by Rebecca West
He halted us again as we crossed the dust towards the church. ‘No, certainly we were not barbarians,’ he said. ‘Look, look at her. Nothing about her is accidental. She is built not out of simplicity but out of the extremest sophistication. She is full of tricks, so elaborate that I can hardly explain them to those who are not trained architects. The towers supporting those cupolas are pulled out of their proper axes by somebody who knows—and it is unbelievable what theory and practice one would have to have mastered before one could know it—that thus there could be achieved an effect of airy lightness. Ah, but what this builder knew. Think of it, there is water, and much water, under this ground. At one point it lies within three feet of the walls. But he was calm, he was sure of his knowledge. I would not dare to build a building of such a size and importance so near water. He dared, and he was right in his daring, for after six hundred years the church is lying level as she was built, and she is not an inch nearer the water. Such things barbarians cannot do at all, such things hardly any of the cultured races have been able to do.’ There was evidence of the unfortunate position of the Balkans in his realization that we had probably doubted the value of the culture which Kossovo had destroyed. ‘But you must go inside. The interior of Grachanitsa tells you all about the people who built her.’
That was true; and what it told us was, to our surprise, not unfamiliar. From the immense height of the cupolas light descends on three naves, divided by gigantesquely sturdy columns, and arrives there multicoloured, dyed by the frescoes which cover every inch of the walls. There is here a sense of colossal strength, of animal vigour, of lust so lusty that it can sup off high pleasures as well as low, and likes crimson on its eye as well as wine on its tongue, and a godhead as well as a mistress. In fact, here is something very like the spirit of the late Tudor age; and this is the kind of church that the architects of Hampton Court might have built if the Gothic obsession had not laid its hand on their end of Europe. This was a startling correspondence, because the Serbian king who built Grachanitsa some seventy years before the battle of Kossovo closely resembled our Henry VIII.
This was King Milutin. In the twelfth century the Nemanyas, a family of chieftains who lived in a petty fortress on the Montenegrin border near the Adriatic coastline, produced a genius in the person of St Sava and a man of great talent in his brother, King Stephen the First-crowned, who together founded a stable Christian Serbian state, which their descendants expanded north towards the Danube, east towards the Vardar river, and south into Byzantine territory. When the dynasty had been under way about a hundred and fifty years Milutin came to the throne, and in himself and his royal functions his likeness to Henry VIII was very strong.
He worked marvels for his country, but was untender to many of his subjects. He hungered hotly for women, but was cold as ice when he discarded them or used them as political instruments. He was ardently devout, but used his religion as a counter in his international relationships without showing a sign of scruple. There is a robustness in him that charms from the yonder side of the grave, but without doubt his vitals were eaten by the worm of melancholy. His picture is among the frescoes here. He stands, deeply bearded, in the costume worn by Serbian royalty, which is clearly imitated from the Byzantine mode: a stiff tunic of rich material studded with jewels, which disregards the frailty of the enclosed flesh and constrains it to magnificence. That costume powerfully recalls the later Tudor portraits, the gorgeous robes that held together the grossness of Henry VIII and the brain-raddled emaciation of Elizabeth and presented them as massive monarchs. Such vestments speak of a world founded on the idea of status, which regarded a king as the beloved deputy of God, not because he was any particular sort of man, but because it was considered obvious that if he were crowned a king he would try to act like a beloved deputy of God, since society had agreed that was how a king should act. There stands beside him, equally sumptuous, his wife Simonis, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II. She was Milutin’s fourth wife. He had had to work up to her, earning the right through a long life to avenge an early disappointment.
Of that disappointment we read in the writings of a contemporary who was on the side of those who inflicted it. Pachymeres, the Byzantine historian, relates that the Byzantine Emperor Michael Palaeologus wished for an alliance with King Stephen Urosh of Serbia, and to that end offered his second daughter, Anna, as wife to King Stephen’s second son, who was this same Milutin. Michael’s wife, who was not only Empress but a great lady by birth, had a poor opinion of this proposal, and before the bride and her train started she sent some officials and a bishop as scouts to see if the Serbian court was fit for her daughter. Their adventures were sad. They were shocked by what seemed to them the poverty of the land; and for some reason this invariably happened in the Middle Ages when anybody visited any country other than his own, and Byzantines were likely to receive this unfavourable impression with peculiar poignancy. There was an authentic reason for this which held good over a long period. For hundreds of years their standard of living was higher than in most other countries, so much higher that when one of their ladies went to Venice to be the wife of the Doge Selvio in the eleventh century, the luxury of her habits, which included eating with a gold fork and wearing gloves, led her to be regarded as fit for Hell. But later, when this superiority was nothing like so marked, the Byzantines grew soft and insular and complaining, like a certain type of well-to-do English person who grumbles at French coffee, at American trains, at German bedclothes, to a degree far beyond what is justified by the amount of irritation these can cause in the sane. The Byzantine emissaries evidently belonged to this class, for they reported that the Serbians subsisted solely on what they brought down hunting and what they stole; but it is known that at that time they conducted a lively trade in timber and livestock and wheat and oil, that there were several rich mines, and that the organization of artisans set up by the Romans still flourished.
The insularity of these Byzantines was further alarmed when they came on a manifestation of the West with which they were unfamiliar. King Stephen Urosh was married to a French princess, Hélène of Anjou, who was a Roman Catholic zealot of an austere type. She is said to have been an admirable woman of great benevolence and intelligence, who did much excellent work in restoring the lands which had been laid waste by the Mongols, but she practised that extreme type of Catholic asceticism which is the root of Puritanism. Under her influence her elder son, Dragutin, who was a cripple, formed a habit of sleeping in a grave lined with thorns and sharp flints. Her husband, although he remained within the Orthodox Church, was governed by her ideas. When the officials and the Bishop arrived at his palace he received them coldly, and on hearing that they were part of Princess Anna’s train and that many more were following, he said sourly that he was sorry to hear it, for he and his family were not accustomed to such luxury. Then in a spirit with which we are all familiar, particularly if we were young before the war, he took them to see the wife of his elder son Dragutin, who was the daughter of the King of Hungary. She was plainly dressed and was spinning wool. ‘Now that,’ said King Stephen, ‘is the sort of wife that we like here.’ The touch can be recognized by those of us who were brought up on relays of princesses who were all but dropping dead under the continuous effort of public simplicity, who wore shirt-blouses unusual for gauntness, who had no fires in their bedrooms, who went to bed so early that, even allowing for the early hour at which they rose, their slumbers must have been inordinate.
But the Byzantines did not understand. Leaving a bad impression behind them by their obvious perturbation, they rode back hastily and stopped the Princess at Ochrid. Not certain what to do, whether to take her straight back to Constantinople or wait for orders or let her go on and be recalled, they hung about the district till there arrived a Serbian ambassador named in the chronicles George, simple George. He seems to have been a person of great resource. He had plainly been sent to discourage the expedition from proceeding, since the Se
rbian court had liked the Byzantine emissaries as little as they had liked it. He began by telling them that on the way he had been robbed, and they naturally asked themselves what mercy they as foreigners could expect from robbers who did not spare notables of their own country. George also started a conversation in ambiguous terms which led them to question him sharply as to whether the conditions of the marriage contract to be signed between Michael Palæologus and Stephen Urosh were likely to be faithfully observed. He answered with transparent evasiveness. And in the night the Byzantine emissaries’ horses were stolen. They found the local police unhelpful in the search for them, though ready enough to provide extremely inferior substitutes. Princess Anna and her train left in haste for home.
This incident cannot have pleased Milutin, though he probably liked the bit about the horses. He had a marked distaste for his family’s ideas. Simplicity he abhorred, and throughout his life he showed that Roman Catholicism was to him simply a means of winning the support of a man called the Pope who exercised an enviable amount of power. He worked to become inarguably great, in terms that would be understood across a continent, that would be understood even by gorgeous Byzantium. There was a certain amount of preliminary waiting to be done, while his family life broke into curious blooms. His pious elder brother Dragutin rebelled against his father King Stephen; with the help of his brother-in-law, King Ladislas IV of Hungary, beat him thoroughly in a great battle in Herzegovina, and seized the throne for himself. He was so completely under his Roman Catholic mother’s influence that it cannot be doubted she was in sympathy with his revolt, which they both probably justified by Stephen Urosh’s fidelity to the Orthodox Church, although King Ladislas, a notorious scoundrel descended from an unlovable Asiatic tribe, was an odd ally in a Holy War. When Dragutin had won he threw his father into prison and proceeded to manoeuvre his country towards the abandonment of the Orthodox Church and conversion to Roman Catholicism. These plots were detected and resented by his people, and after he and King Ladislas had made an unsuccessful attempt on Byzantine territory, for which he had to make amends by the surrender of a large tract of Serbian land, he abdicated in favour of Milutin. He then settled in Bosnia, which his Hungarian wife had brought him in her dowry, became a Roman Catholic, and asked the Pope to send him a mission of Franciscan friars to convert the Bogomil heretics and the members of the Orthodox Church within his territory. Thus there was initiated the period of savage religious persecution which made the distracted Bosnians prefer Islam to Roman Catholicism, and enabled the Turk to entrench himself in a key position in South-East Europe. This was a truly lamentable rascal.
When Milutin ascended the throne he felt under no necessity to set his father free. He, a Lear who really had something to worry about, died in an Albanian prison a year later. Thereafter Serbia prospered steadily, for no other apparent reason than that Milutin was a fortunate ruler, like a garden whose owner has the ‘green finger.’ The mines gave up their riches, wine and wheat and oil and livestock flowed out of the country in a fat river of well-being. Abroad, he carried on a continuous policy of expansion at his neighbour’s weakest points. He ate southwards into the disordered Byzantine Empire, his first marriage helping him. He had married the daughter of Duke John of Neopatras, the most powerful of the despots who were setting up for themselves here and there on the Greek islands in defiance of Constantinople. Then Byzantium sent the Tartars against Milutin, and on the plea of consolidating his position in the West he sent Duke John’s daughter packing, quite in the manner of Henry VIII, and married Elizabeth, the sister of Dragutin’s wife and his old ally, the Asiatic King Ladislas of Hungary. But this new marriage was remarkable for the number of ways in which it was bound to displease people. The Roman Catholics outside and inside the Serbian Empire were scandalized, not only because Milutin was divorced but because the bride was a nun. The members of the Orthodox Church were equally scandalized because she was the sister of Milutin’s brother’s wife, thus falling within the prohibited degrees. She was also unpopular with Milutin’s party because she was Hungarian, and the alliance between Dragutin and her brother had meant a defeat for Serbia and the loss of territory. It is impossible to believe that this marriage can have secured more support for him than it lost, and that the motive was not passion. One must compare it to Henry’s impolitic and impassioned marriage with Anne Boleyn. It resembled it too in brevity. Before long Milutin dismissed her and married Anna Terteri, the daughter of George Terteri, a fierce and able Emperor of Bulgaria, who was part Slav, part Asiatic. East and West found it not at all impossible to meet in South-East Europe after the barbarian invasions.
But soon Anna also was dismissed. Under Milutin’s government Serbia had become so rich and his disingenuous statesmanship so notoriously successful that the Byzantine Empire regarded its power with alarm. But the Turks, massing decade by decade in Asia Minor, were a graver danger. So the Emperor Andronicus II, who had succeeded his father Michael Palaeologus, signed a treaty of peace with Milutin, and offered to seal it with the hand of his widowed sister Eudocia. This offer could not have been made unless Milutin had composed a masterly fantasia on legalist themes comparable to Henry VIII’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon. On the face of it Milutin could not marry anybody, because the canon law of the Orthodox Church definitely forbids fourth marriages. But Milutin overcame that difficulty. He now claimed that his first divorce had been illegal. In support of this he brought it forward that the Orthodox Church officials would never permit the name of his second queen to be mentioned in the liturgy, though the real reason for this had been that she was connected to him within the prohibited degrees. This pretence that his first divorce had been invalid meant that not only his second but his third wife had never been really married to him, and that their children were all bastards. That did not distress him, for though he had two sons who were affected by this decision, a mere heir was not what he wanted. He wanted an heir who should have a title through himself to the Serbian crown and through his mother to one of the Byzantine crowns. Also there was at last to be won revenge for the sneers of Michael Palaeologus’s eunuchs, sent to see if he were a fit bridegroom for Princess Anna. The precise moment had arrived when he could pursue these ends because his first wife, the very first of all, had died; and although the Orthodox Church looks on the remarriage of widows and widowers hardly more favourably than if they had been parted from their spouses by divorce, now that he had succeeded in wiping out his second and third marriages, the one he contemplated counted as only his second, and he was free to make it after performing a slight penance.
The Emperor’s sister Eudocia, however, refused this opportunity. She put in the alternative pleas that she dearly loved the memory of her husband and would not for the world marry again, and that when she married again she wanted a more respectable bridegroom than Milutin. For public opinion was profoundly shocked by his matrimonial casuistries. It is to be noted, however, that there is nothing in Milutin’s reign comparable to the beheading of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. In certain respects Milutin was far more civilized than Henry VIII, though he lived a hundred and fifty years earlier in a country that had been Christianized three hundred years later. Few would care to say that Henry VIII might not have forgotten the duties of filial piety if he had had an energetic mother who led a campaign against all his divorces, and never ceased to act as a Roman Catholic propagandist in both his own realm and neighbouring territories. But although Hélène of Anjou denounced all Milutin’s marriages but the first, and not only supported her Roman Catholic son in Bosnia on the western frontier of Serbia, but tried to convert the Emperor of Bulgaria on its east, she outlived Milutin. We know also what happened to Sir Thomas More; better luck attended the Archbishop Jacob, who was fearless in his opposition to Milutin’s tortuous matrimonial policy, yet lost neither his life nor his archiepiscopate. Still, sufficient unto the day was Milutin’s barbarity. It was in sorrow and shame that the Emperor Andronicus resolved to buy Serbian adh
erence at a higher price than he had meant to pay. Since his sister Eudocia refused to be sacrificed he had to offer up his daughter Simonis, who was only six years old.
Their services are insufficiently recognized, those girl children who held together the fabric of history by leaving their nurseries and going into far lands to experience the pains of rape and miscarriage, among strangers talking unknown tongues and practising unhomely customs. The practice has not been so long in desuetude that we can despise it as a remote barbarity; it was thought a pity that the Belgian Princess who married the Crown Prince Rudolph of Habsburg had not shown the signs of womanhood at the time fixed for her wedding, but the ceremony was not for that reason postponed. Nor is it necessary, in order to feel its horror, to exaggerate the infamy of early sexual activity; it is sheer humbug to pretend that a girl of twelve who is married to a kindly young bridegroom is in worse case than a woman in her forties, of the kind that would like to marry, who is not married. If child marriage were as fearful as the modern world pretends, the white race would be extinct by now. Erasmus declared in a sermon that, though it was usual for little girls of ten to marry and straightway have children, he himself thought it too young; and our own Henry VII was born of a thirteen-year-old mother who lived to be a vigorous woman with scholarly interests.
But the export trade in these little princesses was indubitably and totally repulsive. For a child-wife to be happy she must have a gentle husband of her own kith, and familiar faces round her when she comes to childbirth. But these royal children were sent out into strange lands, not to see their kinsfolk again for years and perhaps for ever, to be handed over to men who would not have been able to compel such precious gifts if they had not proved themselves bloody in mind and deed. Often such marriages marked the signature of peace between powers that had been savagely at war, so that little girls were sent to the beds of enemies who had been the Bluebeards of their nursery tales. Every child in the Byzantine Empire in the thirteenth century must have shuddered at nights to think of the Tartars, the little yellow men that passed over the land like living flames from hell. But when Michael Palaeologus needed the support of the Tartars against the Bulgars, he sent superb presents to their chief, Prince Chalaii. There was chosen as ambassador the priest and Abbot of the monastery of Christ Ruler of All, who took with him, among much else, a portable altar, screened with magnificent curtains and embellished with images of the saints and with a superbly worked cross, and furnished with costly chalices and plates for the celebration of the mysteries; and also an illegitimate daughter of the Emperor called Euphrosyne who had been promised to the Tartar chief as his bride. She was well under ten years of age. When the train arrived at the South Russian camp of the Tartars it was found that Prince Chalaii was dead, so his son Nogai married her instead. The bridegroom looked curiously at the pearls on the Byzantine bonnets of her suite and guessed them to be charms against thunder. Nothing is known of Euphrosyne’s later life save that one of her sons was strangled in some convulsion of Bulgarian politics. Michael Palaeologus had another illegitimate daughter, Marya, whom he sent even further afield on the same sort of errand. She went to marry the Khan of Tartary who lived at Baghdad, a grandson of Genghis Khan. It is to be remembered that these Asian invaders were as shocking to that age as they are to this, for in spite of the greater social violence of the Middle Ages there was a stricter chivalry observed in war. No prisoner was put to death or held to ransom unless he was royal or noble, captured common soldiers were disarmed and turned loose, and there was no killing save in actual battle. A society which held this code would plainly be appalled as we are by the Tartars’ massacre of millions and their destruction of all property and disregard for all human rights in the territories they ravaged. It is not to be believed that Euphrosyne and Marya were unafraid, either as children or as grown women.