Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (57 page)

I

Istanbul is the fourth largest city in Europe, and the largest in Turkey. It straddles the waters of the magnificent Bosporus, its ancient suburbs lying on the European shore and the newer eastern suburbs on the Asian side. Founded as
Byzantion
in the seventh century BC by Greek colonists from Megara, it changed its name to Constantinople in AD 330, when it became the capital of the Roman Empire, and to Istanbul in 1453, when it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Since it commands the only passage for shipping between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, its strategic and commercial importance is unsurpassed. Its historical monuments include, from the Greek period, the Serpentine Column, which has stood in the centre of the hippodrome for nearly 2000 years; from the Roman period, the cathedral of St Sophia, the Aqueduct of Valens and the matchless Theodosian Walls; and from the Ottoman period, the sultan’s Topkapi Palace and the Suleymaniye Mosque. The Golden Horn, the natural harbour which first attracted Greeks, Romans and Turks alike, is the heart of the city. It provides Europe’s closest view of Asia. The posters say ‘
Hos¸ kars¸ılamak türkiye
’ (‘Welcome to Turkey’).
¹

Anyone wishing to look deeper into the life of Istanbul will probably be told to turn to the novels of Orhan Pamuk, and in particular to his
Istanbul: Memories and the City
. In the citation for his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy wrote: ‘In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’:

A lovely spring breeze was wafting through the balcony’s grand doors, carrying the scent of linden trees. The lights of the city shone on the Golden Horn below. Even the slums and shanty-towns of Kasimpasa looked beautiful. I thought how happy I was, even feeling as if this was a prelude to yet greater happiness. The gravity of what had transpired with Fusun confused me, but I told myself that everyone has his secrets, fears, and moments of worry. No one could guess how many of these elegant guests felt similarly uneasy or carried secret, spiritual wounds.
²

Pamuk certainly writes of Istanbul’s pains and of his own inner life with emotional precision. Of himself, he says: ‘I am the living dead’; and of his hometown: ‘Istanbul is no longer a city of consequence… It is an insular little place sinking in its own ruins.’
³
In this introspective mode, his writing has depth, and his interest in varied social milieux and competing intellectual traditions gives it breadth, too.

Yet in some respects, Pamuk’s vision is surprisingly blinkered. Readers will search in vain for many of the symbols and references which might be conjured up by such a rich history. His much-vaunted exploration of ‘a vast cultural history’ turns out to be entirely Turkocentric. ‘The East’ of his experience means the flotsam of the late Ottoman Empire. ‘The West’ stands for Atatürk’s secular, Europeanized, national republic and its foreign sources of inspiration. The past, it seems, goes no further back than the world of his parents and grandparents. Pamuk’s gloomy artistry is the work of a modern
Istanbullu
with marked historical myopia: a writer blind to all but the most recent remains of what went before.

Throughout 2010, together with the Ruhr region in Germany and Pécs in Hungary, Istanbul served as one of the three chosen European Capitals of Culture. Having created the ‘Istanbul 2010 ECOC Agency’, it participated with energy and elan under the slogan of ‘
Avrupa Kültür Bas¸kenti
’. Hundreds of events took place spanning the visual arts, music, film, literature, theatre, traditional arts, urban culture, education, cultural heritage, museums, tourism and sports. The year-long festival opened on 10 January with a rally in the Golden Horn Congress Centre attended by the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘  an. ‘I salute everyone: from Emperor Constantine to Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror,’ Mr Erdog˘an said, ‘from Sultan Suleyman all the way to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who have since its foundation ornamented Istanbul like an embroidery.’
⁴
Proceedings ended twelve months later at a closing ceremony addressed by State Minister Egemen Bag˘is¸. ‘The world has re-discovered Istanbul with this project,’ the minister said boldly; ‘Istanbul is [not just] a European city; it is the city which shaped European Culture.’
⁵

II

Byzantium – whose English name was taken from the Latin, not the Greek – is a piece of historical reality; despite its changing appellations, it has had a continuous and evolving existence since the day of its foundation. The ‘Byzantine Empire’, in contrast, is no more than an intellectual construct, an abstraction, some might say, that never really existed. Promoted by the
philosophes
of the Enlightenment – the Byzantines themselves continued to call their territories the ‘Roman Empire’ – it is a label of convenience invented long after the state in question had disappeared, a substitute for another artificial name – the ‘Greek Empire’ – which some historians (including Gibbon) preferred. Its inventors disliked theocratic states in principle, and could not stomach the idea of a Roman Empire that was not ruled by Rome.

The translation of the Roman Empire from a state whose centre of gravity lay in Italy to one based further east took place very gradually. Its division into Western and Eastern sub-states, each with its own emperor, was introduced by Diocletian in AD 285; the choice of Byzantium as the new capital was made by Constantine I in 330; the Western Empire collapsed in 476; and the definitive loss of Italy occurred in stages between the initial invasion of the Lombards in 567 and their much delayed entry into Rome in 772. This was the latest point, 440 years after the founding of Constantinople, when the Empire can be said to have shed its former western provinces for good, and when, looking at its history in retrospect, westerners felt it had ceased to be ‘theirs’. Yet another thousand years would pass before the Enlightenment concocted a new designation for this political entity with which the ‘West’ no longer identified.

The Roman Empire was never in fact primarily western, nor purely Roman. The Romans had conquered Greece and the Greek-speaking Hellenic world (including Byzantion) in their republican days, long before they intervened in more distant places like Gaul, Germany or Britain; and the intermingling of Greek and Roman traditions played a fundamental role in all subsequent developments. Shortly after the death of the first
Augustus
, Octavius Caesar (r. 726–767 AUC: 27 BC–ad 14), the wealthiest and most populous imperial province was in Hellenized Egypt. Christianity, the future imperial religion, came out of the East in the same era, and four out of the five Church patriarchs would reside there. When the forty-ninth emperor, Diocletian, divided the Empire into two halves, he himself chose to be
Augustus
of the East; and when the fifty-sixth decided to move the capital from the Tiber to the Bosporus, he did so in response to a well-established political, commercial and cultural shift.

From then on, the Roman Empire grew ever more oriental, both in geography and civilization. As from 380, under the sixty-sixth emperor, Theodosius I (r. 379–95) Christianity gained a religious monopoly, soon causing ‘Caesaro-papism’ to become the norm. The
basileus
(emperor) ruled both as
autocrator
and as
pontifex maximus
; Church and State were inseparable. In the fifth century, the provinces of Britannia, Gallia, Germania and (northern) Africa were overrun by ‘barbarian’ hordes; in the sixth, despite a brief resurgence under the eighty-eighth emperor, Justinian (r. 527–65), Hispania and Italia began to peel away. The Empire was being reduced to what in modern terms might be called the Balkans and the Levant. In the seventh century, as the Lombards bit off most of Italy, the first attacks were launched by the rising power of Islam, with whose adherents the imperials would fight to the death for more than 800 years. In the eleventh century the Great Schism cut the Empire off from the Latin Church of the West, creating the lasting division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. All the while, despite their use of the Greek language, the Empire’s rulers and subjects continued to think of themselves as Romans and to call their homeland either
Romania
or
Pragmata Romaion
, the ‘Land of the Romans’. This was the offence for which Westerners in general, and the
philosophes
in particular, could not forgive them.

To all who have been seduced by the concept of ‘Western Civilization’, therefore, the Byzantine Empire appears as the antithesis – the butt, the scapegoat, the pariah, the undesirable ‘other’.
⁶
Although it formed part of a story that lasted longer than any other kingdom or empire in Europe’s past, and contains in its record a full panoply of all the virtues, vices and banalities that the centuries can muster, it has been subjected in modern times to a campaign of denigration of unparalleled virulence and duration. The fashion, if not initiated by Voltaire, was certainly inflated and disseminated by him. ‘
Byzance
’, wrote the Sage of Ferney in 1751, was ‘a story of obscure brigands’, and ‘a disgrace to the human mind’.
⁷

Montesquieu wrote an early work on the decadence of the late Roman Empire, for which he invented the adjective ‘byzantine’ in its modern sense. His chief contribution to political thought lay in his definition of ‘the separation of powers’; and since Byzantium knew no such separation, he was necessarily hostile. ‘Henceforth’, he wrote after dropping the Roman name, ‘the Greek Empire is nothing more than a tissue of revolts, seditions and perfidies… Revolutions created more revolutions, so that the effect became the cause.’
⁸
The flail was then taken up by Georg Hegel, founder of the modern philosophy of history. ‘Byzantium’, Hegel opined, ‘exhibits a millennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weakness, baseness, and want of principle: a repulsive and hence an uninteresting picture.’
⁹
Such was the Enlightenment’s prevailing wisdom. Did the Empire of Augustus know no crimes?

Yet predictably no one matched the great Edward Gibbon in the eloquence of his disdain. Thanks to Gibbon, the whole of Byzantine history came to be conceived as the inexorable progress of Decline, varied only by the welcome moment of its Fall. Gibbon’s notorious chapter 48, which traces the reigns of the Byzantine emperors from Heraclius (no. 93, r. 610–41) to Alexius V (no. 151, r. 1204), overflows with the relish of his wilful prejudice. The Greek empire, Gibbon wrote in his chapter 48, saw the triumph of barbarism and superstition; ‘[its fate] has been compared to that of the Rhine, which loses itself in the sands before its waters can mingle with the ocean’.
¹⁰
Or again:

[T]he subjects of the Byzantine Empire, who assume and dishonour the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes… on the throne, in the camp, in the schools, we search, perhaps with fruitless diligence, the names and characters that may deserve to be rescued from oblivion.

The negativity is relentless:

Of a space of eight hundred years, the four first centuries are overspread with a cloud interrupted by some faint and broken rays of historic light… The four last centuries are exempt from the reproach of penury: and with the Comnenian family the historic muse of Constantinople again revives, but her apparel is gaudy, her motions are without elegance or grace. A succession of priests, or courtiers, treads in each other’s footsteps in the same path of servitude and superstition: their views are narrow, their judgment is feeble or corrupt: and we close the volume of copious barrenness, still ignorant of the causes of events, the characters of the actors, and the manners of the times.

The Gibbonian lash spares none of the sixty rulers mentioned in that long chapter. On the subject of the Empress Irene, for example, the last of the Isaurian dynasty (no. 110, r. 797–802), who had blinded her son (and about whom Voltaire wrote a play), his outrage assumes cosmic proportions:

The most bigoted orthodoxy has justly execrated the unnatural mother, who may not easily be paralleled in the history of crimes. To her bloody deed superstition has attributed a subsequent darkness of seventeen days, during which many vessels in mid-day were driven from their course, as if the sun, a globe of fire so vast and so remote, could sympathise with the atoms of a revolving planet. On earth, the crime of Irene was left five years unpunished; her reign was crowned with external splendour; and if she could silence the voice of conscience, she neither heard nor regarded the reproaches of mankind. The Roman world bowed to the government of a female; and as she moved through the streets of Constantinople the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot before [her] golden chariot… But these patricians were for the most part eunuchs; and their black ingratitude justified, on this occasion, the popular hatred and contempt.