Some tale-bearers and scandal-mongers whispered that the princess responded readily enough to her brother’s amorous advances, and was only infuriated when the scandal leaked out. For my part, though such things are by no means uncommon among ruling families, I do not think Galla was guilty. One thing she was not was a slave to her own desires. She was slave to nothing and no one.
The poor woman, so haughtily controlled in almost every situation which fate had so far thrown at her in her short but turbulent life, seemed quite bewildered as to what to do. This was the Divine Ruler of the empire, after all. What if he should actually demand, one hot night, flushed with wine and illicit passion…? It was unthinkable, yet to refuse him would be perilous in the extreme.
There was only one alternative. To leave his presence. To flee, as Aetius himself had fled before from the unpredictable mad impulses of the emperor, and hope he would forget her in whatever new passion his wavering heart set upon.
So one moonless night, Galla took ship from Ravenna for Constantinople with her three-year-old son, Valentinian, and little Honoria, still a babe in arms. At Spoleto, across the Adriatic, a small party of soldiers joined them. One of them wore the fine scarlet cloak of a general.
‘On time as ever, General Aetius,’ Galla observed as he stepped aboard at the head of his men.
He jumped easily down from the gangplank. ‘As always, for you, Your Majesty.’
Galla turned away in the dark and smiled.
8
Thus Aetius and Galla arrived together in the Golden City of Constantinople.
How to describe this majestic metropolis, this city of gleaming towers and golden domes, of august monuments and smooth marble pavements, situated so superbly on the Golden Horn, overlooking the Bosphorus, that very nexus of two continents of Europe and Asia, as if both knelt as tributaries before her haughty feet? After Rome, I loved Constantinople above all other places. In its newness and its relative innocence beside the sunbright Sea of Marmara, I confess that sometimes this New Rome made the Old seem dark, and bloody, and corrupt, stained by the long centuries, and by the dark desires of men.
At this time, Constantinople was a city of a million people, presiding over the finest natural harbour in the world. Founded by Constantine the Great nearly two centuries earlier, on the site of the ancient Greek fishing-port of Byzantium, it was declared the new capital of the Roman Empire and named after the God-Emperor himself. Constantine was never a man for false modesty.
The proud new capital was a city of fantastic wealth and monumental architecture. The richness of its seas was legendary. You had only to throw a net into the water, it was said, and you would haul in a weighty catch. And with its free hospitals, state-employed doctors and teachers, its subsidised entertainments for the masses, elaborate postal services, rates, taxes, customs and excise, street lighting, price-fixing, and its inexhaustible obsession with sport, it was a very modern city indeed.
Three things united the Byzantines above alclass="underline" the Christian faith, Roman citizenship, and a passion for chariot racing. This last meant that everybody, from the emperor downwards, was either a Blue or a Green, depending on which chariot team they supported. And woe betide anyone bumping into a crowd of rival fans in a dark alley on race-day
…
It was also a city of endless theological disputes. Whereas, historically, most mobs have rioted from hunger, injustice or cruel oppression, Byzantine mobs rioted over fine points of Christian theology, or minute changes to the liturgy. In vexation, various emperors involved themselves in these disputes, trying to comprehend the complexities and suggesting new doctrines which might unite the bitterly opposing factions. ‘Aphthartodocetism’ was one such doctrine, proposed by old Theodosius the Great, but it failed to catch on. The Christians remained just as factious and turbulent as the chariot teams.
Had it not been only a few years earlier, in the Year of Grace 415, that the brilliant Hypatia was butchered in the streets of Alexandria by a mob of savage Christians, urged on by Bishop Cyril himself? Hypatia was one of the most brilliant women of her age, an astronomer, poet, physician, and philosopher. But a pagan. She had never accepted the deity of the Jewish carpenter, and could outwit and defeat any who argued against her, with the scintillating brilliance and deftness of a Cretan blade. At last the Christians grew sick of her clever, articulate, erudite scepticism – and perhaps her intellectual superiority, her high-minded passion, the purer fire that burned within her, her ardour for the truth, and her faith in things other than the primitive mystery cults of Palestine. Her unshakeable sweet reasonableness must certainly have enraged these devotees of their own blazing irrationality. So they set upon her in the street, and beat her to death. Then, still unsatisfied, these professors of the religion of brotherly love scraped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and heaped the remains of bleeding meat in the gutter for the dogs to eat as they had once devoured the flesh of the wicked Jezebel, according to their own blood-stained Scriptures.
Even the theologians complained there was too much theology around. That great doctor of the Eastern Church, St Gregory of Nazianzus, said despairingly that you couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread in Constantinople without becoming embroiled in a theological disputation with the baker regarding the true relationship between the Father and the Son. Likewise, he continued, ‘The money-changer will talk about the Begotten and the Unbegotten instead of giving you your money, and if you want a bath, the bath-keeper assures you that the Son surely proceeds from nothing.’ Poor Gregory was made unwilling patriarch of the city by old Emperor Theodosius, but he lasted only a year before he fled back to his native village and became a hermit.
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.