The empire of Byzantium,
that golden dream.
The climax of ancient Rome and Greece.
One emperor,
one single faith.
The dream that lasted for a thousand years,
a dream shattered by the armies of the West.
The fame of Byzantium traveled from Iceland to China,
from Ethiopia to Russia,
to every kingdom on the earth.
And, at its center, Constantinople, the world's great marketplace.
Its fabled wealth,
its gold, its emeralds, its palaces, its glittering churches.
A legend so rich it caused its own destruction.
Founded in year 330, the Christian Empire of Byzantium
had its center here in Istanbul in modern Turkey.
The Byzantines called this city Constantinople.
A thousand years ago it was the richest city of them all,
the eye of all the world.
In the very center, the ancient Church of Saint Sofia,
converted now into a mosque.
Here, the emperors of Byzantium met the King of Heaven,
the lords of this world and the next, the center of the Christian universe.
Visions of this holy city and its golden emperors
filled the mind and the imagination of every medieval prince and king
until one day an army of the Christian west came here and destroyed it.
Beside the church, above the sea, a shadowed park
with five centuries of buildings in it,
the palace of Byzantium.
A thousand years ago there were gold pavilions here,
chapels, mansions, set in a sea of green.
An earthly paradise,
one of the most potent ancient legends of our planet,
the home of God's emperor on earth.
So, where is the Holy Palace of Byzantium in modern Istanbul?
There's a lump of it there.
A sad, pathetic pile of brick.
You have to go into the streets and to the alley ways.
You really need a map.
Look, I'll show you. Modern Istanbul...
why do maps always run the wrong way?
Modern Istanbul, ancient Constantinople.
I'll show you what I mean.
Look! There's the great Roman roads coming into the center of town,
the Hippodrome where the people met the emperor,
the great church just beside it. And there!
Between that wall and that one there, that whole area was all palace.
Dozens of buildings, dozens of churches, all together,
high and glittering right across the hill!
So, you might ask, "Where the hell is it now?"
The golden palace is buried beneath old Istanbul.
The little streets are haunted by its lost pavilions,
by ghosts of ancient gardens,
by the shadows of its courtiers and generals.
The enormous curve of the imperial race track still stands there,
shattered wonder of the medieval world.
We're right at the very heart of the palace of imperial Byzantium.
There's a corner shop.
Well, at least you can say the Byzantines invented corner shops.
They had a law about them. There should be one in every street,
they said, for the necessities of life.
That there, though, that's something else.
That's a part of the palace itself.
Just part of the foundations, though.
Once they held a great high terrace,
not that tea house up there,
where the emperors walked each evening in the fading light,
their fine silks flowing gently in the fresh sea breezes.
Constantinople was the greatest sea port in the medieval world.
Arab, Russian, Viking, and Italian boats
once sailed along these walls.
This is the ruin of an imperial pavilion, some fourteen centuries old.
The warm sea once splashed against these walls.
Those are the doors through which the emperor once walked to board the
royal yacht, The Greyhound.
The emperors liked to live beside the seaside,
so it's always a good idea to, when you're walking along the seaside walls
of Constantinople,
to look and see if these little gates give you something of the entrance of the palace.
Some of them don't look much today,
but, they're very interesting.
See, this Greek text?
It's part of a Greek version of the book of Habakkuk,
a text we know once was laid around the base
of a great statue of the emperor Justinian,
who stood in the center of the city.
So this, then, is not an ancient gateway,
because that statue was still standing a few hundred years ago.
Where on earth can we find the picture of the palace of Byzantium?
It's still here, of course,
in its imitations and echoes of the great palace of Constantinople
that stand in Sicily and Spain and Syria and Rome.
Villas, gardens, the verandahs, all set like tents across the hill.
Scented courtyards,
splashing fountains,
a world that ordinary people never saw.
Some of their very stones were plundered from the golden palace of Byzantium.
There were churches, too, filled with the holiest of relics.
Fragments of the true cross, set in gold and blood red rubies
and great jeweled cups,
made for the emperor's own communion.
And at the heart, at the very center of this magic palace,
Byzantium's throne room, the throne room of the emperor of Christendom.
As you approached the imperial throne of Byzantium,
you'd have felt as naked as a man on Judgment Day,
utterly defenseless.
The man who sat on that chair didn't rule by the will of God,
he was "The will of God on earth".
He was God's instrument, he was "Divine providence personified."
Some Byzantines believed that the end of world history would come
when that man on that throne took his crown off and laid it on the rock of Calvary.
It's probably the most total form of government the world has ever seen.
You don't have, for example, participatory government in this.
Who could participate in the will of God?
You can only bow before it.
You can't have morality or loyalty. You can't have good kings or bad kings,
because, who could know the workings of the will of this astonishing emperor?
That is Byzantine politics.
Byzantium, ruled with cosmic certainty.
It didn't dominate its neighbors with vast armies,
but, with images of God and government
with bars of gold and promises of princesses in marriage and alliance,
all dressed up in the silk robes of Byzantium.
The Byzantines operated a kind of cultural imperialism,
and at the center of the show was Constantinople,
the golden palace, and its emperor.
The rituals of its church and court.
In the tenth century,
diplomats and merchants, Easterners and Westerners,
all gave astonishing descriptions of a weekly procession that
wound through the cloisters and the gardens of the palace, all filled
with singing choirs
and ran up to the great Church of Saint Sofia.
"Behold, the morning star!" they sang, as the emperor approached.
"In his eyes the sun's rays are reflected!
Adore him, ye nations!
Bow the neck to his greatness!"
The whole world agreed that this was the most magnificent, the most
awe inspiring sight on earth.
At its ending, the procession passed up a wooden walkway
that ran right up to the gallery of a great church
and entered Saint Sofia through this door.
Here, high up in the gallery of Saint Sofia,
was the chapel of the emperors and the court.
Below the balcony, in the incense and darkness of the ancient church,
pilgrims from Asia, Africa, and Europe
visited and kissed a thousand holy relics...
a little holy land of marble, gold and bronze.
In this smaller, private space above, the emperors held courtly services
and were enrobed for the vast ceremonials that took place each week in
the church below.
And, here they are still,
the dynasties of old Byzantium,
still walking in the grand procession from a thousand years ago.
That's the emperor, John the Good up there,
all decked out in his Sunday best and carrying a bag of gold for the church.
He was a good king. He was from the Camejanie family.
It was a noble dynasty, died out in 1185.
That's his wife, Irenae.
She was a Hungarian princess. See, she's got blonde hair.
And that poor little weedy chap around the corner is their son Alexis.
John desperately wanted him to succeed to the throne,
but, he died young.
That person there is the most celebrated, most married monarch of
the Macedonian dynasty, the empress Zoe.
Zoe ruled Byzantium in her own right in the 1050's.
But, Zoe also had royal blood in her veins, and she legitimized three
successive husbands as emperors.
That's the last of them, Pius Constantine the Ninth.
If you look closely, you can see that the head of that figure's been changed.
I bet there were portraits of her other two husbands underneath.
Now the funny thing about this mosaic is that Zoe's portrait's been
changed along with her husband, too.
You know, some historians have said that she was very vain.
It's certain she was beloved of the people of Constantinople who thought
her very beautiful.
And, you know, she was almost sixty when that portrait was made.
In the year 987,
Russian ambassadors came south into the sun to see Byzantium.
They told their prince, the ambitious Prince of Kiev,
that they couldn't begin to describe the splendor of Saint Sofia.
They could only say that God dwelt here within it,
and they were all baptized.
Just as it intended, Byzantium had dominated its neighbors with pious splendor
and magnificence.
These Russians, though, were tough and warlike.
Despite their new found faith,
they still hovered dangerously on Byzantium's northern borders.
Rather than dispatch grand armies to subdue them,
the Byzantines employed images of God and government.
They built churches in central Europe the like of which the Northerners had
never seen.
And sometimes, too, the Byzantines sent bishops and ambassadors,
men laden with wisdom and relics and the word of God.
The Byzantines didn't like to travel north in the winter.
The diplomats had to go sometimes with little bars of gold stamped with
the emperor's name,
wrapped in furs and stuffed under the sledge out of the way,
the gold to bribe local chieftains to attack one another
rather than to go and attack Constantinople.
It was a terrifying journey.
First of all, you went to a Byzantine border fort.
There the governor tried to grab a few of the sons of the local princes to keep
them under control.
And, then, you set out across the icy wastes.
When you met some villagers you might give
them some silk brocade, or pepper, or leather.
But, always out there as shadows hiding in the woods, the Epechenade.
These were ancient tribesmen who really prided themselves on killing travelers
who drank from their gold bound skulls
that hung on the walls of their tents, so it was said.
After months of travel,
you'd arrive at the side of the frozen river Nepa,
and look up at the great fortress of the ruler of Kiev, the Prince of the
Verangian Russe.
Before Byzantium, the princes of Kiev had all lived in wooden huts.
These towers and domes and all the dreams they hold came here from old Byzantium.
And, the story of their making is an extraordinary tale.
This little area here was once the center of Kiev Enrusse,
a little stockade just six hundred yards across.
Now, you've got to think, it's the year 988.
There's Prince Vladimir, a Byzantine bishop, and a lot of Byzantine craftsmen are
coming out here.
It's just before dawn. It's very cold.
And, at a particular holy moment, after a prayer is said,
they plot the position of the altar.
And then, as the sun comes up and a shadow is cast across the snow,
a nobleman called Simon, so tradition tells us, took off a golden belt.
They measured out twenty golden belt lengths.
And, that would be the first church in Vladimir's kingdom.
It's an astonishing moment in history!
It's the old technology of Greece and Rome
a thousand years after those empires are gone
going into parts of the world that they had never managed to conquer!
Vladimir's church is gone now.
There's still a few bits of the floor left, though.
Some precious relics of a tremendous Byzantine achievement.
You know, it's at times like this archaeology really comes alive.
You know, this isn't just a little bit of old brick or mortar or something.
These are the first bricks ever laid in central Europe.
It's not just stone on stone, either.
This is like somebody got into a Cadillac
and drove it into the middle of the Amazon
and parked in a village where nobody's ever seen outside people before.
This is astonishing.
Look!
It's only a bit of ceramic and a bit of mortar.
You need two separate kiln masters with two separate kilns for that.
They have to find the lime to make the mortar.
They have to go to the river to find the clay, down the road here.
They have to build their kilns, cut the trees.
And then, they've got them cutting stone,
local stone hewn from open quarries for the first time.
The Russians didn't like working stone.
There's an old Russian proverb, "It is easier to teach an ill tempered wife
than it is to cut stone."
But, actually, their real problem was the weather.
It was truly terrible.
It was either freezing, freezing cold...
and they complained bitterly that it was so difficult to lay bricks in fur lined
coats and mittens.
And then, when it thawed, this area was almost a mass of mud
and they had to devise incredibly elaborate wooden structures
to hold the building up at all when they extended the foundations.
So, this is an extraordinary enterprise.
How ingenious those people were coming from the South. How determined!
It took them eight years to get this place up.
They learned, though.
The next time they built a church in five years.
This is the church they built, the Cathedral of Saint Sofia of Kiev.
Beneath the old Ukrainian domes,
Byzantine brick and ancient Greek geometry.
These could be the walls of an imperial church in ancient Constantinople.
Inside, memories of the palace of all palaces, and the church of all churches,
the original Saint Sofia of Constantinople.
And gleaming mosaics, too, made by Byzantine craftsmen
sent here to work for Vladimir's son, Prince Yeroslav.
Carefully preserved images of Jesus, Mary and the saints,
images of government and holiness to pacify the North.
The heavenly court of old Byzantium,
floating high above the Prince of Kiev.
The heavenly court, now entirely mirrored in Yeroslav's new court on earth,
aided and abetted by a Byzantine bishop
who wants him to punish sinners, to feed the poor,
and to fight the enemies of Byzantium.
But, there's something else going on in this wondrous building,
something else yet more subtle. It's like a soap opera here.
It imparts manner. It imparts gesture.
It shows you the Byzantine way of walking and talking.
Between that fierce structure and this new manner,
the old order of Russe was entirely swept away.
But, you know, despite all of that the Byzantines never really trusted the Russe.
They needn't have worried, though.
The Russians had learned their lesson very, very well, indeed.
And, centuries later, when Constantinople itself had been thrown away,
when Constantinople the second Rome had gone,
then, Moscow, the new capitol of the Russe declared itself as the third Rome.
Just as the dangerous northern tribes passed under Byzantium golden spell,
so did it's southern European neighbors, Greece and Italy, and the islands of
the Mediterranean.
Venice, that ancient little town set on the mud banks of the north Italian salt marsh,
was the owner of a powerful fleet of warships,
as much a menace to Constantinople as were the tribesmen of the north.
Beneath the stones of Venice, the bricks and columns,
the technology and arts of old Byzantium.
Just like Kiev, Venice's first churches
and its most powerful images of God
and government all came here from Byzantium.
This was the old Venetian's single most powerful portrait of the "Face of God".
The Pallidoro, made for the high order of the Simbarcks.
It's a funny old thing, actually.
It's cobbled out from all sorts of things, gold strips, bits ofjewelry.
It's all there, like a magpie's nest.
The single most beautiful things about this is these wonderful plaques of enamel.
They're Byzantine imports.
They were made in the imperial workshops in the year 1105
and they're probably copied from the decorations of a chapel in the imperial palace
of Constantinople.
That's Christ in the center.
All around him and all in order, large to small, is laid out the court of heaven,
just as Byzantium's foreign kings and princes decorated the emperor's court
at Constantinople.
If you were a useful ally for Byzantium,
and you sent off thirty of forty pounds of gold to Constantinople with a humble letter,
the emperor might just honor you with some of these panels...
pictures of God and your local saints and portraits, too,
of you amongst the golden prophets and the angels of Byzantium.
This was the power of Byzantium abroad,
its prestige, its foreign policy.
This little chap here is Oldelafo Fallia,
the ruler, the doge of Venice.
He's the man who commissioned the greater part of the Pallidoro.
Now, this is where you can start to see something of that provincial envy of
Byzantium starting to work,
that envy that almost rose up and threatened to destroy the great imperial empire.
Look! See what I mean.
There's the man, there's the Virgin Mary,
and there you would expect the man's wife, but, it isn't his wife.
It is the Empress Irenae of Byzantium.
So, what's going on here?
Well, I think the Venetians have sort of rejigged it
so the dear old doge of Venice who,
by Constantinoplian rights was a minor official on the edge of empire,
suddenly popped up as, you know, married to the great empress.
They're also, the Venetians, cunning devils, given him a halo.
You see, they've soldered a whole new head on there.
The Byzantines would never have sent a figure of a local ruler with a halo on.
So, he's sort of really bumped up in the holy heirarchy here.
But, there's one thing the Venetians missed,
and this is quite funny,
because, rulers in the celestial universe wear red socks.
The Virgin Mary has red socks, the empress has red socks,
all the kings on this have red socks.
Poor old Oldelafo doesn't.
So, he isn't really at the top of Byzantium's holy heirarchy.
You don't think that's important?
Oldelafo would have, though.
Deep down, he knew that the great Byzantine god,
that ordered everything within this Christian universe,
had seen that dubious halo.
Also, that this same god held the power of eternal life and death.
By the Middle Ages, Byzantium's most powerful images of God and government
had crossed the Mediterranean and penetrated central Europe, too.
And, always, at the very heart of this Christian universe, was the golden emperor
of Byzantium and the glittering city of Constantinople.
What did that legendary city really look like?
In modern Istanbul, one single precious district of the city
still holds something of the air of ancient Constantinople, buried underneath it.
Part built from the stones of the city's ancient marketplaces,
Istanbul's bazaars still stand in Byzantium's thin streets.
That old electric mix of races and religions,
trades and professions, is still here as well,
just as it was a thousand years ago.
Oh my god, what are they now?
Leeches.
Yes, leeches. Leeches.
So, clean your shoes, clean your blood.
Doctor's eczema heumatisma...
That's amazing. Old Byzantine leeches.
Yes.
They're good for everything, huh?
Yes.
Set between the East and West, Constantinople was the world's great marketplace,
a living legend.
Goods from Byzantium's bazaars
are found today in excavations in Sweden, in Afghanistan, in England, and in Russia.
And, like Coke cans in the Gobi desert,
they give out a very special buzz.
Something for your constipation?
Henna for your fingernails?
Cumin?
Everything a Byzantine, Sultanas would need.
Bet they didn't call it that!
In Byzantium, women mostly made the deals.
Nowadays, though, the traders here are men.
Bolta Ghamda, African gold and ivory,
Asian gemstones,
eastern silks and spices,
and multinational traders, Italians mostly,
buying and selling everything you could think of.
There were fortunes to be made out of Byzantium.
You know, the weavers, the great silk bazaars of Byzantium
have been famous for centuries upon centuries.
In the West, they just had little bits of Byzantine silk
and they used it to wrap the bones of saints
and to put upon the high altars of cathedrals.
So, you can imagine that when a Western diplomat came here, about 950 AD,
and actually bought two whole rolls of silk for his own clothes
that he was very pleased with himself.
But, when the bishop got to the borders, the customs, the Byzantine customs took the
cloth away from him.
They said that even great bishop Louit Prand
of Cremona, the embassy of the king of Germany,
wasn't grand enough to wear this fine fabric.
You know, the Byzantines had a knack of
making great kings feel like little lads from the country.
The old bazaars had ancient wisdom up for sale, as well.
In Byzantium's book market,
the best part of the learning of the ancient
world was copied out by publishers and merchants.
And here it is still today, the oldest book store in the world.
You know, this is an amazing place.
Just think, six hundred years ago there was a very famous Arab travel writer
and he was coming through here rummaging about in the bazaar, looking for books,
Ibn Battuta he was called.
Anyway, there he was rummaging around.
There would have been more people here then, lots of scribes actually writing them.
And, a Byzantine magistrate who's walking through the square recognized him.
And, the old two men got together,
the Arab and the Christian,
and they sat down and they talked about writing books.
They talked about travel and the joys of scholarship.
Westerners really loved the book bazaar in Byzantium.
They could find things there that were real legends,
magical lost works like this, for example.
This is a copy, Greek copy,
of an ancient work made in Alexandria by an ancient Greek.
And it concerns the workings of the universe.
Westerners only knew this from the talk of learn�d Arabs.
Now, after visiting the bazaar,
they can actually own a copy of Ptolemy's Alchemist.
Books like the Alchemist gave algebra and chemistry to western Europe.
To westerners, it must have seemed that all the wealth and wisdom of the world
was held inside Constantinople
and in the houses of the lucky people of Byzantium.
The Byzantines lived in a very face to face community.
It was a very tight, enclosed world.
They were incredibly superstitious,
always looking for signs as they looked at each other,
things that might change the meaning of their relationships with one another.
The angle of a man's shoulders could tell you if he was having an affair.
If you had a dream that you've put on a pair of shoes and weren't going anywhere,
could mean you might be getting married.
You could nod at a woman and it meant that
you would be having an affair with her very shortly.
Superstitions everywhere!
They divine the future by listening to thunder,
but, above all, they loved charms and trinkets,
things you can buy in bazaars, glittering treasures.
And this, that is the greatest charm of all.
It's been around for thousands of years before Byzantium
and it'll go on for a thousand years beyond us all.
It's a charm against the Evil Eye.
The Evil Eye, of course, is envy.
That thing that's so destructive inside small communities,
and so destructive for Constantinople, too.
Constantinople was called the eye of all the world.
Everybody envied its gold and silk and pretty princesses.
Not everybody, though, was allowed a glimpse of heaven.
Poor old bishop Louit Prand of Cremona had come to Constantinople
for silks and for a Byzantine princess for his prince,
hadn't got either of them.
The Byzantines lectured him upon the gross behavior of his prince
and sniffed at the very idea of sending an imperial princess to such
a barbarous and distant kingdom.
Louit Prand greatly resented these haughty Byzantines,
especially the great warrior emperor,
Nakafouras Fokas, who came to the throne in 963.
You wouldn't want to meet him on a
dark night, bishop Louit Prand reports to his prince.
He's a monstrosity in a smelly old robe,
a dwarf with the eyes of a mole, disfigured, disgraced, pig like, an Ethiopian.
Every week, Louit Prand continues, like some crawling monster,
the emperor walks in procession to the great church and the singers cry,
"Behold, the morning star approaches!"
They might just as well say, "Come on you burned out old crow,
old woman, clod hopping barbarian!"
As Western diplomats, like Louit Prand, reported on the weakness of the emperors
and on the thousand years of treasure in their city,
so western Europe's princes grew ever stronger, ever more powerful, and ever
more envious of Byzantium.
In 1204, the Venetians managed to divert a cutthroat army of Crusaders
from their sacred vows to capture Palestine for Christendom.
Promising them the plunder of Byzantium,
they provided lists of the treasures and the holy relics inside Constantinople.
On the thirteenth of April, Venetian war galleys sailed up to the city walls
and the knights of France and Germany, of Italy and England,
jumped from the boats onto the battlements.
The campaign that followed was a nasty mix of treachery and chaos.
But the ending, the city's walls were
breached and the imperial throne was overturned.
Many Byzantine nobles fled here to the palace of Blachenai,
where they were besieged by Henry, the noble Prince of Flanders.
Now, the Venetians knew exactly what was in this palace.
They even had an inventory of its contents.
When the nobles gave up the fight, they took everything they could out
of the building...
gold, silver, precious jewels, silks, satins,
ermine, minerva,
the hold was tremendous.
More booty, it's said, was taken from this town than from all the cities
since creation.
Over the next fifty years
half of Constantinople was boxed up, crated,
and shipped out of the city to Venice and the West.
At the very heart of Venice,
between the state palace and Saint Marks, the old state church,
is the city's ancient treasury,
and the root of that treasure was the plunder of Byzantium.
It was Europe's pawn shop, really.
Emperors left their crowns here for cash.
The king of France actually bought the Crown of Thorns from this room.
And, in the 1790's, when Napoleon and his armies turned up in Italy,
he was able to take half a ton of gold from this room and melt it down
just to pay his troops.
But, despite all of that, despite all the losses,
this is still the single place in all the world where you can get a glimmer,
just a flash, of the treasure that once filled Byzantium.
A glass bowl enameled with classic images,
taken from the emperor's own quarters in the palace.
From the palace chapels, the cups of the imperial communion.
A golden icon of Saint Michael, studded with Indian emeralds...
the Byzantines used its glowing colors to foretell the future.
This, too, came from the palace,
probably from the chambers of the queen.
Inside Saint Marks, as well, the altar's filled with the holy
relics looted from Constantinople.
This superb Madonna, Venice's most holy icon,
had been carried into battle by the emperor Alexis Mozouflos.
The Venetians tore it from his abandoned war chariot.
It's not just the inside of Saint Marks that filled with the
plunder of Byzantium,
the whole outside of the cathedral is covered in stones stripped from the
churches of Constantinople
and shipped by the Venetian navy.
A great new balcony was built from the stones of old Byzantium
and four bronze horses, said to have come from the very heart of
Constantinople, were set up high upon it.
Saint Marks was plated with the plunder of Byzantium.
Today, the old brick church has all but disappeared beneath the foreign marble.
Shiploads of columns from Constantinople now decorate the doorways of the church.
These beautiful square pillars from an ancient church that had stood on
the main highway of Constantinople were used as gallows.
The Venetians hung criminals from them.
Other fragments of this lost masterpiece
once stood in Crusader chapels from Spain to Austria.
This is an interesting piece. It has an amazing history.
You see, when the Venetians first took the sculpture from the boat,
they found that one of the feet had been broken off.
So, they made a new foot out of a lighter, whiter stone.
You see that?
Now, just a few years ago, in Istanbul, the Turkish archaeologists actually dug
up the original foot.
So, now we know where this sculpture came from.
It came from the monument of Constantine the Great,
the first king of Byzantium.
Those were his four sons.
Think of that! We have bits and pieces here from all ages, all styles.
This stone is from Egypt. Others are from Syria, from Greece,
all that style, that richness that went
into Byzantium then has gone to make the city of Venice itself.
Byzantium didn't just make Venice beautiful.
All the courts of western Europe now held the plunder of Constantinople,
objects whose hypnotic sparkle crackled through western Europe.
In modern Germany, the little town of Limburg still holds one of
these most alien objects,
a piece of the cross on which Christ was crucified,
transformed by a Byzantine into one of the world's great jewels,
and then carried off to Germany by Heinrich von Ullman, the crusading knight.
In 1235, when this church was just being finished
and the Crusaders were still ruling in Constantinople,
that doorway would have been surrounded
by the ill, the mad, and the crippled and the bored.
They weren't just standing there waiting for handouts.
What was going on was something rather unusual.
Inside this church, inside all churches
in western Europe where there was a relic of a saint,
there was a special power.
This power came, actually, from heaven,
and in lieu of hospitals, that was the best thing
these people could hope for was a cure.
After all, Jesus had cured the poor.
Now, saints were denominated as holy men by two things,
by the actions of their lives,
and by the fact that their bodies didn't decay.
So, their little fragments of bone and flesh were very important.
When people went up to their shrines and touched them,
they were in touch, you might say, with a little bit of heaven,
as if there was a hole in the holy ozone.
You could reach up through heaven, through the words of the priest,
and the incense and the music,
and some of these blessings could rain down upon you.
The relics of Byzantium though weren't relics of local saints.
They'd been brought from the holy land.
They were the personal possessions,
some of the very things that Jesus and Mary had touched,
and they were never used to cure the poor.
These holy things were held in the imperial churches and in the palaces of Byzantium.
In that extraordinary world, halfway between earth and heaven
they confirmed the divine role of the emperor on earth.
By stealing these powerful objects from Constantinople
the pious kings of western Europe had gained a confidence they'd never had before.
This then, that taking of the relics,
was the taking of the holiness of the divine right of kings,
the beginning of Western Europe, of Eurocentricity, and almost,
you might say, of the modern world.
Back at Constantinople,
the Crusaders' colonial administration failed.
The knights couldn't balance the books.
Driven by debts and petty wars, they left for home.
On August the fifteenth, in the year 1260,
a new emperor, Michael the Eighth, walked in solemn procession
through the ancient gates,
dressed in the imperial robes of silk and gold
with his choirs, his soldiers, and all his priests.
Safe inside, he addressed the adoring people of the city
who had labored under foreign rule for fifty years,
and now celebrated the return of Christ's true emperor to the very center of the earth.
A while ago, God was angry with us
and made the West into a great wind that blew us from our city,
and we lived like the birds beneath the branches of a tree.
But, just as he'd promised Abraham the promised land,
just as he granted my ancestors eternal victory,
so, he has given me back the sacred city.
Michael might have thought that God had put
Byzantium back into the center of the cosmos.
The truth was,
the Crusaders had wrecked Constantinople,
plundered it, broken it,
destroyed it.
And, the emperor's return to great power-politics was suicidal.
Michael and his Byzantines didn't know that, though.
As Michael said,
they thought that God had restored the cosmic balance,
that the golden dream was up and running as before.
In the imperial chapel, in the gallery of Saint Sofia,
their artists made a celebratory mosaic for the emperor's return,
Jesus, Mary, and Saint John the Baptist.
You'd think the world had never changed.
Just twenty feet away,
the stone is said to mark the grave of the Venetian who led the Western armies
to Constantinople,
Inricus Dandolo, the man who broke Byzantium.
His bones, they said, were thrown out the window into the street,
and even the dogs wouldn't eat them.
The great mosaic though, humane, transcendent, optimistic,
is the finest single work of all Byzantium's mosaic masters.
See how it takes the light.
The court of heaven shimmers in the church.
This is the Christ the Byzantines had always worshipped.
Not a Western Christ upon a cross,
impaled in dismal earthly history,
but, the old Eastern Christ.
Christ of all times and of all places,
Christ of the palace,
Christ of Kiev and of Venice,
Christ, Lord of Byzantium.
The same Christ whose relics and whose images
now fill the churches and imagination of the West,
the Christ whose soft, impassive face
would watch his Eastern empire gently fade away.