From The Holy Mountain (53 page)
As we were speaking in this way, the old woman came in and began her almsgiving. In silence and with serenity she came and gave me some coins. Then she gave some to my kinswoman too, saying: "Take these, and eat." When she had gone, we realised that God had revealed to the poor old woman that I had suggested to my relation that she give the money away. My kinswoman therefore sent a servant of hers to get vegetables with the two coins. These she ate, and she affirmed before God that they were as sweet as honey.'
The flow of money into the Holy Land brought by the Empire's richest families caused new trades to flourish. Religious tourism, then as now, must have brought in much business for innkeepers and tour guides; certainly by the sixth century there was already a set tour 'circuit', and guide books (some furnished with maps) were available to help the pilgrims understand what they were seeing. Another flourishing cottage industry was the trade in relics. Palestine had something of a monopoly in Old Testament bones, and a good share of New Testament mementoes as well. The relics of Joseph and Samuel, Zachariah and Habakkuk, Gamaliel and St Stephen were all exported during this period, as were the chains of St Peter, the nails which fastened Christ to the Cross and a painting of the Virgin Mary by St Luke. A local Jewess used to display the robe of the Virgin Mary, while the priests of Bethlehem would, for a fee, show pilgrims the bones of the children slaughtered by King Herod, or at least those they had not already sold to the churches and reliquaries of the capital. Famous relics were very expensive - Theodosius II paid a fortune in gold coin as well as a huge gold cross for the relics of St Stephen - but even the most humble pilgrim would be able to afford second-division relics such as casts of Christ's footprints, oil from the lamps at Golgotha and dust upon which the feet of Christ had trod. For the inventive Byzantine entrepreneur, the relic trade must have been an almost inexhaustible source of income.
The Church had much more power here than anywhere else in the Empire. When the local Samaritan population broke out in revolt in 529
a.d
.,
the Emperor Justinian sent to suppress it not a general but 'a monk of high rank named Photion'. Photion fulfilled his duties with somewhat unmonastic zeal, 'fighting against them and conquering them, putting many of them to torture, driving others into exile, and generally inspiring great fear'. According to some sources, more than a hundred thousand Samaritans lost their lives in Photion's purges.
But Jerusalem, like Palestine as a whole, was not just full of clerics, monks and credulous pilgrims; laymen always outnumbered clerics, a fact that caused the always irascible St Jerome some irritation. Writing to his friend Paulinus of Nola, who was planning a trip to Jerusalem, Jerome warned that he should not expect a city of saints: 'It is a crowded place, with the whole variety of people you find in such centres: prostitutes, actors, soldiers, mimes and buffoons. Such a throng of both sexes that you might wish to avoid in part elsewhere you are forced to suffer here in its entirety.' St Basil's younger brother, the choleric Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, was equally unhappy at the moral character of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. He wrote home in a fury that 'if God's grace were more plentiful in the vicinity of Jerusalem than elsewhere, then the people who live there would not make sin so much their custom. But in fact there is no sort of shameful practice in which they do not indulge: cheating, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrels and murder are everyday occurrences
...
What proof is there then, in a place where things like that occur, of the abundance of God's grace?'
Indeed the monks themselves could be pretty unruly. They had to be permanently banned from Gaza when they insisted on disrupting night spectacles at the theatre and various festivals they considered 'pagan'. In Chalcedon, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus opposite Byzantium, when the monks protested about the staging of Olympic Games, the local bishop reminded the leader of the protesters that he was a monk and should therefore 'go and sit in a cell and keep quiet'; but in Palestine the monks were much more numerous and were clearly made of sterner stuff. On one occasion troops had to be used to restore order after the Palestinian monks rose in revolt against a Bishop of Jerusalem they considered heretical. Things got even more out of control during the reign of the heretical Emperor Valens: when the monks demonstrated violently against a bishop he had installed, the Emperor deported large numbers of them, condemning them to the Imperial mines and quarries in the deserts of Upper Egypt.
Sometimes the monks did get away with it, however. Under an oppressive and bigoted late Roman law, the Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem except once a year on the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, when they were permitted to come and weep over the ruins of their Temple. In 438
a.d
. these regulations were relaxed by the Empress Eudoxia, an act which electrified the Jewish diaspora but outraged the more fundamentalist monks. As the Jews gathered in unprecedented numbers on Temple Mount, the Syrian monk Barsauma led one of the most horrific anti-Semitic pogroms of the period, attacking and killing many of the Jewish pilgrims. Barsauma protested that he and his followers had not been directly involved and that the Jews had been killed by 'missiles coming, as it were, from Heaven'. But the surviving Jews had evidence that this was not true, for they had managed to seize eighteen of Barsauma's followers, and brought them to the Empress for trial. But even the Empress could do nothing in the face of the monastic mob Barsauma was able to muster: cheerleaders in the crowd threatened to burn her, and set up a chant of 'The Cross has conquered'; 'the voice of the people spread and swelled for a long time, like the roar of a wave of the sea, so that the inhabitants of the city trembled because of the noise of the shouting.' Barsauma was never brought to justice, and indeed was later canonised by the Syrian Orthodox Church.
Yet despite such pogroms, rebellions, and internal turbulence, Palestine underwent a massive increase in population during the Byzantine period. Archaeological surveys of pottery picked up in the fields of Israel and the West Bank have found around four times the density of Byzantine pottery as that of the Israelite period, implying that the population during Byzantine rule must have been quite significantly higher than during the centuries preceding it. Whole areas of the region never settled before (or since) were cultivated in this period: in the depths of the Negev desert, for example, six Byzantine towns have been excavated standing in what was then cultivated land. It is probably only in the twentieth century that the population of the region began to equal or surpass the exceptional high point reached during the sixth century.
The seeds of the destruction of Byzantine Palestine may well have lain in the scale of this sudden expansion. Excavations at Scythopolis (modern Beit Shean) have shown that while the town's brothels were flourishing, bathing was falling out of fashion: the town's five bath houses, all flourishing during the Roman period, fell into disuse under the Byzantines. This may have been partly due to the influence of the monks, who regarded the baths with horror and heaped praise on those who refrained from washing for the longest possible period: one story of the desert fathers admiringly tells how a wandering monk chanced upon a saintly hermit in a cave in the furthest reaches of the desert, 'and believe me, my brothers, I, Pambo, this least one, smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away'. Basic norms of hygiene were not just ignored by the monks and their admirers: they were deliberately, piously flouted.
But it was not just a question of fashion; there were structural problems too. The old Roman aqueducts were clogging up, while in Scythopolis the neatly paved drains built during the pagan Empire fell into disrepair and were replaced by open sewers. In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen.
The result of all this was a wave of epidemics throughout the sixth century. The pages of John Moschos contain many references to outbreaks of plague, and the evidence of modern archaeologists has shown that leprosy, smallpox and tuberculosis were rife, while lice proliferated to an extent unknown in almost any other period of Middle Eastern history.
Many historians now believe that it is in the devastating infections and plagues of the late sixth century that the root cause of the rapid collapse of the Byzantine Levant should be sought.
Every morning during my stay in Jerusalem I toured the lanes and alleys of the Old City, searching out fragments of the Byzantine period, often in the company of Bishop Hagop. The Bishop had cheered up somewhat since our first meeting, and was always at his liveliest in the ancient vaulted passageways of the different quarters, pointing out both the architectural remains littered around us and some of the Old City's more unusual modern inhabitants.
'See that blind beggar? Yes, the man in the wheelchair in front of that Crusader arch. He's only blind from nine until twelve. Then he takes off his dark glasses and has another job, as a waiter in a kebab restaurant in the Muslim Quarter. Very good kebabs, too. Over there, that's the Church of St John the Baptist. It's got some lovely Byzantine stonework but the Greeks have gone and put horrible new frescoes in the apse: bright yellows and blues.'
The Bishop shuddered. 'The taste of some of these modern Greeks
...
Have you seen the mosaic they've put up in the Holy Sepulchre? It looks like something out of Walt Disney. Now, look down here. See the tall man selling olive-wood figurines? He's called Isa. For years he used to be a cook. Specialised in making sandwiches: nice dainty ones for wedding parties. He was famous for his special liver sandwiches and soon became the most popular caterer in the Old City. Then someone noticed that the cat population near his house kept declining every time there was a wedding: eight to ten cats went missing whenever a reception was held. News spread about this, but people kept begging him for sandwiches. In the end he couldn't satisfy demand: the cat population ran too low and he couldn't produce the goods. So he got into olive wood instead. But at least he was quite humane with the cats. There's a Cypriot monk who makes his unfortunate cats fast in Lent. He locks them up and you can hear them yowling into the night. And it's not just Lent. About once every year he has dreams in which he thinks he is given an exclusive premonition of the coming of the Messiah. So for a fortnight afterwards he makes these poor cats scream all night in expectation of the Second Coming. Terrible noise. Now, see that pillar
...'
Perhaps the biggest surprise of our walks was discovering quite how little of Byzantine Jerusalem has survived. While in northern Syria hundreds of unnamed and unknown late antique towns and villages still exist virtually intact, in Jerusalem, once probably the most magnificent provincial town in the entire Christian Empire, only desultory fragments of floor mosaic and piles of collapsed pillars remain to hint at what has been lost. Following the trail of John Moschos's writings around the city takes one to a variety of dank cellars and obscure crypts, but even here there is little surviving that is of more than antiquarian interest. Ironically, the only great Byzantine building left in the city is a mosque - the Dome of the Rock - decorated by Byzantine craftsmen for the new
Muslim conquerors in the late seventh century, shortly after the fall of the eastern half of the Empire. Runciman has called the Dome 'the supreme example of the rotunda-style of building in Byzantine architecture'.
Of Constantine's original Holy Sepulchre very little survives. Fragments of its walls are visible through a dark hole in the side of the Syriac chapel, but most of the existing structure is Crusader, with a few later additions from the Ottoman period. The Nea, Justinian's magnificent New Church of Mary, Mother of God, where one of Moschos's friends, Abba Leontios the Cilician, worked for forty years, has also effectively vanished. Fragments of it - mere lumps of wall, along with some strange vaulted substructures - lie scattered around various undercrofts in the Jewish Quarter. Archaeologists have excavated what remains, and seem excited by their discoveries, but it is almost impossible for the layman to imagine that these sad piles of brick and stone once surpassed many of Justinian's surviving churches - Haghia Eirene in Istanbul or San Vitale in Ravenna - still less that the Nea could be mentioned in the same breath as Haghia Sophia, the greatest of all Byzantine buildings.
The Cardo - the great central bazaar of Byzantine Jerusalem -is a similar story. It dominates the portrait of the city on the sixth-century mosaic map discovered at Madaba in Transjordan in 1884, and fragments of it have been discovered all over Jerusalem. Near the Holy Sepulchre, deep within the bowels of an echoing Russian Orthodox complex known as the Alexander Hospice, one can see a hundred yards of its arcades and paving, as well as a modest Byzantine stab at a classical Triumphal Arch. The Cardo resurfaces again for two hundred yards in a hole in the ground in the Jewish Quarter, beside a line of new boutiques selling bronze
menorah,
Israeli flags and Hebrew T-shirts for the American tourists. It then disappears into the side of a restaurant, never to be seen again.
