God's Gold (31 page)

In other words, Constantine deliberately emulated both the layout and the function of Rome's Circus Maximus and Palatine palace, and boosted his imperial control by merging the two: the palace now led directly to the royal box on the edge of the hippodrome. Palace and circus were thus one and the same, a physical artery bonding emperor, politics, and people. Never before had such an intimate and coercive policy been forged.

In AD 534, Justinian's city of 500,000 people was in no doubt that Constantinople, and more precisely the hippodrome and adjoining palace, was the center of the civilized world. The new didn't just imitate the old, it supplanted it. And the dominant means of conveying this message were the artistic masterpieces, steeped in symbolism, for which the Early Byzantine emperors ransacked the Mediterranean.

The hippodrome was in effect a museum where more than twenty-five famous antiquities were permanently exhibited. Here statues of the greatest rulers of classical antiquity rubbed shoulders, from Alexander the Great to the Roman dictator Julius Caesar and the emperors Augustus and Diocletian, ransacked far and wide from Rome to Nicomedia in modern Turkey. The legendary founders of Rome and, hence, of the Byzantine Empire, Romulus and Remus, were prominently displayed. Each year their foundation festival, the Lupercalia, was reenacted in the hippodrome. All of these golden memories united the great rulers of antiquity with those of the present. This was reputation by association.

Although Constantinople was originally selected to be a new imperial capital partly as a central Mediterranean bridgehead from which to launch operations against the northern barbarians and the eastern Persian threat, the city proved highly vulnerable. After the barbarians crossed the Danube in AD 378, no natural barrier existed to delay their menacing advance. To address this fear the emperor Theodosius created a deeper set of land walls in AD 413. Reflecting the mounting external threat, Anastasius I (AD 491–518) eventually turned to an even more extreme defense in depth, building a twenty-eight-mile-long wall forty miles west of Constantinople between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. New Rome finally had its own Hadrian's Wall.

To protect the empire, palace, and people from the horrifying image of barbarians at the gates, the hippodrome was peppered with
apotropaia:
statues of Zeus, hyenas, and sphinxes, patron gods and talismans that warded off evil. This psychological shield with its veneer of imperial respectability was complemented by the greatest artistic wonders of the age, all assembled within the hippodrome's walls. The display of the Ass and Keeper originally displayed at Nikopolis in Epirus, Greece, to commemorate Octavian's momentous victory over Mark Antony—paving his transformation into the first and greatest of Rome's emperors, Augustus—now told viewers that after his decisive defeat of Licinius at Chrysopolis, Constantine was Augustus's equal.

All of these masterpieces and their conscious messages were intermixed with statues more naturally associated with a hippodrome. The great charioteers, horse tamers, and pugilists, the brothers Castor and Pollux, blessed the arena, as did Hercules, the epitomy of strength and guile, fighting the Nemean lion and outwitting the Hesperides sisters for their golden apples. Hercules' successful completion of the Twelve Labors made him the perfect symbol of male virility and aspiration, and thus the presiding genius of athletics competitions.

The reused antiquities reflected Constantinople's respect for classical Greek and Roman values, but more crucially harnessed the past to validate the present and future. The accumulation of the Mediterranean's greatest art under one roof, linked to the palace, sent out a powerful
message: the center of the civilized world had literally been transplanted to New Rome. The hippodrome became a microcosm of the universe, which the emperor controlled. In this respect Constantinople's hippodrome was a mirror image of Vespasian's Temple of Peace in Rome. And how better to boost control of the past and mastery of the future than to house here the Temple treasure of Jerusalem. The masterpieces already on show illuminated the Byzantine Empire's earthly domination. Possession of the Jewish menorah, table, and trumpets would allow Early Christianity to claim dominance of the heavens too.

I followed Belisarius's footsteps of AD 534 along the Kennedy Caddesi highway, only today I was pursuing the wheels of the fishmonger's cart rather than a gold-plated chariot. Other than stunted sections of seawalls, I passed little Byzantine architecture. Would the hippodrome where the Temple treasure was paraded reveal itself readily or had it been completed obliterated by modern development?

At Aksakal Sokagi Street I turned left up the steep slope of Istanbul's First Hill. Like the Palatine in Rome and Carthage's Byrsa Hill, this was the business end of ancient Constantinople, where the emperor and Senate held court—the White House, Pentagon, and Madison Square Garden all rolled into one. I roamed quiet backstreets, startling chickens looking for a comfortable bed where to lay an egg or two. Not ten minutes away from the throbbing nerve center of Istanbul, this district still feels like a sleepy peasant village.

I wound my way uphill past FedEx and UPS depots superimposed over ancient warehouses. The window of a wooden shack above a secluded children's playground suddenly cracked open to expose a buxom elderly lady, her head wrapped in a tea towel. She beat a rug against the side of her flimsy hut and stared at me, bemused by this oddity prowling the backstreets of Istanbul. I smiled back, relieved we no longer live in Ottoman times, when far worse refuse would have been thrown over me.

This distraction quickly faded as behind the shack my eyes focused
on a wall of red Byzantine brick. Some 50 feet tall, it curved uphill for about 100 feet. The arched entrances blocked with brick resembled one of Rome's finest architectural spectacles: the entrances to the Colosseum. Unblock the arches and you had exactly the same concept. A quick check of my medieval and modern maps confirmed my hunch: this was the monumental semicircular southern entrance to Constantinople's hippodrome, the
sphendone,
its walls now incorporated into an earthen bank supporting the edge of a hill and Marmara University. Crushed marble and pottery gleaming on the ground reminded me of long-forgotten splendors. The ghost of an Ottoman-period building, a cross section of its domed roof and floor still plastered against the Byzantine walls, made it clear just how lucky any section of the hippodrome is to survive in the urban jungle of Istanbul.

I hurried uphill, excited to discover what the hippodrome looked like on the summit. Rounding the corner, I was greeted by a series of yellow, pink, and blue wooden peasant huts opening onto a broad park dominated by the Blue Mosque to the east. But still no sign at all of any hippodrome superstructure.

Ottoman and modern Istanbul were alive and kicking, but Byzantium seemed obliterated. Turks dressed in baggy brown MC Hammer cotton trousers and suit jackets fed pigeons. The tones of an ice-cream van competed with the traditional cries of imams calling people to prayer across the city. While nothing of the hippodrome's walls still stands aboveground, a modern road now occupies the original contours of the charioteer's racetrack. I also spied the original central
spina
terrace intact, although now landscaped into a tranquil garden.

To the north the hippodrome's starting gates—the “barriers” to which General Belisarius paraded in the triumph of AD 534—have been consumed by the streetcar lines of Divan Yolu, the main road running from the Russian Quarter and Theodosius's Forum into the heart of Istanbul. The domed roof and minarets of the Church of Saint Sophia swallow the panorama and dwarf a stump of masonry, all that remains of the
Milion,
a four-way arch from which new Byzantine territories were mapped out. On the edge of the pavement a youngster sat at a
table with a rabbit, carrot, and a handwritten cardboard sign that invited you to part with some loose change and
LET THE RABBIT TELL YOUR FORTUNE
. I decided to give this wisdom a miss.

Unlike Rome's Circus Maximus, whose grassy banks still soar into the sky opposite the Palatine, Constantinople's hippodrome has been flattened. A bird's-eye view from the skies betrays its 1,476-foot-long elliptical contours, but on the ground the original layout has vanished. The stench of sweat and the 50,000-strong cheering throng are hard to resurrect. The arena's saving graces are three original antiquities still standing at the southwestern end of the central
spina
around which chariots once careered.

I walked down the flattened central terrace where bronze and marble statues of Hercules, an eagle, wolf, dragon, and sphinxes once gleamed in the eastern sun. A flower bed arranged in the shape of a crescent moon and five-pronged star, the flag of Turkey, adorns the original podium where a classical Greek statue of Helen of Troy was once on show. Today not one statue of Helen survives, but in the late twelfth century Niketas Choniates, chancellor of the Byzantine Empire, enjoyed a close encounter with this beauty, revealing:

Helen of Troy may have vanished, but three of the hippodrome's surviving antiquities still hint at the arena's original style. Farthest south is a roughly built pillar of stone soaring 105 feet high. Once sheathed in bronze, its original function remains a mystery. Nearby is the Serpent Column, composed of the intertwined bodies of three bronze snakes and, according to local legend, with venom enclosed in its walls. Now only eighteen feet tall, the column was originally sur
mounted by three snake heads supporting an enormous bronze victory bowl. These relics once formed the shaft of a trophy that was the centerpiece of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, seat of the great Oracle, where it had been dedicated to the god by the thirty-one Greek cities that defeated the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC. This Greek masterpiece remained intact in the hippodrome well into the medieval period. Only in April 1700 did the Serpent Column come to an ignoble end, when an exuberant member of the Polish embassy sliced off the snake heads under the influence of raki, the next best thing to stealing police traffic cones.

The most complete ancient monument surviving within the hippodrome, however, is Theodosius's Column. Once again, it was time to confront an old “Roman” friend. Atop a sculpted base is Constantinople's token Egyptian obelisk, yet another nod to artistic tastes in Old Rome. Commissioned by the pharaoh Tutmosis III (1504–1450 BC), it stood originally in Egypt's Temple of Amon at Deir el-Bahri opposite Thebes. Weighing 800 tons, and 88 feet tall, the skewer is covered with hieroglyphs commemorating the pharaoh's victory over Syria. The obelisk, however, broke during its sea voyage to New Rome, where a disgusted Constantine abandoned it by the shore. A few decades later, in AD 390, the emperor Theodosius salvaged the monument: the surviving upper two-thirds of the obelisk were mounted on four bronze blocks and an exquisite marble sculpted base.

I was especially keen to examine this slab of marble during my trip to Istanbul because it was decorated with the faces of Theodosius and the royal family enjoying a day out at the hippodrome: the very scenes that Justinian and Belisarius would have experienced in the triumph of AD 534. One side of the base brings to life the emperor receiving homage from barbarian captives; on another, his nephew, Valentinian II, ruler of the western Roman Empire, and his sons Honorius and Arcadius, hand out laurel wreaths to a sporting hero. I stared long and hard at the
kathisma,
the royal box sculpted onto the base of Theodosius's Column as an arched chamber supported by columns and jutting out across the hippodrome. Soldiers armed with spears and shields guarded the royal
box just as they would have when the Temple treasure was paraded here. The tightly packed crowd in the hippodrome is also visible, as well as chariots tearing around the arena to a backdrop of dancing maidens and musicians (whose poor artistic perspectives make them look more like aliens). This artwork gets us unusually close to the atmosphere and geography of the Byzantine triumph.

After breathing in the bygone atmosphere of a day at the races, I crossed the
spina
and entered the courtyard of the Blue Mosque, which hovers over the exact position of the Byzantine palace and
kathisma,
the most powerful seat in the Byzantine Empire. Here emperors communicated with their people, entertained the masses, and celebrated their omnipotence. The concept reminded me of a more sophisticated version of medieval jousting. From the elevated mosque podium above the entrance stairs I replayed in my mind the magic of the triumph of AD 534, as recorded for posterity by Procopius:

So, I had been right all along: the Jewish Temple treasure was recaptured from the floating treasure chest at the port city of Hippo Regius. Finally, the Vandal king Gelimer had been coaxed down from his hiding place among the Moors on Mount Papua. The final straw had been the failing health of his children, who had started discharging worms. Gelimer would eventually be exiled with his family to Galatia in modern central Turkey, but for now was compelled to endure public humiliation and pay obeisance to Justinian. Procopius writes:

Not much survives of Early Byzantine Constantinople, but enough texts and ruins to resurrect snapshots of the triumph of AD 534. Theophanes Confessor would later confirm Procopius's report of the Temple treasure's presence there. The event may have been a heavily diluted version of Vespasian's spectacular showcase of AD 71, but nevertheless this was a pivotal rite of passage. For a very brief period of time Justinian was able to enjoy the sense of being a Roman lord of the entire Mediterranean. But was God's gold kept in this place of entertainment that doubled up as a public museum? These were irrational times. The end of classical antiquity was fast approaching. Justinian's reign would mark the curtain call of
romanitas
. The Dark Ages were coming and time was running out for the Temple treasure of Jerusalem.