Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (59 page)

But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam…

The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries:

‘The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor…’

Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The [166th] Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared.

Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque:

‘The
muezzin
ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the
ezan
or public invitation… The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the
namaz
of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. “The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch song on the towers of Afrasiab.”  ’
³²

One thousand, one hundred and twenty-three years had passed since the refounding of the city by the Emperor Constantine: 2,211 years since the Megarans had laid the first stone.

III

Describing or summarizing Europe’s greatest ‘vanished kingdom’ is almost too much to contemplate. Like European history in general, the story is too long, too rich and too complex; and if Orhan Pamuk is typical of his compatriots, it is virtually forgotten among the Byzantines’ most immediate successors. Despite their hard-won achievements, professional historians struggle with the enormity of their task. Summary evocations are perhaps best left to poets, especially to one who was once the pupil of J. B. Bury:

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
³³

Borussia

Watery Land of the Prusai

(1230–1945)

I

Kaliningrad is the most westerly city of the Russian Federation. Capital of the surrounding autonomous
oblast
or ‘administrative district’, it was named in Soviet times after one of Stalin’s many disreputable henchmen, Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), sometime president of the USSR. It lies on the Pregolya river, 30 miles from the Baltic coast and the ex-Soviet naval base of Baltiysk. The city centre, which straddles a number of islands, was extensively damaged during the Second World War, and the ruins of its historic buildings were long left uncleared by the controlling Soviet military. Now, restored to civilian rule, Kaliningrad possesses the full infrastructure of a modern, developing city: an international airport, a direct rail link to Moscow, a business park, an industrial zone and a university. Its ex-Soviet population of 430,000 consists almost entirely of Russian-speakers drawn from all the former Soviet republics.
¹

Thanks to wartime devastation, grandiose plans were drawn up in 1945 to design ‘a Russian and socialist city’ worthy of ‘our Soviet Man, victor and creator… of a new, progressive culture’. The chief architect, Dmitri Navalikhan, assumed that building would start from a tabula rasa, that is, on a site from which all traces of the past had been erased; the style was to be a ‘New Brutalism’. In practice, nothing so ambitious proved possible. Navalikhan’s plans still lie in the Moscow archives, the object of art historians’ curiosity.
²
When rebuilding did start, attempts were made to demonstrate that Kaliningrad was an ancient Russian city returning to its roots. The first statue to be erected, in 1946, was to the eighteenth-century soldier Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, whose father had briefly served as governor of the city during the Seven Years War. Only then was the main street, the
Leninskiy Prospekt
, laid out from the railway station to the city centre, and lined with statues of Lenin, Stalin, Kalinin, Kutuzov and Pushkin.

Kaliningrad’s present, anomalous situation is the result of the simultaneous collapse of both the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself. Having been assigned after the Second World War to the Russian SFSR,
*
the Kaliningrad
oblast
served as the linchpin of Soviet strategic defences in the Baltic region. But in 1990–91, when adjoining parts of Poland and Lithuania left the Soviet bloc, it suddenly found itself cut off from the rest of Russia, and the demise of the USSR rendered the concept of a Soviet military zone redundant. Surrounded by foreign countries, the stranded Russian enclave, with a total population close to 1 million, became a sad anachronism.

The full history of Kaliningrad’s unenviable fate in the 1990s has still to be written, but there can be no doubt that it was characterized by a large measure of neglect and an almost total lack of financial investment. Submarines of the ex-Soviet fleet rusted at their moorings; ex-Soviet soldiers and their dependants lost all means of providing for themselves; environmental pollution mushroomed. The ensuing vacuum was filled by social, economic and political pathologies of all sorts. Crime syndicates flourished. A scheme was afoot to declare independence from Moscow. In 1998, to retake control, Moscow declared a state of emergency.
³

At the very end of the century, concerted efforts were made to rescue the failed city by the rehabilitation both of its physical infrastructure and its social fabric. Modern buildings were constructed, eyesores were cleared, roads mended and trees planted. Drug gangs were rounded up, protection rings closed down, and foreign smuggling stifled. The aim was to turn Kaliningrad into the hub of a Special Economic Zone, a ‘Baltic Hong Kong’ attracting new enterprises, casinos and tourist hotels. The European Union, eager to contain the danger on its borders, offered far-reaching advice and co-operation.
⁴

In the course of Vladimir Putin’s two presidential terms, from 2000 to 2008, Russia, though patently only pseudo-democratic, made considerable progress towards greater stability and prosperity, and Kaliningrad’s downward slide was halted. New industry arrived, notably in the form of a television assembly plant that now supplies one in three television sets throughout Russia, and a BMW car factory, whose products go mainly to Germany. Hotels, a casino and tourist agencies have been established, and an Agreement of Special Association signed with the European Union. City-twinning partnerships have been created, not only with fellow Baltic ports like Kiel, Gdynia or Klaipeda, but also with Norfolk (Virginia) and Mexico City. High-powered delegations visited, including European Commissioner Chris Patten and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Conferences were held, an EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee was formed, and in December 2006 a casino law aimed to confine gambling to a special zone within the Special Zone. Most importantly, travel and transport arrangements were eased so that people and goods could move freely to the rest of Russia. It did no harm that the president’s wife, Russia’s first lady, Lyudmila Putina, had been born and raised in Kaliningrad. And though formally only prime minister after 2008, Putin clearly remains master of the Kremlin.