Alexis rode on. The sun shone over the city, upon victors and vanquished. Henceforth let them be one people; let peace and justice reign! Let ships leisurely sail over the oceans, laden with gold, ivory, rare vases, precious woods, and spices; let crops no longer be laid waste by armies on the march; let roads be safe and nights peaceful in the sleepy towns; let palaces and temples arise more numerous than the trees in the forest; painting and music become like dreams come true; philosophers and historians leave to future generations the memory of noble sufferings and triumphs that will form the basis of other victories. He rode on. The great square of which they were so proud suddenly seemed interminable to the quailing merchant princes. Would the Emperor never finish riding slowly, silently across it on his white horse? At last he drew near the High Council, who waited pale with dread but concealing their fear. The merchant princes bowed. He gazed at them. Then he leaned forward and said: “So, we shall build the world empire together.”
Night fell for the first time on conquered Pomposa. The City, capital of the Empire, was beautiful, with countless sites admired by travelers and geographers. But it was new. Everything in Pomposa, on the other hand, had the fragile dignity of that which already belongs to the past. The old houses of the patricians were painted red, ocher, or yellow. Their roofs were eaten with moss, their stone columns crumbling. Some were in a state of collapse, others had crumbled already or would soon do so. Death as well as beauty lurked everywhere. But from the dilapidated walls rose up the memories of the greedy merchants and proud painters, the cruel and unjust judges, the seductive and shameless women, all of whose hidden virtues had made the sovereign of the seas a masterpiece forever. In the falling dusk, everything looked lovely and unreal. Alexis had never visited Pomposa during his travels with Philocrates, but he had often dreamed of it. And now here it was, the place that wore time like a jewel, whose very vices added to its beauty. Alexis felt no hatred and took no vengeance. He was simply bringing together the scattered members of a larger empire. Gaiety was absent now but certain vague signs—the stifled sound of women’s laughter, the curiosity of people in the streets, the bustling activity of the shops—showed it was ready to revive at the first opportunity. Alexis already knew he would not destroy Pomposa. Beauty, too, can be the weapon of power. He would absorb it into the Empire: Pomposa with its inexhaustible treasures, the barbarians drunk with blood and gold, and the City itself would all, in Alexis’s Empire, merge into one.
The Emperor dismounted. There was business to attend to. Troops had to be assembled; supplies organized; land distributed among the nomads, governors, and magistrates installed in their new offices. He convened a meeting for the following day of the High Council, who were already half reassured. They went home to their palaces, where amid untold wealth and swarms of little black pages their wives waited, in heavy gowns of brocade and velvet ornamented with lace and oriental pearl, together with their children attended by fencing and philosophy masters or wily duennas. The masters of all this, speaking as experienced politicians, said the worst was over, a fresh start must be made, and perhaps there was still some way of creating a future that did not consist entirely of rubble and ruins. Of course, something would have to be sacrificed—a few ships, much gold, statues, and precious stones, perhaps a certain number of heads would have to roll. Pomposa would no longer be free. It would have a directory, consul, senate, or something of the sort, worked out by Logophilus, supervised by Bruince, and at the orders of the Emperor. But at least the city of the sea would not be destroyed or handed over to the dreaded barbarians; it would be allowed to keep its painters and its courtesans for new masterpieces and new pleasures.
The capture of Pomposa lent the Empire a splendor nothing else could have conferred, and gave it the reflected glory of antiquity and decadence. Alexis often went to Pomposa to rest between campaigns, mixing with the painters, engravers, sculptors, and poets of whom he had dreamed so much. Many of its artists were invited, with arguments ranging from persuasion to constraint, to settle in the Empire and especially in the City, which owed them much of its reputation as a capital of literature and the arts. The others remained in Pomposa, surrounding the Emperor with flattery sometimes rather forced, but also with beauty. Equestrian statues of Alexis were set up in the squares; he was depicted as general, saint, prophet, donor, Solomon, King David, crowned with halo or laurels, in the great religious and military paintings in the temples and palaces. A Pomposan poet whose name is unfortunately unknown wrote a Latin poem, “Hymn to the Emperor Alexis,” which is in effect a plea for the conquered city.
Only a handful of artists paid no heed to laws, war, the Emperor, or their own careers, and modern commentators as different as Albert Camus and André Breton have agreed with one another and disagreed with Giraudoux and Claudel in thinking them the best.[4] The Emperor was always indulgent toward all artists. So much so, indeed, that when arrested, highway robbers and conspirators often tried to pass themselves off as artists, in order to save their necks. Thus, in the city of the merchant princes, Alexis, having served his apprenticeships to pleasure, saintliness, and force, now served his apprenticeship to beauty.
But Pomposa was to bequeath to Alexis memories of something other than happiness—or perhaps it was indeed an obscure and terrifying kind of happiness. For it was there amid the feasting and the gold that death, which would have none of him in the wilderness or on the battlefield, brushed him with its wing. When he was in Pomposa the Emperor liked to stroll through the narrow streets almost or even entirely alone. He would look at the sunlight falling on the old houses, the statues standing out against the sky on their bronze or marble columns, the color of the stone in the dusk. Sometimes there was so much beauty he could scarcely breathe. Then he would think he used to breathe more freely in the desert. And he would be seized with a kind of fury against painters, sculptors, architects, engravers, and metal founders, and would talk of getting the barbarians to destroy all the treasures born of sin and greed, themselves begetters of frivolity and effeminacy. Balamir even had to defend against the Emperor the gilded temples, marble lions, and votive columns. The fact was that the barbarians, settled on estates taken from the High Council and the wealthiest merchant princes, laden with jewels, stuffed with meat and wine, dazzled by the splendor of the squares, streets, palaces, and even the simplest houses, had been conquered by their own conquest. They felt they now shared in it, and they were glad. Unlike the Emperor, they felt no revulsion. They had dreamed of wealth and luxury too much, and now they too began to love money, to dress in silk and purple, to look down on their clumsy weapons, and to wear chains of precious metal and chased daggers. But something irresistible rose up in Alexis at all this ornate superfluity, these vain treasures, these images of wonderfully camouflaged nothingness. He wanted to burn and destroy. It was a thirst for purity, a desire for simplicity and nakedness, for a void, for a reduction. And then he would look once more at the city at his feet. It was beautiful. And he was conquered by its beauty.
One day as he was walking in Pomposa, just before an expedition beyond the Alps toward the Rhone and the Rhine, he was dreaming as usual of the world empire where peace would reign with the same rules for everyone, where there would be no more question of barbarians and patricians, within and without, or the dreadful gap between laws and men—where the Empire would be the world itself, and he, the Emperor, his long task accomplished, would at last be free to withdraw. Suddenly he caught sight of a street with pink- and yellow-painted houses, and in the distance a stone bridge over a river, a little square with a tree in flower, a column, a sculptured wellhead, and a young woman at her window, laughing in the sun. He just had time to think how pleasant it must be to live there, free from care and ambition, taking life as it came and waiting for death without puzzling one’s head about the world, when a divine hand was laid on his heart and threw him to the ground. He was given up for dead. For five days, physicians worked desperately at his bedside to save him. The quest
ion of the succession to the immense Empire began to stir hopes and ambitions. And then, on the sixth day, he arose, cured. All he would say was that beauty is that which is closest to death, and that there are mysterious links between them.[5]
Power, like love, cannot be halted. No sooner had Pomposa fallen than Rome and Sicily rose, with their threats and temptations over the horizon of the Empire. Alexis only needed an excuse for tearing himself away from Pomposa’s formidable charm, and he threw himself into conquest as if it were a liberation. The army moved off again, going southward with the slingers and the elephants. The archpatriarch of Rome and the king of Sicily did not have time to raise an army. The whole of Italy lay open to whoever wanted to take it, and the Emperor, attracted in spite of himself, could do no other than be drawn into this political and military vacuum: he had always been drawn to go over the hills and far away. And there was a new phenomenon, too, though it scarcely surprised Alexis: voices were beginning to call on him and sing his praises, in Rome itself and in Sicily, just as other voices had done years before in the deserts of Arabia and the public places of Samarkand. There had been stirrings in the Eternal City; agitators and fanatics had announced from the Capitoline Hill the advent of a new age and the reign of Alexis; the name of the Emperor had been acclaimed by the mob on the Janiculum slopes, beyond the Tiber, and in the Palatine gardens. The archpatriarch summoned the college of priests with whose aid he ruled Rome and where there had already been differences of opinion, and he soon realized it would be impossible to resist the alliance between the Empire and the barbarians that had already conquered Pomposa and the army of the coalition. At first he thought of just awaiting the attack and dying at the gates of Rome. But the danger of looting and slaughter made him change his mind. He decided to go to meet the Emperor and beg him to spare the city which, more than Pomposa or Onessa or Aquileus, perhaps even more than the City itself, had played so dazzling a part in history that many saw it as the center of the world.
The archpatriarch was an old man, worn out by fever and suffering. But he mounted his horse and rode out of Rome by the great bridge over the Tiber which gave on the road to the north. He was followed by an army that reflected exactly the spirit of a Rome that today, after the passage of so many centuries and so many different civilizations, is so difficult to imagine or understand. Nothing could be weaker than the archpatriarch, yet nothing could be stronger. When, a few years earlier, Balamir had asked Alexis how many horsemen the patriarch of Rome could put in the field, the Emperor had had to reply that the power of Rome rested not upon horsemen but upon virtue, faith, the strength of the soul. The Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs had laughed heartily. Nothing could be nobler or more elevated than the archpatriarch’s teaching—sometimes it got lost in metaphysical speculations impossible to describe—and yet nothing in all the Mediterranean and beyond had drawn down on itself more hatred and scorn. Rome had inspired the most profound philosophers, the most exquisite poets, the sublimest artists, and it had been called infamous and obscure. The reason was that Rome was ruled by paradox. Minds were governed not by violence and fear but by charity and love, yet countless pyres had been lit to burn not merely books but men and women condemned, out of love, to suffering and fire. For some, Rome and its patriarch were nothing more than a hangover from primitive mentalities—fraud more or less tainted with sorcery, derived perhaps from Ikhnaton or Mithras. For others it was the light of the world and its only hope. The patriarch was the seventh to be called Hadrian. Among his escort were to be seen the faces of saints and ascetics, mingled with those of sensualists and torturers. Some were wearing cloth so thin and coarse the skin could be seen between the strands, while others were clad in red or blue velvet, with gold thread and precious stones that sometimes called forth exclamations from the plowmen or peddlers of fruit and fish who flocked by the roadside to see the procession go by. At its head the archpatriarch, all in white, his scepter in his hand, wearing a tall white cap derived perhaps from the bull’s horns in Mesopotamian folklore, with his long beard and face covered in wrinkles and worn with prayer and fasting, seemed to be dreaming of the other world he believed in despite his own unworthiness, a world linked to our own, despite the gulfs that separate them, by hope and faith.
During his descent on Rome Alexis had settled his barbarians on various excellent sites where time and human genius would create cities destined to become famous. He founded Siena, Borgo Pace, Vallombrosa, Impruneta, Monteriggioni (mentioned by Dante), Monte Oliveto Maggiore, San Gimignano, Pienza, Gubbio, Montepulciano, Spoleto, Urbino, and Todi. He was on the shores of Lake Bolsena, between Bolsena and Viterbo, almost on the spot where the town of Montefiascone stands today, when he saw advancing toward the imperial army the strange cortege led by the archpatriarch. The barbarian squadrons were just getting ready to launch their arrows and charge when the Emperor noticed something—the approaching troop was surrounded by lighted torches, whose pale flame was scarcely visible in the bright sun shining out of a sky quite clear but for a few thin white clouds. It was a surprising spectacle, this band riding along in white robes, dazzling dalmatics, wretched habits, but not a single suit of armor, preceded by candles and cressets burning in broad daylight, as if they had to make their way through the shadows of darkness. The truth was that for them this world was indistinguishable from night. Alexis rode his horse a little nearer and looked at them intently—these men riding at foot pace seemed unarmed, without even the short daggers every traveler then wore to defend himself against robbers. He listened. The wind carried the strains of hymns sung at the tops of their voices by the riders and the men who accompanied them on foot. The thought went through his mind that this was the power that scorned swords and acted upon men’s souls. He ordered his troops to halt, and went forward alone. The archpatriarch Hadrian saw this sumptuously clad captain or general, whom all his companions seemed to obey, ride out from among the host that filled the fields and woods, the hills and the shores of the lake. Hadrian ordered his attendants to stay where they were, and he too rode forward alone. From afar the imperial army and the patriarch’s little band both saw the two men watching one another as their horses approached at a walking pace; they saw them draw level, stop, bow, and, without dismounting, begin to talk.
Of all the encounters of which history is so prodigal, that between the Emperor Alexis and the archpatriarch on the then delightful shores of Lake Bolsena is certainly one of the best known. Like Alexis’s reunion with Helen it has inspired many poets and painters. Dante describes it with a majesty that made both Flaubert and President de Brosses yawn.[6] It inspired one of Raphael’s most famous frescoes—The Miracle at Bolsena, in the Heliodorus Room in the Vatican Museum. (Only a few yards away is the equally famous School of the City, which shows Aristo, Philontes, Marcian, Aziri, Polyphilus, Menalchas, Bruince, Logophilus, Isidore, and the Polititian grouped around Alexis; nearby lurk the anachronistic shades of Hermenides and Paraclitus.) Earthly fear can be seen in the pontiff’s fine features, but also faith in another world more powerful and more pure. The Emperor’s attitude registers the surprise and respect of a conqueror face to face with the spiritual dignity and power that overcome mere force. Goethe used to declare he would have given half his lifetime to know what the two men said to each other. But it is one of the best-kept secrets in history, and science has never penetrated it. We can only imagine the words of flame that must have been exchanged when two visions of the world at once so alike and so unlike confronted, opposed, and joined with one another. They were alike in that both claimed to apply to all men and offer them a happy future in which contradictions would disappear. They were unlike for the same reason: neither Alexis nor Hadrian accepted any limit to their power. Certainly the calm audacity of the pontiff, which nothing in this world could intimidate, impressed the Emperor. But though Raphael does not depict it, Hadrian’s surprise must have been considerable when he saw the conqueror amidst the barbarians, full of violence and anguish, yet obviously inspired, like
himself, less by the savage fires of conquest and destruction than by the flame of history bent on co-operation and unification. What they said to each other, Heaven only knows—man does not. But there are plenty of theories. Some are convinced that the Emperor’s amazing power of persuasion, which Gurdjieff and Swami Sri Sarabhavanamuktenandāmanayagam, otherwise known as Babaji, call his “magnetism,” “initiatory power,” and “inner force,” affected Hadrian in the same way it affected everyone else. Others believe, on the contrary, that in the Roman patriarch Alexis suddenly saw written in letters of fire what he had been seeking all his life. Some authors go even further and attribute to this first meeting between Alexis and Hadrian the beginnings of a system that was to play a tremendous part in the history of the world, and the official origins and formidable consequences of which we shall come to later. This system was, quite simply, the dividing up of world rule between Rome and the Emperor. But that a tacit—some say an explicit—agreement was discussed and arrived at on the occasion of the encounter at Bolsena, there is of course, here again, no proof; there can be no more than a risky and romantic working hypothesis, more proper to the novel of adventure or fictionalized history than to science. The one definite fact—and this we know with certainty—is that after the miracle at Bolsena the Emperor Alexis, following a nationalist and reactionary tradition, far from repulsing Hadrian as Raphael suggests, made a ceremonial entry into the Eternal City by the side of the pontiff, to the acclamations of the Roman crowd, at the head of the two rival forces, the immense imperial army and the patriarch’s slender following, joined into one.
What Rome was like then all kinds of evidence vie to tell us—inscriptions, texts, ambassadors’ reports, travelers’ tales. It was a city sumptuous but poor, the empty shell of former splendor. The rise of Pomposa and of the City had dealt a death blow to the military and commercial power of the sovereign city of the world. It was still full of temples, baths, triumphal arches, columns, and statues, but it belonged to the past and now exercised only a spiritual prestige. Yet the brilliance of the setting survived the city’s decline, and the barbarians’ entry into Rome struck contemporaries like a thunderbolt. The capture of the Eternal City without a blow being struck marked the final collapse of a world long undermined, and the triumph of Balamir in the eyes of his nomads. He had brought them where he had promised to bring them—in the fall of Rome the Kha-Khan’s speech after Jester’s execution found its epilogue.[7] Even more than Pomposa, the refinement of whose civilization filled them with a sort of shyness and fear, the quiet grandeur, nobility, and majestic simplicity of Rome and its treasures dazzled and fascinated these rough, wild men. It is very probable the Emperor had promised the archpatriarch he himself would be responsible for the safety of the Eternal City and the discipline of the nomads. And for the first few days they did in fact camp without causing too much disturbance in the Field of Mars and around the Janiculum. But one sweltering summer night[8] with a storm threatening, a series of obscure incidents, due no doubt to drinking, led to an outburst, and the barbarians, too long without women and crazed with wine and gold, fell upon the unarmed city. The murder, rape, and looting lasted two whole days and three nights, and only began to abate at dawn on the fourth day. Even today the people of Rome still remember the hours of terror, dubbed “le tre notti dolenti.”
The Glory of the Empire Page 38