used to devastating effect by Mehmed II in the siege of Constantinople in 1453.

  By the time of these Chronicles, the Byzantines’ own elite force was mostly memory. The Varangian Guard had once been the finest fighting unit in the world, famed for their use of axes. They had come from England, Anglo-Saxon refugees from the Norman Conquest in 1066, to place themselves at the service of the Emperor of Miklagard (Byzantium). They’d grown rich in his service, having the privilege of filling their helmets with gold on the death of an emperor. By 1400, however, they had almost ceased to exist.

  But what the Byzantines lacked in armies, they more than made up for in diplomacy. Their cousins, the Komnenoi of the tiny Empire of Trebizond, had after all survived for centuries by marrying off their beautiful princesses to local warlords. Manuel II Palaiologos of Byzantium, however, had two better plans for survival. The first was to bring a monster even greater than Bayezid west to fight him: Tamerlane.

  Tamerlane, or Temur-e-leng (Timur the Lame), was a Mongol warlord of unreliable descent who’d been made lame while horse-rustling as a young man. By 1400, he had conquered most of Central Asia with a savagery not even matched by his predecessor Genghis Khan. Having united the tribes and kingdoms of his home Chagatai Khanate, his horde swept down the superhighway of the steppe to lay waste to everything as far as Anatolia, where he came up against the Empire of Bayezid. On the way he had levelled Aleppo, Antioch, Delhi, Herat, Kabul and countless other cities, building his trademark towers of skulls among their ruins to spread terror before him. In twenty short years, it is estimated that he accounted for some 5 per cent of the world’s population. His greatest desecration may have been the destruction of the beautiful Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of Islam’s noblest buildings.

  But Manuel’s problem was that Tamerlane didn’t really want to come west. He had two obsessions: making his capital of Samarcand into the greatest city on earth, and reuniting the four khanates created by the sons and grandsons of Genghis Khan. By 1400, he’d conquered three of them: the Khanates of Chagatai, Persia and the Golden Horde of the north, and only the greatest remained: China, the former Empire of Kublai Khan now ruled by an ambitious new dynasty: the Ming.

  As for Samarcand, by 1400 it certainly had some of the biggest buildings on earth and its suburbs were named after other great cities to prove that it was the greatest of them all. But such was the fear inspired in the architects by Tamerlane to make them build faster, many of the mosques and palaces were built without proper foundations and fell down soon after he died.

  To build Samarcand Tamerlane needed booty, and there was far more booty in the east than the west. Why was this? In large part it was due to the Silk Road (not called so then) that stretched six thousand miles from Chang’an in China to Constantinople. It was a trade route like no other, with caravanserai every twenty miles, which was the distance a camel could walk in a day. It was also a sort of internet along which new ideas and new inventions could travel. Great cities like Palmyra and Tabriz sprang up along it, made rich by the taxation of trade. In 1400, the annual revenues of the city of Tabriz exceeded those of the King of France.

  Manuel’s second plan was to bring another crusade from the west. But there was a problem. Since 1054, the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches had been in schism and the Pope would not give his blessing to any more crusades until the schism had been ended. Worse still, the Western Catholic Church was itself in schism and two Popes, one in Rome and the other in Avignon, were at each other’s throats.

  In The Mistra Chronicles, I use some artistic licence to describe the way that Plethon (who was in fact instrumental in ending the East–West schism) makes an ally of the powerful Florentine banking family of Medici to further this end. In this book, he meets Giovanni de’ Medici, the founder of the bank. In future books, his son Cosimo will become crucial in unifying the Churches. In fact, Manuel spent the years 1398–1400 touring the courts of Europe trying to gain support, and money, for the Byzantine cause. He was even entertained by the English King Henry VI at Eltham Palace, but no funds were made available.

  So this is the historical context and the narrative of The Mistra Chronicles: a once-great empire on its knees with two plans for its survival, one facing east, the other west. How it happened is part-fact, part-fiction.

  This second book in the series, The Towers of Samarcand, includes some interesting historical characters that are worthy of further description. In the Byzantine camp, the Emperor Manuel, his wife Helena Dragaš and his brother Theodore, Despot of Mistra, were all brilliant, cultured people determined to do what they could to save their empire. Plethon was very much as described, an eccentric thinker of genius who didn’t ha
ve much time for organised religion.

  In the Ottoman camp, Bayezid is depicted in the book as past his best. Certainly he’d been a man of rapid and unexpected conquest in his youth, earning for himself the name of Yildirim, or ‘Thunderbolt’. His heir Suleyman was a good soldier but, after the Battle of Ankara, became debauched. Suleyman’s brother Mehmed was the clever one who ultimately triumphed in the civil war that engulfed the Empire after the death of Bayezid. Bayezid’s mother, the Valide Sultan Gülçiçek, certainly existed, although whether she was quite as nasty as depicted in the book is a matter for conjecture. The Valide Sultan, mother of the ruling Sultan, was always a very powerful figure whose power held sway far beyond the harem walls.

  Tamerlane was an odd mixture of psychopathic cruelty and cultural sensibility. He was a brilliant strategist who rarely lost a battle and the stories of his military ruses described in this book are all true. He was intelligent, could speak several languages, and did invent a new version of chess. His son Miran Shah was as mad as depicted and lacked any of his father’s genius. Miran Shah’s wife Khan-zada was said to be beautiful and brave and did warn Tamerlane of his son’s intrigues against him. Tamerlane’s grandson and heir, Mohammed Sultan, known as a paragon of virtue, did die from his wounds after Ankara. Much of the description of the extraordinary court of Tamerlane, including the feast on the plain of Kanigil (which happened in 1404, rather than 1399 in this book), comes from the diaries of the Castilian envoy, Ruy González de Clavijo, who arrived at Samarcand with the Ambassador Sotomayor. His diaries describe Angelina of Hungary and Maria from Trebizond, both captured on the field of Ankara. They are an entertaining read.

  I have been inaccurate as to the timing of the Chinese Emperor’s death to fit in with the narrative. In fact the Hongwu Emperor, the first of the astonishing Ming Dynasty, died in 1398, three years before I describe.

  One of the more intriguing characters in the book is the historian Ibn Khaldun. He led a strange and peripatetic life, including holding the position of Kadi to the Mamluk Sultan, before he sat down to write his extraordinary histories. The story of him being lowered from the walls of Damascus to meet Tamerlane is entirely true, as was his success in securing the release of his compatriots in the city.

  Yakub II of the Germiyans existed and his capital was Kutahya in the Anatolian steppe. He hated Bayezid, who had imprisoned him for three years in the castle of Ipsala after annexing his beylik, only slightly less than he hated Allaedin ali-Bey of the neighbouring Karamanid tribe, which had yet to fall beneath the Ottoman yoke.

  King Giorgi of Georgia also existed and Tamerlane’s campaign into Georgia took place as described, although it wasn’t led by Mohammed Sultan. The story of the baskets lowered to smoke out King Giorgi’s army in the caves of Vardzia is completely true as is the story of his escape with Prince Tahir.

  Little is known about Qara Yusuf of the Qara Qoyunlu (or Black Sheep) tribe who had his capital in Tabriz. The Black Sheep formed a buffer state between the Ottoman and Timurid Empires and Qara Yusuf tried desperately to play one power off against the other. Amazingly, he survived to die in 1420.

  Another fascinating character was Hasan-i Sabah, founder of the assassin cult. He was a brilliant mathematician, astronomer and alchemist who, in the late eleventh century, gathered a following of fanatical Ismai’li diehards who were prepared to die for the Shia cause, their main targets being the ruling Sunni Seljuk Turks of Persia. He captured the impregnable stronghold of Alamut in the Alburz Mountains and used it to send forth his assassins to do their work. It is said that they would first be drugged with hashish, then led into a garden where they would awake to beautiful women. Then they were told that they were in paradise and could only return having performed their deed.

  Apart from the wily Doge Venier of Venice, the main Italian of the book is the Genoese Marchese Giustiniani Longo, Lord of Chios. By the end of the fourteenth century, Venice was pulling ahead of its fierce trade rivals, the Genoese. The two republics had gone to war in 1378 and a Genoese fleet had actually entered the Venetian lagoon, briefly occupying the island of Choggia. But Venice had won the war and, at this time, was busy trying to prise as much territory and trade as it could from Genoa. Chios was one of the few Mediterranean islands still controlled by the Genoese, most of their colonies now being in the Black Sea. It was held under a long lease from the Byzantine Empire by a joint stock company, the Mahona, which was the first of its kind and a forerunner of the England’s East India Company. The Mahona had been formed in the mid-fourteenth century by twelve Genoese families under the collective name of Giustiniani in deference to the great Byzantine Emperor Justinian. Its purpose was to exploit the trade of alum, mined in neighbouring Phocaea on the Turkish mainland, which was the valuable substance used to fix dye in clothing. Its other purpose was to trade mastic and it is entirely true that Chios produced a kind of mastic found nowhere else in the world. Mastic was used as a breath freshener, a wound sealant, an embalmer and, in India at least, a filler for tooth cavities. At the time of this book, the Genoese had already begun to build extraordinary maze-like villages in the south of the island to protect their workforce from Turkish corsairs. The ‘Mastic Villages’ of Chios can still be visited today.

  The book reaches its climax with the extraordinary battle of Ankara, one of the greatest and most important battles ever fought in history. The story of the interchange of slanderous letters between Tamerlane and Bayezid is well documented, as is the way that Tamerlane persuaded Bayezid to abandon his position in front of the fortress to follow him around Anatolia in a wild goose chase. The diversion of the Cubuk Creek by Tamerlane did happen and Bayezid’s army was forced to fight without water. Most telling for the outcome of the battle, however, was the defection of the gazi tribes to Tamerlane at the height of the battle. Afterwards, Bayezid was placed inside a cage for Tamerlane to gloat over. Bayezid died of the shame a year after the battle.

  Whether or not Tamerlane intended to march on Constantinople after Ankara is unknown, although he did take Smyrna from the Hospitallers and the story of the defenders’ heads being hurled from the battlements to land on the decks of the relieving Hospitaller fleet is true.

  What is also true is that the only time a Mongol horde had turned back from invasion of Europe before was on the death of the Khan. This was Ögedei Khan, third son of Genghis, who gave permission for his sons Kadan and Güyük to conquer all the way to the ‘Great Sea’ or the Atlantic Ocean. They were on the point of taking Vienna in 1241 when the death of their father forced their recall to Karakorum to crown his successor. The Mongols never again reached further west.

  So, by the end of The Towers of Samarcand, Tamerlane has gone home and Constantinople is still free. The first of Manuel’s plans has worked but Bayezid’s son, Suleyman, unwisely ferried to Europe in Byzantine ships, has lived to fight another day. The next book will see Luke and the Varangians continue their mission to secure the future of the beleaguered Byzantine Empire.