In the course of the ages, five great waves of invasion have broken over Rome: in 390 B.C., despite the geese of the Capitol, it was the Gauls, with the long swords they tossed scornfully into the scales in which the vanquished weighed out the gold for ransom; in the fifth and sixth centuries it was Alaric’s Visigoths, Geiseric’s Vandals, Ricimer’s Suevians, Odoacer’s Heruli, and the Ostrogoths of Totila; in 1084, the Normans of Robert Guiscard; in 1527 the imperial troops of Charles V and the constable de Bourbon. But the most terrible of all was the work of the barbarians of Balamir and Alexis. In three nights—”le tre notti dolenti”—the great circus was destroyed, the amphitheater burned, the baths laid waste, the triumphal arches knocked down, the hanging gardens ruined, the noble pine-bordered road among the tombs dug up in search of gold. The ground was strewn with rubble. As Amédée Thierry writes in his Stories from Roman History, “In a single conflagration Rome was completely buried in its own ashes. . . . The inhabitants rushed forth pell-mell, men, women, children, slaves, and masters, calling each other by name, dragging at and colliding with one another, and those who escaped the flames did so only to fall on the barbarians’ swords in the streets. At the height of the fire the threatening storm burst with indescribable violence, drowning all other noises; repeated claps of thunder and flashes of lightning pierced the darkness. It was as if heaven were joining with man to wipe out the unhappy city. Several big buildings were struck; in particular, temples and other edifices in honor of the gods. . . . Wherever the eye turned it saw bronze shafts projecting from walls, shattered roofs, broken pediments, felled columns, blackened and melted statues. . . . Wherever fire did not rage, murder, rape, and looting spread like another scourge from one quarter to another. No woman was safe from outrage; neither rank, age, nor religion offered any protection. Several sacred virgins were victims of the utmost violence. In the ferocious barbarians the attraction of debauchery was reinforced by natural cruelty, familiarity with bloodshed, a love of torture, and above all a passion for money; and the golden palaces of the patricians were the scenes of the most lamentable tragedies. . . . As a contemporary vividly put it, fire and the sword divided between them the fate of the world’s sovereign city. For Rome it was a time of weeping, and in three nights Balamir won the terrible name of ‘destroyer of the Eternal City.’ “A few days after the sack of the city, Hadrian VII exclaimed, in a famous tirade: “There is none like thee, Rome, though thou art now little more than a ruin. . . . But the rubble of three nights shows what thou wert when whole. . . . On thee thy leaders lavished treasures, fate its favor, artists their genius, and the whole world its wealth. And now the city is fallen, of which, if I wish to say something worthy, I can only say: it was Rome.”
The modern tourist can still find traces all over Rome of those terrible three nights. It was centuries before the people’s resentment abated. The famous corbel traditionally known as the Bocca della Verità in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedino, long considered an Etruscan remain, is really a caricature of Balamir in the form of a grinning mask with a vast mouth into which children are afraid to put their hand. Stendhal, in his Walks in Rome, tells how right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the pasquinades—scraps of satirical verse placed by anonymous authors in the mutilated statue of Maestro Pasquino, at the corner of the Braschi Palace, beyond the Piazza Navona—still sometimes took the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs as their target.
At the news of the sack of Rome the Emperor, who was then in the Alban Hills on the way to Anagni, Capua, Pompeii, Beneventum, and the Basilicata, gave vent to an anger as terrible as the deed that inspired it. The barbarians were duodecimated—i.e., one out of every twelve was beheaded. The rest were divided into two groups, of which the first, with Balamir, went via Provence and Marseilles to conquer Spain, while the others were dispatched to continue the war on the borders of China. So the consequences of the sack of Rome constituted a new stage in the growth of the Empire and the completion of the conquest of the world. In less than five years Balamir, anxious to redeem himself in the eyes of the Emperor, after annexing in passing Provence, Languedoc, and Aquitaine, and having led his men to the shores of the ocean he had made them dream of, had crossed the Pyrenees and had taken Spain. He in his turn founded León, Salamanca, Guadalajara, Toledo, Aranjuez, Mérida, Cuidad Real in honor of Alexis, Las Navas de Tolosa, Málaga, Medina-Sidonia, Granada, and Córdoba. Then, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, he joined up with part of the imperial army which had set out from Antioch and Tyre. The junction was made on the east bank of the greater Syrte[9] between Cyrene and Barka, not far from the site of the present town of Benghazi. The whole of the Mediterranean basin now belonged to the Empire. The Kha-Khan entered Alexandria more than half a century after the death of Vanessa. Some say he had been asked by the Emperor to destroy such traces as still survived of Alexis’s early adventures there.[10] Once North Africa was pacified, Balamir joined the army fighting against the Chinese, after an immense journey that inspired Rabelais’s war of Picrochole. It was in this last, oriental campaign that Balamir met his death.
Operations began with a great victory at Ki Liu-chan over the Chinese general Ho K’iu-ping, who thought the Kha-Khan was still five or six days’ ride away. Fighting had been going on for several hours before the Chinese leader realized he was faced with something more than a minor advance guard. When he saw his mistake and that the whole barbarian army was massed against him, the battle was already lost. Balamir’s mobility won a new nickname for the destroyer of the Eternal City: the Chinese called him “the flying general.”[11] For over six months the flying general sowed terror throughout the Far Eastern marches of the Empire, as once he had sown terror along the Amphyses and the Nephta, in Dalmatia and in Rome. He won success after success, commemorated in the great winged horse of stone that was put up on the arid heights of Shensi, between Yenngang and the bend of the Hwang Ho, the very place where, centuries later, Mao Tse-tung stayed after the Long March—and afterward preserved in the imperial palace in Peking, in the heart of the Forbidden City. While the Chinese expected an attack on Cambaluc (now Peking), which would have meant the loss of the north of the Middle Kingdom, Balamir swerved aside to the region then called Kao Keou-li (now Korea). His object was to seize all the ships and barges in the Korean ports and make a surprise landing in Japan.
Balamir took up his position on a height to watch over the preparation of his makeshift fleet. Below, warships, fishing boats, canoes, galleys, junks, and sampans jostled one another. A huge army of porters and traders had loaded weapons and provisions in the holds and on deck, and the expedition was about to sail for Hondo and Kyushu when a violent storm—which some superstitious historians have seen as a kind of reprisal for the summer storm that had broken over Rome—tore up the moorings and scattered the ships, destroying most of them and throwing the rest up on the coast. From his tent on the hill the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs watched in silence the disaster that was overtaking him. It was the barbarian army’s first reverse. Nature had got the better of history.[12]
The emperor Jimmu Tenno, then reigning in Japan, saw the providential typhoon as a sign of the protection afforded him by the god Izanagi and the goddess Amaterasu, born from Izanagi’s left eye. The emperor built a temple at Naiku in Ise province, and dedicated it to Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, ancestor of the mikados, and to her brother Susanoo. We still do not fully understand the worship accorded there to certain mysterious objects, one of them a concave mirror the edge of which has eight indentations—yatano kagami—and in which is reflected a black sword—kusanagino tsurugi. It is not impossible that this veneration for the reflection of the sword symbolizes the overthrow by the planetary gods of Japan of the bloody sword of the Oïghurs.
The Korean disaster plunged Balamir into despair. He had hoped to reach one after the other the two extremities of the then known world—the great ocean in the west, and the islands and sea of Japan in the east—and so give the Emperor, to whom he was still passiona
tely attached, supremacy over the whole world. But now, after the years of triumph, he had met with a setback. “Every man,” he wrote to Alexis, “has seen the wall that limits his destiny.” His was ending in Korea. Although he was impervious to remorse he was riddled with superstition, and could not help thinking this was retribution for his involuntary disobedience in Rome when he had been unable to keep his barbarians from disobeying the Emperor’s express instructions. His nights were haunted by the ghost of Rome crying out for justice, and telling him that till the end of time he would be an object of reprobation to all poets, artists, believers, and travelers. Sometimes his agitation was so great he would wake up, seize his sword, and rush from his tent, trying to drown in blood the visions that made him experience for the first time the mysterious emotion that had once so intrigued him. Balamir, covered with sweat and roaring in frenzy, was finding out what it was to be afraid. The storm prevented him from trying to forget by venting his blind fury on the islands of Japan—all he could do was remember. He wrote a last letter to Alexis, asking forgiveness both for having let Rome burn and for having failed to conquer Japan. Then he retired to his tent and gave himself up to the malady from which even princes and victorious generals and the powerful ones of this world are not always exempt. The Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs died of grief in his tent on a Korean hillside, on the shores of the sea of Japan, five years and nine moons after the sack of Rome.
The barbarians did not want to leave behind in some insubstantial grave that might be violated the remains of one who had laid waste to so much of the earth. At first they thought of taking the body with them in their retreat, and then, considering the perils of a long journey across vast spaces filled with enemies, they changed their minds and tried to honor his memory with a tomb that would be worthy both of him and of themselves. They began to hollow out the side of a hill, after the fashion of the cave tombs of Xanthus and Telmessos,[13] but still this did not seem safe enough. So then they decided to divert the course of a river and build their prince’s tomb in the river bed. They chose the river Naktong or Naktonggang, on which the United Nations forces took their stand in 1950, during the Korean War. By means of dams and canals they deflected the water for a stretch along which a hundred or so Chinese prisoners, strictly guarded, were made to work. After four or five days a wide deep grave had been dug in the river bed. The body of the Kha-Khan was carried there at night, by torchlight, while bronze drums beat out a funeral chant to the accompaniment of muted cymbals and the whine of a Chinese organ with twelve bells and twelve pipes. In accordance with their ancestral traditions, the assembled barbarians had cut their faces with daggers and knives, so that their tears, as they flowed, were mingled with blood. It must have been an astonishing scene, all these crooked warriors, their fearsome countenances covered with scars and open wounds, weeping in the warm night, to the sound of savage music, for their dead leader.
Balamir’s treasures were buried with him, and the wildest stories have always circulated about them ever since. Some writers have maintained that during his passage through Egypt the Kha-Khan managed to get hold of the treasure of Tutankhamen. As is well known, when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, they realized at once that tomb robbers had been there before them.[14] Certain bold spirits have concluded that the thief was none other than Balamir. In the present state of historical and archeological research this hypothesis cannot be completely dismissed, but neither can it be regarded as established. Other historians have suggested that the bold Kha-Khan also annexed the treasures of Delos, Halicarnassus, Ezion-geber,[15] Babylon, and Ophir. None of these theories is based on adequate proof. But in such murmurs of history not everything is false, and here, as often, truth is stranger than fiction.
A fabulous treasure did indeed fall into Balamir’s hands. It was Solomon’s treasure. But it did not happen in Jerusalem, where Balamir, on his way back from Spain and Mauretania, paused on his journey to Persia and China. It happened in Rome. The Romans had seized several priceless works of art from Solomon’s Temple as war booty, and taken them to Rome: jewelry; Solomon’s gold plate; religious objects, including the “sea of bronze,” a huge engraved bowl designed to serve for ritual ablutions before worshippers entered the temple; and, above all, subject of the highest veneration for the Jews, the seven-branched candelabrum that the traveler can still see depicted in bas-relief on the Arch of Titus in the Forum. Balamir had seized this treasure during the sack of the Eternal City, and throughout his journeyings, first around the Mediterranean, then across Asia, he had never let the seven-branched candlestick or the sea of bronze out of his possession. And the twists of history have decreed that Solomon’s fabulous treasure should rest today by the side of the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs in the bed of the Naktonggang in the Land of the Quiet Morning.[16]
One black, one white, one bay, and one dappled horse were slain over the grave and buried beside the prince and his treasures. Dawn was breaking when all these lengthy preparations were at last concluded. Then the Kha-Khan’s Mongolian and Chinese concubines came to mourn over the tomb, tearing out their hair, waving rattles, uttering ritual sobs and funeral chants over the corpse, and scratching their faces and bare breasts with their orange nails. The three youngest and prettiest, who for the last few months had usually shared his nights and his ravings of Rome and slaughter, were put to death like the horses, and their blood flowed down over the prince’s body, the seven-branched candelabrum, and the rest of Solomon’s treasure. When all was over, the bronze drums gave one last salute to the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs as he lay surrounded by his wealth, his women, and his horses, and the waters of the Naktong were released to follow their natural course once more. They rushed back foaming into their bed, covering forever the remains of the barbarian chief who had destroyed Rome and shaken the world. To make sure the site of the tomb should remain secret, all the prisoners who had taken part in the work were murdered on the spot and their bodies thrown into the river. Then, under the rising sun, the leaderless barbarians mounted their horses and set off westward, toward the steppes and the high plateaus.
The news of Balamir’s death reached Alexis on the Rhine. Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics, and Crete had been conquered almost without a fight. Only Sicily had attempted to resist, but it did not take Carradine’s fleet long to organize a veritable pontoon between Regium and Messina and force the straits. Syracuse held out for three months, Segesta and Selinus were destroyed and razed to the ground. Only half a dozen temples were spared by Logophilus to bear witness to Sicily’s glory and, in their present ruined state, to fill the modern traveler with wonder. Alexis ascended the throne of Palermo less than six months after his triumphal entry into Rome at the side of Hadrian VII.
From the Mediterranean the Emperor went to the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates to inspect the imperial troops there. He went through Edessa, Samosata, Dura-Europos, and Ctesiphon about eighteen months before Balamir passed there on his way to Bactria and China. The Emperor himself went on as far as Gedrosia, Arachosia, and Paraponisus; he, too, crossed the Khyber Pass and went down into the plain of Peshawar, watered his horse in the Indus and the Hyphasis, and took Lahore. Two separate series of negotiations were begun, with Prince Kuchan in the northwest and King Maurya in the southeast. It would obviously be difficult, not to say impossible, to go into the details of these talks. Their result was to extend the supremacy of the Empire almost to the Ganges valley, to Pamir, Lake Balkhash, the Aral Sea and the Urals. Farther east, up to the Altai and Lake Baikal, the New Alliance maintained the domination of the Empire indirectly. And thus was formed, between the taking of Rome and the death of Balamir, the greatest empire in history. During the few years of its greatest, though fragile, expansion, the Empire stretched from Spain to China. In Europe its limits were the Rhine and the Danube. When Balamir was breathing his last in Korea, Alexis had already left the Indus and the Ganges, had spent a few months in the City, and was making for the Rhine an
d Danube frontiers, where the people were restive. It was here he was overtaken yet again by one of the fateful messengers who pursued him all his life. This one had just crossed the whole Empire to bring the Emperor the news of the Kha-Khan’s death.
The Glory of the Empire Page 39