A History of the World (40 page)

The cynical and brutal story of the Fourth Crusade had slow-burning consequences. The Byzantines had known bad times before. At the battle of Manzikert in 1071, they had been humiliated by ‘Turks’, nomads from the Far East. But nothing had been as bad as this. Though the puppet Latin state in Constantinople did not last very long, and though Byzantium recovered some of its power and self-confidence under later emperors, it would never again be the same. Its awesome system of walls, created in 412, had repelled every invader for nearly eight hundred years, but now they had been shown to be vulnerable. Stripped of much of its wealth, of much of its classical heritage and of its honour, with its old territory now carved up into mini-empires, subsidiary kingdoms, sultanates and duchies, Byzantium was no longer the mighty fist of the Christians, armed against all comers. In due course it would fall to the Muslim invaders. The Venetians, who took home statues of lions, horses and angels and vast amounts of precious objects, had accidentally aided the rise of Islam inside Europe. And the power of Venice would steadily grow.

So it is grossly unfair to dismiss Byzantium, with its passionate Christian faith and its inherited Roman and Greek ideas, as merely a
sequence of unpleasant tyrannies. Yet to modern eyes it must seem an alien civilization. Certainly, it was highly conservative, slow-moving and anything but democratic.

For Europeans brought up to revere the classical Greek world, with its lucidity, its belief in reason and its political experimentation, Byzantium’s stately hierarchy and its mysticism can be difficult to swallow. A better way to understand it might be to compare it with other dynastic empires such as the Ottomans’ or the Chinese. Like the courts of the Song, Tang or Ming emperors, the Byzantines relied on a highly efficient and literate civil service, charged with taxing and administering many different peoples fairly. Again like the Chinese, the Byzantines made use of a large class of eunuchs, castrated either in childhood, or in adulthood as a precondition for serving at court. Barbaric as the practice might seem to us, eunuchs were very useful to many early empires. Unable to have children, lacking an independent family base, they were more dependable. They could also safely serve in the women’s quarters, where they might hear the most secret of secrets. In China, Byzantium and under the Ottomans too, eunuchs rose to positions of great power and wealth, sometimes commanding armies and fleets.

The detailed court procedures and rituals of Byzantium, carried out in huge court complexes, were not so different from life in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Just as those entering the presence of a Chinese emperor had to kowtow, banging their foreheads on the floor, so those in the presence of a Byzantine emperor had to commit
proskynesis
– a similar routine, but touching rather than banging. In Byzantium the powerful positions held by religious leaders as advisers and counsellors were analogous to those of the Confucian mandarins. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven, under which emperors had divine authority but had to act morally in order to retain it, would have been recognized in Constantinople, where any emperor found guilty of offending God would be killed or ousted. Sometimes, as in China, natural disasters were taken as signs of divine displeasure. Moreover, both empires made a fetish of their ancient origins, the Chinese harking back to mythical times and the Byzantines insisting on their continuity with ancient Greek and Roman culture.

Both empires retained their power through highly advanced engineering and technologies, secrets they tried to keep to themselves. The
Great Wall of China remains one of the world’s most impressive works of civil engineering, designed as it was to keep out ‘barbarian’ nomads. The huge ramparts of Constantinople, similarly, to keep out wild people from the steppes, were in their way the Great Wall of Europe.

Another first was gunpowder. Once they had discovered that mixing together saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal produced this useful addition to their armoury, the Chinese could more easily keep their enemies at bay. They had discovered this during the Tang dynasty (618–907), and by 1132 under the Song had made an early kind of bomb, followed in 1259 by a bamboo-barrelled ‘fire-spitting lance’, a cross between a flame-thrower and a primitive gun.
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The Byzantines, meanwhile, had been using ‘Greek fire’, that terrifying mix of sulphur, pitch, crude oil and nitre discovered in the 660s by a chemist called Callinicus. It was sprayed on enemy ships and soldiers – with devastating effects – using a sort of pump. In the 940s it was listed as an official Byzantine state secret by Constantine VII,
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and was still one of Constantinople’s secret weapons at the time of its fall in 1453.
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There are other parallels, including a similar skill in hydraulics and water clocks, a similar emphasis on public processions to impose royal authority, and a firm belief that their capital city was the centre (or navel) of the world. Most significantly, conservative empires, founded with a strong sense of their own past, worked in similar ways, deploying similar hierarchies of civil servants. Byzantium was not a particularly cynical culture, but dynastic despotism always leads to feuds between generations and between siblings, sometimes ending in treachery, murder and the plotting of palace coups. The great female intriguers of Constantinople, and their eunuchs, were cousins-under-the-skin of the dowager empresses of China, and theirs. The dynasties survived as long as they had technical superiority over their enemies, a strong peasant base from which to levy taxes, and an efficient bureaucracy. For some of the time, at least, Byzantium had all three.

It collapsed, as we have seen, partly because the Christian West was not prepared to come to its help; and, indeed, led by the Venetians, had done its best to fatally weaken it. It should be remembered that some Venetians and Genoese, as well as Spaniards (and perhaps a single Scot), rallied to Byzantium’s cause in its final struggle, and died there. A Venetian ship had managed to slip past the Turkish blockade
and sail through the Aegean, looking for a relief expedition, but had found nothing. The captain had asked his crew to have a vote about what to do – sail home to Venice, giving up Constantinople as doomed, or return to give the emperor the bad news and die alongside him. Only a single sailor voted to go home, and was shouted down: they returned, and died too.
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Yet the odd thing is that the fall of Constantinople, though a hugely symbolic event for Christian and Muslim civilizations alike, did not itself have world-shaking consequences. Very soon after they had absorbed the news, the Venetians and the Genoese were back again to negotiate new trading deals. Business never sleeps.

The Ottomans seized the Balkans, getting as far as Vienna, but they failed to overwhelm Western Europe and establish Islam across Christendom, as they had hoped to do. Quite soon, with its varied population and grand court, its eunuchs and stately rituals, Ottoman Constantinople seemed not so very different from what had preceded it. Even turned into a mosque, the magnificent church remained oddly familiar. Byzantium’s artistic and literary influence, which had arrived in Italy, France and Germany as loot, increased with the revival of interest in classical Greece, which in turn would play a part in the Renaissance.

Leonardo

‘The Moor’, they called him, perhaps for his dark looks: Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. One day, the duke received a remarkably boastful letter from a would-be military engineer. This young adventurer was offering to come and build light, portable bridges that would allow troops to chase the enemy, or flee from them, as he put it. ‘Also I will make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter among the enemy with their artillery, and there is no company of men at arms so great that they will not break it’; and he could make cannon, mortars, catapults, fireproof ships, underground explosions – you name it. The letter-writer, who was from the south, from a workshop in Florence, added that ‘in time of peace’ he could design buildings and aqueducts. ‘I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever can be done, as well as any other.’

Ludovico knew his art, and he wanted a giant bronze horse made in memory of his father; he also knew his warfare, and must have been intrigued by this arms-dealer in ideas. Ludovico was not exactly old aristocracy. His father, Francesco, had been a mercenary warlord, who changed sides so many times he must have been perpetually dizzy. Need to fight the next city along the river? Francesco was willing. Take on the French? The pope? Simple.

The Italian Renaissance, apart from being a great age of devotional painting and Church architecture (not to mention slavery, riot and assassination), was an age of warlords. The civic-minded, peaceable citizenry of the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany were not natural fighters, yet they were often in conflict; so they hired warrior-leaders, the condottieri. Francesco Sforza had been typical of the breed. This thick-necked, heavy-eyed fighter, the illegitimate son of a mercenary and famous for being able to bend metal bars with his bare hands, had a knack of ending up on the winning side. He had fought almost everyone, including his own brother, a son, a son-in-law, and most of the possible enemies to be found in northern Italy.

When the Duke of Milan died without an heir, the city briefly returned to a form of republic, but factional fighting and famine brought a further crisis; the burly old soldier had moved in and taken over. To general surprise, he proved to be a shrewd and popular ruler, but when Francesco died and his oldest son Galeazzo Maria Sforza took the reins, he proved to be a different proposition altogether. A sadist and a rampant womanizer, he was said to have had a poacher executed by forcing a hare, fur and all, down his throat; to have nailed another man alive into his coffin; and to spend his leisure hours inventing tortures for his enemies. Pleasingly, he was assassinated. His son, aged seven, inherited; but Uncle Ludovico became regent, the son mysteriously died, and Ludovico found himself Duke of Milan.

Ludovico’s story was not so surprising in the Italy of the time. English playwrights would soon be scouring histories of the ruling Italian families for the plots of their bloodthirsty tragedies. Nor was Ludovico uncultured. He had been taught by one of the great humanist scholars of the day – the ‘humanists’ being those who studied the Latin and Greek literature and philosophy emerging from al-Andalus and elsewhere, bringing old truths to young cities. He needed clever
men around him, and to turn Milan into a truly brilliant court he needed culture – sculpture, music and painting.

So in October 1481, a strong, good-looking young man of thirty, wearing a short pink tunic and a curly beard arranged in ringlets, presented himself to the Sforza court. He was carrying a specially made lyre, because the effective ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had sent him in the first instance as a musician and singer, as a kind of present to his Milanese ally.
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With him was a sixteen-year-old youth who would later become a musician and actor. Tongues may have wagged: the Florentines were famous throughout Italy as sodomites. And in this case, tongues were almost certainly right, for the boastful singer and military engineer, who could also turn the odd picture, was history’s famous homosexual artist, Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo, like Sforza’s father, was illegitimate, the son of a multiply married Florentine pen-pusher and a peasant girl born in a small village. But his father had spotted the boy’s precocious talents and had him apprenticed in the workshop of one of Florence’s star sculptors and metalworkers, Andrea del Verrocchio. By the 1460s the great days of the small, independent-minded Italian city-republics were mostly long gone, but the tradition of guilds and workshops that had underpinned them lived on. The communes they then formed, in famous towns such as Pisa, Lucca, Mantua, Siena, Bologna, Verona, Padua, Genoa and Perugia, as well as Florence and Venice, had begun to emerge in the late eleventh century as the old imperial powers lost their grip.
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Competing amongst themselves and specializing in particular skills and products, these cities had complex systems of election and justice, which generally shared power between local landowners and the tradesmen and craftsmen.
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For a while, particularly in Tuscany and Lombardy, it had seemed a hugely successful and novel system, more vigorous than the larger enclaves such as the Papal States, and Naples to the south. But factionalism, revolts by poorer, excluded citizens, as well as fighting among the richer families, reduced their influence, until one by one most of the city-state republics succumbed to the rule of local grandees, dukes and princes. Venice mostly managed to stick with its old, intricate republican system, but powerful, swaggering Florence was more typical of the contemporary trend. After bitter disputes between rival parties and factions, it eventually fell under the spell of a
family of hugely rich bankers, the Medicis. In the same year that Leonardo joined Verrochio’s workshop, Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’ and grandson of Cosimo, the first Medici ruler, had just taken over.

Leonardo would do his apprenticeship in the busy, communal and relatively democratic worlds of the guild and the workshop, two building blocks of the Italian city-state. For tradesmen and professionals – doctors and sculptors, leather-workers and goldsmiths – the guilds were the key institutions that allowed them to play a full part in the life of the city. The guilds established and policed standards, organized religious processions, funded hospitals, and acted as mutual-aid and political networks. The workshops were mini-factories and at the same time offered a system of higher education, which gave young men the chance to learn directly from leading masters until they qualified to set up in business themselves.

In the 1470s, Verrocchio’s was one of the leading artistic workshops in Florence. According to the art historian and biographer Giorgio Vasari, he had studied the sciences, particularly geometry, and worked as a goldsmith. He had then visited Rome and encountered the craze for sculpture based on works from classical times, which ‘were being unearthed every day’ there.
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He had turned to sculpture, and afterwards to painting. As a brilliant, radical and intensely curious man he was the perfect teacher for Leonardo. In these studios a lot of collaboration took place; when Leonardo one day painted an angel into a work of Verrocchio’s, Vasari tells us, and did it better than his master, Verrocchio simply gave up the brush and stopped painting. He had already been outmatched.