The Gathering of the Storm

8

Thus Aetius and Galla arrived together in the Golden City of Constantinople.

How to describe this majestic metropolis, this city of gleaming towers and golden domes, of august monuments and smooth marble pavements, situated so superbly on the Golden Horn, overlooking the Bosphorus, that very nexus of two continents of Europe and Asia, as if both knelt as tributaries before her haughty feet? After Rome, I loved Constantinople above all other places. In its newness and its relative innocence beside the sunbright Sea of Marmara, I confess that sometimes this New Rome made the Old seem dark, and bloody, and corrupt, stained by the long centuries, and by the dark desires of men.

At this time, Constantinople was a city of a million people, presiding over the finest natural harbour in the world. Founded by Constantine the Great nearly two centuries earlier, on the site of the ancient Greek fishing-port of Byzantium, it was declared the new capital of the Roman Empire and named after the God-Emperor himself. Constantine was never a man for false modesty.

The proud new capital was a city of fantastic wealth and monumental architecture. The richness of its seas was legendary. You had only to throw a net into the water, it was said, and you would haul in a weighty catch. And with its free hospitals, state-employed doctors and teachers, its subsidised entertainments for the masses, elaborate postal services, rates, taxes, customs and excise, street lighting, price-fixing, and its inexhaustible obsession with sport, it was a very modern city indeed.

Three things united the Byzantines above all: the Christian faith, Roman citizenship, and a passion for chariot racing. This last meant that everybody, from the emperor downwards, was either a Blue or a Green, depending on which chariot team they supported. And woe betide anyone bumping into a crowd of rival fans in a dark alley on race-day

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It was also a city of endless theological disputes. Whereas, historically, most mobs have rioted from hunger, injustice or cruel oppression, Byzantine mobs rioted over fine points of Christian theology, or minute changes to the liturgy. In vexation, various emperors involved themselves in these disputes, trying to comprehend the complexities and suggesting new doctrines which might unite the bitterly opposing factions. ‘Aphthartodocetism’ was one such doctrine, proposed by old Theodosius the Great, but it failed to catch on. The Christians remained just as factious and turbulent as the chariot teams.

Had it not been only a few years earlier, in the Year of Grace 415, that the brilliant Hypatia was butchered in the streets of Alexandria by a mob of savage Christians, urged on by Bishop Cyril himself? Hypatia was one of the most brilliant women of her age, an astronomer, poet, physician, and philosopher. But a pagan. She had never accepted the deity of the Jewish carpenter, and could outwit and defeat any who argued against her, with the scintillating brilliance and deftness of a Cretan blade. At last the Christians grew sick of her clever, articulate, erudite scepticism – and perhaps her intellectual superiority, her high-minded passion, the purer fire that burned within her, her ardour for the truth, and her faith in things other than the primitive mystery cults of Palestine. Her unshakeable sweet reasonableness must certainly have enraged these devotees of their own blazing irrationality. So they set upon her in the street, and beat her to death. Then, still unsatisfied, these professors of the religion of brotherly love scraped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and heaped the remains of bleeding meat in the gutter for the dogs to eat as they had once devoured the flesh of the wicked Jezebel, according to their own blood-stained Scriptures.

Even the theologians complained there was too much theology around. That great doctor of the Eastern Church, St Gregory of Nazianzus, said despairingly that you couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread in Constantinople without becoming embroiled in a theological disputation with the baker regarding the true relationship between the Father and the Son. Likewise, he continued, ‘The money-changer will talk about the Begotten and the Unbegotten instead of giving you your money, and if you want a bath, the bath-keeper assures you that the Son surely proceeds from nothing.’ Poor Gregory was made unwilling patriarch of the city by old Emperor Theodosius, but he lasted only a year before he fled back to his native village and became a hermit.

In the streets between the crowded red-tiled houses, arguing about theology you would hear a Babel of different voices: Greek and Syrian, Latin and Hebrew, Persian and Armenian. There were even a few Goths serving in the imperial armies by this time; but with their long ungainly limbs and horrid ruddy faces, their coarse blond hair and cold blue eyes, they were widely despised as racial inferiors.

The rich rode in carriages under fringed canopies, drawn by pairs of milk-white mules. Camel caravans crowded the marketplaces, having come from Persia, India, or along the silk route from China. (Although in time this trade would drop off markedly when an enterprising merchant smuggled some silkworm eggs out of Soghdiana, and Byzantine silk production began.) Grain came via Alexandria from the plentiful granaries of Egypt, while timber, furs and barbaric amber jewellery came south out of the steppes of Scythia and the forests of Germany.

In the city’s Forum stood a gigantic statue of Apollo topped with the head of Constantine, on a column of red porphyry. Out of the Forum led the high street of Constantinople, the Mese, running a full three miles to the Golden Gate in the great wall of the city. The Mese was where the noble lords and ladies of Byzantium came to do their shopping, at the most lavish jewellers and perfumers, in cool marble arcades piled high with fabulously expensive bolts of coloured silk, or at the little stalls of artisan leatherworkers, where they liked to buy the softest belts and the most delicate purses made from the hides of aborted kid-goats. For it is well known that the rich always have exquisite taste in such things.

Everywhere there was bustle and wealth and plenty.

Unless, of course, you were poor.

The most wretched and destitute inhabitants of the city survived in foul-smelling alleys where kites picked over the piles of rubbish and rats bit their children at night. The true nature of the Son mattered little to them, and jewellery and silks were very far from them.

Galla arrived on a day when the city was still in a warm hubbub of self-congratulatory triumph, after the defeat of the ever-threatening Persian armies to the east, and the subsequent marriage of young Emperor Theodosius II to his beautiful bride.

Theodosius was Galla’s nephew, and she was fond of him. He was at this time in his early twenties: gentle, scholarly, a good horseman, and in other fields no more than mildly incompetent. But he had some capable generals, and the mighty Sassanid dynasty of Persia had only recently found that the Eastern Roman legions were still more than a match for them.

It was Theodosius’ fearsome, pious, grimly virginal older sister, Pulcheria, who exerted the most influence in the Byzantine court.

Rumour flourishes in courts and palaces as nowhere else. It was said that, despite her loudly advertised virginity, Pulcheria seemed to spend rather a lot of time closeted with her favourite saints and holy men in her private chambers. But most of these rumours arose among the Nestorian faction – her theological enemies, for reasons too tiresome to go into – and can be dismissed like the rumours of Galla’s incest with her brother.

It was in the winter of 414 that the twelve-year old Theodosius had succeeded to the throne of the Eastern Empire. Pulcheria, then barely fifteen years of age, was declared official guardian of her brother and invested with the title of ‘Augusta’, an empty honour, so it was thought. But from that moment the adolescent girl began to rule, and she effectively held the reins of power over the teeming, hugely wealthy Eastern Empire for the next thirty-six years.

Her brother, as he grew in years and wisdom, was no fool, as I have said: no Honorius. Scholarly, gentle and humane, he had a love of handwriting in a variety of beautiful and elaborate scripts, so that he became nicknamed ‘Theodosius Kalligraphos’. All the Eastern emperors had nicknames in this way. Another had had the misfortune to be nicknamed ‘Constantine Copronymos’, on account of his having unfortuitously shat in the font when he was being baptised as an infant.

Under Pulcheria’s unsmiling influence, the Imperial Palace had grown into a virtual nunnery. All males were scrupulously excluded from the female quarters; and in an elaborate and lengthy ritual in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, amid much chanting and incense, she and her sisters, Arcadia and Marina, dedicated their virginity to God. Inscribed tablets of gold and gems were offered up before the altar, as kind of celestial promissory notes. Within hours the vulgar streetraders and hucksters in the Agora were chuckling at the news, saying that this was not much of an offering, since none but God would want their virginity. It was sad but true: the emperor’s sisters, with their long, cold faces, and their flat fronts apparently uninterrupted by anything resembling breasts, were not exactly the adornments of their age.

Disapproving of all indulgences of the flesh as she did, Pulcheria could hardly be filled with joy when a certain new girl came dancing and laughing into this gloomy, curtained court: the adornment of her age, beyond a doubt. She who was to be empress. Even her name was beautiful: Athenais. Her laughter, her brilliant eyes, her wit and smiles, her glossy black hair tumbling in waves about her shoulders. The arch of her brows, the curve of her slender neck, those eyes like black honey, meeting yours beneath those raven lashes. The sway of her hips as she sashayed away from you, having just silenced you with some teasing barb, murmured from those full carmine lips.

Athenais: the most beautiful girl I ever saw.