A City Where East Meets West and the Past Is Always Present
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Version 0 of 1. GHOST EMPIRE A Journey to the Legendary Constantinople By Richard Fidler Illustrated. 492 pp. Pegasus. $29.95. ISTANBUL A Tale of Three Cities By Bettany Hughes Illustrated. 800 pp. Da Capo Press. $40. When the British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to traverse Europe on foot in 1933, his fantasy was to see only one city: “The chief destination was never in a moment’s doubt. The levitating skyline of Constantinople pricked its sheaves of thin cylinders and its hemispheres out of the sea-mist.” It was a vision partially derived from Yeats and Pierre Loti, the “holy city” with its “gong-tormented sea” and its memories of many a “drowsy Emperor” entertained by mechanical golden birds — a fantasy not unlike the one that drove the Vikings to the Bosphorus in A.D. 860, spellbound by the idea of the metropolis they called Miklagard, or the Rus of Kiev to choose Christianity in the 10th century. That is, in any case, the Western vision; the Islamic vision was equally mystical: “Verily you shall conquer Constantinople,” the Prophet said. Compressed into one urban site, the layers of Istanbul’s pagan, Christian and Islamic pasts present endless narrative possibilities that historians can form into sweeping, commercially enticing sagas. Two new, purposefully encyclopedic, books do precisely that. Richard Fidler’s “Ghost Empire: A Journey to the Legendary Constantinople” and Bettany Hughes’s “Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities” follow — if we are to stay within the limits of writing in English — in the footsteps of the brilliant John Freely’s “Istanbul: The Imperial City” and Philip Mansel’s “Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924.” But the two books are very different both in structure and tone. Fidler, a well-known Australian radio broadcaster, uses the conceit of exploring Istanbul with his young son as a narrative prop. Hughes, equally well known in Britain for her popular historical documentaries, gives us an even heftier opus written with a classicist’s linguistic precision. Both books tell the same story of the same city populated by the same cast of characters. Except that they don’t. Hughes’s book begins with the prehistoric substrata, delving with curiously gripping detail into layers of settlement archaeologists have only recently unearthed. She begins with the discovery of the world’s oldest wooden coffin, under the Yenikapi metro station, containing an 8,000-year-old woman whose fellow villagers even left their footprints in the ancient mud. And so, right from the start, we are confronted with a vastly larger sense of time than that in which the city is usually conceived. Moreover, Hughes also establishes just how deep the Greek roots of the settlement called Byzantion went, and how heterogenous the Hellenic frontier town of the seventh century B.C. probably was. She has a fine feel for the complexities and shadings of that distant past. One of the strangest and most haunting objects in 21st-century Istanbul is the twisted bronze monument called the Serpent Column, a fifth-century B.C. monument to the Greeks’ victory over the Persians. Still standing inside the shattered remains of the hippodrome, broken and yet superbly elegant, it was commissioned by the Spartan general Pausanius and moved to its present location by Constantine himself in A.D. 324. “One cannot help but feel,” Hughes writes, “that Pausanius would be secretly pleased to know that this monument — a rather etiolated creature now — is one of the few remaining classical antiquities to survive back in modern Istanbul in the public space next to the Blue Mosque, today a favorite lunch-break stop for tourists and young Istanbullus.” It’s like a root from a vanished forest that has accidentally survived. In contrast, Fidler begins his story more conventionally, with the Romans and, to be more precise, with his son, Joe, in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, admiring the colossal head of Constantine, the man who made Constantinople both the capital of the Roman Empire and a Christian metropolis. While Hughes’s tone is both scholarly and rich in visual detail, Fidler entertains us with novelistic vignettes and cut-and-paste erudition, though he wobbles a little here and there. In a timeline that precedes the main narrative we are informed, for example, that the city was “renamed Istanbul” in 1453. In fact, the Ottomans kept the name Kostantiniyye in official usage until the dissolution of their empire in 1923, and the two names were used in parallel fashion by court officials. “Istanbul,” in any case, comes from the common Greek expression “eis tin polin,” “into the city,” and was a word used by both Turks and Greeks long before Mehmet’s conquest. As always with this great hybrid city, the continuities have as much force as the momentous changes. That said, Fidler displays great charm in the telling of his tale, spicing it with delicious gossip. Take the story of Nicephoros II Phokas, the ruthless mid-10th-century emperor who turned the tide of Byzantine military fortunes with a series of brilliant victories against Arab armies, culminating in the reconquest of Cyprus and Aleppo. In the summer of 968, the Lombard bishop Luitprand of Cremona visited Constantinople to negotiate a marriage contract between the family of Nicephoros and the future Otto II, king of Italy. Tensions between East and West were running high. Nicephoros treated the bishop shabbily, and Luitprand returned the favor with some unfavorable immortalizations. “He is a monstrosity of a man,” Luitprand wrote, “fat-headed and with tiny mole’s eyes. A short, broad, thick beard disfigures him, half going gray and disgraced by a neck scarcely an inch long, which is pig-like by reason of the big close bristles on his beard. In color he is like an Ethiopian and, as the poet says, ‘you would not want to meet him in the dark.’ ” Interestingly, this tale doesn’t appear in Hughes’s account. Instead, she goes from a discussion of the Viking presence in the 11th century to a lovely depiction of everyday life inside the walls of the city in that period and from thence to a consideration of the rich and productive cultural rivalry between the Christian empire and the caliphate, an overlooked period of synthesis and mutual imitation. She draws our attention to the “polychrome” mosaic of the Near East and the polyphony of the great Greek-speaking Roman city that lay at its heart, and rightly so. Much that we now consider “Western” had its roots in that mosaic. Hughes argues that in this period — just before the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 heralded the arrival of a new enemy, the Turks — the two religions and empires had found a way of coexisting: “The men and women of Constantinople knew, from firsthand experience, of the conviction within the vast Muslim empire that thickly rimmed their lands. Hot-headed, unilateral aggression would only result in jihad. Constantinople, the City of God, was an entity that needed guarding, not squandering, that had to rely on displays of diplomacy and strength rather than on direct aggression.” Yet surely the rivalry had itself been made more potent by the military successes of Nicephoros at precisely this time and the recalibrating of influence his “direct aggression” had achieved. After all, the reconquest of the largely Greek city of Aleppo in 962 was no small matter; it was a demoralizing catastrophe for the Hamdanid regime on the Arab side. And the pig-like emperor ridiculed by Luitprand was so violent and austere in his military methods that he was known as “The Pale Death of the Saracens.” Of course, historians always omit some things and include others that seem more important to them, and so it should be. Neither Hughes nor Fidler ignores the violent arrival in Byzantine lands of the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan in the late 11th century (Fidler notes that his mustache was so long it had to be tied behind his head to keep it from flying into his eyes during battle) and with him the beginning of Christian Constantinople’s long decline. Like the Ottoman sultans who would succeed him, Arslan filled his court with mathematicians and literati, including the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and in the end the eventual transformation of the Christian city into a Muslim one entailed less disruption and destruction than is commonly imagined. The Istanbul of Suleiman was every bit as imperial and cosmopolitan as that of Justinian, and it’s a virtue of both books that they’re able to depict this transformation subtly while at the same time showing how intricate and improbable Istanbul’s history has been. The effect is rather like stumbling across the Serpent Column late at night after carousing in Istanbul’s 21st-century nightclubs: a melancholic sense of historical vertigo. |