The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Through this prodigious enterprise, probably unique in the annals of history, Alexis did his best to remain what a manuscript preserved first in the Irish monastery of Glendalough, then in that of Cuchulain, calls “li reis e li empereres de grant vertus e merci.” Countless acts of generosity and mercy—we ourselves shall meet with more than one of them—are attributed to him by contemporary chronicles, in the midst of brutality and sometimes savagery; and apparently this does not seem to be due merely to the propaganda that other rulers in other times and places (for example, the Emperor Augustus in Rome) were to raise to the level of an institution. Alexis, though responsible for so many deaths, did not love violence for its own sake. But he was making war; he had written as much to Philocrates many years before, and he repeated it throughout the years of conquest. He made war in order to establish the reign of the universal on earth. Diversity, contradiction, and difference seem to have caused Alexis actual physical suffering. The claims of unity and necessity expressed themselves in him with astounding force. The history of the Empire, the vicissitudes of his own life and the lessons of Asia all taught him the perils of division and the beauties of harmony. The avarice of the rich, the greed of the poor, want, fear were all the result of division; security and happiness were born of a world that was unified. War was a necessary transition from the reign of diversity to that of unity and necessity. And Alexis waged that war at the head of the barbarians—in other words, of those who for the civilized world represented the element of contradiction and the destruction of every kind of harmony and happiness. Many cities had to be burned to bring about peace. Léon Daudet, who has a certain sympathy for Alexis and sees clearly the desire for unity that drives him, is nevertheless surprised at the alliance with Balamir, and curiously dubs the Emperor the “maniac universalist” and the “devotee of difference.” The truth of the matter is that Alexis stands at an intersection between a phase of history of which the battle of Amphibolus is the key event, and a religious and mystical experience in which human life is much less important than the advent of the universal. This dual pressure, translated into terms of ordinary politics, meant that the constant threat of invasion by the barbarians was intolerable, and that it was absolutely necessary to remove it by bringing the barbarians into close association with the life of the Empire and making them partners in the task of unifying the world. Thus and thus alone can one explain the New Alliance, the entente with Balamir, and the collaboration with the barbarians in world conquest.

  Balamir, who was a man of powerful intelligence, realized sooner and better than anyone else what the Emperor’s offer might mean to the barbarians and to himself. He accepted that offer sincerely, and was to remain faithful to it all his life. And as violence ineluctably penetrated and permeated Alexis, so the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs was won over by the insidious charms of culture and civilization. It is very interesting for the historian to trace the dual movement precipitating the Emperor into all the rigors of power and the Kha-Khan into all the delights of ease. Balamir the barbarian becomes a disciplined prince whose chief pleasure is in the tragedies of Menalchas and Polyphilus and the poems of Valerius. And Alexis the sage and poet, who spent years of suffering expiating two deaths and the excesses of his youth, ravages the world at the head of his armies. The fact is that it is impossible to rule without violence. As Hegel well puts it in his Phenomenology of the Mind: “The stone is innocent and Alexis is guilty. But he is absolved, because he represents the necessary work of universal history and the very form of the new world.”

  XX

  THE SACK OF ROME

  POMPOSA, WHOSE DAZZLING AND FRIVOLOUS HISTORY was from the beginning inseparable from that of the Empire, heard with consternation the terrible news brought back from Cyprus by its admirals. The city of painters and processions, sailors and procuresses, immediately began to prepare for war. It was unlikely it could be fought out on land, where the New Alliance obviously enjoyed a crushing superiority. Fortunately Pomposa could contemplate much more hopefully a struggle at sea. The Empire’s fleet, swelled by that of the pirates, was comparatively new. Pomposa had the advantage of experience and of numerous factories scattered all around the shores of the Mediterranean. Preparations for war at sea were pushed forward as fast as possible. Whole forests were cut down in Dalmatia and Carinthia to supply the naval dockyards with wood for galleys and warships. Negotiations were resumed more vigorously than before with Sicily, Rome, and the Dalmatic republics in which Pomposan influence prevailed. A year or two after the fall of Cyprus, Pomposa’s power in the western Mediterranean was once more at its height.

  But meanwhile the situation in the eastern Mediterranean had not improved—Rhodes, too, had fallen. Unlike Cyprus, it had offered little resistance to Alexis’s ultimatums. As soon as his fleet was sighted approaching the harbor, Rhodes opened its gates to the Emperor. Only the citadel of Lindos on the east coast of the island attempted any defense. Lindos held out for a fortnight, and saw its courage rewarded by being made an example of. Its ramparts and palaces were reduced to the ruins the tourist still admires today. The Pomposan ships charged with defending the interests of the merchant princes in the various parts of the Mediterranean were taken by surprise and defeated first in sight of Cape Malea, then near the Cerbical Islands, and above all off Patmos. It was too much. The High Council of Pomposa decided not to yield one inch more and to strengthen all its naval and military forces. The whole of Crete, recently conquered, was transformed into a vast fortress. A fleet cruised around it, charged with preventing the imperial navy from repeating its exploits against Cyprus and Patmos. A second fleet protected Pomposa itself, and a third, the strongest of all, was kept in reserve in the huge triangle between Sicily, Crete, and Dalmatia. But all these precautions were soon shown to be useless. At the very moment when after its first reverses Pomposa was recovering its position at sea and seemed at last able to resist the attacks of the imperial and pirate fleets, astonishing news reached Pomposa: The battalions of the Empire and the squadrons of the barbarians were on the move on land. They had already crossed the straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean by means of a pontoon bridge and were approaching Macedonia and threatening both Greece and the Danube.

  The magnitude of the danger was apparent at once to the High Council’s military and political advisers: the Emperor could now descend at will upon Athens and Corinth where Pomposa had important interests, or else continue toward the valley of the Danube, the Pomposan factories on the Black Sea, and perhaps toward Niš and Dalmatia. He must be stopped at once, thrown back into the sea, prevented from pursuing a strategy that might open wide to him the gates of southeast Europe. Pomposa drummed up its allies and clients. Again gold started to flow like water. The pay of mercenaries and sailors was doubled. The unprecedented decision was made to conscript the sons of patricians into the army. In less than two months an army was got together that included side by side, in dazzling disorder, the powerful forces of Kings Stephen and Sigismund, the Transylvanians of Jean Hunyadi and Stephen Báthory, King Ladislas and his militia, the Teutonic legions of Count Varus, the knights of Rhodes and Cyprus summoned back from the Euphrates,[1] the troops of the grand master of Jerusalem, five or six generals from Burgundy and the Rhine, the constable of Provence, the count of Nevers, Marshal Boucicault, the legate of the patriarch of Rome, the formidable Spanish infantry under Captain Jules Branciforte, the Lusitanians under Don Pedro of Alfarubeira, together with his famous dromedaries, and General Hernani Bragmardo whose memory is celebrated by Rabelais, the Pontic mercenaries, the one hundred thousand nephelibate knights dressed all in black and led by the Prince of the Entommeures, bold, dashing, tall, and thin, with his fabulous nose and ruffian’s face, the hundred and fifty thousand Arismapian infantry, the Poldevian detachments led by King Mieszko, Prince Hegesippus, and Prince Simon, and lastly the Pomposan army and the Moldovalacks commanded by their voivode Mircea.

  Against the coalition raised by Pomposa, Alexis and Balamir
ranged the serried masses of their Tcherkesses, Petchenegues, Comans, Bactrians, Sogdians, Tokhars, Syrians, troops from Khorasan, Khwarizm, Kabulistan, Fergana, Kandahar, Orkhon and Kerulen, Transoxiana and Djagatai, Cossacks, Massagetan archers, Balearic slingsmen who had served the Empire for years as mercenaries, Circassians, Siberians, and Samoyeds. The two wings consisted of mounted squadrons of nomads divided into four corps according to whether their mounts were black, white, bay, or dappled. In the center were Balamir’s two massive corps d’élite, the Sipahis or “men-at-arms” and the Yeni-tcheri or “new troops,” on either side of the Twelve Thousand with Alexis at their head. But what above all was to amaze and alarm the armies of the coalition with surprise and terror was a marvelous innovation they had never heard of save in old tales recounted by their nurses—the front line was composed of three hundred war elephants carrying towers of archers, intended both to terrify the enemy and, having borne the brunt of his attack, to penetrate his lines.[2]

  The two armies came face to face outside the walls of Adrianople. The battle of Adrianople, one of the few dates every schoolboy still knows, was yet another frightful massacre. It decided the history of the world for several centuries. A Persian chronicler reports:[3] “The two armies, both fanatically sure of victory, fell on each other with such frenzy that the sun was hidden by clouds of dust, and the storm of wild, whirling, foaming, howling horsemen made it seem the earth had opened and the vapors of hell were licking at the sky.” The knights of the Pomposan army, oblivious of order and discipline, displayed quite heedless daring. Each one aimed not so much at common victory over the enemy as at outdoing his own companions-at-arms in dash and boldness. The sons of the Pomposan patricians and, even more, the knights of the generals of Burgundy, the constable of Provence, and Marshal Boucicault managed to get the better of the advance guards and outflank the elephants. King Stephen and the voivode Mircea ordered them to halt, to wait for the massive infantry support of the Transylvanians from the mountains and the Arismapians. But, carried away by their success, they would not listen, and continued to advance until the ribbon of mounted skirmishers suddenly fell back and they came face to face with the serried mass of Balamir’s Yeni-tcheris, a wall of leather cuirasses and bronze helmets. The first ranks of the “new troops” were kneeling, their long pikes thrust forward, and the men of Burgundy and Provence, unable to halt, were literally spitted. Uccello’s polyptych, The Battle of Adrianople, divided up among the Louvre, the National Gallery of London, and the Uffizi, has fixed forever in a motionless splendor, a geometric poetry of colors and volumes, the instant of tumult in which, from one end of the canvas to the other, flashing pikes are raised and fall, and pink or gray-blue horses with vast cruppers and silver bridles rear or are laid low. Behind the men with pikes the archers loose their arrows. There was a few moments’ hesitation. The onslaught of the attackers slackened, faltered, broke, and began to fall back here and there in disorder. And then all at once the attack turned into a rout involving the entire huge army of the coalition. Throughout the rest of the day until nightfall, Alexis’s and Balamir’s horsemen pursued the survivors across the battlefield. Some succeeded in escaping westward and getting back to Dalmatia, others managed to reach the Pomposan ships cruising far away off the coast of Macedonia; but most of them were taken prisoner. They expected to be killed, perhaps tortured, but Alexis gave orders for them to be fed and treated kindly. The distribution of goods and weapons abandoned on the battlefield did much to keep the victors obedient and well disposed. The survivors were spared and the wounded properly tended. Many eventually served in the imperial army. Alexis’s reputation for mercy and humanity even in the midst of violence, which was to do so much to embellish his legend, dates from the battle of Adrianople.

  The imperial troops and the nomads wintered in Thrace and Macedonia, where once more Alexis’s genius for organization was seen. But at the beginning of spring the army was on the move again. For elephants and men it was a sort of long walkover, the stages of which are too well known to need going into. Alexis had decided that whenever the citizens of a town or the defenders of a fortress threw open their gates to the imperial troops their lives would be spared, they would be treated with all the honors of war and retain their former offices and privileges. Towns and citadels that resisted would be delivered over to the barbarians. Thus were destroyed Sirmium, Spalato, Pola, Aquileus on the Adriatic, and Grado. It was not yet autumn when Alexis’s and Balamir’s elephants entered the Po valley.

  Pomposa had raised a new army made up this time of Romans, Sicilians, Moors, Irishmen, and more troops from Spain and Provence, from the Rhine, the Loire, and the Seine. It was led by the four Della Scala brothers, Cangrande, Bartolomeo, Alboino, and Cansignorio, and it met Alexis on the plain of Verona. For a large part of the day the battle was indecisive; then suddenly, through fear, revenge, or self-interest, the contingents from the south of Italy went over to Alexis and the Pomposan army was crushed. There was now no further obstacle before the Emperor, and he entered Pomposa on the day of the summer solstice.

  Let us pause a moment in the great square in Pomposa, full of standards and banners, where the High Council of the merchant princes came to give ceremonial welcome to the victor of Verona and Adrianople. Pomposa, city of painters and masks, bride of the sea, ruler by virtue of gold and intrigue, was in mourning. But for Pomposa even mourning had to be decked in the accustomed splendor. Like those women who even at the point of death put on a last, superfluous beauty, so the city glittered to captivate its conqueror. The square had never looked more beautiful. Everyone was there: velvet-clad pages with long trumpets like angels in frescoes; cavaliers with gold and brocade trappings; stern magistrates in the modest white collars and severe black gowns that had made the City tremble in the days of the Porphyries; courtesans with long trains, sparkling jewels, fringes on their brows, and heavy necklaces, and followed by great mastiffs; sailors carrying their oars over their shoulders as soldiers did their pikes; priests; men-at-arms and men of the law; eager painters scribbling sketches in the palms of their hands; lovers, uneasy as always; thieves watching their opportunity; scullions; physicians in their tall hats; the ambassadors of Sicily and of the Grand Mogul; the legate of the patriarch of Rome; excited chambermaids; usurers; Moors; financiers; porters; idlers. Accompanied by Theodora, Balamir, Bruince, Logophilus, red-bearded Carradine (now an admiral), the leaders of the barbarians, his generals, and his priests, the Emperor Alexis moved forward slowly on his white horse.

  Benozzo Gozzoli’s Magi in the Medicis chapel of the Riccardi Palace in Florence shows us how the Italian Renaissance imagined the scene. The first rider, on whom is concentrated all the attention of the crowd, all its hopes and fears, is Alexis the demigod. The second is Bruince. The third, a Moor representing Balthazar, is in fact Balamir the Oïghur, the nomad, the barbarian, the Asiatic, transformed by popular imagination into an Ethiopian, The procession advances slowly, through a terrifying silence. The High Council, motionless, is at last tasting defeat. What Alexis is feeling the merchant princes know well. They often experienced it themselves when they received the submission of peoples reduced by Pomposan ships or gold. What is new to them is the fear that grips them, a fear loftily hidden under the patrician’s impassivity before a suddenly hostile fate. They have no idea what awaits them—perhaps, this evening, they will be crucified or hanged. Motionless they watch the three fair-haired pages clad in black, mere dots in comparison to the vast crowd, as they go alone across the square to meet the Emperor, to present to the victor on cushions of purple, azure, and gold the salt of welcome, the keys of the city, and the gold ring set with emeralds that for centuries had symbolized Pomposa’s invincible sovereignty over the sea. Alexis is swept by a wave of pride. Once again his past rises up, and instead of moving through the silent trembling crowd he is amid the oaks and birches of the great forest of Balkh; Vanessa is near him, moving lightly in her white robe and smiling through her tears; the ancient mansio
ns become temple tombs; dusty roads suddenly covered with ice stretch as far as the eye can see from the high mountains of China to the frontiers of the Empire; Helen, Jester, Philocrates, and Isidore, old and ill, are all with him, looking on as he takes possession of Pomposa. He rides on. There is nothing to be read in his face—neither revenge nor ambition nor weariness nor contempt. He rides on. He leans down from his white horse to the pages. He tastes the salt, picks up the keys and lays them down, puts on his gloved finger the golden ring of Pomposa.

  At such a moment, when history was in the balance, when one of the most formidable conquests of patience and genius was being engraved in time and men’s memories, it was impossible not to think of the now distant days when Pomposa reigned over the City. Then in fear and trembling the Porphyries received the orders of the High Council; then the mercenaries in the pay of the merchant princes galloped arrogantly through the terrified streets of the city of the Tiger. Now the Eagle and the Tiger had Pomposa in their power. How much time and suffering, how many setbacks and ordeals had had to be gone through before victory was won? Alexis rode on toward the High Council of the merchant princes, reflecting that henceforth the world was his. How long it takes to conquer a world! How easy it is! It takes only a few hundred thousand dead, perhaps a million, perhaps a little more; they will not have seen the Emperor take possession of Pomposa, but their sacrifice will not have been in vain, for it will have made possible man’s historic dream of a world empire. Alexis rode on. He thought how the dead must be honored, have steles and altars raised to them, rituals and ceremonies devoted to them, so that their sons would be encouraged to give their lives as they had. He knew his task was written in the firmament of history and that it was not yet finished. It could be finished only at the end of the journey—when the sun never set on the Empire, its seas and forests and deserts and plains and rivers and mountains.