The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (6 page)

at least he had them in his mind’s eye, and at his inspiration the Venetians had devised a particular mechanism for attacking the high towers from the water. Using the lateen yard-arms of their ships, they contrived a series of gangplanks which protruded from the prows of their galleys at a steep angle, like ladders to the tops of the ramparts. Covered with awnings of leather, to protect the assaulters against fire and arrows, these were jammed hard against the battlements by the impetus of the ships’ grounding.

Supported by 250 shipboard catapults, up these precarious contraptions crawled the assault force, beneath a storm of stones and arrows, and presently the first of the towers was in Venetian hands. Instantly grappling ladders were thrown against the walls below, and the main body of the army swarmed up to the ramparts. The fight did not last long. Inspired by the frail but militant figure of their Doge, sword in hand on the strand below, the Venetians cleared the battlements tower by tower – twenty-five in all, in a single hour’s fighting – and by afternoon the city seemed to be won. The news went home to Venice, we are told, by carrier pigeon across the Balkans.

‘O city, city!’ To disembark in Constantinople thus must have been a traumatic experience for the more sensitive of the Venetians. This was a holy city, after all. Constantine, its founder, had set up his capital here after the vision which, on the hills outside Rome, had converted him to Christianity, and he conceived it from the start as a divine city: asked how far he proposed to go, as he first marked out its limits, he is supposed to have replied, ‘Until He stops who goes before me.’ His successor Justinian too, when he built the matchless shrine of Santa Sophia, felt he was fulfilling a sacred destiny. ‘Now at last,’ legend had him saying as he entered its gigantic nave for the first time, ‘I have outbuilt Solomon.’

Even the glitter of Venice paled somewhat beside this marvel. The shape of the place was strictly functional. Through the Theodosian walls two roads entered the city, one from the west through the Adrianople Gate, one from the south through the ceremonial entrance called the Golden Gate. They met on the spine of the ridge, then proceeded the triumphal way called the Mese through a succession of forums, each the pride of a different emperor, to the complex of state buildings, memorials and open spaces that was the heart of the city.

It was a city of marvellous statues. Lysippus was supposed to have created the great bronze Hercules, whose thumb was as big as a man’s waist, Phidias had made the image of Athene Promachos, Athene the Champion, that had been brought here from the Acropolis in Athens. The bronze group of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf had come from Rome at the foundation of the city; the wooden statue of Athene was supposed to have been removed by Aeneas from Troy; the lovely marble figure of Hera was from the isle of Samos. Bellerophon riding Pegasus was so big that ten herons had made their nests between the crupper and the horse’s head. A huge bronze ox-head from Pergamon gave its name to the Forum of the Ox, and here is how Nicetas described the statue of Helen of Troy: ‘Fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars… all harmony, grace and elegance.’

It was a city of columns, too. There was a column whose elaborate frieze, if you read it right, supposedly foretold the
future. There was a column with hermits living on the top. There was a column one of whose trap-doors flew open every hour, to announce the time of day. There was a column into whose base had allegedly been inserted the crosses of the two thieves at the Crucifixion, St Mary Magdalene’s alabaster jar and the basket of the miraculous loaves. There was a column carrying an equestrian figure of Justinian, and another with the Empress Helena, and another with a bronze woman, Servant of the Winds, swinging with the prevailing breezes. There was Constantine’s Pillar sheathed all in copper. There was an Egyptian obelisk. There was a sinister and beautiful object, called the Column of the Three Serpents, which had come from the oracle at Delphi.

It was a city of churches, strewn across every quarter of it – more than one hundred dedicated to the Virgin alone, at one time or another, and thirty-five to the Baptist. At one extreme there was Santa Sophia, which seemed to have been lowered into place from heaven itself, which was served by 600 clergy and illuminated at night by lanterns, flickering from each arch of its dome, to be seen like a vision far out at sea. At the other extreme there were the myriad tiny shrines and hermitages which were hidden away in back-alleys, in the purlieus of palaces or the crannies of bazaars, or the scores of monasteries and nunneries which were embedded unobtrusively in the fabric of the place.

The churches of Constantinople were built in the sweet symmetry, at once innocent and commanding, which was the essence of Byzantine architecture, and was to find its way across the western world in successive adaptations of the Romanesque. They were decorated with the mosaics, frescoes and woodwork which only Byzantine artists could create. They were crammed with holy objects: fragments of the True Cross or the Virgin’s veil, heads of St Stephen or the Baptist, the lance that pierced the Saviour’s side, St Thomas’s doubting finger, arms and legs of holy martyrs, and, most revered of all, the wonder-working Nikopoeia Madonna, painted by St Luke himself, an icon of victory which was carried into action in the van of the imperial armies, and whose sheltering veil, every Friday morning, was miraculously parted as a pledge of the divine favour.

Then there were the kaleidoscopic bazaars of the city, which
made even the markets of Rialto look ordinary. They were a labyrinth of lanes, ordered trade by trade, commodity by commodity, and in them cultures and continents met. If there were always buyers from Greece and Italy, there were always sellers from Persia, Afghanistan, India, Russia. Slavs, Armenians, Syrians, Negroes, Jews all frequented these stalls, and you could buy Siberian furs and skins there, honey from Turkestan, amber from the distant Baltic, cottons and sugar from the Levant, ivories, silks, spices, carpets and
objets d’art
from India, Tibet and China. There were no restrictions on imports to Constantinople: it was the whole world’s bazaar.

In the heart of all these wonders lay the Augusteum, the great open place outside Santa Sophia which was the focus of the capital. Here was the Hippodrome, the huge arena which was not only the empire’s sporting centre, but its great place of public assembly: criminals were executed there, triumphs were celebrated, and there the two national factions of old, the Blues and the Greens, had fought out their differences and proclaimed their emperors. Dynasties had risen and toppled in the Hippodrome. In the centre of it stood the serpent column, the Egyptian obelisk, and a whole parade of curious blocks, pillars and pyramidal objects; all around were heroic bronze figures of famous charioteers, with their horses, commissioned by the heroes themselves in self-esteem, or sometimes by their supporters in tribute. And mounted magnificently on the emperor’s box at the head of the stadium, more lovely than nature itself, stood the four golden horses of Constantinople, the most famous animal figures ever made by man, nostrils elegantly flared, forelegs raised in postures of gentle but masterly power – cast from some alloy no man could analyse, brought from some source no man could remember, created long before by some genius whose name was forgotten.

Immediately beside the Hippodrome, immediately opposite Santa Sophia, stood the Bucoleon, the Great Palace, just as the Doge’s Palace stood beside the Piazza and the Basilica (the church for God, it used to be said, the palace for the emperor, the arena for the people). It was like an inner city of its own, spilling down the hillside in a complex of pavilions, courtyards, churches, barracks and gardens to its water-gate on the Marmara shore. It
was the palace of palaces, full of astonishments. The Imperial Silk Factory occupied only a small corner of its space; in the imperial chapel even the nails and hinges were made of silver; the palace lighthouse was a signal station too, and its flashes kept the emperor in touch with his officials far away in Asia Minor. The very complexity of the place, corridor leading into gallery, hall opening only into anteroom, was designed to overawe the princes and ambassadors of lesser powers, while the core of it all, the audience chamber of the emperor himself, seemed to simple visitors actually magic. Mechanical birds twittered on enamelled branches as one entered it. Automatic lions roared, beating the ground with their tails. The towering blonde Varangians, like creatures from another planet, stood perpetually on guard with their battle-axes. When at last one reached the imperial presence, the emperor was discovered sitting on a sumptuous throne of gold and diamonds dressed in robes of many colours: but even as one made one’s obeisances, to a peal of organs he was whisked into the air and out of sight, descending a moment later still on his throne but in a yet more dazzling change of costume.

Such was the city, part art, part mysticism, part sleight-of-hand, part shambled orientalism, that awaited the Venetians that morning. It remains The City still to thousands of Greeks all over the eastern Mediterranean, and some of it survives. Constantinople coincided exactly with that part of Istanbul known today as Stamboul, and you can still follow the course of that triumphal way along its spine, from the Theodosian walls to Constantine’s original forum – thick with traffic now, and enlivened by the exuberant freelance minibuses which, packed to the doors, and announcing their destinations with raucous shouts from the young conductors hanging to their steps, are proper successors to the racing chariots. You can see the stump of the serpent column, still eerily suggestive in the centre of the Hippodrome. Santa Sophia has been a mosque and is now a museum, and down at the seashore you may find, neglected behind a car park, the ragged water-gate of the Great Palace. The domes of the Church of St Irene still show above the trees of the Topkapi Palace. The mighty Mosque of Fateh occupies the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles, the model of St Mark’s. A few last
lovely mosaics smile down at us from the Christian past. A pillar here, an obelisk there, attest to the pride of the old emperors.

All the life has gone, though, from old Byzantium: too many layers of history have been piled on top.

In the event this was not the Fall of Constantinople – not yet. The Venetians were obliged to withdraw again, the French, faced by the tough Varangians, having failed to break the defences in their sector of the attack. But that same night Alexius III fled anyway, disappearing into Thrace, and the Crusaders were free to put their own nominee upon the throne without violence. Having rescued the poor blinded Isaac from his dungeon, from which he emerged trembling and disturbed, they set up the two of them, father and son, as joint rulers of the empire, and withdrew the armies to the Galata shore once more.

This was not a success, as Dandolo probably foresaw. The father was senile, the son presumptuous, and nobody was pleased. Young Alexius miserably failed to meet his commitments to the Crusade – ‘You stupid youth,’ Dandolo is reported to have said to him, ‘we pulled you out of the dung, and we’ll soon put you back there’ – and before long another contender to the throne arose. He was the court grand-chamberlain, Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Murzuphlus, ‘bushy-browed’, because his eyebrows met in the middle. Under his leadership the people rejected Young Alexius absolutely. Chaos fell upon Constantinople. The mob furiously destroyed Phidias’ great figure of Athene because, they said, it was her beckoning shield, flashing out to sea, which had brought the Crusade so calamitously upon them. Fires started by drunken soldiers destroyed whole areas of the city. Fighting broke out between the factions. Murzuphlus had himself crowned in Santa Sophia, assumed the livery of the emperor and stormed about the city on a white horse. Poor old Isaac died at last. At the end of 1203 Young Alexius was found strangled in his palace, and in the spring of 1204 the Crusaders, stimulated as always by the Venetians, were obliged to storm Constantinople all over again.

This time they did it with a vengeance. Now the enmities were cut-and-dried, and the rough laws of war applied. The riff-raff
Crusaders could indulge their lust for blood and loot. The Venetians could revenge all the humiliations of the past. It was Holy Week, but this did not deter the warriors of Christ. In three days of half-crazed rape, looting and destruction the soldiers sacked Byzantium once and for all, almost obliterating its heritage of splendour and sanctity. The booty was supposed to be fairly shared among the armies, but when the time came there was no controlling the soldiery.

Everywhere they smashed, stole and ravaged. No woman was safe on the streets, and no church was sacrosanct. The greatest treasures of classical times were wantonly destroyed. Lysippus’ Hercules was melted for its bronze; so was Bellerophon on his flying horse; the Servant of the Winds was wrenched from her pillar, and all the copper sheathing was stripped from Constantine’s column. The she-wolf of Rome, the ox-head of Pergamon, were thrown into the cauldron for their metals, and Nicetas’ Helen of Troy, that heavenly relic of the Golden Age, was never seen again.

The myriad holy relics of the city were ruthlessly stripped from their shrines, to find their way to churches, monasteries and castles all over Europe. The toys of the Great Palace were taken apart. The precious Greek manuscripts of the libraries were burned as so much wastepaper. The tombs of the emperors were rifled. The mosaics, tapestries and reliquaries of Santa Sophia were ripped from their settings, its altar was broken into pieces, and on the patriarch’s throne in the centre of the nave the drunken soldiers seated a painted whore in mockery – like a scene from Bosch, the harlot preening and screaming with laughter on the throne, the horde of drunken soldiers, brandishing swords, chalices, icons, bottles, swathes of precious silk or obscene mementoes of their lust, dancing heavy-booted round the nave.

‘Since the beginning of the world,’ wrote the Marshal of Champagne, ‘never was so much riches seen collected in a single city.’ There was more wealth in Constantinople, reported his colleague the Count of Flanders, than in all the rest of Europe put together. The great barons of France were no doubt shrewd enough in their choice of booty – Louis IX was later to build the Sainte Chapelle in Paris specifically to house the Crown
of Thorns. The Venetians, though, were the most organized looters. They alone maintained the discipline of their forces, and looted methodically, under orders, for the glory of their nation.