The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Read online

  His own decision to transform it yet again seems to have been taken towards the end of 324, some six months or so before the Council of Nicaea. Inevitably, when his new city of Constantinople became both the centre of the late Roman world and the most splendid metropolis known to mankind, stories were to grow up - encouraged, very probably, by Constantine himself - about the supernatural circumstances attending its foundation: how the Emperor had first decided to build his new capital on the plain of Troy, but how God had come to him by night and led him instead to Byzantium;1 how, when he hesitated at Chalcedon, a flight of eagles had flown down from the mountains, picked up the builders' tools and materials and carried them in their talons to

  1 Sozomcn, Ecclesiastical History, II, j.

  the mouth of the Bosphorus; how, as William of Malmesbury tells us, Constantine dreamt of a wrinkled old woman who was suddenly transformed into a young and beautiful girl, and how a few nights later the dead Pope Sylvester appeared in another dream and explained that the woman was Byzantium herself, whom he was destined similarly to rejuvenate: and finally how he personally traced out the line of the walls with his spear -replying, when his companions showed astonishment at its length, with the words: 'I shall continue until he who walks ahead of me bids me stop.'1 In fact, however, there would have been no call for such supernatural guidance; at that time the Emperor was merely planning a commemorative city on the model of Adrianople or Caesarea, bearing his name and serving, by its sheer magnificence, as a perpetual reminder of his greatness and glory to future generations. A fine city, to be sure; but nothing more.

  What decided him to make it the capital of his Empire was, almost certainly, his second visit to Rome. His disillusionment with that city was now complete: its republican and pagan traditions could clearly have no place in the new Christian Empire that he was so carefully shaping. Intellectually and culturally, it was becoming calcified, growing more and more out of touch with the new and progressive thinking of the Hellenistic world. The Roman academies and libraries were no longer any match for those of Alexandria, Antioch or Pergamum. In the economic field, too, a similar trend was apparent. Not only in Rome but throughout much of the Italian peninsula, malaria was on the increase and populations were dwindling; during a century in which the financial problems facing the whole Empire frequently brought it to the verge of collapse, the incomparably greater economic resources of what was known as the pars orientalis constituted an attraction which no government could afford to ignore.

  Strategically, the disadvantages of the old capital were more serious still, and had been for some time: none of Diocletian's tetrarchs, for example, had dreamt of living there. Already for the best part of a century, the principal dangers to imperial security had been concentrated along the eastern borders: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube, the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and - most menacing of all -the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire by now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. Less than seventy years before, in AD 260, the Roman Emperor Valerian had actually been taken prisoner by the Persian King

  1 The Constantinian walls actually followed a line a little over a mile inside the Theodosian walls that we know today. No trace of them survives above the ground.

  Shapur I and had spent the rest of his life in captivity, suffering the ultimate indignity of being regularly used as the royal mounting-block. In 298, admittedly, Galerius had settled the score by gaining a decisive victory over King Narses, sealing it with a forty-year treaty of peace; but this treaty had only a dozen years more to run, and after its expiry a renewal of warfare was a virtual certainty. In such an event what possible part, it might be asked, could Rome be expected to play? The plain truth was that the focus of the Empire - indeed, of the whole civilized world -had shifted irrevocably to the East. Italy had become a backwater.

  There were other, less material considerations too - among them a widespread belief that Rome's days were numbered. The Sibylline oracle had prophesied - in one of those appalling puns so beloved of the ancients -that the mighty Roma would one day be reduced to a rhume or mule-track, and many people feared that the end of the city would also bring about the end of the world. This idea had been developed in several literary works, among them the Divine Institutes of Lactantius - who, during his years as tutor to the Caesar Crispus, would have had countless chances of discussing it with the Emperor himself; and Constantine, who was even by the standards of his day an unusually superstitious man, may well have believed that by founding - in the name of Christ the Saviour - a 'New Rome' in which the spirit of the old would somehow be immanent, he might also be giving the entire world a new lease of life.

  This superstitiousness was still more in evidence when the time came for the city's consecration. Only after agonizing discussions with his augurs and astrologers did the Emperor designate, as the most auspicious day for the ceremony, 4 November 328, 'in the first year of the 276th Olympiad, when the sun was in the constellation of the Archer and at the hour dominated by the Crab'. The rites then performed - in which we know that the pagan High Priest Praetextus and the neo-platonist philosopher Sopater both played an important part - were by no means exclusively Christian; the contemporary accounts leave us with a clear impression that Constantine was once again hedging his bets, seeking blessings from all possible sources in the hope of securing a blanket benediction for the city that was to bear his name. There is even a hint of the same attitude in those famous words quoted above, 'I shall continue until he who walks ahead of me bids me to stop.' Who, one is tempted to ask - and once again Gibbon's phrase is irresistible - who was 'this extraordinary conductor'? Constantine, so far as we know, never identified him - perhaps because he was not too sure himself.

  The members of the imperial suite whose questions prompted so gnomic a reply can be forgiven their concern; for the walls that the Emperor so confidently traced - running some two and a half miles, in a sweeping convex arc, between points now approximately marked by the Orthodox Patriarchate on the Golden Horn and the Samatya Gate on the Marmara shore - enclosed an area well over five times more extensive than its predecessor. Clearly a city of such a size would take many years to create; the New Rome, like the Old, could not be built in a day. But Constantine had already decreed that the ceremony of formal dedication should coincide with his silver jubilee in the early summer of 330 - only a year and a half away - so construction work continued at a furious rate, concentrating above all at the eastern end of the peninsula, on and around the old acropolis.

  The focal point here was the Milion, or First Milestone. It consisted of four triumphal arches forming a square and supporting a cupola, above which was set the most venerable Christian relic of all - the True Cross itself, sent back by the Empress Helena from Jerusalem a year or two before. From it all the distances in the Empire were measured; it was, in effect, the centre of the world. A little to the east of it, on a site occupied in former times by a shrine of Aphrodite, rose the first great Christian church of the new capital, dedicated not to any saint or martyr but to the Holy Peace of God, St Eirene. A few years later this church was to be joined - and somewhat overshadowed - by a larger and still more splendid neighbour, St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom; but for the time being it had no rival. A quarter of a mile or so away from it towards the Marmara stood Constantine's huge Hippodrome, in the central spina of which was erected one of the most ancient classical trophies in the city - the so-called 'Serpent Column' brought by Constantine from Delphi, where it had been erected in the Temple of Apollo by thirty-one Greek cities in gratitude for their victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC.1 Half-way along its eastern side, the imperial box gave direct access by a spiral staircase to that vast complex of reception halls, government offices, domestic apartments, baths, barracks and parade grounds that was the Palace.

  Directly westward from the Milion ran a broad thoroughfare, already begun by Severus, known
as the Mese; and where this crossed the old Severan walls the Emperor laid out a magnificent new forum, oval in

  1 The heads of the three intertwined bronze serpents are believed to have been chopped off by a drunken member of the Polish Embassy to the Sublime Porte in 1700; a part of one of them was recovered in 1847 and can be admired in the Archaeological Museum.

  shape - it was probably inspired by the somewhat similar one at Gerasa (Jerash) in Arabia - and paved entirely in marble. At its centre stood a great hundred-foot column of porphyry, brought from Heliopolis (the City of the Sun) in Egypt, itself standing on a twenty-foot marble plinth. Within this plinth had been deposited a number of remarkable relics, including the hatchet with which Noah had built the ark, the baskets and remains of the loaves with which Christ had fed the multitude, St Mary Magdalen's jar of ointment and the figure of Athene brought back by Aeneas from Troy. On the summit stood a statue. The body was that of an Apollo by Phidias; but the head, which was surrounded by a metal halo with representations of the sun's beams radiating from it, was that of Constantine himself. The right hand carried a sceptre, while in the left was an orb in which had been placed a fragment of the True Cross.1

  Once again, Christian and pagan elements are combined; but this time Apollo, Sol Invictus and Jesus Christ all seem subordinated to a new supreme being - the Emperor Constantine. We shall never know for certain, but the existing evidence surely points to the fact that by the last decade of the Emperor's life he was rapidly giving way to religious megalomania. From being God's chosen instrument it was but a short step to being God himself, that summus deus in whom all other Gods and other religions were subsumed.

  Beyond the forum, there was as yet relatively little building: the Mese turned north-west, and after running a mile or so through open fields split into two, the left-hand branch leading towards Thessalonica, the right-hand towards Adrianople. Around the Palace, the Church and the Hippodrome, however, tens of thousands of labourers and artisans worked day and night; and, thanks to the wholesale plunder by which the towns of Europe and Asia were deprived of their finest statues, trophies and works of art, it was already a fine and noble city - though not yet a very large one - that was dedicated, as Constantine had determined that it should be, in a special ceremony that marked the climax of his silver jubilee celebrations.

  The festivities, which continued for forty days and nights, may well have included the first of those extraordinary annual exhibitions of

  i The Column of Constantino still stands - but only just. After an accident in 416 it was bound together with iron hoops (renewed by Sultan Mustafa III in 1701). In 1106 the Emperor's statue was blown down in a gale, and later in the same century the capital was replaced by Manuel Comnenus. The monument also sustained serious damage by fire on several occasions, which is why the English have usually known it as the Burnt Column; the Turks prefer to call it the Hooped Column By any name it is a pitiful sight today.

  330

  Emperor-worship which, in later years, regularly marked the birthday of the city. On these occasions virtually the whole populace would throng to the Hippodrome to watch a sumptuous procession, the centrepiece of which was another colossal statue of Constantine, this time fashioned of gilded wood and holding in its left hand a small representation of the Tycbe, or genius of the city. This was solemnly carried in a triumphal car on a circuit of the theatre with an escort of soldiers in full ceremonial dress, each carrying a lighted taper. As it passed, all would bow; and when it arrived opposite the imperial box the Emperor himself would rise and make a deep obeisance.

  Whether or not Constantine ever adored his own likeness in this manner is uncertain. From the few facts that have come down to us, the general impression is that the Christian element in the dedicatory celebrations was a good deal more in evidence than it had been for the consecration eighteen months before. At last, as the forty days reached their culmination, the Emperor attended High Mass in St Irene, while the pagan population prayed for his prosperity and that of the city in such temples as he had authorized for their use.1 It is with this Mass, at which the city was formally dedicated to the God of the Christians, that the history of Constantinople really begins - and, with it, that of the Byzantine Empire.

  The date was 11 May 330. It was, we are credibly informed, a Monday.

  Only half a dozen years before, Byzantium had been just another small Greek town, with nothing other than its superb site to distinguish it from a thousand others across the length of Europe; now, reborn and renamed, it was the 'New Rome' - its official appellation (though never generally adopted) proudly carved on a stone pillar in the recently completed law courts. By now, moreover, Constantine had made it abundantly clear that this was to be no empty title. The old Rome, to be sure, was never actively made to suffer for its relegation to secondary status: its people kept all their ancient privileges, continuing to enjoy their free issue of bread and other commodities. Its trade, too, went on as before; the port of Ostia remained busy. But several of the old Roman senatorial families were already beginning to trickle away to Constantinople, lured by the promise of magnificent palaces on the Bosphorus

  1 Constantine is known to have given authority for two of these, one dedicated to the Tyehe and one, close by the Hippodrome, to the Dioscuri - Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins; and there may well have been others, quite apart from several remaining from former times.

  to say nothing of extensive estates in Thrace, Bithynia and Pontus; while a larger and infinitely more sumptuous Senate House had risen in the new capital to accommodate them in a second, Constantinopolitan Senate - the clari - which was to function in parallel to that of the clarissimi in Rome.

  Meanwhile all the cities of the Empire were ransacked for works of art with which the growing city was to be adorned - preference being normally given to temple statues of the ancient gods, since by removing them from their traditional shrines and setting them up in public, un-consecrated places for aesthetic rather than religious purposes, Constantine could strike a telling blow at the old pagan faith. Among the most important appropriations were the Zeus from Dodona, the Athene from Lindos - though this may have been taken by Theodosius the Great half a century later - and the Apollo from Delphi; but these were accompanied by some thousands of other, lesser sculptures of unknown description and unrecorded provenance. The speed of the new city's transformation seemed to its inhabitants, native and immigrant alike, almost a miracle in itself1 - the more so in that the Emperor was simultaneously engaged on another vast work of self-commemoration at Cirte in Numidia (which he had decided to call by his own name, Constantine) and a complete reconstruction, in honour of his mother, of the little town of Drepanum on the Asiatic shore of the Marmara which he had named, predictably, Helenopolis.

  Meanwhile in 327 Helena herself, with all the zeal of a passionate convert, had set off at the age of seventy-two for the Holy Land, where Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem took her on a tour of the principal shrines and where, according to tradition, she found the Cross in a cistern beneath a temple to Aphrodite - distinguishing it from those of the two thieves by laying it on a dying woman, who was miraculously restored to health. Eusebius, curiously enough, while writing at some length about the Empress's journey and her benefactions to the various churches, fails to mention this momentous event; on the other hand we find Macarius's second successor, Bishop Cyril - who was himself, as a very young man, almost certainly in Jerusalem at the time - speaking of

  1 'A particular description, composed about a century after its foundation, enumerates a capitol or school of learning, a circus, two theatres, eight public and one hundred and fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticoes, five granaries, eight aqueducts or reservoirs of water, four spacious halls for the meetings of the senate or courts of justice, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and four thousand, three hundred and eighty-eight houses which, for their size or beauty, deserved to be distinguished from the multitude of plebeian habitations' (Gibbon,
Chap. XVII).

  it only a quarter of a century later as if it were common knowledge. Further corroboration is provided by a significant action of Constantine himself: soon after the Cross arrived in his new capital, he sent a piece of it to Rome, to be placed in the old Sessorian Palace which his mother had always occupied during her visits to the city and which he now ordered to be converted into a church. Still known as S. Croce in Gerusalemme, the building has been indissolubly associated with St Helena ever since.1

  The Empress, Eusebius reports, having been granted by her son 'authority over the imperial treasury, to use and dispense monies according to her own will and discretion in every case', was taking full advantage of her prerogative. Thanks to her, endowments were provided for the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and that of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, together with others at Mamre (the shrine near Hebron associated with Abraham), Tyre and Antioch; most important of all, however, was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where Helena gave new impetus to the ambitious building programme which her son had initiated in 325 to mark the successful conclusion of the Council of Nicaea. As a result of this undertaking, the whole uneven surface of the rock which surrounded the Tomb was levelled to form a vast courtyard, with a portico along one side and colonnades around the other three. At one end was the Tomb itself, enclosed in a small circular aedicule known as the Anastasis; immediately to the east stood Constantine's new basilica, with two aisles along each side and a deep atrium running across its entire breadth. Its outer walls were of finely polished stone, while those of the interior were covered with revetments of polychrome marble, rising to a gilded and coffered roof.