Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [10]
As solicitous for its subjects’ welfare as it was in controlling their thoughts and deeds, the state provided much of the cradle-to-grave care expected by the Communist faithful today. Emperors and wealthy citizens vied in endowing hospitals, poorhouses, orphanages, homes for the blind or aged (where “the last days of man’s earthly life might be peaceful, painless, and dignified”), homes for repentant prostitutes (some became saints), even a reformatory for fallen women aristocrats. Medical services included surgical and maternity wards, psychiatric clinics, and leprosariums. In contrast to the unwashed West, early Byzantium abounded in public baths. Street lighting made the nights safer.
A modern state in many ways. Passports were required for travel in frontier districts. Tourists can sympathize with Liudprand; he ran afoul of customs on his way out. From his baggage, officials confiscated prized cloths of purple silk.
Sunrise burnished the gold of autumn leaves in the Balkan Mountains. A horse plowed a Bulgarian field where peasant women bent to their toil. My photographic colleague and I stopped our camper to capture the scene.
A police car pulled up. A policeman and a political official checked and recorded our documents. The official ordered us to strip our cameras. With no explanation, no heed to our anguished protests, he ground the cassettes under his heel, pulled out the film, and cast in the dirt our color record of the region’s Byzantine churches.
The incident came as an unpleasant reminder that a harbinger of Eastern Europe’s police states was Byzantium, suspicious of foreigners and as chary about letting out information as it was avid in gaining it.
State visitors were shown what officials wanted them to see. En route to Constantinople a guard of honor kept them from deviating from the imperial post route. Assigned servants and interpreters learned as much as possible from the envoy’s entourage. Also, merchants were kept under surveillance. No alien might trade or trespass beyond fairs held near the borders except in the presence of an official. In the capital the prefect assigned them separate compounds to curb spying—fur-clad Rus with drooping mustaches; unkempt Bulgars belted with iron chains; Khazars and Petchenegs from the steppes; merchants of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Lombardy, and Catalonia. If one overstayed his three-month term, he was stripped of goods, whipped, and expelled.
How free was speech? How welcome criticism? One clue was the name of the imperial council: Silentium. The historian Procopius extolled Justinian’s military and building campaigns—on the emperor’s orders. He had to reserve his bitter personal opinions for a Secret History, “for neither could I elude the watchfulness of vast numbers of spies, nor escape a most cruel death, if I were found out.” Only at chariot races and other events in the Hippodrome could the populace express discontent before the emperor. Factions among the 60,000 spectators sometimes exploded into riot. Justinian survived one attempted rebellion by drowning the Hippodrome in blood.
Behind the court’s glittering facade lay perhaps “the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed,” fulminated a Victorian historian, William Lecky: “a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.”
Surrounded by would-be usurpers and assassins, no incompetent emperor remained God’s vicar on earth very long. Of the eighty-eight emperors from Constantine I to XI, thirteen took to a monastery. Thirty others died violently—starved, poisoned, blinded, bludgeoned, strangled, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated. The skull of Nicephorus I ended up as a silver-lined goblet from which Khan Krum of the Bulgars toasted his boyars. The Empress Irene was so obsessed with retaining power that she had her son blinded and took his title of emperor. Even the sainted Constantine the Great had his eldest son slain and his wife suffocated in