The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  The death of Jester was a great turning point even more in the mind and heart of the Emperor than in the foreign and internal policy of the Empire. Philocrates’ teaching was not forgotten; it had simply turned out to be irrelevant. Jester had had to be killed to save the Empire from the barbarians. And now, in the name of the Empire, the barbarians would have to be sent forth to conquer the world. One thing followed another so naturally and inevitably that it sometimes seemed to Alexis he decided nothing at all—it was events that decided for him. But he was at the center of all events, and they revolved around him as if he were their master. And therefore he was their master. There was little question now of meditation or retreat. There were not enough hours in the day for the endless decisions to be made, the building of temples, the founding of towns, the raising of troops, the appointment of governors, prefects, generals. Sometimes, as dusk fell over Aquileus, the Emperor thought still of his letters to Philocrates or of his conversations with Jester. And he would dream, too, of the great forest, the nights in Alexandria, the temple at the gates of the city, the beach of fine white sand where they both used to lie, of the desert, and of the tombs where he had been imprisoned. How far away it all was! The debauchee, the saint, the Fool of God had been metamorphosed into the war chief, the emperor, the tyrant. Tomorrow he would conquer the world. And all this had come to pass because there is a game and the game has rules, because time passes and things change, because there are men and their dreams, and because every day the world advances a little and regresses a little.

  Alexis had not wished for Vanessa’s death—but he was responsible for it. He had not wished for Simeon’s death—but he had been obliged to bring it about. He had not wished for Jester’s death—but he had had, in despair, to decide upon it in order to save the Empire from the vengeance of the barbarians, which might have destroyed it altogether. That was the way things went. But they left traces of their terrible passing. Alexis was never the same after Jester’s death. He was then in the prime of life. But all the evidence of those who knew him, chronicles, accounts by foreign ambassadors agree that after this crisis his character changed. A harsh, intractable element appeared in a temperament that had at first thought itself born for pleasure, then devoted itself to the gods, then been revealed to itself, before the final avatar, in war and the ruling of men. If Alexis had died during one of the orgies whose sinister reputation spread all over the Levant, he would have been remembered only as an obscure debauchee. If he had perished from his sufferings and fastings during the period of Asian religion and mysticism, he would have been revered for some generations as a saint and the Fool of God, then buried in hagiographies and forgotten. But all the products of space and time—the lands and peoples of the Empire, history, power, the memory of men—all seized upon him. He had seen people die around him, and he had sometimes been the cause of their deaths. He would never be the same again.

  It was about this time that the process that historians and psychoanalysts have with some exaggeration dubbed “the break with the mother” began and was completed. Helen had been horror-struck by the execution of Jester. Alexis did everything he could to make her understand its significance and the motives behind it. Tradition, unconfirmed by any records, has it that Jester himself left Helen a letter in which he forgave the Emperor and asked Helen to do the same. But Helen never forgave. The Emperor always continued to show his mother the deepest respect and the most solicitous affection, but she took no further part in affairs. She withdrew more and more often into her ancient northeastern forest, where a stately mansion now arose in the place of the old fortified houses. And there, finally, she died. Alexis was in Sicily.

  All that had been going on in the Empire had not left the rest of the world unmoved. Cyprus and Pomposa, which had helped Alexis against the barbarians, looked on uneasily at the setting up of the New Alliance (we have already seen the part Cyprus played in attempts to overthrow it). Its confirmation threw all the great powers of that time into consternation. From then on, for anyone who observed events closely and clearly, the future was already decided. Alexis was under no illusion. Even if he had felt able to advocate a different policy, he would in any case have been obliged to lay the foundations of a world empire. The princes of Cyprus saw the execution of Jester as an insult and a threat directed first and foremost at them. Alexis’s attempts to appease them were of no avail. They wanted war. And they got it.

  The eternal question of responsibility can in this case receive but a dusty answer. Cyprus, Pomposa, Sicily, and the others wanted to destroy the Emperor and the New Alliance. The Emperor wanted to build the Empire and defend it, and his victories and conquests led him ceaselessly on to other victories and other conquests. But history, alas, is not a matter of morals, as Alexis had learned from the life and death of Philocrates and of Jester. But is there any other morality than that of history? It is through history alone that the gods speak. Alexis felt as if he were becoming a god himself when he bore heavily on the human in order to obey the divine. What, for a time at least, became more important for Alexis than pleasure or meditation, and what made Goethe so admire him that he wrote one of his most beautiful poems about him, was action. Power and glory consisted in changing the world.

  A year after the death of Jester and the Emperor’s letter to Balamir, a solemn and momentous ceremony occupied all Aquileus. Holiday crowds filled the streets, which were strewn with rose petals, alive with murmur and song, decorated with bright hangings at every window, and full of the din and animation of soldiers in groups of five or six, merchants and peddlers in their booths, and crowds of wide-eyed sightseers come in from the country. Occasionally, bands of nomad horsemen would sweep by, riding from their quarters to the positions assigned to them. Arms were raised in salute as they passed, and the women might smile, though still only briefly and shyly. There had been no serious incident since the arrival, a month earlier, of the formidable warriors who had left so many memories of terror behind them here in the city of the priests and throughout the Empire. They had brought their sheep and cattle along in their wake, and roasted them whole over enormous fires in the fields outside the city where they had been quartered. The people of Aquileus brought them eggs, fruit, and rye brandy. The nomads had crucified a dozen or so of their own number for drunkenness, rape, or theft. Balamir himself, in his eternal white sable, had just arrived at the palace. In the morning the Emperor had appeared before the crowd with him, and now they were going up together into the great temple. Certain priests and representatives of great families had, of course, been indignant that the barbarian leader should visit the legendary tomb of Arsaphes and the most holy shrine in the Empire. They said: “What an insult to so many memories! For whom, for what did our fathers and brothers, our friends and our sons die? You notice Princess Helen is not here? She, at least, remembers Philocrates, and Jester, and the battles the Emperor has forgotten. All that is missing from the rejoicings is the five or six hundred thousand who were slain by the barbarians, and Simeon, resurrected, come at last to enjoy his triumph.” Before the great temple at Aquileus, in the sacred meadow known first as the Field of Spring and then as the Field of the New Alliance, twenty thousand white bulls were sacrificed at once, and their blood gushed into the gridded channels and furrows that the priests drew on the ground. The bloody sword of the nomads stood upright in a block of rare wood at the very entrance to the temple. Alexis and Balamir together lit a sacred flame, the symbol of their alliance. The rejoicings were designed to include remembrance of all the dead, both those of the Empire and those of the barbarians. As at the Emperor’s coronation, priestesses flourished red and black scarves toward the east. But now the list of those whose memory and death were linked to the Empire was longer: to Thaumas, Vanessa, Philocrates, Jester, and the many others was added the other Jester. The Emperor had expressly asked for his name to be included, and Balamir had agreed. The case of Simeon presented a problem. It was gotten round by invoking the memory of the victi
ms of the double duel. Isidore and Bruince stood behind Alexis. Balamir was followed by his captains, clad in leather and hides. It was the beginning of a new age. Albert Mathiez used to compare the ceremony at Aquileus a year after the events connected with the death of Jester with the Feast of the Federation a year after the taking of the Bastille. In both cases, crisis and bloodshed were followed by reconciliation and consecration, sealed with unanimity and popular enthusiasm. And in both cases, alas, the bloodshed was not over. In exchange for his death, Jester had bequeathed the Empire a whole world to conquer.

  XVIII

  SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND EVERY-DAY LIFE UNDER THE EMPIRE

  DURING THE FIFTY-FIVE YEARS OF HIS REIGN—ONE of the longest in history—Alexis completely reorganized the decaying Empire he had found when he mounted the throne. This long-term task was accomplished day by day, between military expeditions and the grand designs of foreign policy. Let us pause for a while in our chronicle of the emperor’s adventures, and look at the inhabitants of the Empire and the kind of life they lived at the time of Alexis.

  The Empire had not changed very greatly since the far-off days of Basil and Arsaphes. The centuries flowed by more slowly then than now; it is only in the last hundred fifty or two hundred years that the world has had a little more difficulty recognizing itself every morning. Nature—the rivers and forests, wild animals and plants—was much the same as ever. But year after year war had swept over cities and fields, destroying ports, houses, flocks, herds, and harvests. Year after year, fear had reigned over the Empire. For the peasant, the plowman, the shopkeeper, the fisherman, Alexis stood first and foremost—and this is one of the clues to his success—for security and the end of fear. After the successful reconquest, war never broke out over the lands of the Empire again. True, the New Alliance meant a period of intense military activity, but all these operations without exception were carried out on foreign soil, farther and farther from the Empire’s own borders. The war effort was considerable, and there were few families that did not lose at least one of their members. But people’s homes were safe, and this levy on life itself seemed quite natural. Men did not live to be very old in any case, and death on the battlefield seemed more honorable than death from plague or famine.

  These, together with war, were the great scourges of the age. But plague and famine greatly decreased under Alexis’s reign. Bruince introduced vigorous long-term measures to ensure supplies, and brought about a vast expansion in the production of rice and cereals. And the Empire had only two epidemics of plague in the whole of Alexis’s reign. The first was limited in extent, and the infection was brought in by detachments of nomads from Persia and India. The second, at the very end of the reign, wrought terrible havoc, and was started by a ship from a Scythian port that the Varangians had been besieging. Plague had broken out among the Varangians, and they were obliged to lift the siege. But before they withdrew, their leader, to revenge himself on fate, had the decomposing corpses of a dozen of the victims thrown over the walls into the city. This was enough to unleash the scourge there, too. The inhabitants, scarcely recovered from the rigors of war, were decimated by the plague. Some of the wealthier survivors got together secretly and chartered a ship to flee the stricken city. Several hundreds, with their wives and their gold, embarked they cared not whither.

  After no more than a few days the plague rose grinning on the terrified vessel and struck one of the crew. They threw the man overboard, alive, using oars and boat hooks to avoid touching him. A couple more days went by. The more optimistic believed it might have been an isolated case, and hope was returning when, one after the other, a woman and one of the most important merchants of the town fell ill. The ship, on to which far too many refugees had crowded—by dint of money, pleading, or force—became a hell. Ashore, in the town, at least people had been able to isolate themselves, avoid suspected victims, or run away. At sea, on the ship, the hale and the sick were thrown together in a tiny space in which death alone could prosper. Some people took to the boats, in twos or threes, each anxiously examining his companions beforehand to make sure they still had their health and strength. A husband would abandon his wife because she looked rather pale; complete strangers trusted one another because their complexion was clear and they seemed sturdy. Meanwhile a storm had blown up, and from the deck those left on board watched with satisfaction as those who had escaped were swallowed by the waves. Some were stabbed and thrown overboard because they showed signs of fatigue, or even just because they were seasick. When the ship came in sight of the coast of the Empire, more than fifty passengers had already died—murdered, drowned, or carried off by the plague.

  The survivors sailed into the port of Onessa. They were coming alongside, and a sailor had just leaped ashore to fasten the moorings, when he collapsed on the quay. The crowd of sightseers, which always gathered to watch the arrival of ships from distant parts laden with mysteries and dreams, sent someone to notify the port authorities. It did not take them long to establish the malady that had struck the sailor down—it was the plague. The fugitives were at once forbidden to land, and were ordered to put to sea again without delay. The officer in command of the port and his men had remained prudently on the quay, some distance from the ship. They saw the passengers hesitate, and little groups forming on deck, and though they could not hear what they were saying they could sense a kind of agitation forming and rapidly increasing, spreading uneasiness, almost dread, through the harbor and the big crowd now assembling there. Then suddenly the people on board the plague ship made a combined rush on to the quay, fanning out over the empty space fear had created around the ship.

  The crowd of spectators fell back as one man before their approach, a sharp order rang out, and a shower of arrows rained down on the fugitives. About a dozen of them fell. The rest hesitated a moment, and then, with a shriek, men, women, and children resumed their mad rush forward. It was as if what they wanted to do now was not so much to escape as to touch and communicate to others the infection. The circle formed by the people of Onessa had widened still more to escape the plague carriers. Those who were trying to scatter had to make their way against the bolder spirits, who moved forward gripping axes, pikes, or cudgels. There was time for another hail of arrows; then came the clash. As they fell, the doomed newcomers clutched at their murderers, trying to clasp them in their arms and drag them with them into death. The port was strewn with corpses. But some had survived arrows, clubs, and pikes. Now was their chance, for no one would fight them hand to hand, and the crowd opened before them with cries of terror. Those of the passengers and crew who had not yet left the ship saw there was no hope of another mass rush on the shore, and they set sail as fast as they could, under the arrows and burning torches that fell down from all sides, threatening to add the perils of fire at sea to the ravages of the plague.

  Messengers were sent at a gallop from Onessa to the City and all the ports along the coast to warn the troops to be on the alert for the plague-stricken ship. When it reached the entrance to the harbor of the City, three galleys barred its way. The condemned men sailed to and fro for days. They had started out with plenty of supplies, but now hunger and thirst began to slink in the shadow of the plague. Every night dozens of living and dead were thrown into the sea. One moonless night the survivors, now only about twenty strong, managed to elude the warships that had been following them at a distance all this time. They jumped off the ship and swam to the shore about a hundred miles north of Cape Gildor. Several were drowned, and fewer than ten of those who had escaped the Varangians’ vengeance finally came ashore. But they were enough to finish what the earlier fugitives had begun at Onessa. In the last years of Alexis’s reign, a terrible epidemic swept through the Empire, wiping out in a few weeks whole regions that had survived both war and the tyranny of the barbarians.

  But the plague and the sufferings it brought were fortunately an exception in Alexis’s long reign. For more than half a century, between conquests and other mili
tary expeditions, the Emperor devoted himself not only to the prosperity of all, but also to an idea that was then quite new—the prosperity of each. To meet the necessities of war and the hopes of peace as well, the administration of the Empire was entirely overhauled. Basil and Arsaphes had already set about the problems of roads and water supply,[1] but what would now be called the scientific and technical adjuncts of everyday life had been neglected in favor of more immediate worries, and often left in a state of chaos. Bruince, with a very modern sense of what government implies, considered it incumbent on the State to make its administration cover all the activities within the Empire and to introduce standards that would be observed as generally and as rigorously as possible. With the help of Bruince and a curious character called Logophilus, whom we shall come back to, Alexis concerned himself first and foremost with a radical reform of weights and measures, the calendar, and coinage.