The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (8 page)

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 C
omne
nus. 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 itself
1
- 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 Ger
usalemme, 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.

Little of these splendid edifices remains today. Fires and earthquakes have taken their toll, and the passage of sixteen and a half centuries has done the rest. It must also be admitted that with only a limited quantity of first-class architects and craftsmen available at any given site, all too much of the imperial construction work was hasty and slipshod; walls were too thin, foundations too shallow. Yet the vision was there, and the energy, and the determination to preserve, perpetuate and adorn the great shrines of the Christian faith; and if few of these shrines nowadays possess a single stone recognizably dating from the time of Constantine,

1 The Chape] of St Helena in the crypt of this church is - with the communicating Chapel of St Gregory - part of the ancient Palace. According to legend it was once the Empress's bedroom; it is now thought more probably to have served as her private chapel.

there still remain a remarkable number whose very existence is due, in large measure, to him.

And, of course, to his mother. By now an old woman, she had for years enjoyed immense popularity across the Empire; and her zeal for the religion that she had so enthusiastically embraced had in its turn been responsible for untold quantities of conversions. Her journey to the Holy Places caught the imagination of all Christendom; and even if we may question her finding of the True Cross, we can deny neither the number nor the generosity of her benefactions to churches and monasteries, hospitals and orphanages, wherever she went. We do not know the length of her stay in the Levant, nor the circumstances of her death; there is no certain evidence that she ever returned to Constantinople, and she does not seem to have been present at any of the dedication ceremonies. It may well be, therefore, that she died, as one suspects she would have wished to die, while still in the Holy Land - the first recorded Christian pilgrim, and the founder of the pilgrim tradition that has continued from her day to our own.

Throughout the triumphal ceremonies by which Constantine inaugurated his new capital - and, as he believed, a new era for the Roman Empire - he was uncomfortably aware that, in one vital respect, he had failed. Despite the Council of Nicaea, despite all that he had done to bind together the Christian Church, it remained as divided as ever it had been. To some extent - though this he is unlikely to have admitted, even to himself - the fault was his own: personally uninterested in the nicer distinctions of theological doctrine and swayed above all by his determination to achieve unity within both Church and State, he vacillated constantly between opposing camps, allowing himself to be persuaded by whatever favourite happened to have his ear at any given moment. But the greater part of the blame lay with the Christian leaders themselves. Obviously, they believed that vital issues were at stake - issues for which, as many had already proved, they were ready to face exile and even martyrdom; none the less, by their eternal bickering and squabbling, by the hatred and bigotry, intolerance and malice that they showed to each other and by the readiness with which they stooped to every form of dishonesty to achieve their ends, they set a sad example to their flocks - an example which, moreover, countless generations of their successors have been all too ready to follow.

Archbishop Alexander died in 328, and was succeeded in his Alexandrian see by his former chaplain, Athanasius. The two had been
to
gether at the Council of Nicaea, where Athanasius had proved even more skilled and quick-witted a dialectician than his master. In the years to come, he was to show himself to be something more: the leading churchman of his time, one of the towering figures in the whole history of the Christian Church, and a canonized saint. (He was long erroneously believed to have been the author of the Athanasian Creed, which still bears his name.) Arius and his adherents were to have no more redoubtable adversary.

For the moment, however, their star was once again in the ascendant. Even after Nicaea, Arius had never lost the support of the Emperor's family - in particular that of his mother and his half-sister Constantia -while the Asian bishops (as opposed to those of Europe and North Africa) were also overwhelmingly pro-Arian in their sympathies and took full advantage of their proximity to the imperial court to further their cause. Already in 327 they had persuaded Constantine to recall Arius from exile and to receive him in audience; the Emperor, impressed as much by the brilliance and obvious sincerity of the man as by his assurance that he willingly accepted all the points of faith approved at Nicaea, had gone so far as to write at least two personal letters to Archbishop Alexander urging (though
taking
care not to command) that he should be allowed to return to Egypt. He seems to have been genuinely surprised when the archbishop proved reluctant to comply - and was probably still more so in the following year when Alexander's flock, by their election of the firebrand Athanasius, showed themselves equally obdurate.

Not that Athanasius, even on home ground, was universally popular; firebrands seldom are. For internal political reasons unconnected with the Arian controversy, the local Meletian Church under its own Bishop John Arkaph was bent on his destruction, and over the next few years unleashed against him, in quick succession, accusations of fraud, bribery and even sacrilege. When all three charges failed to stick, they tried one of murder, claiming that a Meletian bishop had been flogged to death and dismembered at his instigation. According to one version of the story, Athanasius was actually able to produce the missing bishop, all in one piece, before the examining magistrate; in any event he had no difficulty in establishing that his alleged victim was alive and well, and the case collapsed. Arkaph and his followers now had one last try: rape. They found a young woman whom they managed to bribe or frighten into claiming that she had been violated by the archbishop - an experience which, she added, was made the more regrettable by the fact that she had vowed herself to perpetual virginity. Unfortunately, she failed to recognize her ravisher in court; and once again Athanasius was found to have no case to answer.

Whether Constantine was, as he maintained, genuinely troubled by these continuing accusations - groundless as they invariably proved to be - or whether he was simply falling ever more under the influence of the pro-Arians around him, he seems gradually to have come to the conclusion that Athanasius, rather than Arius, was now the chief impediment to that Church unity for which he strove. By this time, too, he was making plans for celebrating, in
335,
the thirtieth year of his reign by the formal consecration of the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Here he proposed to summon a vast convocation of bishops, drawn from every corner of the Empire; and he was determined that doctrinal harmony should prevail among them. He accordingly gave orders that the bishops on their way to Jerusalem should hold a synod at Tyre, in the presence of a high imperial official, in order - as he rather disarmingly put it - 'to free the Church from blasphemy and to lighten my cares'.

The synod was called for July. It was, as soon became clear, to be attended almost exclusively by bishops of the Arian persuasion, and consequently to be less a gathering of distinguished churchmen than a trial of Athanasius; and the archbishop seems to have realized as much. In the previous year, when a similar exercise had been proposed at Caesarea, he had categorically refused to attend and the idea had been abandoned; on this occasion, however, he resolved to face his enemies and duly presented himself before the tribunal. He was soon to regret his decision. All the old charges were now revived, and new ones introduced; hosts of new witnesses were called, each one apparently prepared to swear black and blue that the archbishop had broken every commandment and committed every crime in the statute book. He himself fought back with characteristic vigour, not hesitating to meet his accusers with their own weapons; and the synod soon degenerated into a general uproar of lie and counter-lie, of calumny and curse, insult and invective. Finally a commission of inquiry was appointed, consisting of six of Athanasius's most implacable opponents, with orders to proceed forthwith to Egypt, there to gather further evidence. At this point the archbishop, believing - probably rightly - that his life was in danger, slipped away to Constantinople. He was deposed in his absence, after which the synod broke up and its members continued their journey to Jerusalem.

Once arrived in the capital, Athanasius went straight to the Palace,
but was refused an audience; and we have it on Constantine's own authority that, one day when he was riding into the city, the archbishop suddenly appeared in his path and flung himself in front of his horse. 'He and his companions looked so weighed down by their troubles,' wrote the Emperor, 'that I felt an ineffable pity as I realized that this was Athanasius, the holy sight of whom had once been enough to draw the Gentiles themselves to the worship of the God of All.' The whole episode, we can assume, had been expertly stage-managed by Athanasius; but despite its promising beginning it did not succeed. Six bishops, including the two Eusebii, hastened to Constantinople at the Emperor's bidding, with a new and dangerously damaging allegation: that the archbishop was even now planning to call all the workers at the port of Alexandria out on strike. If he were not immediately reinstated, they would refuse to load the transports with the grain on which Constantinople depended for its survival, and the capital would be starved into submission. In vain did Athanasius deny the charges; where his beloved city was concerned, Constantine was deaf to the voice of reason. In a rage, he banished the still protesting archbishop to Augusta Treverorum - the modern Trier - and then turned back to the interrupted task of getting Arius reaccepted in Alexandria.

Now, however, it was the Emperor's turn to fail. Every attempt by Arius to return brought new outbreaks of rioting in the city - led by the great St Anthony himself, aged eighty-six, who had left his desert hermitage to champion the cause of orthodoxy and who now wrote several personal letters to the Emperor on behalf of Athanasius. Although these were written in Coptic - Anthony spoke no Greek - they seem to have had some effect, inducing Constantine, probably some time in
336,
to summon Arius back to Constantinople for a further investigation of his beliefs. It was during this last inquiry - so Athanasius later wrote, with considerable
Schadenfreude,
to his Egyptian flock - and while the pro-Arian bishops were trying to persuade the Patriarch of Constantinople to allow him to attend Mass on the following day (a Sunday), that

Arius, made bold by the protection of his followers, engaged in light-hearted and foolish conversation, until he was suddenly compelled by a call of nature to retire; and immediately, as it is written, 'falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst and gave up the ghost' . . .

This story, to be sure, comes from the pen of Arius's arch-enemy; but 1 Acts. I. 18.
although there are - predictably - several different versions of exactly what occurred,1 the unattractive circumstances of his demise are too well attested by contemporary writers to be open to serious question. Inevitably, it was interpreted by those who hated him as divine retribution: the archbishop's biblical reference is to the somewhat similar fate which befell Judas Iscariot. It did not, however, put an end to the controversy - nor even to the exile of Athanasius, which lasted until after Constantine's own death in 337. Only on 23 November of that year did he finally return to Alexandria, starting up as he did so yet another period of factional strife in that unhappy diocese. Constantine's dream of spiritual harmony throughout Christendom was not to be achieved in his lifetime; indeed, we are still awaiting it today.