The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Language, the arts, drama, literature, philosophy, history: thus was made up the luster, frail yet immortal in men’s memories, of a civilization. It is not inappropriate to speak of the age of Alexis as one speaks of the age of Pericles or of Louis XIV. Among the infinite combinations of men and events there sometimes suddenly appear such happy conjunctions that it seems as if everything conspired to produce their transient perfection. There is talent, peace at home, power abroad, prosperity, and even victories to lend a sense of greatness and collective dignity. In every art, every science that for centuries has not produced a single great name, suddenly there are two or three or more. Great minds spur one another on, and their rivalry leads them to the heights. The triumph of arts and letters in the Empire, its military power, its wealth, the ships in the harbors, the buildings in the cities, the gardens and aqueducts, the steles continuing right to the borders of the desert, the roads, the granaries, the statues in the temples, the columns hung with booty, and all the rest—all was no doubt due to some fortunate throw of the dice in the gamble of history. But it was also a heritage, the result of a long ripening process that went back to the first golden ages of the City, to Arsaphes and Thaumas, and to the endeavors of the priests, despite their many follies. All had their part in the flowering of the Empire: Isidore, Logophilus, Bruince, the philosophers and tragedians, poets and craftsmen, priests and architects, barbarian captains and sailors in the navy, and Alexis himself, who had willed and organized and created everything save the other people concerned, though he had discovered and singled out and honored them. But nothing of what Alexis had dreamed of came about exactly as he had hoped. It entailed much more harshness and cruelty than he had thought, but by dint of energy in the face of setbacks, strength of will, good luck, and genius, Alexis gave meaning and direction to what had been entrusted to him by fate, the gods, and history. There were some shadows across the light; there was a good deal of blood, mingled with just a little guile and with much greatness. There were faith, good will, trust, and sorrows. And all together, the dead and the living, those who wrote, those who carved in stone, those who took life also, those who brought back gold and silver from distant lands across the sea, those who gave orders, and those who obeyed—all combined, with Alexis, to produce the Empire and its glory. “Men,” wrote Justus Dion with more modesty and moderation than might appear, “are capable of great things and many marvels. They have accomplished some already; they will accomplish more. But the Empire will remain through all ensuing time one of the symbols of man’s greatness.”

  *Trévoux was a center of Jesuit literary activity.—Trans.

  XIX

  THE SPIRIT OF CONQUEST AND THE MEANING OF DEATH

  THE EMPEROR HAD GREATLY CHANGED WITH THE passing of the years. He was no longer the young man of legendary beauty and the Alexandrian nights, nor the ascetic of the columns and the temple tombs, nor the hero of the battles of the princes and of the six days. Physically, he had put on weight and his features had thickened. He had grown a beard, which was to turn white as time went by. Morally, power had taken hold of him even more than he of it, and the love of authority, which he had once so disliked, had come to him with age, with the exercise of responsibility, with victory, and disappointment. Perhaps it had come without his really wishing it; but now a whole mechanism of countless interconnected events was in motion all around him, and necessity was in command. But his inspired energy, breadth of conception, will power, and what Sir Allan Carter-Bennett calls “a cosmic sense of history” were all still intact in him and more imperious than ever. The Pomposan ambassador reported to the merchant princes that “ordinary mortals saw the Emperor high on his throne in the City as one hurling thunderbolts at history rather than as one ruling men and things.”

  By then the conquest of the world was an established fact. We have already referred several times to the insoluble problem of responsibility. It is certain that the fear and anger of the great powers, especially Cyprus, when confronted with the New Alliance, were influential in setting in motion a machinery that was to have far-reaching consequences. But it is also true, and only apparently paradoxical, that the Emperor’s whole training, his travels, his sojourn in Asia, and even his metaphysical experiences, urged him irresistibly toward the conquest of the world. The acquisition of wisdom and knowledge only took on its full meaning for him in action and the handing on of all the treasures he had amassed. Robert Weill-Pichon hits it off well when he speaks of Alexis’s conquests as a “metaphysical crusade.” Like Hellenism and Rome, like the Catholic Church, like the French Revolution and Napoleon, like Lenin and communism, Alexis conquered the world to educate it and to make it share in the order, the revelation, and the civilization that he personified. This point has of course been much debated. But less general considerations—accidents of history—enter into the matter also. Let us dwell for a moment on two sets of causes which in their different ways, and among many others, were to play a part in bringing the future to birth.

  After Helen, the courtesans of Alexandria, Vanessa, and the Yemenite, there had apparently been no woman in the Emperor’s life. Bruince often reminded him[1] that the future of the Empire depended on his providing himself with descendants. The minister cited the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs, who had married Zenobia, daughter of Helen and Roderick and sister of Alexis and Simeon, by whom he had had a son, Khubilai, whose dazzling career we shall see later. Several marriages were contemplated or even arranged for the Emperor: with a princess from Cyprus, with a princess from Sicily, with the heiress of one of the most important families in Pomposa, and even, in order to restore the balance between the families of the two princes, with Mesa, Balamir’s sister, who finally—by way of demonstrating the barbarians’ attachment to the New Alliance when this project, always rather vague, came to nothing—married Bruince. The Emperor always lacked time or inclination, until one day something happened that caused an upheaval in the Empire and was to echo through history right down to our own time.

  The reader will recall the important role played by feasts, games, and combats in the period we are concerned with. The games, which often involved bloodshed, included chariot and horse races, the racing of bulls, wild-beast fights, contests of all kinds. One of the most popular is supposed to be the origin of the Japanese sumo, and the Afghan bouzkachi is thought to derive from a race, or rather free-for-all, in which no holds were barred and riders on tarpans or the little half-wild horses of Dzungaria or Mongolia tried to snatch a goat hide from their opponent. Polo, too, the horseman’s sport par excellence, is said to have been transmitted from the Empire to Persia, whence, many centuries later, it spread to the Anglo-Saxon countries and to the Argentine. But of all the Empire’s games the most famous and the most terrifying was that which historians, for want of specific documentation and exact knowledge, call simply the ball game. It was simultaneously a sport, an entertainment, a pantomime of war, and a religious ceremony. It is because of its sacred character that this popular sport, the rules of which we do not know, remains so much a mystery to us. Like everything that has to do with vanished religions, its spirit, general relevance, and real significance elude us. Here, too, there were two teams on horseback, and the game consisted in trying to put a ball made of light wood or stiffened cloth through a wooden or, more often, stone ring fixed to a wall; goals were scored with the aid of elbows, knees, and shoulders, or with a kind of long, curved mallet halfway between the Basque chistera and a baseball bat. Sepak raga, a kind of badminton played today in southeast Asia, where a cane ball is headed or kicked over a net, has close affinities with the ball game of the Empire. But during the period we are speaking of, victory by one or another of the sides in the ball game was followed by sensational events: the finest horse in the winning team and the captain of the losing side both had their throats slit on the ground where the game had been played and in the presence of the onlookers, and revolting scenes took place that were at once wild and chaotic yet ruled by a strict litur
gy. Temple prostitutes crawled up to the two dead bodies, smeared themselves with blood, mimed the sexual act, and, following the preferences indicated by the crowd, proceeded, between themselves or with the priests, to excesses beyond description. The bodies of the man and the horse were then dismembered, and all the boys of the town or the surrounding district who were just twelve years old competed in ritual combat for possession of the heads.

  These bloodthirsty games were enormously popular and watched by wildly excited crowds. Fighting and feasting, which had reached their heyday in the first golden age of the City and under Basil the Great, had declined for want of the necessary resources under the barbarian tyrants. But they had started up again more vigorously than before with the return of peace and prosperity. Alexis, largely in memory of Philocrates, who had often expressed his loathing of scenes that revived the memory of the sacrifice at Mursa, tried to suppress them, but had to yield before furious popular resentment. It was because of the social role of the games, the universal esteem in which they were held, their sacred nature, and the way they kept alive a love of arms and blood that Professor Bjöersenson said, in a felicitous phrase which we have met before:[2] “The Empire rested on three pillars. It had three preoccupations and three laws that were really one: war, feasting, and religion.”

  The fight among the boys for possession of the heads was only a prelude to a new development in this savage entertainment. When one or more of the boys, distinguishable from each other by the different bright colors they wore, had succeeded in getting hold of the heads, they had the honor of bringing them, still dripping with blood, to the priests and temple prostitutes. To the plaudits of the crowd they were given prizes of purple ribbons or fine robes, after which the head of the losing captain was shaved by the prostitutes and thrown by the priests back on to the ground between the two teams. Then the last phase of the game began, fierce and gory and more like a nightmare than an entertainment, accompanied by howls from the mob and scenes of hysteria and possession. Now it was the children, on foot, who imitated the game previously played by the horsemen, and tried to get the ball through the wood or stone ring. But the ball they used was the head of the vanquished captain. The boy who succeeded, with foot or knee, elbow or shoulder, or with the curved mallet but never with the hand, in getting the head through that monstrous empty eye, that symbol of the gateway to death, was received with great solemnities by the priests. He underwent rites of purification and lustration in the temples, he offered sacrifices to the sun and the tutelary deities of the Empire, the priests crowned him with laurel and oak leaves mixed, temple prostitutes initiated him into love, and he was equipped as a warrior, with choice weapons, a shield of wood or leather, and a helmet surmounted by an eagle. Often he would enter upon a religious or military career. But that career was likely to be short—the captains of the adult teams in the ball game were often chosen from among the young men who had won their laurels in it as boys.

  The temple prostitutes who entered the arena after the double massacre of the man and the horse, between the game proper and its gory simulacrum, enjoyed a very special status in the Empire. They were part of the sacred world of the priests, but were excluded from the society of the Empire’s ancient families, of high officials, and even of the priests themselves, who collaborated with them in religious ceremonies and often enjoyed their bodies, but in private life treated them with disdain and sometimes contempt. They obeyed no rule comparable to that which restricted the activities of priestesses of the temple of the sun, like Vanessa. They were bound by no vow. All they did was make love before everyone during the games. They occupied their place in the sacred liturgy by offering themselves to the gods by way of the priests, the boys who conquered in the ball game, and the pilgrims. In his journal, translated by Henri Estienne and quoted by Montaigne,[3] one of these pilgrims, speaking of the prostitutes, remarks with naïve enthusiasm: “And I assure you there are so many of them for the use of those passing through and of pious and fortunate travelers that it is a wonder and great delight.” In theory they were available to anyone for a price in accordance with their age, beauty, fame, and speciality, but they were not obliged to give themselves if they did not choose, and jokes were often made about immensely wealthy merchants and even governors who had met with refusal and been turned away. They were, in fact, rather like the great Italian courtesans who delighted, one after the other or simultaneously, the cardinals and monklings at the courts of the Italian Renaissance, and who appear in Boccaccio, Brantôme, and later in Balzac’s Contes drolatiques (Ribald Tales). The picture was even completed by farcical intrigues, with the women playing off powerful protectors against younger sweethearts. But the nature of their functions, at once sacred, bloody, and public, made them, even for that day and age, more frightening, and lent them something at once more awe-inspiring and more coarse. It was not unusual for one of them to give up her profession out of lassitude or love or having made her fortune. A few, though with difficulty and usually after a hard struggle, managed by intelligence and energy to attain quite a high position in imperial society. Menalchas the dramatist is said to have begun his career as the protégé of one former temple prostitute. Another, who became extremely rich, is supposed to have contributed to the costs of building the great temple of the City.

  Despite the repugnance he had always shown for cruel games, the Emperor’s position and his concern for his own popularity obliged him to attend at least once a year. In those days the preparations for feasts and combats created as much rumor and excitement as corridas in Spain or horse racing in England nowadays. In the year with which we are concerned, no one in the City talked of anything but the beauty and majestic elegance of a temple prostitute whose successes had made her extremely proud despite her youth. The rumor reached the Emperor, who decided to attend the games. The young woman, as depicted in mosaics in the City and Pomposa, one of which is preserved in the Brera in Milan and the other in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was indeed very beautiful—slim, wide-shouldered, with a fair, pale complexion and a face and bearing of peerless nobility. Her long, black hair came down to her shoulders. Her abstractedness amounted to insolence, yet when she raised her dark eyes toward the spectators, there glowed in them, according to contemporary accounts, a flame that seemed to speak of passion held in check by scorn or indifference. The games took their usual course. Yet it was amidst a silence unbroken by any of the usual shouts, perhaps frozen in men’s throats at the sight of such rare beauty, that the temple prostitute crawled through the blood to the two corpses, and, following a ritual handed down through generations from antiquity, mimed the act of love with the dead man and the animal still twitching from its death agony. Justus Dion takes care not to mention the incident, but contemporary chronicles relate that the courtesan, perhaps knowing of the Emperor’s presence, performed her office with such loftiness and dignity that “the crowd was seized with a frenzy from on high which was the voice of the gods.” At all events, the Emperor cannot have been indifferent to the ceremony, nor to the satisfaction of the gods, nor to the officiant who inspired it, because we know that the same evening a messenger was sent from the palace to fetch her. Scarcely one moon later she abandoned her office to live there, and before the year was out Alexis married her. To the scornful yet furious smiles of the patricians, male and female, the temple prostitute put on the great imperial azure robe. She was not yet twenty. The Emperor was forty-nine. Her name was Theodora.

  The sensation caused in the City and throughout the Empire can easily be imagined. The Emperor’s marriage widened still further the gap created between Helen and her son by Jester’s execution, and Alexis’s mother never met Theodora. There had been attempts to dissuade the Emperor, and the chief priests and old families even brought pressure to bear to try to make him renounce his passion, or his vagary—both words are to be found in contemporary texts—and bring him around to the advantageous marriages long put forward by various ambassadors. But apparently he
had made up his mind the very first day, perhaps the very first instant, and he never wavered. Alexis’s will was not in the habit of yielding. But also Theodora was a very exceptional woman. The future proved that the Emperor was right, and Theodora left posterity a great name worthy to be coupled with that of Alexis. Forceful women famous for one reason or another are not rare in history, from the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, and Zenobia of Palmyra to Catherine Sforza, Isabella d’Este, Elizabeth of England, Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Queen Victoria. And love between man and woman is not as unknown as people like to pretend. But rare in any age are couples in which the man and the woman both collaborate, with equal happiness, in the same great design. The two most illustrious examples are the Emperor Alexis and the Empress Theodora, and Justinian, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the other Theodora. There has often been some confusion between the two Theodoras, encouraged by the fact that they share the same name, though it is one quite frequent in history, and perhaps also by some slight similarity between their lives. Both women were geniuses, of humble origin and unyielding character. But it also seems that by contamination many of the traits belonging to our Theodora were attributed to the empress of Byzantium, and that the latter’s place in history is largely due to the name she had in common with her predecessor. Many historians, and more especially essayists, writers of melodrama and would-be historical plays, and novelists given to the lamentable genre of historical fiction, bear the heavy responsibility of having contributed to what amounts almost to a fusion of the two Theodoras. The best known of the culprits is probably Victorien Sardou. As is well known, his play Theodora, performed with enormous success in 1884 and typical of the historical melodrama then in fashion, was based on the personality and experiences of Alexis’s wife. But the situations and atmosphere owe a great deal to the history of Byzantium, which was more familiar to Sardou than that of the Empire. Even today, when our knowledge of Alexis and his time has been expanded by many excellent books on the subject, the confusion is still often met with. But it cannot be overemphasized: historical accuracy requires that most of the anecdotes and enterprises ascribed to the Byzantine empress should be restored to the former temple prostitute. And, of course, when we use the name Theodora hereafter we refer only to the wife of Alexis.