The Towers of Samarcand (56 page)

Luke knew this but perhaps the mothers didn’t. Ferried to safety, the heir to Bayezid had established himself at Edirne and seemed keen to make peace. Thessaloniki, second jewel in Byzantium’s crown, had been returned.

Plethon stood beside the Emperor. ‘Suleyman’s still dangerous, majesty,’ he said. ‘He’s just buying some time.’

The Empress smiled and pressed his arm. ‘Tush, philosopher. Be merry like the crowd. We are delivered. Look.’ She was pointing towards the hippodrome where a single horse stood on a plinth. ‘Now,
that
is a wedding gift.’

It was Luke’s gift to the city. The four horses of the hippodrome had gone to Venice two hundred years earlier so Luke had replaced them with Eskalon, carved in Chios as the quartet had been centuries ago. The bronze horse shone like a god.

Luke turned to his wife and raising her crown with one finger, kissed her on the lips.

The snow was falling thickly on the hill of Mistra and the little courtyard of the Peribleptos Monastery was deep with it. It was the hour before dawn on Christmas Day and the monks were sleeping in, having enjoyed their annual holy supper the night before. With twelve dishes for the twelve apostles, and straw beneath the table for when the baby saviour chose to come, it had been more fun than last year. The Turks had been defeated and Mistra was still free. They’d even drunk wine.

For the three people in the crypt below the monastery church, the padded silence of snow and sleeping monks was welcome. Although Varangians kept guard at the doors and windows, what they had before them could never be revealed to anyone. For two of them, it was known. For the other, it was a revelation.

Luke, Anna and Plethon were kneeling by the side of an open casket and none of them had spoken for several minutes. Beside them was an empty grave with earth piled to one side. There were torches on the walls and their light made a nativity of the scene. It was very cold and a night creature howled from deep inside the woods beyond the city walls.

This seemed to stir Plethon. ‘We should replace the ring now and bury the casket. It’s nearly dawn.’

Luke nodded. What he’d just seen was beyond comprehension. He leant forward and placed the ring in the casket. Then he took Anna’s hand and found it trembling either from the cold or something else. ‘When do you think we’ll need it?’ he asked, his voice a whisper.

Plethon rubbed his eyes. The casket always made him so tired. ‘Soon. Bayezid might be beaten but Suleyman lives on. And he still has a powerful army. We don’t have much time.’

Luke knew this to be true, just as he knew that the next part of Plethon’s plan would be played out in the west: in Italy. They’d talked long about Popes and Medicis and the union of Churches. Soon he’d have to go there, but not yet. He’d been appointed Protostrator of Mistra, the youngest yet. And the Protostrator’s new wife was with child, a brother or sister for Giovanni. No one would stop him being in Mistra for the birth.

He let go of Anna’s hand and, very slowly, closed the casket’s lid.

The Mistra Chronicles
take place in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the decades leading up to the fall of the Constantinople in 1453. It was a time of colliding empires: the Ming in China, the Timurid in central Asia, the Mamluk in Egypt and Syria, the Ottoman in Turkey and the Balkans, and what was left of the Empire of Byzantium: Constantinople and the Greek Peloponnese, where
The Mistra Chronicles
begin and end.

The Byzantine Empire had once been one of the greatest powers on earth. Its citizens had always called themselves Rhomaioi, never Byzantine, because they saw themselves as directly descended from Romulus and Remus (or Aeneas who himself was Greek). They were right. The Empire had once been the right-hand half of the Roman Empire, the part not overrun by the barbarians in the fifth century, and its capital was Constantinople, founded by the Emperor Constantine in
AD
324.

The Empire had waxed and waned in the thousand years leading up the start of our story. Under the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, it had recovered much of the western half of the Empire. But his successor Maurice fought a twenty-year war of attrition against his eastern neighbours, the Sassanids
of Persia, so that the Byzantines were in no shape to withstand the Arab invasions that swept out of Saudi Arabia after the death of Mohammed in 632. But the walls of Constantinople, greatest in the world, had held, helped by the Byzantine secret weapon of ‘Greek fire’. This was a liquid that, when spouted from a siphon and ignited, could burn on water. How it was made was a state secret known only to the Emperor and a few others and it was particularly lethal against besieging ships. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that Constantinople’s walls were finally breached by an entirely unexpected enemy: the Christian Fourth Crusade.

This was a story of pride, greed and ignorance, and led to one of the worst cultural rapes in history. The aged Doge Dandolo of Venice had agreed to build ships to carry the crusade to Egypt. But when the crusaders couldn’t pay for them, he did a deal: take back the city of Zara for Venice and the debt would be repaid. But once the crusaders had a taste for pillage, they found the offer of 200,000 marks to help the son of the deposed Emperor of Byzantium recover his throne impossible to resist. They put Alexios Angelos back on the throne and waited outside Constantinople to be paid. After a year, they stormed it, led over the walls by the blind nonagenarian Doge. Only fifty years later was the city recovered by the Byzantines and by then, most of its riches were in Venice.

So by the end of the fourteenth century, the Byzantine Empire had no money, no army, no navy and precious little territory. Constantinople was a city of fields and ruined palaces and its population had sunk to just fifty thousand. Meanwhile, a Turkic tribe from the Anatolian steppe had conquered most of its neighbouring tribes and crossed over to Europe in 1354. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, fourth in the line of Osman,
had, by 1400, swept up to the Danube and as far south as the Peloponnese, thus surrounding Constantinople. In 1396, the West had sent a crusade to the aid of the city, an army that ‘could hold up the sky with its lances’. But the chivalry of Europe had jousted and feasted its way to the Danube only to be annihilated at the field of Nicopolis. Now Bayezid boasted that he would ‘water his horses at the altar of St Peter’s in Rome’ and it seemed that he might. The rebirth of wealth and culture that was taking place among the city states of Italy, the movement we know as ‘the Renaissance’, which would lead to the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and ultimately secure western global dominance, was under threat. All that stood in Bayezid’s way were the walls of Byzantium.

In contrast to Constantinople, by 1400 the Byzantine Despotate of Mistra in the Greek Peloponnese was thriving. ‘Despot’ has bad connotations but the rulers of this tiny kingdom were usually the brothers or sons of the reigning Emperor and were good, cultured men. The Despotate had two main cities: Mistra, built in the twelfth century near the ancient site of Sparta, and Monemvasia. They were very different. Mistra was the home of the court and government, run by the Protostrator, a sort of prime minister. It was a place of music, culture and courtly love, a sort of Camelot. Monemvasia, meanwhile, was a rich seaport on the trade route between Venice and the east. Its main export was Malvasia wine, an expensive, sweet wine much favoured in the courts of Europe. In England, they called it Malmsey and the Duke of Clarence was said to have drowned in a butt of it. Monemvasia was ruled by an Archon, subservient to the Despot in Mistra but often in rebellion. In my
Chronicles
, the families of Laskaris and Mamonas hold the offices of Protostrator and Archon as indeed they did at the
time. You can still visit the ruined Laskaris House in Mistra. Perhaps its most famous citizen, from early in the fifteenth century, was the philosopher Plethon, a disciple of Plato and a man of eccentric views, who advocated the return to a Hellenic, even Spartan, model of society.

With or without help from their Spartan past, the Byzantines were no match for the vast forces that the Ottomans had at their disposal. Not only could Bayezid call on the Anatolian gazi tribes with their lethal composite bows, but the conquered Serbs provided him with heavy cavalry. The Ottomans also had the Devshirme, introduced by Bayezid’s father Murad I, by which Christian boys were forcibly taken from the villages of Eastern Europe to be trained as janissaries, the elite slave soldiers of the Ottoman army.

What Bayezid didn’t have yet, however, were cannon large enough to bring down the walls of Constantinople. Invented centuries before in China, these weapons had first appeared on the battlefields of Europe at the siege of Algeciras in the Iberian peninsula. Two English knights brought the technology back with them and cannon were used, with only modest success, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. By 1400, there was an arms race to develop cannon big enough to make city walls redundant. They were ultimately to be used to devastating effect by Mehmed II in the siege of Constantinople in 1453.

By the time of these
Chronicles
, the Byzantines’ own elite force was mostly memory. The Varangian Guard had once been the finest fighting unit in the world, famed for their use of axes. They had come from England, Anglo-Saxon refugees from the Norman Conquest in 1066, to place themselves at the service of the Emperor of Miklagard (Byzantium). They’d grown rich in his service, having the privilege of filling their helmets with
gold on the death of an emperor. By 1400, however, they had almost ceased to exist.

But what the Byzantines lacked in armies, they more than made up for in diplomacy. Their cousins, the Komnenoi of the tiny Empire of Trebizond, had after all survived for centuries by marrying off their beautiful princesses to local warlords. Manuel II Palaiologos of Byzantium, however, had two better plans for survival. The first was to bring a monster even greater than Bayezid west to fight him: Tamerlane.

Tamerlane, or Temur-e-leng (Timur the Lame), was a Mongol warlord of unreliable descent who’d been made lame while horse-rustling as a young man. By 1400, he had conquered most of Central Asia with a savagery not even matched by his predecessor Genghis Khan. Having united the tribes and kingdoms of his home Chagatai Khanate, his horde swept down the superhighway of the steppe to lay waste to everything as far as Anatolia, where he came up against the Empire of Bayezid. On the way he had levelled Aleppo, Antioch, Delhi, Herat, Kabul and countless other cities, building his trademark towers of skulls among their ruins to spread terror before him. In twenty short years, it is estimated that he accounted for some 5 per cent of the world’s population. His greatest desecration may have been the destruction of the beautiful Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of Islam’s noblest buildings.

But Manuel’s problem was that Tamerlane didn’t really want to come west. He had two obsessions: making his capital of Samarcand into the greatest city on earth, and reuniting the four khanates created by the sons and grandsons of Genghis Khan. By 1400, he’d conquered three of them: the Khanates of Chagatai, Persia and the Golden Horde of the north, and only the greatest remained: China, the former Empire of Kublai
Khan now ruled by an ambitious new dynasty: the Ming.

As for Samarcand, by 1400 it certainly had some of the biggest buildings on earth and its suburbs were named after other great cities to prove that it was the greatest of them all. But such was the fear inspired in the architects by Tamerlane to make them build faster, many of the mosques and palaces were built without proper foundations and fell down soon after he died.

To build Samarcand Tamerlane needed booty, and there was far more booty in the east than the west. Why was this? In large part it was due to the Silk Road (not called so then) that stretched six thousand miles from Chang’an in China to Constantinople. It was a trade route like no other, with caravanserai every twenty miles, which was the distance a camel could walk in a day. It was also a sort of internet along which new ideas and new inventions could travel. Great cities like Palmyra and Tabriz sprang up along it, made rich by the taxation of trade. In 1400, the annual revenues of the city of Tabriz exceeded those of the King of France.

Manuel’s second plan was to bring another crusade from the west. But there was a problem. Since 1054, the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches had been in schism and the Pope would not give his blessing to any more crusades until the schism had been ended. Worse still, the Western Catholic Church was itself in schism and two Popes, one in Rome and the other in Avignon, were at each other’s throats.

In
The Mistra Chronicles
, I use some artistic licence to describe the way that Plethon (who was in fact instrumental in ending the East–West schism) makes an ally of the powerful Florentine banking family of Medici to further this end. In this book, he meets Giovanni de’ Medici, the founder of the bank. In future
books, his son Cosimo will become crucial in unifying the Churches. In fact, Manuel spent the years 1398–1400 touring the courts of Europe trying to gain support, and money, for the Byzantine cause. He was even entertained by the English King Henry VI at Eltham Palace, but no funds were made available.

So this is the historical context and the narrative of
The Mistra Chronicles
: a once-great empire on its knees with two plans for its survival, one facing east, the other west. How it happened is part-fact, part-fiction.

This second book in the series,
The Towers of Samarcand
, includes some interesting historical characters that are worthy of further description. In the Byzantine camp, the Emperor Manuel, his wife Helena Dragaš and his brother Theodore, Despot of Mistra, were all brilliant, cultured people determined to do what they could to save their empire. Plethon was very much as described, an eccentric thinker of genius who didn’t have much time for organised religion.