Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (84 page)

How did the Duke of Savoy react to this implicit reproach to himself alongside all other Western monarchs? It was the Serbian city of Belgrade, far to the west of Constantinople, which benefited from the wave of emotion generated by preachers and musical publicists like Dufay, for it was temporarily saved from Ottoman capture by desperate Western armies in a new expedition in 1456.
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By then there was nothing to be done for 'the City' itself. A century later, in 1557, a scholar-librarian in Augsburg, Hieronymus Wolf, invented the Latin word which I use freely throughout this book to describe the culture of the Greek Orthodox East: he took the old Greek name of the city
Byzantion
to create the term
Byzantium
.
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It took an external observer from the Renaissance West to formalize this description, with its resonances of a Christian culture whose roots were in the pre-Christian world - and for Wolf, the term referred to a culture, not an empire. By Wolf's time Byzantium had long ceased to be a living political reality, and it never would be again.

The people of Constantinople who could not flee did indeed suffer the fate which Guillaume Dufay had recalled from Jeremiah: like the people of Jerusalem long before them, they were sent off into slavery. But the Sultan wanted his new imperial capital brought to life; he could not leave the city as a wasteland. Almost immediately he began bringing in new people, and the majority of them were once again Christian and Greek. The Sultan realized that a vital encouragement as earnest of his good intentions would be to restore the Oecumenical Patriarchate, and within less than a year after the capture, he was able to choose a distinguished clergyman, George Scholarios, who now as a monk took the name Gennadios. Scholarios had been a delegate at the Council of Florence while still a layperson, because of his familiarity with Western theology and scholastic method; but usefully for the Sultan, the experience had turned him against the West and against the union with Rome in particular (naturally, Gennadios now made sure that the union was repudiated). One of the first things which the new patriarch did was to burn one of the most important writings of fifteenth-century Byzantium's most distinguished philosopher, Georgios Gemistos (who wrote under the pseudonym Plethon, suggesting both 'fullness' and Plato). What he objected to was Plethon's impassioned advocacy of Plato's philosophy and even of pre-Christian Greek religion.

Such censorship was understandable in the Patriarch's own terms, but it was an important signal about the future direction of Greek Orthodoxy. This was a time when the Renaissance of the West was reaching the height of its rediscovery of and enthusiasm for Classical literature and, through Plethon, Plato in particular (see p. 576); Plethon's surviving manuscripts found a safe home and much esteem in Western libraries.
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As in literature, so in art. The growing naturalism of late Byzantine art, such as that wonderfully presented in the mosaics of the Holy Redeemer in Chora, was left behind. As significant as the fate of Plethon's manuscripts was the strange career of one of the most brilliant and original artists in sixteenth-century Christendom, Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614). Born in Crete, Theotokopoulos trained on the island as an icon painter, but he exploited the fact that Crete was still a colonial possession of the Republic of Venice to travel west and establish a career first in Venice, then in Rome and finally in Spain - though there is little evidence that he ever paid more than lip service to Western Catholicism. As he travelled, his style became more and more individual, leaving behind the tranquillity of the icon for stormily dramatic effects, his pictures full of glancing, restless light and brooding shadow, the figures often ghostly and elongated. This suited the dramatic tastes of some Western patrons, but throughout his long life of artistic productivity, the painter continued to inspire as much bewilderment as admiration - indeed, he still does. The only way that the Italians and Spaniards could find Theotokopoulos a meaningful place in their culture was to emphasize his otherness: they simply called him 'the Greek'. El Greco's wanderings far from his birthplace are a symptom of the way in which Orthodox culture could not now harbour any radical innovation in artistic style: the West found him difficult enough.

The Ottomans' treatment of Christian Constantinople followed patterns familiar since the earliest Arab conquests. A remorselessly increasing total of the main churches became mosques. Hagia Sophia was naturally among them, its domed skyline transformed by an unprecedented array of four minarets, and a century and a half after the conquest its magnificence inspired the then Sultan to build an equally gargantuan Islamic rival nearby, the Blue Mosque, deliberately built on the site of the old imperial palace and boasting even more minarets. Stretching away from this promontory of the city, a score of new mosques built over the following centuries paid their own architectural tribute to Eastern Christianity's lost and greatest church with their domes and semi-domes. The famous Stoudite monastery, with its venerable liturgical and musical tradition, was closed as soon as the city fell and nothing but the church building remained, turned like Hagia Sophia into a mosque; so now both the models for liturgical practice throughout the Orthodox world had vanished.
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Throughout former Byzantine territories, as in Constantinople itself, the churches left in the hands of the Christians had to be lower in external profile than any nearby mosques, and church bells or clappers to summon congregations to worship were banned. This was part of an inexorable transformation of the landscape. The towers and extrovert facades of Christian churches were gradually dismantled, while the public presence of icons in wall niches and shrines - the architectural small change of a Christian world - faded away from the roadsides. As the traveller approached communities from villages to cities, minarets now dominated the horizon of roofs, just as the sound of worship was now the muezzin's call rather than the Christian clanging summons to prayer.
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As with landscape, so with people. The Christian population were given privileged but inferior and restricted
dhimmi
status (see p. 262) as a
millet
(distinct community) with the Oecumenical Patriarch at their head, and soon they found themselves ranged in Constantinople, Greece and Asia Minor alongside another rapidly growing group under a
dhimma
, Jews from Western Europe. Jews arrived here in their thousands from the 1490s after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal (see pp. 586-7), and they were welcomed by the Muslim authorities precisely because of their oppression by Christians. In Thessalonica, Jews remained a majority of the population until the arrival of huge numbers of Greek refugees in the tragic events of 1922-3 (see pp. 924-5), prior to an even greater catastrophe at the hands of the Nazis.
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As had been the case throughout the gradual and piecemeal formation of the Ottoman territories in Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire retained an extraordinary variety of cultures and jurisdictions, with no attempt being made to impose sharia or the customary law codes of Islam as an overall system (although in legal disputes which involved one Muslim contender, Islamic law would apply to the case).

When the Sultan recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch as head of all Orthodox Christians in the empire, it was a huge theoretical boost to the patriarch's power. Alongside him, Greeks who had prospered once more in the capital formed an elite of power brokers with the Ottoman authorities, and from their residence in the Phanar quarter of the city around the patriarch's headquarters, they were known as Phanariots. Such a narrowly restricted group existing on terms dictated by the conquerors was easily led into corruption and selfish exploitation of its position, and the Phanariots' Greek culture and pride in their past were constant potential sources of irritation to Orthodox such as Serbs, Bulgars or Romanians, who were also placed under the ultimate jurisdiction of the patriarch. Meanwhile the patriarch's supposed authority was constantly undermined by the fact that he was at the mercy of the sultan. The Ottoman administration frequently removed and replaced patriarchs, partly to weaken them, but partly because a fee was payable on the accession of a new patriarch, plus bribes from rival contenders. So in the century after 1595, thirty-one clergy were involved in fifty-five changes of patriarch.
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By their unstinting cooperation with the conquerors, the patriarchs saved their community from the worst possibilities of oppression. A major threat loomed in the 1520s, when leading Islamic lawyers (the
'ulema
) tried to attack entrenched Christian privileges, arguing that because Constantinople had resisted attack by Mehmet and was then conquered, Christians were not entitled to their
millet
status. It took a great deal of secret negotiation between the Patriarch and the then Grand Vizier to Sultan Suleyman (reigned 1520-66), plus a great many bribes spread round the palace, to head off this threat. The Patriarch produced witnesses to the early days of the conquest, one of whom was 102 years old, and claimed to have been one of the soldiers in the siege.
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The
'ulema
were nevertheless much more successful in persuading Sultan Selim II in 1568-9 into a radical confiscation of monastic estates, an action reminiscent of and perhaps influenced by the contemporary Protestant dissolutions of monasteries in Western Europe, and a deeply damaging blow to the life of monastic communities. Mount Athos was much affected and it survived largely on the generosity of Orthodox rulers from the north.
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Within their community, the Orthodox authorities now had no very good means of exercising discipline apart from the punishment of excommunication. Between official prompting and popular opinion, excommunication gathered to it the power of folk disapproval; so that in Greek popular culture, with much informal encouragement from clerical writers, excommunicates were considered incapable of normal mortal decay at death. Instead, they became an undead creature called a
tympaniaios
, because the undecayed body of one of these unfortunates was said to become swollen until it was taut enough to be beaten like a drum. The only way of ridding the community of such a terrifying monster was by sprinkling the body or coffin with Orthodox holy water and a priestly rite of absolution. Thus did the clergy keep some control over their flocks, and demonstrate their power against both the local imam and interloping Roman Catholic missionaries.
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Yet there was little they could do if a Christian converted to Islam, except to point out that the penalty for a reconversion of a convert Muslim to Christianity was death, by publicizing the martyrdoms which resulted from such reconversions. Missionary work was impossible, and the efforts of the patriarchate to provide a proper range of theological studies in the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople, to equal the sort of higher education available in Western Europe, were fitful and constrained.

The result was a slow decline in the proportion of Orthodox Christians in the empire, perceptible from the late sixteenth century. Some became crypto-Christians, and generations were able to sustain such a life for extraordinary lengths of time. On the island of Cyprus, finally captured from the Venetians by the Turks in 1570, a large proportion of those who converted to Islam were said to be like a cloth in which cotton was covered with linen, making it look different on either side, so they were known as 'linen cotton' (
Linovamvakoi
). Such double allegiance survived right up to 1878, when the British ended Ottoman power on the island. There are similar stories of generations of crypto-Christians from Asia Minor numbering tens of thousands; even priests who functioned outwardly as mullahs.
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Their passive survival was symptomatic of the general ethos of Orthodoxy in its great captivity. The instinct after 1453 was to preserve what it was possible to preserve in the face of repression and relegation of Christians to second-class status. The disaster only confirmed the end of the period of radical innovation in Orthodoxy, which had lasted from the iconoclast controversies of the eight and ninth centuries down to the affirmation of Hesychasm in 1351. It is worth speculating on how different the Orthodox mood might have been, how much openness to change and new theological speculation might have developed, if Byzantine Orthodoxy had not been so much on the defensive from the fourteenth century down to modern times.

From the mid-sixteenth century, Western Christians - Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, thanks to the great split of the Reformation - interested themselves afresh in their afflicted co-religionists in the East. Both sides of the fractured Western Church were looking for allies among the Orthodox for their own purposes, and hard-pressed Easterners often eagerly sought out their help. But there were major barriers to understanding or reconciliation: the long memory of 1204 overshadowed contacts with Roman Catholics which did not result in full submission to the pope's authority, and Protestant detestation of images - even the nuanced position of the Lutherans (see pp. 619-20) - was deeply offensive to the iconophile Orthodox.
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The one moment when the Church of Constantinople did find a leader who tried to seize the initiative and seek creative change only ended up confirming Orthodox Christians in their determination to defend their past: this was the ultimately tragic career of Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638). One great scholar of Orthodoxy, himself a bishop in the Orthodox tradition, has said of him that he was 'possibly the most brilliant man to have held office as patriarch since the days of St Photius'.
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Lucaris was unusually cosmopolitan for a senior Orthodox churchman. He came from the island of Crete, then still ruled by the Venetians, and as a result he had access to Western higher education in the Republic of Venice's celebrated university at Padua. Padua was itself unusual in Western Europe because, despite the fierce Counter-Reformation Catholicism of the Italian peninsula, it was discreetly hospitable to Protestants; Lucaris gained further acquaintance with Protestantism as well as a different Orthodox world when he travelled far north to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1590s. Here he witnessed the Ruthenian Orthodox Church submit to papal authority in the Union of Brest in 1596 (see pp. 534-5). The event appalled him, and he attributed it in part to the inferior education of Orthodox clergy, who were no match for the highly trained members of the Society of Jesus promoting the union. He began developing a sympathy for the Western Christians who also opposed the Roman Catholics, and in Poland that primarily meant Reformed (that is, non-Lutheran) Protestants.
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