Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Read online

  In the streets between the crowded red-tiled houses, arguing about theology you would hear a Babel of different voices: Greek and Syrian, Latin and Hebrew, Persian and Armenian. There were even a few Goths serving in the imperial armies by this time; but with their long ungainly limbs and horrid ruddy faces, their coarse blond hair and cold blue eyes, they were widely despised as racial inferiors.

  The rich rode in carriages under fringed canopies, drawn by pairs of milk-white mules. Camel caravans crowded the marketplaces, having come from Persia, India, or along the silk route from China. (Although in time this trade would drop off markedly when an enterprising merchant smuggled some silkworm eggs out of Soghdiana, and Byzantine silk production began.) Grain came via Alexandria from the plentiful granaries of Egypt, while timber, furs and barbaric amber jewellery came south out of the steppes of Scythia and the forests of Germany.

  In the city’s Forum stood a gigantic statue of Apollo topped with the head of Constantine, on a column of red porphyry. Out of the Forum led the high street of Constantinople, the Mese, running a full three miles to the Golden Gate in the great wall of the city. The Mese was where the noble lords and ladies of Byzantium came to do their shopping, at the most lavish jewellers and perfumers, in cool marble arcades piled high with fabulously expensive bolts of coloured silk, or at the little stalls of artisan leatherworkers, where they liked to buy the softest belts and the most delicate purses made from the hides of aborted kid-goats. For it is well known that the rich always have exquisite taste in such things.

  Everywhere there was bustle and wealth and plenty.

  Unless, of course, you were poor.

  The most wretched and destitute inhabitants of the city survived in foul-smelling alleys where kites picked over the piles of rubbish and rats bit their children at night. The true nature of the Son mattered little to them, and jewellery and silks were very far from them.

  Galla arrived on a day when the city was still in a warm hubbub of self-congratulatory triumph, after the defeat of the ever-threatening Persian armies to the east, and the subsequent marriage of young Emperor Theodosius II to his beautiful bride.

  Theodosius was Galla’s nephew, and she was fond of him. He was at this time in his early twenties: gentle, scholarly, a good horseman, and in other fields no more than mildly incompetent. But he had some capable generals, and the mighty Sassanid dynasty of Persia had only recently found that the Eastern Roman legions were still more than a match for them.

  It was Theodosius’ fearsome, pious, grimly virginal older sister, Pulcheria, who exerted the most influence in the Byzantine court.

  Rumour flourishes in courts and palaces as nowhere else. It was said that, despite her loudly advertised virginity, Pulcheria seemed to spend rather a lot of time closeted with her favourite saints and holy men in her private chambers. But most of these rumours arose among the Nestorian faction - her theological enemies, for reasons too tiresome to go into - and can be dismissed like the rumours of Galla’s incest with her brother.

  It was in the winter of 414 that the twelve-year old Theodosius had succeeded to the throne of the Eastern Empire. Pulcheria, then barely fifteen years of age, was declared official guardian of her brother and invested with the title of ‘Augusta’, an empty honour, so it was thought. But from that moment the adolescent girl began to rule, and she effectively held the reins of power over the teeming, hugely wealthy Eastern Empire for the next thirty-six years.

  Her brother, as he grew in years and wisdom, was no fool, as I have said: no Honorius. Scholarly, gentle and humane, he had a love of handwriting in a variety of beautiful and elaborate scripts, so that he became nicknamed ‘Theodosius Kalligraphos’. All the Eastern emperors had nicknames in this way. Another had had the misfortune to be nicknamed ‘Constantine Copronymos’, on account of his having unfortuitously shat in the font when he was being baptised as an infant.

  Under Pulcheria’s unsmiling influence, the Imperial Palace had grown into a virtual nunnery. All males were scrupulously excluded from the female quarters; and in an elaborate and lengthy ritual in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, amid much chanting and incense, she and her sisters, Arcadia and Marina, dedicated their virginity to God. Inscribed tablets of gold and gems were offered up before the altar, as kind of celestial promissory notes. Within hours the vulgar streetraders and hucksters in the Agora were chuckling at the news, saying that this was not much of an offering, since none but God would want their virginity. It was sad but true: the emperor’s sisters, with their long, cold faces, and their flat fronts apparently uninterrupted by anything resembling breasts, were not exactly the adornments of their age.

  Disapproving of all indulgences of the flesh as she did, Pulcheria could hardly be filled with joy when a certain new girl came dancing and laughing into this gloomy, curtained court: the adornment of her age, beyond a doubt. She who was to be empress. Even her name was beautiful: Athenaïs. Her laughter, her brilliant eyes, her wit and smiles, her glossy black hair tumbling in waves about her shoulders. The arch of her brows, the curve of her slender neck, those eyes like black honey, meeting yours beneath those raven lashes. The sway of her hips as she sashayed away from you, having just silenced you with some teasing barb, murmured from those full carmine lips.

  Athenaïs: the most beautiful girl I ever saw.

  9

  THE STORY OF ATHENAÏS

  More than beautiful, though. It takes more than mere beauty not only to capture a man’s heart, but to hold it. And Athenaïs was much more than merely beautiful.

  She first came to the imperial court in the conduct of a lawsuit: ardent, passionately indignant at a miscarriage of justice, brilliantly articulate, magnificently scornful of those she felt trying to cheat her of her due inheritance. And still a girl of eighteen.

  She was born the daughter of a prominent and brilliant philosophy professor in Athens, by the name of Leontius. In him, it was said, there burned brightly something of the pure, clear light that had illuminated Athens so many centuries ago, in the days when the Lyceum and the Academy still hummed with life and excitement. On the death of Leontius, a will was discovered which left everything to his two older sons and not a penny to his daughter, whom he loved above all else in this world. At first Athenaïs tried to reason with her brothers, but they laughed her to scorn. They had always resented the greater love that their father had had for her. And so she came to the highest court in the Eastern Empire: the Court of the Imperial Justice itself, in Constantinople, and presented herself before it, unaccompanied by a single advocate or lawyer.

  ‘I could not afford one,’ she said with simple dignity, standing before the open-mouthed court lawyers in her simple white stola gathered round the waist by a slim leather belt. ‘So I shall argue my case myself.’

  It was true. Her aunt, Leontius’ aged sister, had scraped together a small purseful of silver coins: just enough to buy her passage from the Piraeus to the Golden Horn, and no more.

  The will was read out again before the court. After dividing all his estate equally between his two sons, Leontius left only a laconic coda to his daughter: ‘To Athenaïs, I leave not a penny. She will have good luck enough elsewhere.’

  Athenaïs flinched when she heard her father’s cruel words read out. Then, composing herself, she began to argue her case.

  After a short while, someone was sent to fetch Theodosius himself. The scholarly-minded emperor would enjoy a strange spectacle such as this.

  To the astonishment of the assembled legates and priests, counsellors and praetors, this young slip of a girl supported her case with the fluency of the most experienced, smooth-tongued old law-hound in the basilica. She understood precisely the venerable four divisions of Roman law: lex, ius, mos and fas. She quoted freely and word-perfectly from the ancient authorities: from the most obscure imperial decretals, from the entire canon of the ius civile, which she appeared to have at her fingertips; from the Orations of Cicero, and the Institutes of Quintilian; from the Dige
sta of Ulpian, and the Quaestiones of Papinian; from dusty and half-forgotten pandects, from shadowy and unfrequented corners of the responsa iurisprudentium. Even from Demosthenes’ ‘Against Boeotus’, with a learned and scintillating digression on why the arguments of that great Athenian orator still held true, even if Greek law were an utterly separate thing from Roman.

  ‘For laws, like men, are born to die,’ she said. ‘But justice is immortal.’

  Whether it was the spellbinding softness and clarity of her voice or the luminous beauty of her person or her astonishing erudition that silenced the assembled greybeards and venerables, it was impossible to say. Perhaps the implausible combination of all three. But silenced they were. Some of them there on those hard stone benches had already begun to ponder how easy it might be to take this penniless provincial girl for a wife. While others began to curse inwardly that this was a commitment they had already made to another, long ago, and that the commitment still lived.

  It was unheard of for a girl to have been taught in the same way as a boy. But Leontius himself had taught her; unorthodox in his views on child-rearing, as in the wording of his will.

  The slim Athenian girl quoted even from the Holy Book of the Christians, although she was not baptised into the True Church and her upbringing had been wholly pagan. She cited the example of the daughters of Zelopehad, from the book of Numbers: ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, “The daughters of Zelopehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them.”’ A citation from their own Holy Scriptures so learned and so obscure that it had more than one priest amongst that assembly of great minds scrambling from his bench to find a Bible to consult.

  Eventually her argument was finished, and she stood silently awaiting judgement.

  If the court found against her, she would be turned out onto the streets without a penny. A beautiful girl like that - it was clear how she would have to make her way in the world. Some of the greybeards on their benches even began to delve surreptitiously beneath their robes and into their purses, to see how many solidi they had on them. Why, they could hurry after her and make her a kindly offer even on the steps of the court . . .

  At last, after muffled discussion with his private circle of jurisconsults, Theodosius rose to give his verdict.

  He cleared his throat and looked steadily down at the girl. ‘I find the will of Leontius just,’ he said.

  Those there commented that, even as he spoke the words, he seemed to grow in stature and gravity. It was as if in those few short minutes in court, in the presence of Athenaïs, he had suddenly grown up into a man of strength and character. Which was true: he had grown up, because for the first time in his life he had fallen in love.

  ‘Leontius, your wise and far-sighted father, was correct,’ went on the emperor. ‘You have no need of any legacy. You will prosper quite well on your own.’

  Athenaïs’ eyes flamed with dark anger but she said nothing.

  ‘You will depart from our court as penniless as you arrived,’ said Theodosius, seeming to add more cruelty to the verdict. His courtiers heard his words and looked to the girl. Her expression was a powerful mix of resolution and despair.

  Unspeaking, she turned to go.

  ‘However,’ Theodosius called after her, and his voice was gentler now, ‘if you will consent to be my wife, you will find your present poverty of less concern.’

  She halted, her back turned to the emperor against all etiquette, her head still bowed.

  The silence in the court could have been snapped in two.

  Then she turned to face him.

  Any other girl in her situation would have consented immediately, would have fallen at the emperor’s feet and wept with humble gratitude. But Athenaïs was not any other girl.

  She looked the young emperor in the face, once again breaching all rules of court etiquette. She saw before her, for the first time, not an abstract symbol of power and majesty, more gilded icon than man of flesh and blood, robed in the legendary Tyrian purple and the dazzling gold of a living god. She saw a young, fresh-faced, rather lanky boy, with gentle features and myopic eyes, but eyes nevertheless full of intelligence, humour and longing. Perhaps she also saw in him some of the melancholy and loneliness that always accompany emperors and kings.

  She thought in a flash that this was a man she could grow to love.

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ she said.

  And without another word, or a single copper coin in her purse, she turned and swept out of the court.

  She wandered the streets of Constantinople as if in a dream.

  All this . . . all this could be hers ... Empress of half the Roman World. What power and wealth she would have. What good she could do. But she would have to forswear all pagan philosophy, a thousand years of the finest thought and striving of the Greeks, and submit to being baptised into that Asiatic mystery religion of miracles and blood and human sacrifice which the rulers of the empire now professed.

  What would her father say? Her father had been wiser, perhaps, than even he knew.

  She stood at the heart of the city, that crowded square of the Augusteion bounded by those four monumental buildings which seemed to represent the soul of humanity in all its nobility and squalor: from the most lofty, spiritual and orderly, to the darkest and most chthonic forces in the hearts of men. Along one side, the great complex of the Mega Palation, the Imperial Palace and its courts, which she had just left. Along another, the grave Senate House. Along the third, the fine old Church of Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom. And along the fourth, the Hippodrome, the arena for the chariot races between those bitter rivals, the Blues and the Greens. Almost daily the poor of the city crowded inside to watch their teams gallop furiously amid the dust and sometimes the carnage of snapped axletrees and flying chariots, broken men and screaming horses; or erupted into scuffles and fights after the contest was won, cornering some poor isolated supporter from the opposite team in a dank, shadowy alley and slicing off an admonitory ear, a nose, a finger ...

  She looked up at the four great buildings and they seemed to revolve around her. Then she shook herself and left the square and began to wander westwards up the Mese, which runs like a gleaming marble artery through the city, and is one of the wonders of the world. She passed through the marvellous marble-paved oval Forum of Constantine, with its towering hundred-foot column of porphyry in the centre, transported by ship from Egypt, from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. (Oh, I can see it all now before me, as real and sunlit as ever: I, Priscus, knew it well; and never, never, never will I set eyes upon that beloved city again.) The plinth on which the column stood contained the hatchet with which Noah built the Ark, the baskets and the remains of the loaves with which Christ had fed the multitude; and, out of respect for the more ancient ways, the figure of Athene brought from Troy to the Old Rome by Aeneas himself. On the summit of the column, far away in the upper air where only birds and angels flew, gazing out over the rooftops of the city, stood another figure. The body was that of Apollo, carved by Phidias, but the head, surrounded by a halo representing the rays of the sun, was that of Emperor Constantine himself, Ruler of all the Earth under Heaven.

  Here half the citizenry of the city was gathered, so it seemed. A vast, milling throng of whores and hucksters, fishwives, fig-sellers, knife-grinders, songbird-vendors, pickpockets, con men and worse. The gangs of child pickpockets were the worst, all bright, gleaming eyes and deft little fingers, like felonious dormice looking to store away a secret hoard against the winter to come.

  In one corner a coarse-voiced man was reading aloud to an entranced crowd of illiterate listeners from that scandalous daily news-sheet, The Acts of the Roman People. They cheered raucously when he announced that today was the birthday of one of the minor members of the imperial family, and they listened agog as he read from the list headed ‘Crimes, Punishments, Weddings, Divorces, D
eaths, Portents and Abominations’. They were moved to tears at news of the recent death of the Blessed St Thecla, over in Asia, in the wilderness beyond Nicopolis. She had been thrown to savage beasts by a wicked and idolatrous emperor back in the time of the persecutions, but her virginal followers had cast flowers into the arena to calm them. Then she was thrown into a lake of savage seals, but they had all been killed by miraculous lightning. She had baptised herself in a ditch, and later lived for over a hundred and fifty years in a cave, eating nothing but juniper berries. Many sick, lame and blind had come to her there, and she had healed them all. Now she had passed away into a better world. The crowd crossed themselves reverently and prayed that St Thecla would remember them in heaven.