The Emperor ordered the survivor’s story to be kept absolutely secret. Two or three days later, the man died quite peacefully in the palace at Aquileus, where he had been looked after carefully and even sumptuously; rumor said he had been poisoned. The choice before Alexis was simple, but difficult: either war to the death on the soil of the Empire, with all the risks and suffering that that involved, or one further step along the road of forgiveness and appeasement. The Emperor closeted himself with Bruince. It was another of the most painful crises of his life. “The Emperor,” Justus Dion tells us, “cursed the course of things, the concatenation of events, and the burden of power. He saw that history was a cruel game, whether it was governed by the gods or merely grew out of itself. His mind was mazed before this labyrinth of a world, pitched into space and time. But his spirit was strong and his mind lucid. The time had gone by—or had not yet arrived—for dreams of solitude, of withdrawal to the desert or mountains or forest, of meditation on the soul and the divine. Action was needed, to give the labyrinth some form for a while. He summoned Bruince and Jester and the chief priests, ministers, and generals, and decided . . .” The decision was to save the alliance and put Jester to death.
The Emperor and Jester stayed alone together for almost a whole day. We know nothing about what happened during that time, only that they came out of the palace hand in hand and that Jester threw himself at the Emperor’s feet before the assembled crowd. As with Balamir, the Emperor helped him to rise and took him in his arms. Those nearest could see tears streaming down the Emperor’s cheeks as he embraced the boy. The executioner was ready. Alexis himself led to the red-draped platform surrounded with troops him who had saved his life, whom he called his son, and whom he loved above all. The trumpets sounded. Jester’s head rolled from the scaffold.
His death brought countless consequences. The barbarian hordes had already advanced as far as the borders of the Empire. A few more days and they would inevitably clash with the main body of the army that Bruince had hastily mustered and massed along a line of defense some distance within the frontier. Meanwhile Alexis had made contact with the barbarian detachments stationed inside the Empire which had been encircled by the army after the massacre of the three hundred mercenaries and their officers near Amphibolus. These prisoners were already preparing for death when Alexis promised them they should live, and sent their leaders, under strong escort, to deliver a message to the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs. The message consisted of a letter and Jester’s head.
The letter has a curious history. It was supposed to be among the best and most expensive documents that the famous forger Vrain-Lucas succeeded in selling, between 1867 and 1868, to the too naïve Michel Chasles, of the Academy of Sciences, whose erudition did not save him from being hoaxed. In Le Temps of July 8, 1888, in an article on various historical studies of Alexis, Anatole France refers to some of the documents brought into being by the delirious imagination of Vrain-Lucas. The autograph letters include the famous message from Lazarus to Mary Magdalen announcing his resurrection; a letter from Cesarion, visiting Provence, to his mother, Cleopatra; letters written by Shakespeare, Charles V, Rabelais, Saint Theresa, Du Guesclin, Sidonius Apollinaris, and the emperor Hadrian; letters from Cleopatra to Cato, from Joan of Arc to her family, from Attila to a general among the Gauls, from Julius Caesar to Vercingetorix, Judas Iscariot to Mary Magdalen, Herod to Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great to Aristotle, Alcibiades to Pericles, and, of course, the fake letter from the Emperor to the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs. “These letters,” says Anatole France, “were written on paper, in French. But the paper was yellowed and the style archaic. Thus Mary Magdalen says to Lazarus: ‘Mon très amé frère, ce que me mandez de Petrus, l’apostre de notre doux Jésus, me fait espérer que bientôt le verrons icy’ [My dear brother, what you tell me of Peter, disciple of our beloved Jesus, makes me hope we shall soon see him here]. Vrain-Lucas was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to two years in prison, with a fifty-franc fine and costs.” Alphonse Daudet, who made this affair the subject of one of his best-known novels, tells in L’Immortel how the supposed letter from Alexis to Balamir finally blew the gaff on the whole fraud when an expert discovered that the “antique” parchment bore the watermark “Papeteries d’Angoulême—1864.”
But to turn to more serious matters, Marco Polo claims (though he was a great liar and his book, The Million, is, as we all know, full of inaccuracies and braggadocio) actually to have seen the genuine letter when he was at the court of Cambaluc, i.e., Peking. Was it he or some missionary who brought it back to Venice? In all events, by the beginning of the quattrocento it forms part of the treasures of Saint Mark’s, together with the famous tiara of Saitaphernes, with a special note to the effect that it “is and remains” the personal property of the doge. It is not impossible that it was given as a congratulatory present by Yong-lo, emperor of China, on the election of Francesco Foscari as doge in 1423. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the letter passed, by obscure and perhaps sinister means, into the hands of the Medicis. Bernard Berenson liked to tell his visitors, half jokingly, that the Virgin With the Letter by Antonello da Messina, which for many years graced the walls of Berenson’s beautiful villa, I Tatti, near Florence, and was purchased in 1959 by the Museum of Detroit, was really the portrait of a beautiful young nun who escaped from the convent at Fiesole and lived with the artist for two years before being poisoned by a Sicilian rival. Berenson would point out that in the picture Vanina Vanini (the nun, sometimes known also as La Pasticcierina, because she was the daughter of a pastry cook) was evidently reading a Renaissance copy of the Emperor’s letter to the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs before being interrupted by the crying of the child in her arms. And, indeed, one can decipher, on the parchment thrown carelessly onto the wooden table among some carpenter’s tools, five or six Greek words—καί τήν κεφαλήν τήν τoύ ἐμαυτoύ υìoύ—in which a benevolent interpreter might just see an echo of the last episode in the life of the unfortunate Jester.
What is certain is that the genuine letter reached France with Leonora Galigaï and her husband Concino Concini. After the murder of the maréchal d’Ancre by the future maréchal de Vitry, then still captain of the king’s guards, the letter was seized by Charles, duc de Luynes. His widow Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, by then duchesse de Chevreuse, sold it to Finance Minister Fouquet, then at the height of his brilliance and prosperity. Saint-Simon tells how the sight of the letter in its casket of velvet and precious stones, during the famous reception at Vaux-le-Vicomte, was the last straw for Louis XIV. He coveted the treasure for himself, and Saint-Simon tells how, immediately after the reception, Fouquet was disgraced, tried, imprisoned, and most of his possessions confiscated. At that point trace is lost of the letter—or rather the traces are numerous, complicated, and contradictory. Some say d’Artagnan managed to secrete it at the time of Fouquet’s arrest, and kept it for himself instead of handing it over to the king. The king is supposed to have heard about this when the captain of the musketeers was nearing his end, and according to this theory it was because of Louis’s suspicions that the king’s guard burst in on d’Artagnan as he lay on his deathbed at Maastricht in December, 1673. Not finding Alexis’s letter, the guards impounded the manuscript of d’Artagnan’s Memoirs of My Life, published for the first time in Amsterdam at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Having thus escaped confiscation twice, the letter was supposed to have remained in the possession of the Montesquiou-Fezensac family, of which d’Artagnan was a member. An express letter[1] from Gabriel Yturri, Robert de Montesquiou’s secretary, inviting Marcel Proust to lunch at Neuilly and giving him some information he had asked for, states that the letter is still in the archives of the château de Marsan, near Auch, which had been in the possession of the Montesquiou family for centuries. Other accounts of the letter’s history—and perhaps the author will be forgiven a momentary departure from proper historical objectivity, since the personal connection here lies at the very o
rigin of the present work—other accounts maintain that the precious document was given by Fouquet to the counsel who defended him and saved his life in the face of the king’s great wrath. The counsel’s name was Olivier Le Fèvre d’Ormesson, and he was to deposit the letter in a place known only to Fouquet and himself. As we know, Fouquet and Lauzun, both victims of the king’s envy, met in the fortress prison of Pinerolo, where the eternal seducer, Lauzun, abused the friendship of his companion in misfortune, and led astray his young daughter Marie-Madeleine Fouquet (future marquise de Monsalès and related to the Crussol d’Uzès family). The infatuated girl, in her transports, is supposed to have told Lauzun the secret of where Fouquet asked his defender to hide the letter. As soon as he was let out of prison, Lauzun shamelessly went and found the letter, which he then hid in the massive walls of the château of Saint-Fargeau in Puisaye, now the department of the Yonne. The château belonged to the Grande Mademoiselle, Lauzun’s lawful but secret wife, who was dying of love for him. But he is said to have stayed at the château only long enough to carry out, with the utmost secrecy, certain mysterious alterations. So Alexis’s letter is still perhaps somewhere in the thickness of the tower walls at Saint-Fargeau, unless it was destroyed in one of the two fires that ravaged the building in 1750 and again in 1852. Or unless—a last hypothesis—it was sold for an unearthly price, as some claim, to an Italian-American, by the hard-up and unscrupulous grandson of one of the recent owners, who discovered it by chance. In that case the letter from the Emperor to the Kha-Khan of all the Oïghurs would have gone to form part of the loot of the Mafia, and is ending its long existence in the safe of some bank in Palermo, Naples, Chicago, or Las Vegas.[2]
Alexis had judged well in entrusting to barbarians the task of delivering his message to their prince. No one else would have been able to escape the traps and ambushes laid along all the routes that led to Balamir. Even the barbarian messengers themselves, known to be from the Empire, were met with mistrust. But at last, after adventures that would fill a volume, they came to the Kha-Khan’s tent, where a barrier of the most dedicated enemies of the Empire watched over Balamir, his fierce protectors as well as guard of honor. Their captain came to meet the nomad horsemen and wanted to be told what they had to say to the Kha-Khan. Then the leader of the horsemen, without a word, leaned forward over the felt or horsehair blanket that served him as a saddle, and drew out a round object wrapped in damp rags steeped in spices. Slowly he undid the wrappings, still not answering the captain. Then, with a powerful gesture, he sent Jester’s head rolling into the Kha-Khan’s tent.
The Emperor’s letter contained neither pleas nor apologies. It simply related all that had happened, ending with the famous words: “Every man sees things from one side only. Now you know the other side. Do not let passion, impatience, or ambition put so swift an end to all we have begun. Together we shall be impatient about many other things, together we shall have many other ambitions. Do not turn against the Empire. Remember, there is nothing that may not be ours if only we stay united. I send you this letter as a token, together with the head of my son—χαì τὴν χέϕαλην τὴν τoṽ ἐμαυτoṽ υìoṽ. Nothing was dearer to me. But your friendship is dearer to me, and that alliance between our peoples which will give us a whole world.” It is said that when he read the letter Balamir shed the only tears he was ever seen to weep. But he did not waste a moment. He gathered the barbarians together, and spoke to them.
The Kha-Khan’s eloquence must have been very persuasive. The rough, harsh men who listened to him had only one idea in their heads, only one hope in their hearts: to kill, loot, rape—make war. But he managed to persuade them to stay faithful to the alliance. What did he say to them? We know in part, not only from imperial texts, which are probably inaccurate and biased, but from Chinese and Persian chronicles that give similar accounts of Balamir’s words. He held out to the nomads Jester’s livid head, and went over all that had happened in the last month, putting all the blame on Jester. He read out the Emperor’s letter, translating rather freely, with the help of two or three of his captains who were fluent in Greek. And then, knowing his men, he dwelt on the vast prospects opened by the Emperor’s message. He spoke of the distant lands beyond the seas and beyond the Empire, far richer than the children of the steppe and the high plateaus could ever imagine, covered with fruit and wheat and towns in which the humblest cottage was finer than the tents of Mongol princes or the Persian houses which the nomads so admired. He spoke of ships laden with ivory and arms, of gold-roofed temples, of tall, languid women dressed in transparent silk among palace fountains and flowers and green and black marble, of horses from Arabia, of jewels hung around damsels’ necks, of bronze vases, endless feasting, and the fruits of the vine through which everyone, on beds of silk and roses, under a sun that did not burn, could enter the gates of a paradise that knew no dusty heat or icy cold. He uttered names that the barbarians had never heard before, so that the sweet music of mystery and the unknown echoed in their ears: he spoke of Cyprus and Carthage, Pomposa and Rome. He said that beyond all these, where the sun sank into unfathomable depths, there was a great, storm-tossed sea, which made all other seas look like ponds for children to play in. But were the barbarian nomads, who had brought terror to China, Persia, and India, were they children? Instead of tearing themselves to pieces in unnecessary wars, let them join with the Empire and conquer the world as far as the sea where the sun disappeared!
When he stopped speaking there was, as always after his words, a silence of surprise and incredulity that lasted some time. And then cheering arose over the plain, and those who had been most hostile, those who had mistrusted him, those who had wanted to make war on the Empire and bring the Emperor back in chains, all threw themselves at his feet and begged his forgiveness. Once again Balamir had won the day. The pattern of history had shifted.
It had shifted in Aquileus, too. When the riders hurried back in triumph, bringing the Emperor a message of alliance and loyalty and bearing gifts, Alexis realized that the course of history had opened a new era in his life, and that in this era he would find his destiny. He was launched henceforth on a path from which he could not easily turn aside. The days of the struggle for liberation were already far behind. The Empire was saved. But there was the world to conquer. Not a day must be lost in getting ready the tools necessary for a task that only three or four years earlier the boldest spirit would never have dreamed of. The opposition to the Emperor had been stricken with terror at the execution of Jester. By a characteristic tactic, Alexis used the situation to meet some of the opposition’s demands. He introduced various political and religious measures—at that time there was no real difference between the two spheres—designed to strengthen the army and navy, to revive respect for ancestral virtue, and to make the different peoples of the Empire more keenly conscious that they all belonged to one community.
Alexis’s aims and their consequences have given rise to a new debate among the historians that recalls, on a much larger scale, the debate over Basil, prince of Onessa or unifier of the Empire.[3] Some, including Arnold Toynbee, consider that everything in the Emperor’s behavior, his education, his past, the alliance with Balamir, the execution of Jester, points to the idea of a world empire. Others believe Alexis’s sole aim was to prove the greatness of the peoples of the Empire, of those who had fought each other under the Porphyries and the Venostae, of whom he was the common heir, and who were reconciled in him. In this case, what distinguishes Alexis is the emergence, before its time, of a kind of national feeling which grew up slowly out of a struggle against feudalism. As Lucien Febvre points out, “feudalism” and “nationalism” are anachronisms here. But already present is the mechanism that brings together the interests and traditions of great families with a military past, the rise of a national spirit, and the hope of a world empire. The antagonism between the two principles, nation and empire, is well brought out by Renan, who gives three examples: in the contemporary world, Ger
many and Italy, hampered in “their work of national concretion,” the one by the weight of a Germanic Holy Roman Empire, the other by the papacy; the third example, from much earlier times, is the Empire at the time of Alexis. “The first condition for the existence of a national spirit,” he writes, “is the renunciation of any claim to a universal role: a universal role is destructive of nationality.”[4] Such is the confrontation between those who see Alexis, after Arsaphes and Basil before him, as the creator of a nation, and those who consider him the founder of the world empire.
Such rigid alternatives are not usually very helpful. What one has to do is accept the facts and see Alexis as both the pupil of the thinkers of Asia who resigns himself to sacrificing Jester to universal considerations, and the military leader who, within the New Alliance, devotes all his efforts to strengthening the State. It may even be that Alexis’s whole policy consisted in maintaining an equal balance between opposing demands. No sooner was the alliance with the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs confirmed—and at what a price!—than Alexis not only adopted some of the measures Jester had demanded, but also had spies and imperial captains in the barbarians’ pay publicly executed. The Emperor explained these actions in another letter to the Kha-Khan. To adopt Renan’s terms, the simplest way of putting it is that for Alexis the nation was now a step on the way toward a world empire, and that, as Sir Allan Carter-Bennett has it, “out of an assemblage of people who were not even a nation, Alexis made a state capable of conquering the world. And that is what we call the Empire.” To attain this goal, every means was legitimate. Sometimes the emphasis would be on the universal and on peace, sometimes on racial purity and ancestral tradition. Jester was executed to save the New Alliance, but at the same time the lessons he taught and the example he set were not to be lost. Crime, contradiction, some would say duplicity were to have their place in the great design—as if the conqueror’s fate were marked forever by the death of a mistress, a brother, and one who had almost been a son. Yet through all this deviousness, all these detours, through so many complications and reversals, Alexis’s trajectory through the sky of history remains imperturbably direct. A late sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicle charmingly says: “Escreve Alexo, como Deus, direito por linhas tortas.” “Por linhas tortas,” indeed. They signify all the unjust deaths, the bloodshed, the fire in the night, the atrocities that have made Alexis, for many people, indistinguishable from such as the Mongol and Assyrian conquerors, Ashurbanipal, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Stalin, and Hitler, and for the Christians an Antichrist.[5] But “direito”—that signifies power. And glory.
The Glory of the Empire Page 30