The Glory of the Empire
Page 45
The little group that accompanied Alexis left Rome by the same gate through which the Emperor and the archpatriarch had once made their solemn entry to the accompaniment of cheering crowds. Then they set out toward the north. The historian follows them a few days more, across the Sabine Hills, amidst the silence of vineyards and olive groves. They crossed the foaming waters of the Nera by the Narni bridge, with its picturesque arcades later painted by Corot. They went through Spoleto, Assisi, and Gubbio, entering the Arno valley east of Florence, to pass through the Casentino, with its beech and chestnut forests and innumerable streams, the fiumicelli sung by Dante. It is against this storied and bloodstained yet smiling background that the poet describes the old Emperor riding, lost in dream, among
Li ruscelleti che de’verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giu’ in Arno,
Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli.[9]
The Emperor probably spent a night either at Vallombrosa, as Milton says in Paradise Lost, or at Poppi, Camaldoli, or Verna, near Bibiena—Dante’s “Alevernia d’Alessio”—in steep limestone country, wild and lonely, between the source of the Arno and the source of the Tiber:
Nel crudo sasso tra Trevere ed Arno.[10]
Farther north the Apennines hung over rich Emilia, with its corn and vines and flat, monotonous landscape. At a gallop, on the fresh horses that awaited him at each staging post to speed his flight to the realms of absence, Alexis crossed the Po, avoided Pomposa, went through the sugar-loaf Euganean Hills with their orchards of apple, pear, peach, orange, and lemon. He went by Vicenza and the cypresses of Verona, all pink and red in the distance, and hastened, either by the Cadore, the Passo del Pordoï, or the Passo di Sella into the Dolomites and the Alps. A summer sun still shone over the plain. But already, in the mountains, it was winter and icy cold. Snow fell on the little band of travelers, fewer every day, for each evening Alexis would send three or four men back to Rome, Pomposa, Verona, Milan, or Como. When he reached the high peaks of the Alps he was alone with Justus Dion—or perhaps with himself, if the supposed companion was really only his double. Be that as it may, the historian describes, in the last pages of his Chronicles, how the two men went forward, their horses now moving at a walking pace, over the magnificent white landscape. They did not speak. Justus Dion tried to hold back his tears. Alexis had already entered that other life he had so long been waiting for. One evening before sunset the two riders came to a somber blue lake reflecting tall trees and snow-covered mountains. Alexis reined in his horse and dismounted. Justus Dion did likewise. The Emperor put his hand on his companion’s shoulder and said:
“We have come to the place and the moment where our fates divide. I vanish from the world where all fades and passes away. Do you stay, to tell future generations what were our struggles and our dreams. Every man has but one life—a few years, much suffering, much sorrow, which all end in death. Tell those who come after us to believe and hope, and to do something with their brief passage on earth and among men. We have done some fine things. Let them do others, finer. Do not tell them how to act, how to think, or how to love; just tell them what we were and what we did. The others will be different and act differently. Everything about the earth is good—happiness and tears, war and peace, sun and water, indifference and passion, suffering and death. We have to believe all is well. I am not going out of scorn for life, but to live more and better. I am going because we die. Others remain—may they be blessed. Some will hate and despise me—may they be blessed. Many will think the best thing is to laugh at the world and be amused by it—may they be blessed. Some will overcome them and bend them to their law—may they be blessed. Others will arise and lay these low—may they be blessed also. May the world, and life, be blessed, and suffering and death. Just tell the world what we were and what we did. And add a little beauty to beauty, a little history to history, a little world to the world, and a little life to life.”[11]
These are the last words of the Fool of God and the victor of Adrianople. Justus Dion tells us how, at the last moment, he could not restrain his tears. He wanted to follow Alexis, to go with him to the ends of the earth, to abandon him to none but death. The Emperor forbade it; the historian resigned himself. He obeyed once again, and fell on his knees on the frozen ground. The Emperor raised him up and embraced him. Then he mounted his horse and rode away without looking back. And Justus Dion, standing there motionless, watched him disappear alone into the snow and darkness, the man who for so many years, amidst pomp and splendor, had been the master of the world. Thus ended, in the eyes of men, the earthly adventures of the Emperor Alexis.
There is no text or other testimony to tell us anything more about the Emperor’s life after his parting, real or imaginary, with the faithful Justus Dion. And we know nothing of his death. Several places have claimed the privilege of having sheltered him. The Black Forest; the Bavarian Alps, from the Königssee to the Tegernsee and the Starnberger See; the islands of Krk, Rab, Hvar, Korčula, and Mljet on the Dalmatian coast; Cappadocia and the Northern Sporades; the little island of Symē near Rhodes; Patmos; Bodrum (or Halicarnassus); the Cnidus peninsula, and Ephesus—all these claim, with the aid of dubious archeological evidence, to have seen him die. In a letter to Richard Wagner,[12] Louis II of Bavaria, the mad king, refers to a note of October 20, 1847, sent by his grandfather Louis I to the dancer Lola Montez. The note, which has not survived, alludes to the site of Alexis’s grave as a family secret of the house of Wittelsbach. According to tradition, it stood exactly halfway between the two nightmare castles of Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. But the historically minded tourist is not let off so lightly. A letter from the Bishop Juvenal to the Empress Pulcheria gives him reasons for seeking out, this time near Ephesus, another last resting place ascribed to Alexis—Iskanderdjik kapulu.[13] This site, too, has its allusions and arguments to support it, especially since the revelations of a German visionary, Emma Katharina Emmerich, who at the beginning of the last century said she had seen the Emperor Alexis in a dream, breathing his last in a little wooded valley and in a house unknown to her, but which more or less corresponded, as far as her halting account could convey, with the building at Ephesus.
But the best-known legend gives yet another version. According to this, the Emperor never died. He is still alive in an old deserted castle in the forest, on a high mountain surrounded by glaciers. There he sleeps, his elbow leaning on a stone table around which sit, clad in velvet and gold and transfigured by love and faith into great noblemen and a beautiful lady, the six unfortunates whose feet he bathed on the Capitoline Hill. They are all there, the blind man, the leper, the parricide, the prostitute, the epileptic, and the wandering Jew, redeemed and cured by the powers of the Emperor, deep in a splendid dream until the universal Empire returns. By that time the Emperor Alexis’s white beard will be so long it will encircle the table three times. And then the Emperor will awake from his enchanted slumber and rouse his companions. Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, will set off again over hill and dale, but changed now into a radiant archangel, riding on a tiger with the wings and beak of an eagle, to spread the good tidings of the Emperor’s resurrection.
This jumble of legends and rival myths shows the marvelous power of survival of Alexis’s glory. His disappearance from the sight of the crowd merely makes him present everywhere in men’s hearts and imaginations. There are few great events in history in which he does not play his part. William, Harold, and swan-necked Edith all saw him on the battlefield at Hastings, lamenting that he himself had not conquered Britain.[14] He was reported as having been on the ramparts at Constantinople both times it was taken, in 1204 and 1453. He told Benvenuto Cellini to kill the constable de Bourbon outside the walls of Rome in 1527.[15] Cervantes recognized him on October 7, 1571, during the battle of Lepanto, just as the volley was fired that cost the future author of Don Quixote his left hand. He appeared to many of those present at the battles of Kosovo, Tannenberg, and Marignano—wherever the fate of the Old W
orld was at stake. Often both sides laid equal claim to him. In the course of the Russo-Japanese War he appeared first to Admiral Alexeev, viceroy of Manchuria, then, during the disaster at Mukden, to Generalissimo Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin.[16] And on the eve of his encounter with Admiral Rodzhestvensky off Tsushima island, Admiral Togo, who had gone up on deck for a breath of night air, saw through the darkness the shade of Alexis walking toward him over the waves.
Not content with intervening from beyond the grave in the government of men and their destiny, Alexis also interests himself in the forces of nature. Every German child knows that when it snows it is because Frau Holle, housekeeper to the gods and goddesses, is shaking the Emperor Alexis’s eiderdown out of the window. At the same time, for the Italians, he is the companion of the dreaded but beneficent witch Befana, who gives children presents to herald the return of spring. On the other side of the Latin world, the orthodox inhabitants of the Carpathians, Bucovina, and Transylvania, when they break their gaily colored eggs, painted with flowers, crosses, and diamonds and signifying the Easter resurrection, not only cry
Christos a înviat!
Adevarat a înviat!
but also invoke Alexis as symbol and immortal image of cosmic renewal: “Taiasca Capitanul Alexie!” (Long live Captain Alexis).[17] The Father of the Peoples is still present all over the surface of the globe, where countless towns, capes, mountains, villages, and hamlets derive their names from that of the Emperor: The small town of Alexain, for example, near Laval in Mayenne; Alixan, near Romans-sur-Isère in the Drôme; perhaps even Alès in the Gard, though the origin of this name is disputed; anyhow, Aleksin, between Kaluga and Tula on the outskirts of Moscow; Alexikovo, between Saratov, Voronezh, and Stalingrad; Aleksine, on the Moreva; the great Aletsch glacier, in the Valais; the Ala-chan plateau on the left bank of the Hwang Ho in China; Alexandria in Piedmont, which despite the claims of those who know no better has nothing to do with the Macedonian conqueror; and finally, among many others too numerous to mention, Alassio on the Italian Riviera, between Bordighera and Finale Ligure. But above all Alexis reigns above us, in the majesty of cloudless and moonless nights. For the people of Turkey, Syria, all the Near East, and Iran, the star Alpha in the constellation of the Eagle, eleventh among the twenty brightest stars in the heavens, is “the star of Alexis.”
The Holy See could not long remain indifferent to the cries of love and trust that went up everywhere to the Father of the Peoples. In a brief of 1077, the same year as Canossa, Gregory VII, perhaps one of the two or three greatest Roman pontiffs, who had admired Alexis when he was still only monk Hildebrand, pronounced the beatification of the Emperor. In 1498, Pope Alexander VI, at the entreaty of his daughter Lucrezia Borgia, performed the solemn ceremony transforming the beatification into sanctification. It was an event unheard of in the annals of the Church, the only example of a non-Christian being worshipped as a saint. Nine years later Julius II della Rovere issued a decree confirming his predecessor’s decision and fixing July 17 as the feast day of Saint Alexis. And now it is to be seen in any post-office calendar on any kitchen wall.
For several centuries the people had already revered Alexis’s humility and detachment from the goods of this world, and they welcomed his sanctification with rapture. One work of piety followed another, gradually exalting and finally fixing the Emperor’s image. After the twenty-eight lines of the Cantilène de sainte Eulalie and the two hundred forty verses of the Vie de saint Léger, the Vie de saint Alexis, written in the eleventh century, is one of the oldest and most priceless treasures of French literature. It consists of one hundred twenty-five regular stanzas of five ten-syllable lines linked by assonance. The reworkings of this poem in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries constitute a history of language and taste in that period. The work inspired Henri Ghéon’s long-famous miracle play, The Poor Man Under the Stairs, in which he imagines Alexis living as a beggar after his abdication. In Byzantium at the beginning of the twelfth century, Anna Comnena’s Alexiad (’Αλεξιάς, or rather 'Ιστρικòν πóνημα περὶ τοῦ Αλεξíου), a historical work of fifteen volumes, in prose, is one of the soundest sources for the epic of the Emperor. From then on there sprang up innumerable versions of the “golden legend” in every country and in every language, both classical and modern. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced versions of the works cited above and the Greek and Latin writings of Callisthenes, Clitarchus, and Aristobulus, transcribed into Low Latin, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, the Indian languages, the dialect of Picardy, High German, the Slavic languages, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. And always the stress is not so much on power and glory as on the vanity of all things human. In Das Lied des Alexis (The Song of Alexis), by the priest Lambrecht, the Emperor makes a Jew weigh a magic jewel in the form of an eye, the gift of a sage from the Euphrates. However much gold the Jew puts in the other scale, the stone is always the heavier. Then the Jew replaces the heap of gold with a little handful of earth, and the scale with the magic eye in it immediately flies upward. The Jew explains to the Emperor the hidden meaning of the miracle. The precious stone is Alexis himself, who will never be content with all the gold in the world, but whose body, after his death, will be covered by a handful of earth. The Emperor, revolted by his own foolish ambitions, at once reforms.
Other examples: the Historiae Alexii Magni; Alexis’s Expeditions ('Aνἀβασις 'Αλεξíου), an imitation of Xenophon’s Anabasis; the Res gestae Alexii Magni e graeco translatae; Lampidus’ Le Dict d’Alexis; the Iskanderkjik Nâmeh; Firdussi’s Shâh Nâmeh, with its many Koranic references, dedicated to Alexis; the Sharaf Nâmeh of Nizami, who makes Alexis a descendant of Abraham, brought up by the sage, Wilaquwratus (Philocrates?); the eighty thousand Picard alexandrines that make up the five or six versions, chiefly by Lambert Le Tors and Alexandre de Bernay, of Li Romans d’Alexis; the supposed Letters of Alexis; the Alexii Magni iter ad Paradisum; El Libro de Alejo, a Spanish poem of over ten thousand lines divided into two halves of seven syllables each and arranged in monorhymed quatrains on the cuaderna via system, in which Alexis longs to mount into the highest heaven “por veer todo el mondo como yaz o en qua manera” (to see all the earth in its disposition and order); the German romances of Rudolf von Ems and Berthold von Herbolzheim; the poem by Ulrich von Eschenbach in which, through Alexis, the author eulogizes King Ottokar, the father of his protector King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia; Master Babiloth’s Cronica Alexii des Grossen Königs and the humanist Johannes Hartlieb’s Chronicle of Alexis; the Historia Alexii by Quilico da Spoleto; and I Nobili Fatti di Alessio Magno, an anonymous work wrongly ascribed to Simon the Clerk. All these writings all over the world continually repeat the inexhaustible themes of Alexis’s glory, embellishing them with descriptions of feasts and tourneys, scenes of love and chivalry, moral and metaphysical reflections, and sentimental digressions featuring Circe, Roxana, or the Queen of Sheba. Sometimes the Emperor is shown capturing Troy with the help of Oberon the dwarf, king of the elves, son of Julius Caesar, and twin brother of Saint George; sometimes he is seen dying of poison; meditating on Achilles’ tomb; conversing with the Almighty, and on His orders going to pull out four teeth and the beard of the admiral of Babylon; descending in a glass barrel to the bottom of the sea; or flying up to heaven on an airy bark drawn by griffins. Many years later Victor Hugo referred to this last episode in The Death of Satan.
The Emperor’s companions in these works—Sudanese, animals with the gift of speech, enchanters, and magicians—are as extravagant as the adventures and fabulous countries themselves, and are usually just the product of unbridled imagination. But here and there one suddenly catches a glimpse, in distorted and almost unrecognizable form, of Philocrates or Helen, Carradine or Bruince. And for having refused to take part in the Emperor’s act on the Capitol, with words that always clung to his memory—”Sire, said he, never shall I wash the feet of these rogues”[18]—Logophilus was for centuries bracketed with figures like
Ganelon and Judas. All this jumble of truth and invention is intermingled with philosophical discussions, scientific dissertations, travels to the land of Gog and Magog, Egyptian or Islamic legends, and recipes for the elixir of life. There are even parodies. The Emperor, once the associate of angels, is seen among brigands, a highway robber, and cutpurse. In 1493, just before his canonization, a comedy was performed in Lübeck entitled Alexis Attempts to Conquer Heaven. The dawn of the Renaissance, the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, saw the decline and deterioration of mysticism and the epic. But at the height of the Middle Ages the poems and romances concerning the Emperor were held in at least as high repute as the Chanson de Roland or the Matière de la Bretagne, and the Quest of the Holy Grail borrows several details from the legend of the Fool of God. Alexis is of the same stature as Charlemagne, Roland, King Arthur, Tristan, or Lancelot of the Lake. One of these great works in honor of the Emperor, Gauthier de Châtillon’s Alexeid, which no one would think of reading nowadays, called forth from an enthusiastic admirer the exclamation that something had been born that was greater than the Aeneid: “Nescio quid maius nascitur Aeneide.”