TLS: on Byzantium

Monuments of magnificence
Alexander Murray

Military authority and the Byzantine quest for an incarnational faith.
BYZANTIUM. Royal Academy of Arts, until March 22 Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, editors. BYZANTIUM 496pp. Royal Academy of Arts. Pounds 55 (paperback, Pounds 27.95). 978 1 90571 126 0
In the third century AD the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Tigris and from the Esk to the middle Nile. But it was in trouble, and when Constantine became Emperor in 312 he faced an overriding need: defence, against enemies now principally in the East and above all in a revived Persia. Rome was too far to the west to remain an effective capital, so in 324 Constantine began what would soon be called "New Rome", on the site of the thousand-year-old Greek city of Byzantium. As a soldier, Constantine appreciated that the site on the Bosphorus was virtually impregnable, if decently defended, and the perfect departure point for military and other government operations, to be sent off in all directions by land or sea. (The site is plausibly represented at the Royal Academy, a la Google Earth, in a drawing by a fifteenth-century Italian geographer).
Politically, Constantine's choice of site for the new capital stamped the Empire with two characteristics. One is almost too obvious to be noticed: longevity. An empire centred on "Constantine's city", Constantinopolis, could survive losses of a kind fatal for kingdoms less strategically endowed (like Baghdad or Moscow, both of which fell to the Mongols). In the nineteenth century, a fading Turkish Empire with the same capital (its name translated into Turkish as "Istanbul") was to be called "the sick man of Europe". The same had been true of the Byzantine Empire for much of the Middle Ages, and for the same reasons - and not because of the much- mentioned Venetian conquest of
1204, a symptom as much as a cause. A site less privileged would have fallen in the early 1070s, to Turks who had captured an emperor in battle (Romanus IV: one of the emperors pictured on coins shown in the exhibition), and who were close enough to the walls of Constantinople to frighten Westerners - brothers only semi-estranged from the Eastern Christians - into devising the expeditions known now (but not then) as crusades. But Constantinople held, substantially recovered, and in the event baulked the Turks of their ambition for nearly four centuries. And when the city did succumb in 1453, it was a city already in economic decay, falling to an army more than ten times as numerous as its defenders, and much richer. Within months, the decrepit city had become the buzzing capital of a new and more eastward-looking world. It would have fallen long before, but for Constantine's choice of site, backed by the endurance, as an ideological consequence, of the brave defenders' belief that "Rome" must last for ever.
A second characteristic followed from the first. Unlike an island or a territorial saucer ringed by mountains, the Byzantine Empire was defined by its centre, not its periphery. So it developed an exceptionally strong concept of the state, as unifying factor of a variety of peoples, a "Byzantine Commonwealth" (as one Slavonic historian has called it). This strong concept of state was expressed in the Emperor's status. Constantine's move had exposed the imperial office to theocratic traditions older and stronger than anything comparable in the West, traditions which saw a ruler as quasi-divine. These traditions were now to be reflected in the Emperor's cult and court, and included such embellishments as those singing birds made of gold, which Liudprand of Cremona saw on a visit in 949-50, and which would inspire W. B. Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium". Among the positive outcomes of this strong state polity, the most conspicuous was an ethnic mix. All Byzantine emperors had "barbarian" blood in their veins, and the distinction of "Greek" and "Turk" is largely deceptive: what with the enslavements, migrations, conversions forced and unforced, and other vagaries common on unsettled frontiers, modern Turks and Greeks have the same DNA. There were also negative outcomes. One, which passed from Byzantium to successor states like Russia, was the state's firm control of trade and industry. A measure of "Adam Smith" relaxation, and late eleventh-century Byzantium might have been able to pay its soldiers without letting com-petitive Italian cities have privileges, destined to give them an ambivalent dominance in the later Byzantine economy.
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It may be asked, what has any of this to do with us now? Everything has gone, everyone is dead, and has been for most of a millennium. True historians know, of course, that this apparent emptiness is an illusion and that the past is still present, in ways mostly invis-ible. But what of the visible artefacts which must, on any logic, have been used daily by the millions of people in that thousand-year-old empire - things that they wore, admired, studied, used as tools or worked with as precious metal, in or out of monetary circulation? The answer is, they have mostly gone, recycled like the human beings who used them. Wear-and-tear apart (no small item), the idea that the twentieth century was a time of unique violence and destruction is one of its historians' most tempting illusions: they should really look into the dustbin they call medieval history. The conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II, rewarded his
100,000 soldiers by letting them pillage and kill for three days. Books made good bonfires, whether they were Greek classics or religious scriptures. Mehmet
II was not exceptionally cruel for his ilk, rather the contrary: he protected most churches (better than some successors). Sack and pillage was a normal punishment for a city which had resisted siege, and had happened frequently elsewhere in and round the Empire. Whatever does remain from the Byzantine world is a fraction of what there once was.
Whence the triumph of the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It brings together more than 300 surviving artefacts, from places once within Byzantine political or cultural boundaries. Even on its own, each object, like a footprint, is potentially a witness to the world it was made in; a witness given words by expert commentary from an international team of historians and archaeologists, with the results laid out in ten rooms, arranged in an order part-chronological, part-thematic, and equipped with an audio guide and a magnificent catalogue.
The direct provenance of the items reflects in part the Empire's multi-ethnic character, and incidentally, also, recent thaws in East-West relations. America and northern Europe currently house about half the items, but the rest come from properly "Byzantine" locations: Greece and its islands (with at least a hundred exhibits), and other places once in the Greek Empire or its cultural sphere: Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Ohrid, Tblisi, and, apparently after a little coaxing, Mount Sinai. (No amount of coaxing, alas, could conjure anything from Turkey). High on that list should come Italy, once a contented part of the Empire, even after the move, and later its shrewdest beneficiary. One church in Monza still has a set of oil "ampullae" given to it in 600 by the Lombard Queen Theodolinda; and an icon of the Virgin and Child, brought at about the same time to help christianize the old Pantheon in Rome, is still there (or would be but for its loan to London). The assiduity with which the heirlooms are cared for is accidentally revealed by item 48. It is a gap, with a photograph, where there should be a shawl-sized silk rectangle, woven with an "Annunciation", a standard luxury manufacture from Syria, c800, and apparently brought to Rome by one of its Levantine-born popes, to be discovered in 1905 as the lining to a reliquary. Its curators in Rome agreed to lend it but found, when preparing its move, that the 1,000-year-old fabric was just too fragile, so they risked their honour by letting it stay put. Their honour shines.
I visited the exhibition on the day it opened and it was full enough to make me wait to see some items, especially those picked for the audio guide - like the silver-gilt and enamel icon of St Michael, made in Constantinople in the twelfth century, or the bizarre, silver-gilt perfume brazier shaped like a city. The waiting was nevertheless worth it. I was accompanied by my twenty one-year-old goddaughter, an art student. I noticed that she was taking notes from time to time; and at the end I asked her which exhibit she would most like to live with. I had seen her gravitating towards the mosaics, including three haunting "micromosaic" icons (their tesserae just 5mm wide), borrowed from present homes in St Petersburg, Paris and Rome. But my god-daughter had to choose just one, and opted for a bigger mosaic, from the Greek mainland (Thebes), a sixth-century depiction of four "labours of the months". I had feared she might pick my own first choice, so had mentally made a short list of alternatives. It started - perhaps this was too ostentatiously humble - with a bowl, cracked but mended, sole survivor of thousands mass-produced in late thirteenth-century Cyprus, this one incised and painted with a dancer, arms swung sideways in reckless abandon. But I also had a good look at the two dozen ivories, mostly religious diptychs or triptychs, intricately carved in tenth- and eleventh-century Constantinople. Deep down I knew this was window dressing.
My choice had already made itself, and was of course a person, a face, strictly pre-Constantinian, but very much part of his world - as it is now of ours, in the British Museum. The face is of a middle-aged woman, elegant but wholly unaffected, wearing discreet earrings and a small necklace. She was surely wife and mother to a self-respecting family. She appears here in "encaustic" (wax fixed by heat) on a limewood panel once on a mummy-tomb in Hellenistic Egypt, made some year between AD 55 and 70. Robin Cormack (co organizer of the exhibition with Maria Vassilaki of Athens) tells us in the catalogue that we must not take her picture for a likeness. So be it; but she looks more like a real human being than anything else in the exhibition.
That particular face, along with many others less "real", points to what may be the exhibition's most lasting impression on a visitor; and this impression, in turn, leads us to a third - religious - consequence of Constantine's move. More obviously than in the West, in the fourth century the East was where religion was happening, in currents bound to stir in the new capital. The strongest current was towards monotheism, growing both within and without its most high-profile expression, Christianity. Politically, mono-theism was a threat.
The quasi-divine head of a centralized state cannot tolerate a rival.
Constantine's mentor, Diocletian, had felt this menace in his bones, and paid Christianity the compliment of beheading its more salient devotees. Constantine took another course, and joined them, thereby admitting changes to both Empire and Christianity so seismic that historians have been trying to assess them ever since. Of the early results of Constantine's conversion, the most telling was the definition of Christian doctrine, by the ecumenical councils, held under imperial aegis from 325 to 451. The creeds that emerged from these councils were a culminating achievement of Greek philosophy, in an endeavour to define the indefinable. The councils' Christological debates nevertheless reflected preoccupations which, like a scarlet pimpernel, ran back and forth across the boundaries of Christianity.
The deepest of these preoccupations was with the nature of God. How could God be infinitely high above us, and simultaneously in any sense like us - weak, selfish, cruel, human, subject to suffering and death? Christianity addressed the enigma head-on with a God-man who was none of these bad things. But the underlying tension had to work itself out within the Church as much as it did in the interstices between Christianity and "other religions". Consider the ubiquitous Byzantine image of Christos Pantocrator, "Ruler of All". Is he really human, or superhuman? The same man surely could not also have undergone torture and death, like a criminal. This tension left its mark on many artefacts, among them the early crucifixes (a cross with Christ's figure nailed to it). No examples are known until around 400. Even then, a crucifixion image had to show next to it the resurrection, to give reassurance that Christ was still God incarnate. And, that reassurance notwithstanding, Christ on the cross was for a long time still not shown as dead. He has his eyes open and his head straight, unlike that of a man dying or dead (as in item 129, from c600-50, possibly Egyptian). Only in the early eighth century, and then only intermittently, does the notion of a God who died and suffered become digestible, so that his eyes appear closed or his head droops, as in a crucifix from late tenth-century Constantinople (compare this with other earlier, and later, examples). In the thirteenth century, finally, but only at the innovative Western end of the Byzantine cultural zone, Christ's suffering is fully confronted, as here in a two-sided processional cross from Pisa.
Along with these iconographical shifts went doctrinal discussion, a Greek speciality. St Gregory Nazianzen (died 389) once protested that if you went to a shop in Constantinople wanting to buy a loaf, "the baker, instead of telling you the price, will argue that the Father is greater than the Son. The money changer will talk of 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". Underlying all these hyper-technical discussions was the same tension, between God's humanity and divinity. When the Council of Chakedon decreed, in 451, that the divine and human were two natures in the single person of Christ, this was too much for some believers. They thought it an insult to God, and were thenceforth rejected by the rest of the Church as "monophysites" (upholders of one nature). The monophysites were especially strong in Syria and Egypt, in the latter of which they became distinguished as "Copts" (from "E-gypt"), two of whose linguistically instructive texts are on display. But the scarlet pimpernel had not stopped crossing boundaries. It was not only within Christianity that the fervour for God's transcendence worked itself out. By 700, Syria and Egypt had fallen to Islam, with a speed suggestive of the religious tendencies already present there. Muslims carried the same tradition of Semitic monotheism but with a view of Christ as a prophet not as God incarnate. This position cost the Empire half its territory.
It feared to lose more, and with reason. Muslim monotheism had had its eyes on Constantinople almost from the start. In the eighth century, having disposed of the old Persian Empire, Islam pressed hard on Byzantium. The soldiers most effective in defending imperial frontiers - and whose leaders hence became emperors - happened to come from the provinces bordering on Syria. They were fired by a similar zeal, not only for battle but for God's unqualified transcendence. So the scarlet pimpernel smuggled himself back into Christianity in the form of iconoclasm. In 726, the Emperor Leo III, "the Isaurian", ordered that all religious images in the Empire be destroyed. They were an insult to God, who, because of it, had allowed the Byzantines to lose recent battles. The iconoclastic decrees tore another big hole in the Byzantine legacy and consequently in this exhibition. Pre-iconoclastic art is only represented, here as anywhere in the East, by the one exception, a paradox. All Semitic traditions associated certain miracles with Mount Sinai. Another small miracle was added in that the peninsula had been lost to the Empire before the iconoclastic decrees and was now under Islamic rule. Despite theoretical objections to religious images, by a mutual respect between the Muslim authorities and the monks who prayed on a site holy to both traditions, the icons in the Sinai monastery were saved. In the eleventh century a mosque was built inside the monastery walls, and is still there. It is hard by the icons, ten of which are in the exhibition.
The struggle for and against images lasted in Byzantium until 843. The "iconodule" argument then prevailed: if God really did become man, and his purpose thereby was partly to show human beings what God was like, it could not be wrong to portray the incarnate Christ. Surviving icons abound from that time, including a depiction of the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843. They all depict faces - tranquil, majestic, aweinspiring but kind. None frighten. Our thoughts go back to our Greek-Egyptian ancestress, the respectable wife and mother. How much did Greek icons originally owe to images on Egyptian tombs? It is a question for experts, as is another, about the same icons but at the opposite end of the time line: whether Western portraiture, developed largely in Italy, owes some of its origin to Greek icons, by way - say - of "crusader" art, now almost entirely destroyed. A hint of connection may be found in Gentile Bellini's picture of the fifteenth-century Greek convert to Catholicism, Bessarion. The Cardinal's face is represented naturalistically, but he holds upright, like a placard, a big, flat reliquary, covered with icons.
Icons, and the religious doctrines surrounding them, lead us finally to an effect of Constantine's move which may have been the most fundamental of all.
Constantine built New Rome for military reasons, and he remained primarily a soldier, as did most of his successors. (What Byzantine military priorities did to Christian concepts of sainthood can be seen in the platoons of "soldier saints", for example the depictions of St George and St Theodore as armed and mounted knights.) But they inherited a theocratic tradition transformed, not extinguished, by the Emperors' Christianity. Their office put them into an intimate relation to Christ (as expressed, for instance, in the depiction on coins of Christ's direct coronation of the Emperor). True to this tradition, Constantine had tried to make Byzantium also the Empire's spiritual capital.
Here he met an obstacle. Ghosts do not like moving. The ghosts of early Christianity were in old Rome, and there they stayed. Constantine and his successors filled their new city with the choicest relics, including those of the "true cross" allegedly discovered by his mother, Helena (its fragments bestowed on favoured beneficiaries, like the early owner of item 188). And after the rival patriarchates at Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria had fallen to Islam, Constantinople stood alone as rival to old Rome. For all that, its patriarchs never took Roman primacy away. They could be dismissed by the Emperor if he found them too awkward; and the iconoclastic controversy, when others had wavered, had seen old Rome standing doctrinally firm. Rome continued to claim, and to a large extent vindicate, its ultimate spiritual authority in the Church on earth, even as the two huge halves of the old Roman Empire edged slowly apart in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This disjunction between the political and military move, and the immobility of spiritual authority, fed the concept that the two kinds of authority were distinct; and in the course of the Middle Ages, this distinction passed into Western practice, and established, in the foundations of a specifically "Western" consciousness, the principle that the holders of military and political power are not necessarily "right", in any sense of that word, least of all about theo- logical niceties.
That, at least, is one visitor's way of reading the exhibition. There are other ways, and additions and adjustments doubtless to be made to this one, sketched here in the trust that any interested visitor will draw a similar amount of instruction and delight from these priceless survivals. That would be the best reward for the months of skilled devotion, by many scholars in different countries, that have put together an assemblage necessarily ephemeral, and definitely worth visiting - even if we do have to wait to see St Michael.