Blue and Green; or, the Gift of God. A romance of Old Constantinople

Preface

. This book possesses a prologue, as well as a kind of post-initial preface, but I desire nevertheless to say a few words which cannot be incorporated with either. The view which I have taken of the character of Theodora is in many respects opposed to the traditional one, as rendered by Gibbon on the authority of Procopius. I think it is Dean Milman who remarks that the Secret History of Procopius is the most disgraceful and virulent libel in Uterature, as indeed any one who takes the trouble to read it, in connection with the other works of the Byzantine historian, will be disposed to allow. The tale of Theodora's excessive depravity in her earUer years, unrelieved by any redeeming quali-

PREFACE.

. VIII ties or circumstances, rests entirely on this hbel. Gibbon, whilst affeeting to throw discredit upon it, nevertheless gloats over its shameful details with that appreciative and salacious irony which is one of the great historian's chief characteristics. There can be little doubt that Theodora was of base origin, the daughter of an Ursarius, or keeper of wild beasts ; that at an early age she was devoted to the stage, and led the profligate life of most women in her profession. Her great beauty, and in all probability — although the malice of Procopius would deny it — her grace and skill, made her conspicuous above her feUows. There can be as little doubt, that as soon as she obtained the chance she exhibited many admirable and heroic attributes, that she elevated herself to be the fit consort of a disciplinarian and theologian like Justinian, and that her perfect chastity after her union with him is established — as Gibbon himself remarks — upon the complete silence of her implacable enemies. The writer of fiction may fairly claim for such a woman that in her misfortunes she was the victim of circumstances, and that it

PREFACE.

. IX was the nobler side of her nature which triumphed in the end. The author of a German romance, published in an Enghsh version a short time back, under the title of "A Struggle for Rome," has indeed out- Procopiused Procopius, and without any authority, except, it may be, his own disbelief in the refor mation of a woman, has depicted the Empress Theodora as a Messalina of the worst type, even to the day of her death, which he represents as suicide consequent on the detection of her guilt ! But the two or three chapters of " A Struggle for Rome " in which she appears, have perhaps but little claim on the sympathy of any class of readers, except the antiquarian. More than one romance has been grounded on the life of Belisarius, but in each case on the middle and close of it. A reference to Lord Ma hon's work wUl show that little or nothing (if we except a guess at his birthplace) is known of the hero's early youth, which is therefore also fair material for the writer of fiction. The same re mark applies to the youthful career of his wife, X

PREFACE.

. the celebrated Antonina. Of Ecebolus the Tyrian, history contains the brief notice that Theodora accompanied him from Constantinople to Africa. Hardly less scanty are the authentic details con cerning John of Cappadocia, up to the time when he attained high office, and became a notorious man. I am disposed to believe that modern turns of thought and expression are most acceptable to modern readers. I have not, therefore, much con cerned myself to give to this book any strong archaic flavour. Human nature remains the same in all ages ; the manners and customs of the sixth cen tury in the East bore sufficient resemblance to those of our own times to warrant some strength of comparison ; there are probably few collo quialisms of the present day — even to its slang — but have their equivalent in the dead languages.

Writing for modern ears, the interchange may be effected without much impropriety. In this attempt to modernize a very old story, I have endeavoured to avoid actual incongruities ; but I will not affirm that the eye of acute criticism

PREFACE.

. XI may not detect an anachronism here and there. At the same time I entreat readers to take for granted a good deal which I have thought it un necessary to explain. If, for instance, I mention a young lady's neat gloves, I do not enlarge upon the undoubted fact that the fair Byzantines were as careful to be bien gantees et chanssees as their nineteenth-century sisters of London and Paris ; if I speak of sumptuous carriages and splendid liveries, it must be understood that such things were as fully appreciated in Old Constantinople as in Belgravia ; if of thoroughbreds and trials, that without blood and training no horses of mortal breed could have been found to do two miles in harness at racing speed. In the following pages some mention is made of the Bulgarians. At the time when "Blue and Green " was commenced the name of Bulgaria was seldom pronounced by civUized lips, and its existence on the map of Europe was to most people in England a matter of indifference. It has since become literally a household word. At the present time the Bulgarians are regarded by a

PREFACE.

. large section of society — and with good reason — as a harmless pastoral race, victims to Turkish misrule, and recently goaded into atrocious reprisals by Turkish brutality. But I wish to state that my Bulgarians belong to that people which, in common with Hungarians, Poles, Croats, and other oppressed nationalities of the present century, was one of the great scourges of Eastern Europe ; which, although it afterwards adopted, and now claims, Slavonic Brotherhood, was in its origin kindred to the Turk ; which for century after century carried fire and sword and rapine into the fairest provinces of the Eastern Empire, sparing neither age nor sex, and twice besieged Constanti nople ; which founded two kingdoms, the one trans-, the other cis-Danubian, and produced a long line of sovereign princes ; and which, finally, experienced the most terrible of all Bulgarian atrocities on record at the hands of Basil IL, who out of fifteen thousand prisoners spared the eyes of every hun dredth man, that he might lead his blinded com rades home. The historical matter of two or three chapters

PREFACE.

. XIII towards the close of the third volume is contained in Lord Mahon's Life of Belisarius, drawn from the same source, the Persian Wars of Procopius. Similarity of description is in such a case almost unavoidable ; but I have always consulted original authorities in the hope of finding details — such as the combat of Andreas with the Persian champions — which, while too insignificant for the historian, might be invaluable to the romancist. I have not scrupled to borrow freely from Gibbon ; and ac knowledge my indebtedness to an exceUent article on Niebuhr's edition of the Byzantine Historians, in a far back number of the Quarterly Magazine. H.P. CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

Book I. Chaptee Page

Prologue ... ... ... ... ... 1 I. Father and Daughter ... ... 13 II. Arcades Ambo ... ... ... ... 34 III. The Augusteum ... ... ... 47 IV. Trisagion 60 V. Imperious Cæsar ... ... ... 73 VI. The Master of the Bears ... ... 92 VII. The Gift of God 112 VIII. Kakon Kappa 125 IX. A WoiiAis of Business ... ... 142 X. Justinian ... ... ... ... ... 165 XI. The Suppliants 182 XII. The End of the First Act 203

Book II

I. Belitzar ... ... ... ... ... 215 II. The Bulgarian Horse ... ... 228 III. Vox Populi 248 IV. The Lodge of the Rising Sun ... 266 V. The Chalcedonian Stairs ... ... BLUE AND GKEEN. PBOLOGUE. During several centuries the annals of the Christian Church in the East are disfigured by a lament able appendix : a catalogue of inhuman outrages, atrocious crimes, and wholesale massacres, perpe trated, under the cloak of religious zeal, by bigotry and fanaticism. In those unhappy times, council after council, synod upon synod, swayed by men whose great natural gifts were devoted unscrupulously to the furtherance of their personal ambition or the unsparing chastisement of their opponents, failed in defining or enforcing the boundaries of a satisfactory and intelligible faith ; the most subtle intellects of Christendom vied with each other in overlaying the grand and simple outlines of Chris tianity with a hatch-work of minute and vexatious VOL. I. b sophisms; and the world was distracted by the furious dissensions of those who, differing only on some scarcely appreciable point, on the interpreta tion or addition of a sentence, on the rejection or acceptance of a single monosyllable, cursed and reviled each other as heretics, and hurled the worst of human passions into the scale in favour of their especial creeds.

The tenets of Arius, Apollinaris, Cerinthus, Nestorius, Eutyches, and a host of minor authori ties, served in turn as fuel to the fire. All ranks and classes, ecclesiastical and civil, from Patriarch to chorister, from Emperor to peasant, were attacked by the same burning frenzy of dispute ; the ardour communicated itself to women and even children, and the streets of the Eastern capitals witnessed as horrid sacrifices to the Holy Catholic Faith as ever disgraced the rites of heathen idolatry. Truly the gold of Christianity was being refined in a seven-times heated furnace ; and ihe student who stands aghast and indignant before the ap palling picture presented to him, has need of all his patience to accept the apology of Evagrius, an historian of the times : — " Let none presume to sneer, as if the object of successive councils had been simply to depose their predecessors, and to be for ever devising some alteration in the faith. For while we strive to analyze the ineffable and incomprehensible scheme

Prologue

. 3 of Divine mercy, and to extol and exalt it to the utmost, our opinions are liable to be swayed towards various conclusions : to none of those who have originated heresies among Christians can we impute deliberate and initial blasphemy ; they fell away from the truth, not from any intention of dishonouring God, but possessed by the idea that in advancing their respective doctrines they could improve upon the work of their predecessors. "Moreover, we are all unanimous in a confession which involves the essential points : a Trinity is the single object of our worship ; Unity the com plex object of our glorification ; and the Word, who being God begotten before all worlds, in mercy to mankind became flesh by a second birth. "The novel doctrines which have been started on other points arose also from the freedom of thought vouchsafed to us by God the Saviour, even on such subjects as these ; in order that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church might be the better exercised in submitting contending opinions to the yoke of piety and truth, and be brought thereby into the one straight and even way.

" Accordingly the apostle plainly says, ' There is need of heresies among you, that the approved ones may be manifested.' " Here again we have occasion to glorify the ineffable wisdom of God, who to Paul the divine said, ' My strength is made perfect in weakness : ' through those very causes whereby certain members have been lopped off the Church, the true and pure faith has been more firmly established, and the Catholic and Apostolic Church of God has attained amplification and exaltation to heaven." But it is significant that the apologist, who was probably on the whole a more temperate and liberal-minded man than most of his contempora ries, cannot conceal his virulent animosity against those whose unfortunate zeal for improvement had led them into error. "Impious," "God-assaulter," "malignant spirit," "workshop of blasphemy," and the like, are epithets which flow freely from his pen ; he quotes with peculiar satisfaction the account given by the arch-heretic Nestorius of his sufferings in exile, and concludes with the following charitable comment : — "Thus does this man, who had not learned moderation even by his sufferings, in his writings strike and trample with fist and heel, reviling both the supreme and provincial governments.

I learn from one who wrote an account of his demise, that, when his tongue had been eaten through with worms, he departed to the greater and everlasting judgment which awaited him." The arch-heresy of Nestorius consisted chiefly in an attempt to reconcile two contending parties in the Eastern Church ; the one maintaining that the Virgin Mary ought to be styled "Theotocos," or

PROLOGUE.

. the mother of God, the other, " Anthropotocos," or the mother of man. Nestorius devised as a middle term, " Christotocos," the mother of Christ, and by this ingenious and well-meant amendment incurred the bitter wrath of both sides. Driven into bolder assertion, he subsequently refused to apply the unqualified term God to that of which it might be predicated that it was two months or three months old. At the same epoch, in addition to its troubles on the score of religion, the city of Constantinople was distracted by the quarrels of the Blue and Green Factions of the Circus, so caUed from the hue of the liveries or badges which distinguished them. Under one or other of these denominations was ranked the entire population ; the two original colours, white and red, having gradually fallen into disuse except for the occasional purpose of a chariot race.

Such veins of crime and brutality as were left untouched by the advocates of religion were worked to exhaustion by the partisans of the Hippodrome ; a specious and superficial connection was estab lished between the two, and the maintenance of orthodoxy or the punishment of heresy, in the elastic and accommodating cant of the times, were too often the watchwords of those whose sole object was the gratification of their own greed, lust, or revenge. To work out in detail the catalogue of human crimes, was not enough for these Factions. Isolated acts of murder, rape, robbery, and incendiarism failed to satisfy their fury. Whole streets were set on fire and pillaged, and the inhabitants subjected at the hands of their fellow-citizens to the worst outrages which follow the storming of a besieged city ; while at other times slaughter not unworthy of a pitched battle signalized their mutual hate.

It is recorded that at a single festival, the Greens, who had concealed daggers in baskets of fruit, destroyed not less than three thousand of the Blues. On certain occasions which seemed to offer unusual advantages to enterprising crime, the Factions in a manner suspended hostilities, like wild beasts that hunt in couples. At such times they became irresistible, and their coalition of the highest political importance. At the date when our story commences, the religious feud between Anastasius, Emperor of the East, and Macedonius, the Patriarch of Constanti nople, was at its height. It was the misfortune of the former to be called to the throne at a time of life when opinions have become passions, and preferences prejudices — he was sixty years of age when Ariadne, the widow of his Imperial predecessor Zeno, married him, and raised him frorn the position of a domestic in the palace to that of Emperor — and in an age when

PROLOGUE.

. 7 there was but little scope for the exercise of those negative virtues in which he exceUed. The encouraging advice of the public, "Reign as you have hved," was easy to offer but difficult to follow. The good qualities of moderation, economy, and tolerance, which sat so weU upon the Silentiary, became weaknesses, even faults, in an Emperor. Modest worth was incompatible with the spirit of the times. Paradox as it may appear, a man of strong rehgious feelings was forced to become more than half a scoundrel to support them. From his youth the Emperor had been zealously attached to the so-called Eutychian or Monophysite heresy, an attachment which, however culpable in the eyes of severe theologians, was practically innocent enough untU the purple rendered it con spicuous, and forced him into becoming its champion.

The heresy of the Archimandrite Eutyches, that of the Saviour's one incarnate nature, may be briefly summed up in his own words : "I allow," said he, "that our Lord was produced from two natures before then union, but I confess only one nature after their union." To this heresy, then, the Emperor Anastasius stood committed. On his elevation he had been induced to sign a written oath that he would do nothing prejudicial to the Catholic faith ; this bond was now in the hands of Macedonius, and no amount of persuasion or intimidation could bring the Patriarch to restore that which he treasured as a damning proof of the Imperial perjury. From this it may be gathered that Macedonius regarded himself as the bulwark of pure orthodoxy, although his enemies accused him of inclining to the heresy of Nestorius ; but on so dangerous a sea of controversy, where the line of true belief was invisible as the equator itself, it is rash and unnecessary to venture.

If a complete and microscopic comprehension of the mysterious duality of Christ be indeed essential to salvation, then the state of many a good, simple-minded Christian must be more than perilous ; and if by God's mercy it be not, we shall act wisely in leaving the subject to those unquiet intellects which delight in coining difficulties and elaborating solutions. The curious reader is at liberty to bewilder himself by the contemplation of the Saviour as existing in, by, from, or of two natures (for over these prepositions was the world convulsed), but for the purpose of this tale sufficient has here been said. There is, however, but little doubt that the oath which Anastasius was reluctantly induced to si<m in order to obtain power, and of which his reign was a continuous violation, was a constant thorn in his side. As there are some kinds of stone which harden

PROLOGUE.

. by exposure to the atmosphere, and as iron becomes tougher by incessant hammering, so all the innate stubbornness of the man was brought to the surface by the perpetual attacks to which empire exposed him, and a harmless sectarian, naturally amiable and temperate, was transformed into a violent bigot, in whose eyes meanness, injustice, and oppression became venial means of enforcing his peculiar tenets. Blue and Green, sapphire and emerald ! — the livery of the universe ; the hues of earth and air, of sea and sky and land ; of wood and plain and lake and distant mountain, of the river and its bank, of the violet and its leaves ; omnipresent, eternal ! the colours which nature delights in combining, and art has pronounced inharmonious ! Read this tale of a time when their antagonism betokened more misery to mankind than ever did the black flag of the corsair, the red badge of revolution, or the yellow ensign of the pestilence.

BOOK I CHAPTER

I. FATHER AND DAUGHTER. Onk Sunday morning in the year of our Lord five hundred and fourteen, before the bray of trumpet and clang of gong (for church bells were not yet in use) began to summon the inhabitants of Constantinople to divine service, Maria, the daughter of Proclus the Prefect, sat by the open easement of her chamber listening for the sound of the carriage which was to take her to church. It is with much pleasure that I commence my story with the introduction of this young lady ; for although she plays but a subordinate part in its pages, and I cannot claim for her any special development of character, I can guarantee her to be perfectly well brought up and educated according to the idea of the times, and to behave throughout with strict propriety. It must be understood that it is something to be able to affirm this.

I am writing of an age abounding in action and colour, full of unlikely facts and anomalous realities, the annals of which are probably the most romantic that the history of the world can produce ; but an age certainly not prolific of what we should term in these days well conducted people. No doubt they existed, as they always have, and as they ever will exist in every community, however dissolute and degenerate, but as a rule they passed away and made but little sign ; virtue and modesty were constrained to be their own reward, and with here and there a shining exception, most of the prizes in life seem to have fallen to audacity and iniquity. In reviewing the characters of my tale I have been alarmed to find how few of them have any pretensions to nice behaviour, such as might -win the commendation of the respectable nineteenth century, and yet I engage to do all I can, con sistently with truth, to soften, dilute, and mitigate the potent materials to the handling of which I have committed myself.

At the commencement of the sixth century the Eastern Empire was approaching the lowest stage of that degradation from which, under the rule of Justinian, it recovered for a brief period, only to be plunged again into the protracted weakness and viciousness of the Greek dynasty. The hereditary claims of birth were not un naturally ignored under a succession of rulers who had themselves sprung from the ranks; but this policy, instead of conducing, as might be expected, to the frequent elevation of individual merit, served only to establish a tyranny of wealth, impudence, and unscrupulousness. The licentiousness of the age was incredible. Effeminacy and ultra-refine ment walked hand in hand with brutality and ostentation. The corruption of morals extended through all ranks of society, not always excepting the clergy, and the depravity of taste through every branch of art and literature, every phase of life, pubhc or domestic.

The severe beauty of the older forms of architecture was replaced by a bastard system abounding in feeble curves and florid ornament, and the elegant simplicity of the earlier writers by pleonastic declamation. On the stage nothing would go down except coarse burlesque or gorgeous spectacle — the grosser the wit the greater was the enjoyment of the audi ence — while splendid scenery and naked actresses were the most certain aids to managerial success. The women of the upper classes delighted in false hair, paint, and extravagant costume ; intrigue was fashionable, and divorce ridiculously easy. The men were addicted to magnificent clothes, jewellery, perfumes, and warm baths ; their chief recreations, besides the theatre, were gambling, betting, and racing. The army had degenerated into a com pound of spiritless citizens and turbulent mercenaries, equally unserviceable at need, and the long lines of fortifications by which the Emperors vainly sought to protect the neighbourhood of Constantinople bore witness to the hopeless inca pacity of the troops.

And over the chaotic hideous ness of this state of things was cast from the throne a delusive glare of magnificence and power. The servile Byzantines delighted to worship the outward symbols and to endure the pitiful despotism of a sovereignty which was impotent to control the violence of a Faction, or to assert its dignity against the insolence of a barbarian ; their ears were satisfied by the sound and their eyes by the semblance of majesty, and the titles and honours due to divinity were eagerly lavished upon a gilded puppet. I trust that my readers who have got thus far will not be daunted by this digression, this post initial preface, and lay down the volume with the indignant query, " Why write of such an age ? " I plead its marvellous romance. At no other period of equal civilization have the eccentricities of fortune been illustrated by so many and so extraordinary examples; no other period, not being fabulous, can boast of such a wealth of dramatic incident, or present so many personages, the story of whose lives utterly confounds all the ordinary chances of human existence.

Whether I can so depict this age as to interest modern readers, whether I can properly dehneate it with all its strange resemblance to our own times and its special characteristics — its horrors, passions, and intrigues, its many vices and its rare virtues — is another question, but I cannot refrain from the experiment. My chief fear is that the records of those days are so replete with genuine romance that the fiction I have grounded on them may only blur their outlines without increasing their interest; my chief hope, that there are many readers for whom they may possess the charm of being not too familiar. I have selected a time when a transient gleam of better days began to dawn upon the Eastern Empire ; my pet hero at least may, I trust, be found blameless, and the story as a whole, if written without special purpose, not entirely devoid of moral.

Now too, if ever, does some interest belong to the memory of the first war that was ever waged in the name of religion, and of which the theatre was the region between the Danube and Constantinople. I repeat, then, that it gives me sincere satisfac tion to introduce at the outset my commonplace and possibly insipid sub-heroine, this young lady of seventeen, as she sat in her own bower of innocence waiting for the carriage to take her to church ; her small, daintUy gloved hands crossed over the embroidered cover of the missal which lay in her vol. i. c lap, and a look of rather precocious sedateness on her faultless features and in her demure brown eyes. She made a pleasant picture as she sat there, and there was reason enough for the smile of gra tification which lit up the grave features of her father as he entered the room.

"Dressed for church already, my dear?" said the tall Prefect, as he stooped to kiss the young girl's serene brow. " That's weU ; you are early to-day. How are you going ? " " The Lady Juliana calls for me," replied Maria ; " she begged me to be ready in good time, as there was likely to be a crowd." "Do you go as usual to her own church of the Deipara?" " No, father ; to-day we go to St. Sophia." The Prefect's face became grave again. "I am sorry," he said, " that the Lady Juliana should have selected St. Sophia. The Emperor, I grieve to say, has renewed the mandate for the amended Trisagion to be chanted there this morning, and there is likely to be a commotion." " So the Lady Juliana told me, father; but she said there was the greater reason for all good Cathohcs to support the Patriarch in the moment of trial."

" A very proper feeling, no doubt," said Proclus; but his tone was very dubious. " Is she not right, father ? " asked Maria, as the Prefect hesitated. "It is not for me," replied Proclus, "to criticize the conduct of so earnest and pious a lady, or to question its propriety ; but I repeat that I am sorry you are to accompany her, my child. In per mitting you so frequently to be her companion, not only to church, but to many other places, I accord to you a freedom which falls to the lot of few girls. My friends, indeed, blame me, but I have great confidence both in her and you. At the same time there is a vast difference between a lady in her position — of royal extraction, the wife of one of our most influential men, herself taking a leading part in the religious and political questions of the day — and my little daughter, who, I sin cerely hope, may never be mixed up with these unfortunate dissensions."

" There is indeed a difference," assented Maria, with suspicious meekness ; "I could only hope to imitate the Lady Juliana at a great distance." " There is no absolute reason, my dear," said her father, with some warmth, " why you should try to imitate her at aU. Be your own dear self, and I shall be content." "But have I not heard you say, father," asked Maria, rather argumentatively, "how admirable a person she is, and what a pattern to all Christians ? " "All — hem," hesitated the Prefect, a little taken aback, "it is quite possible I may have said so, and with truth. There can be but one opinion as to her piety and sincerity, her charities and good works. A lady who devotes a great portion of her wealth to the building of churches, schools, hospitals, and the like, and who strenuously maintains the cause of orthodoxy, is of course admirable.

But what I wish you to see, Maria, is that her prominent position places her, so to speak, beyond imitation, and that many things which are becoming in her, and are even exacted by that position, may not be so in other people." "There can at least be nothing wrong," pleaded Maria, " in sharing her anxiety for the welfare of the Church." " Certainly not," said Proclus ; " but as the Patriarch cannot possibly stand in need of my little girl's personal support, your prayers for the welfare of the Chinch would be more easily offered amidst a less excited congregation than that which is likely to fill St. Sophia to-day. But there, I have no wish to say more ; you have promised to go with the Lady Juliana — that is sufficient. She takes a great interest in you, and I think I prove my complete confidence in her.