The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  The alliance with Balamir had been the keystone of Alexis’s policy. It had replaced the barren, exhausting, potentially fatal struggle against the barbarians with the fertile, stimulating notion of a world empire in which everyone, including the barbarians, had their function and their place. In the realization of this great design the wild Kha-Khan had always shown both intelligence and loyalty. He too—and here his merit was perhaps as remarkable as the Emperor’s genius—had seen all that the New Alliance had to offer his people: culture, civilization, a world to conquer. Alexis had had to fight against the patricians, the priests, the tradition of hostility toward the barbarians. Balamir had had to resist the nomads’ savagery, their love of bloodshed and pillage, their thirst for adventure, their hatred of constraint and institutions. But both Balamir and Alexis had overcome the obstacles confronting them, and had managed to install the horsemen of the steppes in Toledo and Siena, Guadalajara and Montepulciano. The construction of the Empire would never have been possible but for the coexistence at the same time of the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs and the Emperor Alexis. Separate, these two powers canceled one another out, each closing to the other the way that led to universal power. Together they were capable of conquering the world; and conquer it they did. In the West, the only areas not within the Empire were unknown Africa beyond the Sahara, that was then a kind of world’s end, and the impenetrable forests of northern Europe, bordering on the icy lands of Thule. Among the great powers of the Orient, only the kingdoms of eastern India, southeast Asia, the Middle Kingdom, and Japan, whose princes bore the mysterious titles of tenno and sumera no mikoto,[17] escaped Alexis’s domination. And no doubt even these would have fallen if Balamir had lived. The death of the barbarian general marks the apogee of the world Empire, and foreshadows its decline.

  When he learned of the death of the Kha-Khan the Emperor decided that in Nîmes, Trier, Vienne on the Rhone and Vienna on the Danube, Verona, the two Aquileuses, Carthage, Timgad, Alexandria in Egypt, Tyre, Palmyra, Antioch, Ctesiphon, Samarkand, Bactria, Onessa, Pomposa, and the City, solemn funerals should be celebrated by the men of the Empire and the barbarians together, for the hero whose body lay buried on the other side of the world under the waters of the Naktong. It was the first time ever that a single celebration was held simultaneously in so many different places. Balamir died in the spring, probably about the middle of May. The Emperor had learned of his death in the middle of summer. The Kha-Khan’s memory was honored in the autumn. Some maintain that this was the origin of All Souls’ Day, November 2 in the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Balamir’s end was remembered throughout the latter part of the Middle Ages and the whole of the Renaissance. Imaginary portraits of the Kha-Khan appear—in many a Danse Macabre and Triumph of Death—from the monastery of Saint Benedict at Subiaco to the Campo Santo in Pisa and the catacombs of the Capuchin convent in Palermo.[18] Andrea Orcagna’s great fresco in Santa Croce in Florence, of which unfortunately nothing survives but a few heads, striking both for their exaltation and their brutality, was entirely built up around the terrible countenance of the barbarian prince. He is there again in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, Holbein’s Simulacra of Death, Füseli’s Satan, Sin and Death, and Valdés Leal’s Finis Gloria Mundi in Seville, where the half-submerged corpse beside that of the bishop is the body of the Kha-Khan. He is clearly among the Death’s Heads sculpted by Picasso in 1943, and one of the motorcyclists of death in Cocteau’s Orphée is called Balamir. The fact is that the universal and imaginary funeral for the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs struck the world with wonder. Alexis had forbidden any human sacrifice, but in every town a hundred and forty-four white horses, solemnly consecrated to the memory of the barbarian prince, were sacrificed on the same day, before the assembled priests and soldiers at the moment when the sun was highest in the sky. The crowd sang funeral hymns, the children waved palms or reeds or young oak branches, and horse races or mock combats went on late into the night, by the light of torches that the priests extinguished at dawn by plunging them into the blood of the slain horses.

  The Emperor himself felt Balamir’s death cruelly, and wondered yet again at the frivolity of history. Some thirty or thirty-five years earlier the death of the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs would have been greeted with outbursts of joy by the peoples of the Empire. But how rapidly things change! Now the death of the barbarian captain struck dismay even into the patricians of Pomposa, even into the priests of Aquileus, even into the ancient families of the City and Onessa. The patriarch of Rome himself wrote to the Emperor in praise of the Kha-Khan. He said that the role of the archpatriarch was to forgive, just as the role of the barbarian general had been to conquer and perhaps to destroy. And he, the archpatriarch, forgave.

  All his life Alexis, like everyone else, had been surrounded by death. But until now it had seemed to him an accident. Vanessa, Simeon, Philocrates, all the Jesters, thousands of soldiers and innocent victims had died one after the other in the long tempest of glory that had been his life. What was tragic about their deaths was that they might have lived. But Balamir, in the Land of the Quiet Morning, at the other end of the earth, opposite the islands of Japan, had come to the end of the road. Helen, too, whom he had never seen again and who had died during the siege of Syracuse—she also had fulfilled her destiny. The truth was that time passed, and empires, like men, hastened toward their death. For Alexis there had always been something pointless about war, about the maneuvers of politics, about ruling men, about the Empire itself: and this sense of the vanity of things indeed finally led toward complete self-effacement.

  The most surprising thing about Alexis’s career is that he was brought in spite of himself to power, conquest, and domination. He scorned ambition, success, and violence; and he hated bloodshed. But man and the world had organized themselves around him, and genius, good fortune, and a passion for unity had taken care of the rest. But now, suddenly, he was overcome by a great weariness. Everything seemed to lead to attrition and decay. For years he had sacrificed what was essential—the color of water, the sun, the brief moment of twilight, the soul—to useless struggle. The struggle had always been victorious, but it had always been useless. It was a fight lost before it began. The only victor was time.

  XXI

  THE PEACE OF THE EMPIRE

  BALAMIR’S DEATH ON THE OTHER SIDE OF ASIA opened up the longest period of peace any empire has ever known. The peace for which Alexis had waited and hoped for so long extended from the Atlantic to China, sending forth ships laden with corn and wine, black pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cubeb, cloves and other spices; sellers of scents and silks; astronomers and physicians; caravans bearing pearls, amber, and diamonds, stuff for banners and pennants, camacas and brocades, samites and tartairs, atabi and gold dust. The threads of history that had seemed to be broken were knitted together again in a web of sparkling colors; the blind alleys of fate suddenly opened into the crossroads of trade, fine arts, power, and glory. The Eagle and the Tiger were reconciled in Alexis. The priests were reassigned the place Arsaphes had given to them: a mixture of science, prestige, and submission. The prosperity of the City during its first golden age was but the anticipation, precursor, and promise of the unparalleled splendor it now attained. It took its place beside Babylon and Nineveh, Peking, Rome and Byzantium, Baghdad and Damascus, Memphis and Thebes, Susa and Persepolis, Jerusalem and Athens, among those edifices of marble, brick, and mire destined for magnificence and destruction, in which, between trivial incident and masterpiece, the history of the world takes on a new aspect. It was for the Empire of Alexis that there had been hatred between the two sons of the first prince of Onessa; it was for the Empire of Alexis that Archimandrite had invented the probability calculus and that Hermenides and Paraclites had each conceived his view of the universe; that Arsaphes and Basil the Great had fought against the barbarians, Aquileus, Onessa, and the High Council of the merchants of Pomposa; that the ships of the City had first been defeated off
the Arginous Islands, and then beaten the pirates at Cape Pantama and the fleet with black and white sails at the Cerbical Islands and off Patmos. The whole history of the Empire, and of the Empire before it became the Empire, was like some great riddle to which the answer was suddenly given, some dark labyrinth suddenly filled with light. Alexis, dominant figure of a whole age, not only fashioned the face of the future, but also gave meaning at last to the past. None of the efforts, the victories, the suffering, the setbacks had been wasted. The humblest soldier who fell in the dust of the steppes or in the snow of the Alps or Caucasus took his place in the litanies of the priests and in the inscriptions set up everywhere—by rivers, in mountain passes, where valleys opened into the plain, in the heart of conquered cities. No one had died in vain. Whether crucified by the merchant princes at the gates of the City, impaled by the Oïghurs in the deserts of the southeast, thrown alive to lions or tigers, flayed, blinded, the dead, though its destiny was hidden from them, were the prophets and martyrs of the Empire.

  Three times—once before the golden age of the City, once between Arsaphes and Basil, once under the barbarian tyrants between Basil and Alexis—there had been nothing but desert, without sculptors or gardens, without feasting or hope. The only prospect was exile, torture, suffering. But now anyone who killed was immediately brought before judges appointed by the Emperor. Everyone knew what the morrow would bring. The codes drawn up by Bruince and Logophilus and the treatises of the Polititian set out what was allowed and what was forbidden, laid down rules, distinguished between different cases, prescribed penalties. There was a Georgian saying to the effect that the Empire was so safe under Alexis that a beautiful maiden of fifteen carrying a platter of gold coins on her head could cross it alone by night from end to end without running the slightest risk.[1] Roads were built one after another, always with an invocation to the gods carved on marble steles, and the traditional reminder: “I, Alexis, built this road for the protection of men and beasts . . .” Post stages were organized. One traveler, Odoric Pordenone, wrote: “Couriers gallop at top speed on the swiftest steeds or, in the arid regions, on racing camels. When they come in sight of the stages they sound a horn to announce their approach, and the men in charge of the posts get ready another rider with a fresh mount. He in turn seizes the dispatches, leaps into the saddle, and gallops to the next post, where the procedure is repeated. Thus within twenty-four hours the Emperor receives news from places normally three days’ ride away.” Fire-fighting brigades were set up in each large town. Alexis and Theodora founded more than four hundred almshouses, hospitals, public refectories, and veterans’ homes all over the Empire. New harbors were dug. Spaniards, Syrians, and Persians raised thoroughbred horses, fighting elephants, bulls, and hunting falcons. Libraries were built up in the City, Aquileus, and Onessa that held books and manuscripts in thirty different languages together with commentaries upon them. Schools of painting and sculpture were patronized by the sons of merchants or officers converted to beauty by a tutor from Greece or Sicily. As in the first golden age of the City, the theaters were full, as were circuses, gardens, gymnasiums, and the porticos, where sophists and teachers of rhetoric told of the origins of the world and speculated about man, destiny, and death.

  Four or five special classes or castes were organized and developed: the army, the priests, the merchants, the teachers and artists, and the officials in charge of weights and measures, justice, and supplies. Civilization, prosperity, and the vast size of the Empire entailed the development of public services and the extension of state authority over every kind of activity. The organization of the police and of taxation assumed a completely new importance—both institutions were destined to have a considerable future. The pursuit of criminals, the arrest of the guilty—all maintenance of law and order —had long alternated between arbitrariness and anarchy, usually indistinguishable one from the other. Sometimes summary justice would be executed by groups of individuals setting themselves up as tribunals; sometimes, especially in the time of Basil and of the barbarian tyrants, the armed forces themselves would spread a reign of terror over town and country. Alexis gave Logophilus the task of creating militia bands, which alone had the right to intervene on behalf of the State, whether on land or sea, in the private lives of citizens of the Empire. This was the origin of one of the Empire’s most celebrated institutions—the famous black galley of Onessa, whose responsibility it was to pursue escaping criminals into the most distant regions. Logophilus’ officials, whose position in the Empire was somewhere midway between that of an army and that of a civil service, also performed the no less important task of helping the priests levy the taxes that supplied the treasury. One of the most obvious motives for Alexis’s conquests was the need for resources with which to maintain the army, to improve the City, Onessa, and Aquileus, to build roads and bridges, to develop ports and markets, and to help the needy and sick. Once the Empire had been built up, taxation became Bruince’s and Logophilus’ most important preoccupation. The reform of the coinage and of the system of weights and measures[2] had been an important stage in the improvement of methods of taxation. All over the Empire uniform standards had been adopted, based on land area and the value of goods, with quite sophisticated weightings according to the abundance of harvests and the prosperity of the various regions. Only the priests were capable of the complicated calculations involved in such large-scale administration, so the collection of taxes was naturally entrusted to them, with the help of the police in cases of refusal or dispute. The army had to intervene in more than one instance in countries that lay farthest away, or where there was fierce opposition to the mere idea of taxation—for instance in Palestine and Armenia, in the regions of the Rhone and the Loire, and in Corsica, where the suggestion of taxes caused a rebellion.

  The system obviously called for uniform training of officials, and especially the priests who fulfilled the function of accountants. Here to a certain extent the opposition between Thaumas and Gandolphus cropped up again, under Alexis, in a conflict between Bruince and Logophilus. Bruince wanted to make the privileges and duties of the priesthood available to anyone, from Provence to the Persian Gulf and from the Danube to the Atlas. Logophilus maintained that the priesthood should remain exclusive. He argued that the territories of the original Empire, between the forests of the northeast and the southern steppes, were quite large enough to supply all the priests that were necessary, and that their main task was to perpetuate the domination of the victors over the vanquished. Alexis had to intervene in person before Bruince’s views prevailed. But then there arose a new series of difficulties. The teaching of the priests was hampered, in the distant parts of the Empire, by the many different faiths that were current. The rise of the priests, their propaganda, and often their arrogance, or at least their sense of superiority (frequently justified), led to severe tension and sometimes serious problems in such places as Palestine, Syria, and Persia, where the followers of Zoroaster still held out; farther east still, where Buddhism, once dear to the Emperor himself, continued strong; and in Rome, where the patriarch was ready to yield in anything except the doctrine of which he was the repository. All this led the Emperor to adopt a mixture of tolerance and syncretism: tolerance for religious and metaphysical doctrines and ideas; syncretism in the teaching of mathematics, social morality, and methods of government and administration. Here, again, was manifested the great design of the Empire, the unification of minds. Thus, little by little, there came into being, midway between the priests and the lower officials entrusted with duties concerning police, justice, or administration, a class of sages and scholars who continued to bear the name of priests but had nothing in common with them but a vague belief in the divine forces that existed in varied and indefinable incarnations. The patriarch of Rome was almost alone in steadfastly opposing the dropping of specific beliefs and the merging—or even coexistence—of different religions: he was God’s messenger upon earth, His spokesman and His legate, and he alone
had the power to choose the way that led man to the gods. Between Alexis and Hadrian VII there existed mutual esteem—admiration even—and affection, and the ways of the pontiff were not the ways of violence. But over what was essential the patriarch would never give way. And Alexis was to respect his faith right to the end. As we shall see later, he even went somewhat beyond respect.

  Thanks to the priests a vast operation of surveying and systematization was carried out all over the Empire. Fields, forests, estates, cattle, ships, and fortunes were counted and entered on rolls kept in provincial archives to serve as a basis for taxation. There grew up, one superimposed upon the other, three or four bureaucratic hierarchies, often rivals, in the hands, respectively, of soldiers, priests, provincial governors, and envoys from the Emperor. All came together in the City and the imperial palace, where decisions were made and from which Bruince and Logophilus sent out instructions to the Emperor’s troops and couriers, in Spain and Sogdiana, on the Danube and the Euphrates, in Sicily and Egypt. The system soon grew stiflingly complicated. In the host of officials bustling about the offices at the palace—spatharii and protospatharii, heteriarchs and hypogrammates, silentiarii and protovestiarii, curopalates and logothetes of the drome—an experienced eye could have detected the symptoms of future decadence. But in Alexis’s time everything was still alive with the flame of enthusiasm and novelty. The leaders’ loyalty and large-mindedness, the rich resources available, and the people’s support made it possible to deal with problems as they arose. The future was not yet menacing, but full of hope.

  In the center of the Empire the City, whose splendor and marvelous expansion we have already seen,[3] was the symbol of the Empire’s greatness. It was from this complex that Alexis and Theodora, Bruince and Logophilus governed the Empire.