by Andrew Marr
Confronting him was a vast army under the command of a sharp-nosed, cruel and brilliant young Turkish sultan, Mehmet II. He had already confounded the defenders by dragging his ships overland on rollers so that the city, encircled on two sides by water and on one side by land – where its famous walls were strongest – was effectively throttled. Mehmet had about a hundred thousand battle-hardened troops and excellent cannon, designed for him by a German engineer. He had already taken all the surrounding towns and forts, impaling any survivors in full view of Constantinople’s defenders. Every desperate appeal for help from the Christian rulers of Europe had gone unanswered. A lunar eclipse, the slipping of the most precious icon as it was being carried through the streets, a violent thunderstorm, a thick fog and a strange red glow in the sky had already convinced many that God had deserted what had once been the greatest Christian city in the world. The tolling of bells and the processing of icons continued, however, as the desperate Byzantines called for help.
Now, the eleventh Emperor Constantine told his commanders they must be ready to die for faith, country, king and family. He reminded them that they were the descendants of Greek and Roman heroes. Into the vast Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, hundreds of priests and monks, nuns and ordinary people, gathered to celebrate vespers for the very last time.
In the early hours of Tuesday 29 May 1453, Turkish trumpets and drums sounded, and the attack began. Wave after wave of soldiers flung themselves at the cannon-damaged walls. Eventually, moving in perfect formation, the Christian-born slaves who had been transformed into janissaries, the faithful crack troops of Mehmet’s army, began to overwhelm the desperate defenders. The Turks poured through the gaps, calmly killing as they came. In Hagia Sophia, priests continued celebrating mass even as the attackers forced their way through its great doors, stabbing and spearing the worshippers until they reached the altar, and the priests themselves, who died worshipping as the last service ended. Constantine, determined not to be taken prisoner, is said to have stripped off all his imperial insignia, the purple and the eagles, and thrown himself with his sword into the middle of the fiercest fighting, where he was quickly hacked to death.
The Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire was one of the great success stories of the Mediterranean world; but it is remembered mostly for how it ended. It was long considered a large and impressive failure, to one side of the main thrust of European history.
What do most of us know of Byzantium? We have a vague impression of glitter and decadence; as the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats had it,
Of hammered gold, and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake . . .
We may be aware of the titanic walls, parts of which still stand, around the centre of today’s bustling Istanbul, and of the strange art the Byzantines produced. It is a culture of mosaics and carved ivory, of heavy-eyed emperors and saints and solemn angels. Art historians tell us it led to the better-known altarpieces of the Renaissance, and its connection with the Christian Orthodox icons of Russia and Bulgaria is clear: the first great icon-painting of Russian history, still revered today in Moscow, was actually executed in Constantinople. But it seems somehow outside the mainstream of European art, a ghostly figure half-hidden in theological thickets and historical tangles. And that is true of Byzantium itself.
Even the naming is slippery. ‘Byzantion’ was the name of the old Greek city that Constantine took over and planned as the new centre of the Roman Empire. Following a Graeco-Roman tradition of rulers naming cities after themselves (as with Alexandria), he called it Constantinople. Its citizens called themselves Byzantines to distinguish themselves from Western Romans, but also sometimes Romani (‘Romans’ in Latin) because they also claimed to inherit the best of old Rome. We tend to talk about the Byzantine Empire. As noted earlier, awestruck Norsemen called the place Miklagard, ‘Great City’; it was also known in Greek as the City of God. Today it is Istanbul. But whatever we call it, this was, as its modern chronicler John Julius Norwich reminds us, a remarkably long-lived human society. Founded by Constantine in May 330 and falling to the Ottomans in May 1453, it lasted for 1,123 years and eighteen days. That is, roughly the same timespan as distances today’s British from the England of Alfred the Great, the Saxons and the Danes. If Byzantium was a ‘failure’ or ‘outside the mainstream’, it was a remarkably persistent failure.
The Victorian historians’ contempt for it cast a long shadow. Norwich quotes W.E.H. Lecky, writing in 1869, who considered the Byzantine Empire ‘without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed . . . a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides’.41 Why such anger about Byzantium? Perhaps it is the historian’s love of tidiness. Byzantium does not slot neatly into the narrative of a steady Western march to enlightenment. It has not endowed modern mankind with useful science or much original literature – though it had some wonderfully vivid and scandalous historians of its own. And of course, it ended badly.
But the main reason for the blanketing of Byzantium under layers of condescension and neglect is the centrality of religion to its civilization. For this was a culture more saturated in religious fervour and theological argument than any other in the history of the Mediterranean world. Though founded by a Roman emperor who wanted to impose Christianity on his subjects, it was only gradually that it became a real hub of the Christian world. Even as its jaw-droppingly beautiful and radical Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was being created under the emperor Justinian – it was consecrated in 537, and its world-famous dome now protects a mosque – the city housed many pagan shrines and statues to Roman gods. In law, military and engineering know-how, entertainments, learning and finance, Byzantium was the hinge between the classical and the Christian medieval worlds. But it was a creaky, slow-moving hinge.
The Byzantines were almost always fighting – the waves of nomad warriors arriving from the east, then the Muslim conquerors pressing through their rich eastern flanks; and, often, rival Christian kingdoms to the west and north as well. At its greatest extent, the empire embraced southern Italy, the Balkans, most of modern Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, as well as the Crimea at the northern edge of the Black Sea. At its peak it attracted immigrants from across Europe and Asia to work and fight on its behalf, including Italians, the Vikings who became the Varangian Guard, and dispossessed Anglo-Saxons who had lost their homes after the Norman conquest of 1066. Long before the great walls fell, Constantinople had shrunk to little more than a city-state, with tiny patches of land outside.
But Byzantium’s real conflict, which also never stopped, was about the true nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the correct way to worship. Different beliefs about Christ’s nature, the authority of the pope and the bishops, and many lesser matters radically, and tragically, divided the Byzantines and their Christian enemies.
We often find it hard to take such arguments seriously. But the problem may be ours; for Christians of the time, these were urgent and personal questions. When Constantine summoned all the Christian bishops to that great summit at Nicaea in 325 to discuss the views of Arius, the debate was about whether Christ shared the same divine substance as God or (as Arius and followers thought) was a lesser entity than God. This was no mere squabble, since if the Arians were right, then Christ’s offer of salvation through faith in him was seriously questionable. It was a matter of life and death, no less. Arianism was condemned, though it survived and spread in popularity among many northern peoples. After this came other fierce arguments. Many were about the rituals and words used in church services, and later on about whether the pope in Rome or the Patriarch in Constantinople was the true leader of all Christians. Throughout, brilliant theologians, monks living in monasteries or as hermits, and bullish bishops from outlying churches would test one another and attract substantial popular followings.
At times this led Western Christians to attack their Eastern rivals directly. Most infamously, in 1202–4, the so-called Fourth Crusade went veering wildly off course, and under its Venetian leadership sacked Constantinople itself.
The pope had ordered yet another attempt to seize back Jerusalem from the Saracens. The Crusaders, under French leadership, had decided upon a novel plan. Influenced by the ambitious plans of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, who had recently died, in 1199, they decided to attack via Egypt. To do that, they needed a great fleet to transport them there; only Venice, with its ship factory at the Arsenale, could provide one. The Venetians were led at the time by a blind doge in his eighties, Enrico Dandolo, who drove a very hard bargain, and then announced he would join the crusade himself. But when the time came, far fewer Frankish Crusaders turned up than expected, and without the money to pay for their Venetian ships. Dandolo again drove a hard bargain: they must stop en route and take back a Balkan town that the Venetians had lost. This they did. But there they came across a deposed young Byzantine emperor, who asked for their help, in return for a reward, in getting his throne back from his uncle. At this point, the story gets murky. The Venetians had never wanted to attack Egypt anyway, since they had good trading relations there. But as trading rivals and Latin Christians, they loathed the Byzantines. (It may have been after a fight in Constantinople many years before that Dandolo lost his sight.) So yet again, they postponed fighting the Saracens and turned towards Byzantium instead. It would prove an awesome decision.
It was not particularly difficult for the combined Venetian and Frankish forces to defeat the Byzantine usurper and place his nephew in power, though it involved a bold attack on the famous walls from the unexpected, seaward side. But it proved much harder to get the money the young emperor had promised. He had also offered to place the Byzantine Church under the pope’s authority. This rash promise, the aggressive behaviour of the Crusaders, the huge cost of paying off the Venetians, then a series of disastrous fires, all made the new emperor very unpopular in his city. He was duly murdered by another usurper, and the only way the Franks and Venetians could recoup their money was by means of a second attack. Dandolo, by now quite likely in his nineties, had heroically led his troops from the front in the first attack. Now, as the Venetians tied the masts of their boats together to create platforms from which to assault the walls, he decided to go for broke. Rather than simply looting the place, he would oust the Byzantine rulers entirely and make the city a puppet state under Venetian control.
The attack was successful, but what followed was horrific: a three-day orgy of burning, rape and looting which destroyed much of the classical inheritance of Constantinople. One Byzantine observer described the sacking of the great church itself as both a physical rape and a spiritual one: ‘A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place . . . nor was there any mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God.’ John Julius Norwich argues that this sack of Constantinople, which saw all its accumulated learning go up in flames and its treasures taken back to Europe, may have been the single biggest such loss in history: ‘Western civilization suffered a loss greater than the sack of Rome by the barbarians in the fifth century or the burning of the library of Alexandria by the soldiers of the Prophet in the seventh.’42
The cynical and brutal story of the Fourth Crusade had slow-burning consequences. The Byzantines had known bad times before. At the battle of Manzikert in 1071, they had been humiliated by ‘Turks’, nomads from the Far East. But nothing had been as bad as this. Though the puppet Latin state in Constantinople did not last very long, and though Byzantium recovered some of its power and self-confidence under later emperors, it would never again be the same. Its awesome system of walls, created in 412, had repelled every invader for nearly eight hundred years, but now they had been shown to be vulnerable. Stripped of much of its wealth, of much of its classical heritage and of its honour, with its old territory now carved up into mini-empires, subsidiary kingdoms, sultanates and duchies, Byzantium was no longer the mighty fist of the Christians, armed against all comers. In due course it would fall to the Muslim invaders. The Venetians, who took home statues of lions, horses and angels and vast amounts of precious objects, had accidentally aided the rise of Islam inside Europe. And the power of Venice would steadily grow.
So it is grossly unfair to dismiss Byzantium, with its passionate Christian faith and its inherited Roman and Greek ideas, as merely a sequence of unpleasant tyrannies. Yet to modern eyes it must seem an alien civilization. Certainly, it was highly conservative, slow-moving and anything but democratic.
For Europeans brought up to revere the classical Greek world, with its lucidity, its belief in reason and its political experimentation, Byzantium’s stately hierarchy and its mysticism can be difficult to swallow. A better way to understand it might be to compare it with other dynastic empires such as the Ottomans’ or the Chinese. Like the courts of the Song, Tang or Ming emperors, the Byzantines relied on a highly efficient and literate civil service, charged with taxing and administering many different peoples fairly. Again like the Chinese, the Byzantines made use of a large class of eunuchs, castrated either in childhood, or in adulthood as a precondition for serving at court. Barbaric as the practice might seem to us, eunuchs were very useful to many early empires. Unable to have children, lacking an independent family base, they were more dependable. They could also safely serve in the women’s quarters, where they might hear the most secret of secrets. In China, Byzantium and under the Ottomans too, eunuchs rose to positions of great power and wealth, sometimes commanding armies and fleets.
The detailed court procedures and rituals of Byzantium, carried out in huge court complexes, were not so different from life in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Just as those entering the presence of a Chinese emperor had to kowtow, banging their foreheads on the floor, so those in the presence of a Byzantine emperor had to commit proskynesis – a similar routine, but touching rather than banging. In Byzantium the powerful positions held by religious leaders as advisers and counsellors were analogous to those of the Confucian mandarins. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven, under which emperors had divine authority but had to act morally in order to retain it, would have been recognized in Constantinople, where any emperor found guilty of offending God would be killed or ousted. Sometimes, as in China, natural disasters were taken as signs of divine displeasure. Moreover, both empires made a fetish of their ancient origins, the Chinese harking back to mythical times and the Byzantines insisting on their continuity with ancient Greek and Roman culture.
Both empires retained their power through highly advanced engineering and technologies, secrets they tried to keep to themselves. The Great Wall of China remains one of the world’s most impressive works of civil engineering, designed as it was to keep out ‘barbarian’ nomads. The huge ramparts of Constantinople, similarly, to keep out wild people from the steppes, were in their way the Great Wall of Europe.
There are other parallels, including a similar skill in hydraulics and water clocks, a similar emphasis on public processions to impose royal authority, and a firm belief that their capital city was the centre (or navel) of the world. Most significantly, conservative empires, founded with a strong sense of their own past, worked in similar ways, deploying similar hierarchies of civil servants. Byzantium was not a particularly cynical culture, but dynastic despotism always leads to feuds between generations and between siblings, sometimes ending in treachery, murder and the plotting of palace coups. The great female intriguers of Constantinople, and their eunuchs, were cousins-under-the-skin of the dowager empresses of China, and theirs. The dynasties survived as long as they had technical superiority over their enemies, a strong peasant base from which to levy taxes, and an efficient bureaucracy. For some of the time, at least, Byzantium had all three.