The Riddle and the Knight Read online

  1 was not going far. This rusting hulk of ferry plies its way between Istanbul and the various islands that scatter the shores of the Sea of Marmara. I was getting off at its last port of call, a tiny island some fifteen miles from Istanbul. I only knew it by its Greek name, Halki, but when I'd asked for my ticket the man had stared at me for a mo-

  The Riddle and the Knight

  ment with blank indifference, then given me a ticket for HeybeUadi. It struck me as odd that such an insignificant dot on the map should be honoured with two different names. It was only later that I realized the significance of this topographical schizophrenia.

  By the time we reached Halki, it was 10:30 a.m. and the morning mist had lifted. But still there was no sign of sunshine. Grey clouds loomed overhead threatening rain, while the hilltop that crowned the island had yet to shake off its blurred outline. The monastery on its summit—where I was heading—kept appearing and vanishing in the clouds. It was here that I hoped to make my first rendezvous with Sir John Mandeville.

  The lone barouche owner waiting at the port wouldn't let me walk to the top. I was quite possibly his only customer in months, and he wasn't going to give up a couple of hundred thousand lira without a fight. We agreed to a price, I chmbed into the rickety carriage, and off we set up a winding hill road. Soon we were clip-clopping through an evergreen wood whose branches drooped low over the road. The sea receded into the distance and was soon far below us; the air grew so wet it seemed to drip from the trees. Eventually, soaked through and shivering with cold, we reached a large, locked wrought-iron gate.

  The monastery of the Holy Trinity was a peaceful but lonely place. Abandoned by other monks and deserted by the faithful, one lone ascetic named Father Isaias lived a life that had remained unchanged for centuries. Though surrounded by an alien faith, though disturbed by the Muslim call to prayer that drifted up from the village, he kept alive the ancient tradition of Orthodox monasticism and carried the torch of Byzantium, flickering and fast fading, into the future.

  Here, atop his lonely mountain. Father Isaias lived a life of splendid isolation. Detached from the cares of the world, he could sit and gaze longingly towards the imperial capital that once was Constantinople. He was truly a living fossil—a lone Greek still worshipping in Turkey—and 1 could scarcely contain my excitement at finding him. He was, perhaps, the last link to that ancient capital that Sir John claimed to have visited in the 1320s.

  Mandeville was fascinated by the pious Greeks he met in the city and wrote in great detail about the differences between his beliefs and

  Constantinople

  theirs. In his day, Constantinople boasted hundreds of monasteries housing thousands of monks, for when the city's elderly grew too frail to fend for themselves, they would move to such establishments and spend their declining years in prayer. Others had less choice: a frequent punishment for troublesome ministers of state—those who fell from imperial favour—was to gouge out their eyes and confine them to a monastery. By the time Sir John says he came to the city. Holy Trinity would have been crowded with political prisoners.

  Everything changed when the Turkish janissaries captured Constantinople in 1453; many of the city's monasteries were forced to close their doors for good. Some struggled on for a few more centuries, but then they, too, were abandoned and demolished. Only Holy Trinity has survived to the present day.

  Father Isaias greeted me with a friendly smile and showed little surprise at my unannounced arrival. As soon as he heard why I had come, he welcomed me in for coffee and a chat. "I suppose I am indeed the last living remnant of the Byzantine Empire,'' he said with great pride in his voice, "except . . ."—he paused for a moment as he sieved through his memories—". . . except, of course, that I was born and brought up in Wimbledon."

  Wimbledon? YJith his faded vestments and straggly beard. Father Isaias looked the very picture of a Greek Orthodox monk. He even spoke English with a Greek accent. Yet here he was telling me he came from a genteel suburb of south London more famous for tennis and strawberries than its monastic traditions.

  "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said. "I thought you'd realize. You see, I didn't become a monk until my early twenties. I learned Greek, lived on Mount Athos for several decades, and now I am here. But before that—well, it's true—I lived with my parents in Wimbledon."

  The door creaked and an ancient ghost of a man shuffled into the room. It was Father Germanios, the abbot of the monastery, who quite possibly remembered the fall of the city in 1453. I'd been told that Father Isaias lived here alone, but Germanios had apparently been holed up for years as well. He looked at me through half-blind eyes and held out his shaky hand. "I am London," he said in a proud but faltering

  The Riddle and the Knight

  voice. Isaias looked irritated. ''He means he's been to London/' he explained. Germanios smiled again. "London," he said. "Big, big . . . London." I nodded, and his elderly face beamed with pleasure.

  Together, these two monks trod the empty corridors and lonely rooms, hstening as the echo of their footsteps faded into the gloom. There was a time when the monastery had been used as a summer school, and the cries and whoops of students had rung out down the corridors. Now they had fallen silent, for the students no longer came. Gone, too, were the days when the buildings housed a theological college: the last group of trainee priests had packed their bags in 1971 when the college was forcibly closed by the Turkish authorities. Walking around the Holy Trinity monastery was like entering a school in holiday time, except that the long vacation here had lasted twenty-four years. Being here saddened me: the life of the place was slowly ebbing away.

  "This is one of the small reception rooms," said Father Isaias as he led me into a salon the size of a tennis court. The wooden floor had a highly polished sheen, and the velvet plush covering the gilded chairs was carefully dusted. There was even a fresh display of flowers that filled the ceremonial hall with scent. Someone clearly came in here every day and dusted the room. Someone polished the floor.

  Next door there were classrooms which had been left, Pompeii-style, in exactly the state as when the last student waved farewell. Even the garden, with its neat pots of geraniums and carefully clipped hedges, was well tended. Yet there was not a hint of behind-the-scenes activity. Who cut the grass? Who dusted the windowsills? At 11:30 a.m. the letterbox clattered, yet I never saw the postman. A meal was cooked, yet I never heard a chef. The place was run by phantoms who performed their duties, then scuttled off to hide in the shadows.

  I asked Father Isaias how many worked here; I asked who paid for it all. He looked at me sternly and shook his head. The few Greeks remaining in Istanbul have a hard enough time without me poking my nose into their affairs.

  Despite living on a beautiful island in the Bosporus, Isaias's role as guardian of the Byzantine tradition is a precarious one, and the future has never looked so bleak. Yet it wasn't always so: for more than a thousand years Constantinople was the richest city in the world—the hub of an immense empire that stretched from the shores of Spain to

  Constantinople

  the coastline of the Black Sea. This empire had arisen from the ashes of the Roman world when Constantine the Great—ten centuries before Mandeville set out on his travels—was proclaimed emperor while campaigning in England. One of his first decisions was to move his imperial capital from Rome to the shores of the Bosporus and christen it New Rome. The name didn't stick, and within a generation the city had become known as Constantinople after its founder. As people's horizons shifted eastwards, the lingua franca changed from Latin to Greek and the old Roman world found its successor in the Byzantine Empire. The greatest turning point of all came while Constantine was doing battle in Italy. Looking into the sky, he beheld a vision of the crucifix accompanied by the words 'Tn this sign, conquer." Constantine converted his empire to Christianity and, in doing so, turned a persecuted cult into a state religion.

  Ever since the Turks captured Constantinople in 14
53, the remnants of Christian Byzantium have been in decline, and the empire that Mandeville claims to have visited has today shrunk to one tiny island in the Bosporus and a few pockets of Greeks in Istanbul. But they, too, are on their last legs. There are fewer than twenty-five hundred heirs to the empire left alive. Thirty die every month. Many more leave the city each year, fleeing from persecution or emigrating abroad in search of a better hfe. Even the Ecumenical Patriarchate—home to the supreme head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the enduring legacy of Con-stantine's Christian empire—is under threat. When the present Patriarch dies, there is unlikely to be anyone left to replace him.

  But empires do not disappear completely. Customs are passed down through the centuries and traditions kept alive in family homes. People also remain, and it was these descendants of the Byzantine Empire that I was hoping to meet—descendants of the very families that had so intrigued my knight from St. Albans.

  "It won't be easy to find any Byzantines," warned Father Isaias, "for there are very few of us left. Most fled in the 1920s, and more leave every month. 1 wish you the best of luck, but I don't envy your task."

  I had arrived in Istanbul knowing little more about Sir John than what he writes at the beginning of his Travels. He claims to have been born

  The Riddle and the Knight

  in St. Albans and says he left England on St. Michael's day in 1322, but he declines to mention his reasons for going abroad or explain why he went for so long. Instead of describing himself, he begins his book with a portrayal of imperial decline: a portrayal that could scarcely have been more accurate. For even at the time when Mandeville claimed to have visited Constantinople, the empire was teetering towards catastrophe after a long and bruising battle for power.

  The fault lay squarely at the feet of the emperor's grandson, a brilliant but vainglorious youth called Andronicus. Brought up as the apple of his grandfather's eye, he was corrupted by the gifts showered upon him as a child and soon acquired a greedy obsession with money. In his youth he asked to be given a rich and fertile island to which he could retire for a life of debauchery.

  But quite by accident, Andronicus found himself thrust into the political hmelight. He had an instructor in the art of love—a beautiful lady described as a "matron in rank and a prostitute in manners"— whom he suspected of seducing other men in her spare time. Laying an ambush outside her bedroom one night, he butchered the man fleeing her bedchamber, only to find he had killed his own brother.

  Andronicus was over the moon, for this brother had deprived him of any hope of power; when his father died of grief eight days later, he realized that only his elderly grandfather stood between him and the imperial throne. Chroniclers of the time express their horror at seeing the youth unable to contain his delight at the deaths, and prophesied that such an outcome could only bode ill for the empire. They were right: for the next seven years the empire was torn apart by three separate civil wars, which Andronicus eventually won. His grandfather was stripped of his title and confined to a monastery, and spent his de-cUning days locked in an uncomfortable cell.

  By the time Sir John arrived in the city, Andronicus was busily spending the empire's revenues. His declared aim was to possess at all times a thousand hounds, a thousand hawks, and a thousand huntsmen, and although he was the richest ruler in Christendom, he so depleted the empire's gilded coffers that the state could no longer equip an army strong enough to combat the threat posed by the Turks.

  In his early years Andronicus had cast himself as a future Alexander the Great and cursed his grandfather with the words: "Alexander

  Constantinople

  might complain that his father would leave him nothing to conquer; alas! my grandsire will leave me nothing to lose." But although the young emperor did wage a series of dazzlingly successful campaigns on the empire's western front—and for a short time even recovered Thes-saly and Epirus—these provinces were soon lost to Serbia. In the east the situation was even bleaker: the Turks won a string of decisive victories and were virtually knocking on the doors of Constantinople by the time Andronicus died. It was a miracle, in fact, that it took them another century to capture the city.

  Sir lohn, arriving in these troubled times, comments on the woeful position of the emperor: "He used to be Emperor of Romany, of Greece, of Asia Minor, of Syria, of the land of Judea, in which is Jerusalem, of the land of Egypt, of Persia and Arabia; but he has lost all, except Greece/'

  In this he was correct: although the Catalans still controlled central Greece, and Italian families still held the Aegean islands, Andronicus had indeed reclaimed northern Greece for the empire. It was his only lasting military success.

  Few monuments remain from these final years of Byzantium, and the skyline of today's city is dominated by the domes and minarets of the Ottoman centuries. The taxi driver who had met me at the airport was keen to give me a guided tour of Istanbul, and although I tried to explain my interest in the city's past, he had never heard of Byzantium and kept asking if it was the name of my hotel. Keeping both eyes on the meter and none on the road, he skirted in a huge loop around the city, then plunged us into the worst of the rush-hour traffic. But the detour was worth the cost, for as we approached the Ataturk bridge the lights of the Golden Horn were flickering on, and the stony profile of the Ottoman city, built on the ruins of Byzantium, was spread before us. The minarets and domes lining the water's edge seemed to have heaved their bulks out of the submarine depths, dripping and cold in the chill autumn air.

  My guidebook had recommended the Pera Palas: a huge, turn-of-the-century hotel built for passengers arriving on the Orient Express. It can't have changed much in the intervening years. Its dimly lit Ottoman interior is filled with huge green plants which loom like monsters from the corners of the atrium. Acres of mirrors reflect acres of

  The Riddle and the Knight

  carpets, and in the evenings, small parties of ex-pats gather for gin and tonics before heading into town for dinner.

  The bedrooms had seen better days. The carpet in my luxury suite was threadbare and the paint peeling. And while the room faced southwest towards Halki, the island itself was permanently lost in the cloud of pollution that hangs over Istanbul like a yellowing net curtain.

  A young lad was operating the hotel lift when I first arrived. As I stepped inside, clutching my suitcase in one hand and passport in the other, he immediately pulled down a bench, sprinkled me with cologne, then sprayed the carriage with air freshener. As we neared the top floor, he asked with great politeness: "You wish, sir, to see Agatha Christie's room?" I declined and he shrugged his shoulders. "Agatha is a great British writer," he explained before opening the metal lift doors.

  Half an hour later I had to pop downstairs to reception, so I called the lift. Again the lad splashed me with cologne before repeating his earlier question: "You wish, sir, to see Agatha Christie's room?" I said no for a second time, but he was not easily deterred: later that afternoon he asked me for a third time, with an increasing note of desperation in his voice. He was still operating the lift the following morning, so I walked downstairs to breakfast. But he caught my eye as I was on my way back to my room and called me into the lift. "Sir," he said with a note of determination in his voice, "today you will see Agatha's room."

  "Today I am going to a monastery," I explained. "Tomorrow ... I promise."

  "No, today," he replied, and before 1 could say anything more, the lift had stopped at the fourth floor, the metal doors were flung open, and a second lad was standing there ready to take me hostage: my tour of Agatha Christie's bedroom could begin.

  Guide Two unlocked the literary bedroom and the three of us stepped inside. It was a small room that looked almost exactly identical to mine.

  "Agatha-bed," said the guide, pointing to the bed. "Agatha-sink," he added. "And this . . ."—he tapped the glass firmly—". . . Agatha-window."

  I pointed at the table. "Agatha-desk?" I suggested.

  "No, sir," he rep
lied with a note of triumph, "Agatha-table."

  Constantinople

  On the way out, I gave them both a tip. "No more Agatha/' I pleaded.

  "No," promised the lad from the lift. "Agatha-dead."

  Father Isaias suggested I spend the afternoon at Holy Trinity monastery and led me up onto the roof of the building, from where there was a superb view across the island. The land fell away sharply towards the sea, and far below us was the little village and port where I had arrived. I could just about make out the shadow of a tanker pushing its way through the Bosporus before it gave up its ghost to the mist.

  Father Isaias pointed far into the distance. "See that island over there?" he said. "The Turks confiscated that from us during the war. And that one there . . . ?" He pointed towards a more definite shape. "That monastery has been allowed to collapse. Soon it, too, will disappear completely. This one here is the only one left."

  A gust of wind blew rain into our faces. "That's why I'm here," he added. "I have to keep this place alive. If I left, the Turks would confiscate these buildings as well, and that would be the end of everything."

  There was a moment's silence as we watched a cat chewing the geraniums; the rain began to fall harder, and Father Isaias suggested we move back inside. "Let's go to the library," he said. "There's just a chance we'll find something about your knight. Tell me again—what was that problem you'd found?"

  I had reread Sir John's book the night before coming to Halki, and the more closely I examined his description of Constantinople, the more puzzled I became. He claims to have watched a jousting tournament during his stay in the city, and even describes the jousting ground as being close to the emperor's palace. Yet anyone with a concern for historical accuracy—and Sir John is normally a stickler for details—would have known that while jousting was a favourite pastime of knights in the medieval west, it was almost unheard of in the eastern empire. It was impossible that Sir John could have seen such a tournament in Constantinople, and I could only presume that he had invented the story to add a little local colour to his book.