Istanbul

PROLOGUE

AD 632–718

(10–100 IN THE ISLAMIC CALENDAR)

We do not know the name of the messenger – but we live with the fallout of his message.

The Byzantine Emperor Constans II was a twenty-five-year-old ruler in his capital city of Constantinople in the high summer of the seventh century ad.³ News arrived that a ferocious force of Arabs, many of whom called themselves Muslims – ‘the ones who submit’ ⁴ – with a pine-fresh navy of 200-odd ships, had attacked the islands of Cyprus, Kos, Crete and Rhodes. Constans and his Christian court knew that these Muslims, adherents of a religion not yet a generation old, were a desert people – men so ginger about the sea that a popular Arabic street phrase whimpered, ‘The flatulence of camels is more pleasing than the prayers of the fishes.’ ⁵ With his superior numbers and a maritime tradition stretching back at least to the city’s celebrated foundation by sailors from mainland Greece 1,400 years before, Constans sailed out from his glittering, gold-domed city, praying that this would be a ritual humiliation for his Muslim foe.

Yet within just a day of fighting Constans would be the one degraded – jumping overboard dressed as a common sailor and crouching on the deck of a regular boat, desperately fleeing the slaughter between modern-day Cyprus and Turkey.⁶ The casualties in this Arab–Byzantine, Muslim– Christian conflict were so great it was said that all around the sea was stained red, flushed with human blood. Muslim sources called this the Battle of the Masts; new models of boat, the dromons and shalandiyyāt,⁷ forced hand-to-hand fighting as Byzantine and Arab vessels were roped together. And, disconcertingly for Christian Constantinople, against all the odds, it was the followers of Muhammad that won.

For a fat half-century the city of Constantinople, credited as God’s earthly home, would find herself both physically and psychologically besieged. This was a city that believed she was divinely favoured and that she would remain unconquered until the end of the world. Just a century before this New Rome, the wealthiest city on earth, had been the Christian capital of an empire of a million square miles. The people of Constantinople had such faith in their protector the Virgin Mary that the Mother of God would come to be called the city’s ‘commander in chief’.

Fleeing the scene of the battle, the Byzantine Emperor Constans had returned first to Constantinople, but eventually travelled on to the security of Sicily, leaving his mother city exposed. Those abandoned in the historic centre of the city itself, above what had once been an ancient Greek acropolis looking out over the Sea of Marmara, or sitting scattered along the shores of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, offered nothing like a united front. To some, Arab conquest seemed a certainty. Within just a few years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in AD 632 (year 10/11 in the Islamic calendar), Muslims had looked set to rule much of the known world. In 632 Arab forces had conquered Byzantine Syria, in 636 a Byzantine army was beaten back in Yarmuk, in 640 the capture of Heliopolis had allowed for progress into Byzantine Egypt, in 641 Alexandria had fallen, in 642/3 Tripoli was captured, and now this advance nudging north. If events had followed what seemed to be their natural course, Istanbul would have become the seat of caliphs fifteen centuries ago.

But immediately after the Battle of the Masts there was a lull. The fledgling Muslim community was weakened by a succession crisis and by internecine strife – eventually resulting, from AD 661, in the world-shaping split between Shia and Sunnis that still endures.⁸ In Constantinople life continued, if a little anxiously. Many left the city, unsure whether she could feed or protect them. The imperial dynasty had recently introduced a mutilating form of punishment – rhinotomy – when the noses of disgraced emperors would be split (and the tongues of their wives). The golden nose-cover would become a feature of the Byzantine imperial palace and of places of exile. In outlying territories Byzantine populations hunkered down in fortified settlements such as Monemvasia in the Peloponnese, or physically buried themselves, their homes, their churches and their granaries into the soft rock in Cappadocia, Asia Minor. Emperor Constans had even tried to move the capital to Syracuse in Sicily.

The anxiety was justified: first in AD 667⁹ and again in 668 and 669, the Arabs would be back, bringing an army right up to Constantinople’s Golden Gate. Still using the Greco-Roman boats and those Greco-Egyptian boatmen whom they had pressed into service after conquering the port-city of Alexandria in 642; lowering at the settlement of Chalcedon, just one thousand metres from Constantinople across the Bosphorus straits and within clear sight of the city, the Muslim Arabs teased and threatened those who were trapped within the ‘World’s Desire’.¹⁰ There was now, indisputably, a new maritime power on the block. Each spring from Cyzicus on the coast of Asia Minor the Arabs attacked. All that would hold them back was Greek Fire, Constantinople’s diabolic secret weapon made from a combination of Caucasian crude oil, sulphur, pitch and quicklime, with an effect similar to napalm; along with the firepower of a 500-ship navy built by Constans while absent in Sicily.¹¹ Fresh analysis of the Syriac and Muslim sources suggests that we should think of these early Arab aggressions as nagging incursions, rather than as a full-blown and consistent strategy of besiegement.

In AD 717 all that would change.

Defeated by Constantinople’s walls and by her cutting-edge weapons, but never taking their eyes off the prize, in AD 717 (year 98–99 in the Islamic calendar) Muslim armies returned. The Arabs had secured a base on Gibraltar in 711, footfall to much of the Iberian peninsula. Swathes of the Middle East and North Africa, and the edge of Europe, were theirs. Now it was time to secure the city of God. In 717, the besieging forces, led by the brother of the Syrian-based Umayyad Caliph Süleyman, attacked by both land and sea. Byzantine control of the Caucasus and Armenia had already evaporated. A Muslim fleet of 1,800 supported a vast army. Constantinople’s leaders were so fearful that all inhabitants were instructed to prove that they had the wherewithal to fight and a larder plump enough to survive a full year; those who did not make the mark were expelled. That year the city planted wheat in the gaps between her famous walls.¹² Meanwhile, buoyed up by an eschatological vision – that a ruler bearing the name of a prophet (Süleyman is the Arabic equivalent of Solomon) would take the city – the attacking army made up predominantly of Arabs and Berbers stockpiled vast resources and arms, including naphtha, and jerry-built their own siege walls of mud around Constantinople, isolating those within from their allies.

Yet the Arab plan had an Achilles heel: the seaward sides of the city could not be blockaded by their fleet. First that preposterous Greek Fire – its use directed from the walls of Constantinople by the Emperor himself – and then the convenient defection of a number of Christian Coptic Egyptians on the Muslim ships meant that supplies, men and morale could keep scuttling into the city under the cover of darkness from that squid-black sea. The treacherous currents in the Bosphorus snared Muslim relief ships sailing up from the Sea of Marmara. The Arabs’ own destruction of the surrounding countryside had left the invaders with no food of their own; famine, fear and disease worked its way systematically through their camps. A severe winter, when the earth was white with snow, saw not besieged but besiegers eating pack-animals, possibly even turning to cannibalism.¹³

Finally on the Feast of Dormition, 15 August AD 718, the Arab commander ordered the retreat. Constantinople’s protector, Mary the Mother of God, whose image had been paraded around the walls, was credited with victory.¹⁴ Realising that they had the upper hand, the exhausted Constantinopolitans rallied to attack the retreating enemy one last time – many Muslims drowned, others were harassed by Bulgars. The troops that survived limped their way back to allied territories and then home.

These events became legends before they were history. The onslaughts and heroism and desperate escapes introduce us to a recurring theme in Istanbul’s history, that this is a city that lives a double life – as a real place and as a story.

The songs of Constantinople’s sieges and ocean-borne battles would be sung around the campfires of both sides in the conflict for generations to come. Medieval chroniclers and later sources paint-boxed up the narratives: it was said that the Byzantine Emperor Leo III had sunk the Muslim fleet by touching the Bosphorus with his cross. Many declared that Constans had flown a cross while his soldiers sang psalms and that the Muslim commander Muawiyah had displayed a crescent with his men reciting the Qur’an in Arabic beneath. Memorialisers ignored the fact that both armies probably spoke Greek, that soldiers and civilians would have been able to understand one another perfectly – as they yelled insults and threats and muttered their prayers.

In Christian and Muslim households alike AD 717 became an episode of epic history and of deferred victory. Ottomans would later make pilgrimage to the mosques and shrines they believed had been founded within the city at the time of the siege.¹⁵ Much Arabic literature declared that the Muslims had in fact won – and looked to a further and full vanquishing of Constantinople and her territories at the end of days.¹⁶ It was said that the Arab commander Yazid I had scaled Constantinople’s stubbornly resilient walls before the 674 siege and thus was known hereafter as fata al-‘arab, ‘the young champion of the Arabs’; that Arab commandos had entered the city and had hanged a Byzantine emperor within Haghia Sophia in revenge for the slaughter of Muslims. In the West, tales of Constantinople’s tribulations are, in fact, still sung; in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, a fight for the city of Minas Tirith by land and over waterways,¹⁷ draws inspiration from these attacks. And each year on 15 August populations across the Christian world still thank Mary for her miraculous powers of protection. That Constantinople had not fallen increased her allure. In the minds of many, the city took on fantastical proportions.

Along with the tales of triumph we are firmly informed by Byzantine sources that around the time of the sieges of Constantinople Arabs occupied Rhodes, breaking up and then selling off to a Jewish merchant one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus (which some said had been toppled by an earthquake in 228 BC, others that it had been restored by various Roman emperors or indeed thrown into the sea). This beast of antiquity was then dragged by 900 camels (3,000 according to a few excitable chroniclers) to be sold off as scrap metal. This particular event, although enthusiastically retold in a number of medieval texts and in many reputable modern histories, appears in no Arab sources. Perhaps it is an embarrassed denial – or perhaps this ‘history’ is simply a story with all the hallmark tropes of vandalism and philistinism expected of both Jews and ‘Saracens’, spiced with a tinge of eschatological anxiety.¹⁸

Cultural memory, the hope of history, is often as potent as historical fact.

This is Istanbul incarnate. A place where stories and histories collide and crackle; a city that fosters ideas and information to spin her own memorial. A prize that meant as much as an abstraction, as a dream, as it did as a reality. A city that has long sustained a timeless tradition as old as the birth of the modern mind – where past narratives are nourished that tell us who we are in the present. In hard historical terms the Arab failures did indeed mark a change of ambition. The drive now was not to ‘cut off the head’ of Byzantium’s empire, but to focus on the territories all around – east, south, south-west. The result was 700 years of an uneasy parallel existence between the new monotheists, one that witnessed collaboration as well as conflict. But no one forgot that the ‘bone in the throat of Allah’ had not been taken.

For men of many faiths and for East and West alike, Istanbul is not just a city but a metaphor and an idea – a possibility describing where we want our imagination to take us and our souls to sit. A city that encourages abstractions and armies, gods and goods, heart and body, and mind and spirit to travel.