The Abyssinian Proof

1

Constantinople, May 28, 1453

Isaak Metochites and his family set off through the unlit streets. His son, Michael, pulled the cart with their belongings, its wheels greased and padded to make no sound. His wife and seven-year-old daughter, cloaked in dark veils, followed behind. Constantinople lay about them in a black stupor, as close to sleep as death is to the afterlife.

The silence worried Isaak. For weeks, the Turks had kept up a fierce bombardment, along with a constant barrage of noise from trumpets and castanets, presumably to weaken the nerves of the city’s defenders. Only seven thousand armed men remained to defend the city, he thought, but they were not so easily rattled. It was rumored that the Turks planned a great attack the following day and the sudden silence seemed like a great ingathering of breath by the barbarian god of war.

The night smelled of wet charcoal and decay. Isaak thought he heard the Turkish army stirring on the other side of the city walls. He shook his head sadly at the thought that all that remained of the thousand-year-old civilization of Byzantium was this despairing city, the flat of the Muslim hand against its back, ready to tip it into oblivion. Over generations, the Turks had swallowed the outlying cities and provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the high plains, pastures, ports, and olive groves of Byzantium, until only the capital city remained, the city Constantine had named after himself in the year 330 and anointed the capital of Christendom. A triangle of precious civilization girded by its great walls and flanked on two sides by water.

In the spring of 1453, Sultan Mehmet II, the ambitious leader of the Turks, barely out of his teens, had built a fortress on the Bosphorus strait at its narrowest point, cutting off provisions to the city from the north. It was rumored that the young sultan, whose favorite stories were the biographies of Alexander and Caesar, had piled stone upon stone alongside his men.

Now the Turks were camped outside the city, preparing their final attack. From the land wall he had seen them pitch their elaborate tents amid a sea of soldiers in red turbans and glinting helmets. An enormous iron chain sealed the entrance to the harbor, the Golden Horn, but a month ago the Turks had shocked the population by transporting seventy-two ships by land, rolling them on greased logs over the hill of Pera into the harbor, trapping the Byzantine fleet. Then they flung a bridge of barrels across the Golden Horn and began to mine the city walls. The Venetians had promised to send their fleet to protect the city, but it had not appeared and soon it would be too late. Another Turkish fleet was approaching that would block the Sea of Marmara to the south.

Sprawled along the harbor, Constantinople had become a dark and lawless place. All who could had fled south before the blockade. The day before, Isaak had passed a man roasting a rodent on a small fire beneath the lower walls. Of rats there seemed these days to be an unlimited number. They stopped even in daylight in the middle of a lane, as if to remind the remaining humans that they would soon be evicted. The night before, Isaak had dreamed of his wife lying naked on a sandy shore, the tide coming in. Jolted awake, he had reached for Achmet’s Dream Key and read that if a man dreamed of his wife naked, he would see her grave.

Isaak and his family pulled their cart past a grove of olive trees beyond which rose the high wall enclosing the property of the Studion Monastery. Isaak halted by an iron gate surmounted by a double eagle, then felt his way along the wall until he came to a low door.

He took out a key, recently oiled, and inserted it into the lock. To his relief, it turned easily. He edged the door open, careful not to make a sound. His son unloaded the cart and, ducking under the lintel, passed everything inside to his father. Isaak noticed the palms of his hands were stained black by rust, as if the door were already covered in blood.

The family crouched low and hurried through the monastery garden to a small chapel. Isaak whispered instructions to his son, a young man of twenty, who crept back through the garden to get the rest of their belongings. They slipped out of the chapel toward the crypt, a square hole in the ground covered by an iron grate. As they left, Isaak passed his finger through the chapel’s holy spring and anointed his daughter’s forehead. Beside the crypt, he kept an anxious eye on the caretaker’s quarters, a cottage built against the wall at the other end of the garden. The monastery was quiet. All the monks were in the main church. He could hear the rhythmic drone of their voices praying for deliverance. His son lifted the grate and Isaak made his way gingerly down the steps, his eyes useless in the dark, hands groping for the passage he knew to be there.

The air was cool and the walls wept with damp. Isaak’s fingers felt along the slick stone, stumbling into burial niches until they found the cleft, hidden at the far end of the crypt behind a massive sarcophagus. He pulled himself through, and his son followed with their belongings. Deep under the earth, they lit torches.

Isaak returned to the garden to help his wife down the stairs, then lowered his daughter into the crypt, pressing his hand over her mouth to stifle her protests. There was a commotion below, then silence. Isaak took a last breath of the cool night air and spent a moment to consider the cold blanket of stars that would as soon crown a Muslim city as a Christian one, then moved back underground.

Behind the cleft, a tunnel led to an iron door. Isaak pushed it open. “This cistern has a passageway that goes under the city wall right to the sea,” he explained to his family, their frightened faces looming in the weak light of the flares. “The boat is docked by the Golden Gate, not far.” He hoped they would not be too late. He had remained in the city until the last minute, waiting for his partner’s ship, for a reprieve, for the promised Venetian fleet to arrive and rout the Turks.

A scrap of air tore at the flame of Isaak’s torch as he stepped inside the cistern. Stone columns rose about him, textured by marks of ancient chisels. High above, invisible beyond the arc of torchlight, was a ceiling of vaulted domes. He could just make out the glimmer of white marble, hints of their ornate capitals, and he wondered who had constructed these elaborate underground cathedrals that held the city’s water supply. Had they given refuge to the earliest Byzantines when they too were under siege? How else to explain the warren of tunnels that connected the cisterns to churches and to the palace, and burrowed secretly under the city walls to the shore.

Isaak breathed in the musty odor of decay. Below the tiled platform on which he stood, a lake of water receded into the darkness, rocking shards of light from his torch-water born in the mountains and brought overland by the aqueduct to serve the monastery. He checked to make sure the rowboats were there, tied up to the platform.

As father and son labored to carry the bundles into the cavernous room, one of the sacks fell open, revealing a gold plate, a ruby-studded chalice, and a gold incense burner. Isaak squatted down and, propping his torch against a pillar, opened the sack he was carrying. He spread a clean cloth on the tiles, then took out a purple velvet bundle heavily embroidered in gold. He undid the gold braid that tied it, revealing a simple silver gilt box, one hand’s breadth wide and two long.

He regarded the reliquary with awe. It was the reason he was here and not manning the ramparts alongside Constantine XI, his emperor. God forbid-he crossed himself-perhaps the last emperor of Byzantium. The box would remain with Isaak and, upon his death, pass to his son, to be given to his eldest son. Now he had no choice; they must take the reliquary out of the city. It must not fall into the hands of the Muslims. Travelers who had been to Cairo and Baghdad had told him that entire libraries were devoted to writings about the object lying on the velvet cloth at his feet. The Muslims knew it was here; perhaps this was the very reason the Turks were storming the city. The reliquary would make them more powerful than any weapon they currently possessed. Isaak planned to take it to Venice, where his family had connections and could safeguard it in secrecy. A future generation of Metochites sons must return it to Byzantium when the city was once again safe in Christian hands.

On the lid was an image worked in black niello of Jesus standing on a cloud, face shrouded, a tablet falling from his slack fingers. Below him sat a man with a striped turban on his head, holding a miniature model of a church in one hand, the other reaching confidently for the falling tablet. Behind the man stood an angel with powerful wings, her right hand resting protectively on his shoulder. The angel was weeping. The Greek inscription read, “Behold the Proof of Chora, Container of the Uncontainable.”

“Why is the angel crying?” His daughter had squatted down beside him, her voice magnified and oddly distorted.

Isaak thought for a moment. “I don’t know, Melisane.” He drew his fingertips across the niello figures. “It’s so old that no one knows what these pictures mean anymore.”

“Who’s that?” She pointed at the man in the turban.

“That I can tell you. This is Theodore Metochites, the great-grandfather of your grandfather,” Isaak told her.

She looked confused. “How many grandfathers is that?”

Isaak smiled and ran his hand through his daughter’s black curls. She was his child by an Abyssinian slave who had died in childbirth. Despite the objections of his family, he had acknowledged the child and taken her in.

He was aware that his son was listening too. “Theodore lived more than a hundred years ago. You’re descended from a great man. He was Grand Logothete-a minister of state and a diplomat. He was also a great scholar. Do you recognize the church he’s holding? It’s our church, Saint Savior in Chora.” Isaak put his finger on the turbaned man. “And he built it.”

His daughter traced the angel’s wings with her finger. “What’s inside?”

“It contains the Proof of God,” he answered softly. “It’s something our family has promised to guard.”

“Is God in here? He must be very small.”

Isaak smiled fondly at his daughter. “He’s very small and very big, all at the same time. God is in everything,” Isaak took his daughter’s pudgy hand and pressed it against the lid of the reliquary, “but this is the closest we will ever get to him on earth.”

They remained like that for a moment, father and daughter connected through a mystery.

“I’ll take very good care of him. I promise, Papa.”

“I know you will.”

He had never looked inside the reliquary and he had no idea what kind of proof resided within. All he knew was that he held in his hands the most powerful relic in Byzantium. It was said that one of his ancestors had brought the Proof from Abyssinia in the time of Theodore, almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Theodore had made the reliquary for it, and it had been kept in the vault of the Hagia Sophia cathedral. The emperor had charged the Metochites family with looking after it. Three weeks ago, Isaak had brought it back to the Church of Saint Savior in Chora, the church designed by Theodore, who had lived the last years of his life in the attached monastery. Michael, Isaak’s son, was now caretaker of the church.

Isaak looked up at the serious face of his son, who would henceforth bear the burden of this responsibility.

“You remember what to do?” They had been over their plan many times.

Isaak and his wife would go to fetch Isaak’s mother. Later tonight, they would row the two boats through the underground channel, board the ship sent by his Venetian business partner, and leave this doomed city. They had spotted it that morning from the sea wall: a fast, low-slung galley flying the prearranged blue banner. By some miracle, it had slipped past the approaching Turkish ships.

Along with the Proof of God, Isaak had brought their most valuable belongings-a small, ancient icon and objects made of gold and precious stones that could be traded for their lives, their passage on the boat, and their freedom. Should the family be separated and unable to board, Michael was to take his sister and the reliquary and seek refuge with Melisane’s Abyssinian relatives in the city. If the Turks took the city, Isaak believed the Abyssinians were less likely to be put to the sword than the noble families of Byzantium. The Abyssinians would protect the reliquary containing a treasure from their own land. When he was able, his son was to restore the reliquary to its rightful position or find a permanent hiding place for it.

Isaak could sense the Turks massing outside the cistern, beyond the heavy masonry of Constantinople’s walls, their armor creaking, their lances stretching to the horizon like blades of grass. The city walls groaned against their weight. He imagined he could hear the mellifluous vowels of their language fall incongruously from their harsh throats. These Muslims did not drink wine, he had heard, nor did they eat pork. He imagined they stank of horse, sweat, and leather.

The chill of the cistern crept into his marrow and he began to shiver. Behind him, his wife was weeping. He went over and put his arm around her. She looked up into his face, and in her eyes he saw the sad devotion that had flattered him early in their marriage, and of which he had foolishly tired. He kissed her forehead and whispered something in her ear. She smiled, nodded, and pressed her face against his chest. For the first time in his adult life, Isaak was afraid.

Mary, Mother of God, Container of the Uncontainable, Isaak prayed intently, protect us now.

He cocked his head and listened, as if the sound of an invasion could penetrate the stone walls and soil that separated him from the besieged city. Michael stood beside him, also listening, a stricken look on his face.

Isaak went back to the reliquary. He reached down and brushed his fingertips over his ancestor’s face in farewell, silently begging his forgiveness. In the wavering torchlight, Theodore Metochites’s serious eyes seemed to look directly at Isaak, in admonishment for leaving him in such a forsaken place. Isaak wrapped the reliquary carefully and handed it to his son. Their eyes met and Michael nodded briefly.

Isaak pulled his wool cloak tighter around his shoulders. It was time to fetch his mother. His wife would have to accompany him to the gynaeceum, the women’s quarters, as men were not permitted. He knew his father would be on the ramparts with their emperor. At that moment, he realized with anguished certainty that he would never see his father again.

Isaak embraced his son and leaned down to kiss his daughter. She turned her cheek away in pique, so Isaak let his fingers linger in her curls.

Michael kissed his mother’s hand and pressed it to his forehead.

“Come now,” Isaak said gruffly. “Enough time for that later.” He reached for his wife’s hand and drew her into the darkness. They felt their way through the tunnel, then crept noiselessly out of the crypt and through the garden into the lane.

They ran through the dark streets toward his mother’s house near the land walls. These massive fortifications, constructed in the fifth century, had withstood Turkish onslaughts in the past, as they had those by Huns, Avars, Russians, Saracens, and other invaders for a thousand years. But Isaak had heard of a new weapon fashioned for the Turks by a Frenchman, a cannone as long as five men laid head to foot, that they said could cut through walls like a scimitar through flesh. As they approached, they encountered more and more people running in the opposite direction.

A man stopped them and said urgently, “It’s started. You have to turn around.” As he ran off, he called over his shoulder, “We’re all going to the cathedral.”

A terrible cry rose from beyond the city walls, from the throats of eighty thousand men set loose. Isaak grabbed his wife’s hand and they began to run. An unearthly thunder smashed the air and, a few moments later, a great blast of exploding masonry. The screams of men tore the night. Behind them, the bells of the ancient cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the church of the Divine Wisdom, began to toll.