BOOK IV
THE PALACE OF BLACHERNE
CHAPTER I
THE PALACE OF BLACHERNE
The Prince of India was not given to idle expectations. He mightdeceive others, but he seldom deceived himself. His experience servedhim prophetically in matters largely dependent on motives ordinarilyinfluential with men. He was confident the Emperor would communicatewith him, and soon.
The third day after the adventure at the White Castle, a stranger,mounted, armed, and showily caparisoned, appeared at the Prince's doorunder guidance of Uel. In the study, to which he was hidden, heannounced himself the bearer of a complimentary message from HisMajesty, concluding with an invitation to the palace of Blacherne. Ifagreeable, His Majesty would be pleased to receive the Indian dignitaryin the afternoon at three o'clock. An officer of the guard would be atthe Grand Gate for his escort. The honor, needless to say, was acceptedin becoming terms.
When the Prince descended to the hall of entry on the ground floor totake the sedan there, the unusual care given his attire was apparent.His beard was immaculately white. His turban of white silk, balloon inshape, and with a dazzle of precious stones in front, was a study. Overa shirt of finest linen, with ruffles of lace at the throat and breast,there was a plain gown of heavy black velvet, buttoned at the neck, butopen down to a yellow sash around the waist. The sash was complementedby a belt which was a mass of pearls in relief on a ground of goldembroidery. The belt-plate and crescented sword scabbard were aflamewith brilliants on blue enamelling. His trousers, ample as a skirt,were of white satin overflowing at the ankles. Pointed red slippers,sparkling with embroidery of small golden beads, completed the costume.
The procession in the street was most striking. First Nilo, as became aking of Kash-Cush, barbarously magnificent; the sedan next, on theshoulders of four carriers in white livery; at the rear, two domesticsarrayed _a la Cipango_, their strange blue garments fitting them soclose as to impede their walking; yet as one of them bore his master'spaper sunshade and ample cloak, and the other a cushion bloated intothe proportions of a huge pillow, they were by no means wanting inself-importance. Syama, similarly attired, though in richer material,walked at the side of the sedan, ready to open the door or answer suchsignal as he might receive from within.
The appearance of this retinue in the streets was a show to the idleand curious, who came together as if rendered out of the earth, and insuch numbers that before fairly reaching the thoroughfare by which theGrand Gate of Blacherne was usually approached from the city side, thegilded box on the shoulders of its bearers looked, off a little way,not unlike a boat rocking in waves.
Fortunately the people started in good humor, and meeting nothing tobreak the mood, they permitted the Prince to accomplish his journeywithout interruption. The companionship of the crowd was reallyagreeable to him; he hardly knew whether it were pleasanter to be ableto excite such respectful curiosity than to gratify it successfully. Itmight have been otherwise had Lael been with him.
The Very High Residence, as the Palace of Blacherne was generallyspoken of by Greeks, was well known to the Prince of India. Theexclamation with which he settled himself in the sedan at setting outfrom his house--"Again, again, O Blacherne!"--disclosed a previouspersonal acquaintance with the royal property. And over and over againon the way he kept repeating, "O Blacherne! Beautiful Blacherne! Bloomthe roses as of old in thy gardens? Do the rivulets in thy alabastercourts still run singing to the mosaic angels on the walls?"
As to the date of these recollections, if, as the poets tell us, timeis like a flowing river, and memory a bridge for the conveniency of thesoul returning to its experiences, how far had this man to travel thestructure before reaching the Blacherne he formerly knew? Over whattremendous spaces between piers did it carry him!
The street traversed by the Prince carried him first to the Grate ofSt. Peter on the Golden Horn, and thence, almost parallel with the citywall, to Balat, a private landing belonging to the Emperor, at presentknown as the gate of Blacherne.
At the edge of an area marble paved, the people stopped, it being thelimit of their privilege. Crossing the pavement, the visitor was setdown in front of the Grand Gate of the Very High Residence. History,always abominating lapses, is yet more tender of some places thanothers. There, between flanking towers, an iron-plated valve strongenough to defy attack by any of the ancient methods was swung wideopen, ready nevertheless to be rolled to at set of sun. The guardhalted the Prince, and an officer took his name, and apologizing for abrief delay, disappeared with it. Alighting from his sedan, the worthyproceeded to take observation and muse while waiting.
The paved area on which he stood was really the bottom of awell-defined valley which ran off and up irregularly toward thesoutheast, leaving an ascent on its right memorable as the seventh hillof Constantinople. A stone wall marked here and there by sentinelboxes, each with a red pennon on its top, straggled down along the footof the ascent to the Grand Gate. There between octangular towersloopholed and finished battlement style was a covered passagesuggestive of Egypt. Two Victories in high relief blew trumpets at eachother across the entrance front. Ponderous benches of porphyry,polished smooth by ages of usage, sat one on each side for the guards;fellows in helmets of shining brass, cuirasses of the same materialinlaid with silver, greaves, and shoes stoutly buckled. Those of themsitting sprawled their bulky limbs broadly over the benches. The fewstanding seemed like selected giants, with blond beards and blue eyes,and axes at least three spans in length along their whetted edges. ThePrince recognized the imperial guards--Danes, Saxons, Germans, andSwiss--their nationalities merged into the corps entitled _Varangians_.
Conscious, but unmindful of their stare, he kept his stand, and sweptthe hill from bottom to top, giving free rein to memory.
In 449 A. D.--he remembered the year and the circumstance well--anearthquake threw down the wall then enclosing the city. Theodosiusrestored it, leaving the whole height outside of this northwestern parta preserve wooded, rocky, but with one possession which had become soinfinitely sanctified in Byzantine estimation as to impart the qualityto all its appurtenances, that was the primitive but Very Holy Churchof Blacherne, dedicated to the Virgin.
Near the church there was a pleasure house to which the Emperors,vainly struggling to escape the ceremonies the clergy had fastened uponthem to the imbitterment of life, occasionally resorted, and down onthe shore of the Golden Horn a zoological garden termed the Cynegionhad been established. The latter afterwhile came to have a gallery inwhich the public was sometimes treated to games and combats betweenlions, tigers, and elephants. There also criminals and heretics werefrequently carried and flung to the beasts.
Nor did the Prince fail to recall that in those cycles the sovereignsresided preferably in the Bucoleon, eastwardly by the sea of Marmora.He remembered some of them as acquaintances with whom he had been onclose terms--Justinian, Heraclius, Irene, and the Porphyrogentes.
The iconoclastic masters of that cluster of magnificent tenements, theBucoleon, had especial claims upon his recollection. Had he not incitedthem to many of their savageries? They were incidents, it is true,sadly out of harmony with his present dream; still their return now waswith a certain fluttering of the spirit akin to satisfaction, for thevictims in nearly every case had been Christians, and his business oflife then was vengeance for the indignities and sufferings inflicted onhis countrymen.
With a more decided flutter, he remembered a scheme he put into effectjust twenty years after the restoration of the wall by Theodosius. Inthe character of a pious Christianized Israelite resident in Jerusalem,he pretended to have found the vestments of the Holy Mother of Christ.The discovery was of course miraculous, and he reported itcircumstantially to the Patriarchs Galvius and Candidus. For the gloryof God and the exaltation of the Faith, they brought the relics toConstantinople. There, amidst most solemn pomp, the Emperor assisting,they were deposited in the Church of Saints Peter and Mark, to betransferred a little later to their final
resting-place in the holierChurch of the Virgin of Blacherne. There was a world of pious proprietyin the idea that as the vestments belonged to the Mother of God theywould better become her own house. The _Himation_ or _Maphorion_, asthe robe of the Virgin was called, brought the primitive edifice in thewoods above the Cynegion a boundless increase of sanctity, while thediscoverer received the freedom of the city, the reverence of theclergy, and the confidence of the Basileus.
Nor did the prodigious memory stay there. The hill facing the city wasof three terraces. On the second one, half hidden among cypress andplane trees, he beheld a building, low, strong, and, from hisdirection, showing but one window. Some sixteen years previous, duringhis absence in Cipango, a fire had destroyed the Church of the Virgin,and owing to the poverty of the people and empire, the edifice had notbeen rebuilt. This lesser unpretentious structure was the Chapel ofBlacherne which the flames had considerately spared. He recognized itinstantly, and remembered it as full of inestimable relics--amongstthem the _Himation_, considered indestructible; the Holy Cross whichHeraclius, in the year 635, had brought from Jerusalem, and deliveredto Sergius; and the _Panagia Blachernitissa_, or All Holy Banner of theImage of the Virgin. Then rose another reminiscence, and though toreach him it had to fly across a chasm of hundreds of years, itpresented itself with the distinctness of an affair of yesterday. In626, Heraclius being Emperor, a legion of Avars and Persians sackedScutari, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, and laid siege toConstantinople. The Byzantines were in awful panic; and they would haveyielded themselves had not Sergius the Patriarch been in control. Witha presence of mind equal to the occasion, he brought the _Panagia_forth, and supported by an army of clerics and monks, traversed thewalls, waving the All Holy Banner. A volley of arrows from invisiblearchers fell upon the audacious infidels, and the havoc was dreadful;they fled, and their prince, the Khagan, fled with them, declaring hehad seen a woman in shining garments but of awful presence on thewalls. The woman was the Holy Mother; and with a conceit easilymistaken for gratitude, the Byzantines declared their capitalthenceforward guarded by God. When they went out to the Church in theWoods and found it unharmed by the enemy, they were persuaded theMother had adopted them; in return, what could they else than adopther? Pisides, the poet, composed a hymn, to glorify her. The Churchconsecrated the day of the miraculous deliverance a fete day observableby Greeks forever. The Emperor removed the old building, and on itssite raised another of a beauty more expressive of devotion. To secureit from ravage and profanation, he threw a strong wall around the wholevenerated hill, and by demolishing the ancient work of Theodosius, madeBlacherne a part of the city.
By and by the Church required enlargement, and it was then cruci-formedby the addition of transepts right and left. Still later, a Chapel waserected specially for the relics and the All Holy Banner. This wascontiguous to the Church, and besides being fireproof, it covered aspring of pure water, afterwards essential in many splendid ceremoniescivil as well as religious. The Chamber of Relics was prohibited to allbut the Basileus. He alone could enter it. By great favor, the Princeof India was once permitted to look into the room, and he remembered itlarge and dimly lighted, its shadows alive, however, with the glitterof silver and gold in every conceivable form, offered there as the WiseMen laid their gifts before the Child in the Cave of the Nativity.
Again and again the Church was burned, yet the Chapel escaped. Itseemed an object of divine protection. The sea might deliver tempestsagainst the Seven Hills, earthquakes shake the walls down and crack thehanging dome of St. Sophia, cinders whiten paths from the porphyrycolumn over by the Hippodrome to the upper terrace of Blacherne; yetthe Chapel escaped--yet the holy fountain in its crypt flowed on purergrowing as the centuries passed.
The Prince, whose memories we are but weaving into words, did notwonder at the increase of veneration attaching to the Chapel and itsprecious deposits--manuscripts, books, bones, flags, things personal tothe Apostles, the Saints, the Son and His Mother, parings of theirnails, locks of their hair, spikes and splinters of the Crossitself--he did not wonder at it, or smile, for he knew there is adevotional side to every man which wickedness may blur but cannotobliterate. He himself was going about the world convinced that thetemple of Solomon was the House of God.
The guards sprawling on the benches kept staring at him; one of themlet his axe fall without so much as attracting the Prince's attention.His memory, with a hold on him too firm to be disturbed by suchtrifles, insisted on its resurrectionary work, and returned him to theyear 865. Constantinople was again besieged, this time by a horde fromthe Russian wilderness under the chiefs Dir and Askold. They had passedthe upper sea in hundreds of boats, and disembarking on the Europeanshore, marched down the Bosphorus, leaving all behind them desolate.Photius was then Patriarch. When the fleet was descried from the walls,he prevailed on the Emperor to ask the intervention of the Virgin. The_Maphorion_ or Sacred Robe was brought out, and in presence of thepeople on their knees, the clergy singing the hymn of Pisides, the holyman plunged it into the waves.
A wind arose under which the water in its rocky trough was as water ina shaken bowl. The ships of the invaders sunk each other. Not onesurvived. Of the men, those who lived came up out of the vortexespraying to be taken to the Church of Blacherne for baptism. This wastwo hundred years and more after the first deliverance of the city, andyet the Mother was faithful to her chosen!--Constantinople was stillthe guarded of God!--The _Penagia_ was still the All Holy! Havingrepulsed the Muscovite invasion, what excuse for his blasphemy wouldthere be left the next to challenge its terrors?
The Prince of India saw the blackened walls of the burned Church, anappealing spectacle which the surrounding trees tried to cover withtheir foliage, but could not; then he lifted his eyes to the Palaceupon the third terrace.
To the hour decay sets in the touches of Time are usually those of anartist who loves his subject, and wishes merely to soften or ennobleits expression. So had he dealt with the Very High Residence.
It began in the low ground down by the Cynegion, and arose with thecity wall, which was in fact its southwestern front. Though alwaysspoken of in the singular, like the Bucoleon, it was a collection ofpalaces, vast, irregular, and declarative of the taste of the differenteras they severally memorialized. The spaces between them formed courtsand _places_ under cover; yet as the architects had adhered to the ideaof a main front toward the northeast, there appeared a certain unity ofdesign in the structures.
This main front, now under the Prince's view, was frequently broken,advancing here, retreating there; one section severely plain andsombre; another relieved by porticos with figured friezes resting ontall columns. The irregularities were pleasing; some of them werestately; and they were all helped not a little by domes and pavilionswithout which the roof lines would have been monotonous.
Lifting his gaze up the ascent from the low ground, it rested presentlyon a Tower built boldly upon the Heraclian wall. This was the highestpinnacle of the Palace, first to attract the observer, longest to holdhis attention. No courier was required to tell its history to himthrough whose eyes we are now looking--it was the tower of IsaacAngelus. How clearly its outlines cut the cloudless sky! How strong itseemed up there, as if built by giants! Yet with windows behindbalconies, how airy and graceful withal! The other hills of the city,and the populated valleys between the hills, spread out below it, likean unrolled map. The warders of the Bucoleon, or what is now PointSerail, the home-returning mariner shipping oars off Scutari, thecaptain of the helmeted column entering the Golden Gate down by theSeven Towers, the insolent Genoese on the wharves of Galata, had onlyto look up, and lo! the perch of Isaac. And when, as often must havehappened, the privileged lord himself sat midafternoons on theuppermost balcony of the Tower, how the prospect soothed the fever ofhis spirit! If he were weary of the city, there was the Marmora, alwaysready to reiterate the hues of the sky, and in it the Isles of thePrinces, their verdurous shades permeated with dreamful welcome to thepleasure-seeker
as well as the monk; or if he longed for a furtherflight, old Asia made haste with enticing invitation to some of thevillas strewing its littoral behind the Isles; and yonder, to the eyefainting in the distance, scarce more than a pale blue boundary cloud,the mountain beloved by the gods, whither they were wont to assemble atsuch times as they wished to learn how it fared with Ilium and the sonsof Priam, or to enliven their immortality with loud symposia. Aprospect so composed would seem sufficient, if once seen, to make ablind man's darkness perpetually luminous.
Sometimes, however, the superlative magnate preferred the balcony onthe western side of the Tower. There he could sit in the shade, cooledby waftures from a wide campania southward, or, peering over thebalustrade, watch the peasantry flitting through the breaks of theKosmidion, now the purlieus of Eyoub.
Again the Prince was carried back through centuries. It had beendetermined to build at Blacherne; but the hill was steep. How couldspaces be gained for foundations, for courts and gardens? Thearchitects pondered the problem. At last one of bolder genius cameforward. We will accept the city wall for a western front, he said, andbuild from it; and for levels, allow us to commence at the foot of theheight, and rear arches upon arches. The proposal was accepted; andthereafter for years the quarter was cumbered with brick and skeletonframes, and workingmen were numerous and incessantly busy as colonizedants. Thus the ancient pleasure house disappeared, and the first formalHigh Residence took its place; at the same time the Bucoleon, for somany ages the glory of Constantinople, was abandoned by its masters.
Who was the first permanent occupant of the Palace of Blacherne? Thememory, theretofore so prompt, had now no reply. No matter--the Princerecalled sessions had with Angelus on the upper balcony yonder. Heremembered them on account of his host one day saying: "Here I amsafe." The next heard of him he was a captive and blind.
Passing on rapidly, he remembered the appearance of Peter the Hermit inthe gorgeous reception room of the Palace in 1096. Quite as distinctly,he also remembered the audience Alexis I. tendered Godfrey of Bouillonand his Barons in the same High Residence.
What a contrast the host and his guests presented that day! The latterwere steel clad from head to foot and armed for battle, while Alexiswas a spectacle of splendor unheard of in the barbarous West. How thepreachers and eunuchs in the silk-gowned train of the one trembled asthe redoubtables of the West mangled the velvet carpets with theircruel spurs! How peculiarly the same redoubtables studied the pearls onthe yellow stole of the wily Comnene and the big jewels in his Basileanmitre--as if they were counting and weighing them mentally, preliminaryto casting up at leisure a total of value! And the table ware--thisplate and yon bowl--were they really gold or some cunning deception?The Greeks were so treacherous! And when the guests were gone, theGreeks, on their part, were not in the least surprised at the list ofspoons and cups subtly disappeared--gifts, they supposed, intended bythe noble "Crosses" for the most Holy Altar in Jerusalem!
Still other remembrances of the Prince revived at sight of thePalace--many others--amongst them, how the Varangians beat the boastfulMontferrat and the burly Count of Flanders in the assault of 1203,specially famous for the gallantry of old Dandolo, operating with hisgalleys on the side of the Golden Horn. Brave fellows, thoseVarangians! Was the corps well composed now as then? He glanced at thelusty examples before him on the stone benches, thinking they mightshortly have to answer the question.
These reminiscences, it must not be forgotten, were of brief passagewith the Prince, much briefer than the time taken in writing them. Theywere interrupted by the appearance of a military official whose uniformand easy manner bespoke palace life. He begged to be informed if he hadthe honor of addressing the Prince of India; and being affirmativelyassured, he announced himself sent to conduct him to His Majesty. Thehill was steep, and the way somewhat circuitous; did the Prince needassistance? The detention, he added, was owing to delay in gettingintelligence of the Prince's arrival to His Majesty, who had beenclosely engaged, arranging for certain ceremonies which were to occurin the evening. Perhaps His Majesty had appointed the audienceimagining the ceremonies might prove entertaining to the Prince. Thesecivilities, and others, were properly responded to, and presently thecortege was in motion.
The lower terrace was a garden of singular perfection.
On the second terrace, the party came to the ruined Church where,during a halt, the officer told of the fire. His Majesty had registereda vow, he said, at the end of the story, to rebuild the edifice in astyle superior to any former restoration.
The Prince, while listening, observed the place. Excepting the Church,it was as of old. There the grove of cypresses, very ancient, and talland dark. There, too, the Chapel of purplish stone, and at one side ofit the sentry box and bench, and what seemed the identical detail ofVarangians on duty. There the enclosed space between the edifices, andthe road across the pavement to the next terrace only a little deeperworn. There the arched gateway of massive masonry through which theroad conducted, the carving about it handsome as ever; and there,finally, from the base of the Chapel, the brook, undiminished in volumeand song, ran off out of sight into the grove, an old acquaintance ofthe Prince's.
Moving on through the arched way, the guide led up to the third andlast terrace. Near the top there was a cut, and on its right embankmenta party of workmen spreading and securing a canopy of red cloth.
"Observe, O Prince," the officer said. "From this position, if Imistake not, you will witness the ceremony I mentioned as inpreparation."
The guest had time to express his gratification, when the Palace ofBlacherne, the Very High Residence, burst upon him in long extendedview, a marvel of imperial prodigality and Byzantine genius.