Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

THE PESTILENCE ARRIVED in Constantinople in 542. Within ten days the city was utterly transformed. There was a terrifying absence of moral logic to the plague. It struck down rich and poor, virtuous and wicked alike. Procopius records the death rate in the city leapt to five thousand a day, and then to ten – probably a wild guess, but it says something of the staggering scale of the epidemic. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. Doctors were helpless to explain the plague’s origins, let alone how to treat it.

The sudden onset of the plague created eerie and ghastly scenes. John of Ephesus reports of ‘bridal chambers where the brides were adorned (in finery), but all of a sudden, there were just lifeless and fearsome corpses’.

An epidemic caused by a pathogen as lethal to humans as Y. pestis usually runs its course quickly if it kills the host too rapidly for that person to circulate and transmit the disease. The really successful pathogens behave like the common cold, leaving their hosts well enough to go out and sneeze in crowded places.

A BYZANTINE CHANT has two parts, the ison and the melody. The ison is the underlying heavy drone, the sustained choral note that anchors the chant. The ison doesn’t move, and so exists outside of time. It represents nothing less than the uncreated light of God, eternal and sublime.

‘All the best folktales do that. They wander off the path, even though the iron law of these stories is that you should never, ever stray from the path.’

The ancient Romans believed the Chinese harvested their silk by combing it from the leaves of a tree. The Chinese in turn believed the Romans procured their cotton by combing the hair of a special kind of ‘water sheep’.

IN CONSTANTINOPLE, sex, pregnancy and childbirth were bound up with magical practises that originated in the dim pagan past. Women drank concoctions made from rabbit blood, goose fat or turpentine, which they hoped would make them fertile. For contraception, a woman would sometimes wear a magical amulet containing a portion of a cat’s liver. If a couple remained childless, they prayed anxiously to the Virgin Mary, the defender of the city, to intercede on their behalf. But Mary was an impossible role model, having succeeded at motherhood without engaging in the sordid business of sexual congress.

Cats dogged Joe and me throughout our lunch that day. Our platters of food arrived, and with them came two cats, nagging us for scraps. Three more appeared and all five of them formed a circle of intimidation around Joe, who was greatly amused by the ring of fluffy brazenness around him. One of the cats, a smoky grey kitten with searching black eyes, defected to my side of the table and squeaked out a plaintive noise. I laughed in such a way that could only mean, No kofte for you, kitty-kat. I turned back to my meal and the little beast leapt up and clouted me on the hand.

Joe is getting older too. At fourteen he’s accelerating rapidly out of boyhood into adolescence, a process I watch, like most fathers, with pride but also with a tinge of grief. I know I’m losing a part of him to adolescence soon. His properly proportioned fourteen-year old physiognomy is starting to elongate and become absurdly gangly, an untidy tangle of knees and elbows. When he reclines on the couch in front of the TV he resembles a heap of discarded chicken wings. His feet – almost as big as mine – are too big. The sweet choirboy voicemail message he recorded on his phone in January sounds nothing like the honking baritone of December. I can’t quite gather him up and hold him like I could when he was little. Now I embrace him awkwardly, like a brother or a friend.

In Constantinople’s final, turbulent century, even as its leaders drove the empire to extinction, somehow, heroically, the city experienced a resurgence of culture and ideas, like a final burst of light from a dying star. As the outside world became too horrible to contemplate, the Orthodox church turned inward, venturing deeper into mysticism. Priests adopted an intense style of prayer known as hesychasm, taken from a Greek word meaning ‘to keep stillness’. Hesychasm was not unlike Buddhist meditation; it required breath control and constant repetition of a mantra, the Jesus prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, the sinner’ – to help the worshipper withdraw from the noise and clutter of the outside world. Then, once a state of utter stillness had been reached, the mind would be opened to the uncreated light of God. In such moments, the worshipper might be flooded with ecstasy, although the church cautioned against seeking ecstasy for its own sake. This was an undeniably powerful form of theosis, union with the divine, realised in the most personal manner possible.