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2014 Adam J. Goldwyn

Ingela Nilsson & Paul Stephenson (ed.), Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire.

Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 15. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet 2014, 93108

5

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness: Life ater

death in Greek laments about the fall of Constantinople

On May 29, 1453, Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Emperor of Rome, fell while defending his capital city, Constantinople, from the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet the Conqueror.1 Unlike ater the previous conquest in 1204 by the Latins, the city would never again come under Greek rule. And, unlike the centu-ries-long conquest of Byzantine territory by the Ottomans which began with the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the fall of Constantinople was as unprecedented in its scope as it was in its suddenness: in addition to tremendous human sufering (four thousand are said to have died, with as many as ity thousand captured), the conquest also eviscerated the political, economic and cultural center of the Greek world.2 In addition to the tangible aspects of defeat, the conquest also had power-ful symbolic signiicance: he Byzantines had always regarded Constantinople as the God-guarded city and as the seat of the rightful emperor of all Christians.3 In terms both practical and ideological, then, the Greeks who survived the conquest found themselves an exiled people in a new and uncertain world, a world in which the practices and beliefs that informed and anchored their lives were entirely gone.4 Constantinople was neither the irst nor the last Byzantine city to fall to the Ottomans. As the Ottomans encroached upon and conquered various Byzan-

* he author would like to thank Ingela Nilsson and Dimitra Kokkini for their many suggestions. All mistakes, of course, remain my own.

1 For the contemporary historical sources themselves in bilingual Italian translation, see La Caduta di Constantinopoli (ed. Pertusi) and Testi Inediti (ed. Carile).

2 Harris 1995, 12. On the fall vs conquest of Constantinople, see the contribution by Heilo in the present volume.

3 Harris 1995, 12. In fact, by the time of the conquest, Constantinople was already a shell of her former glory, for which, see Inalcik 1969/70, 231. 4 For a book-length study of the fate of the Greeks in the West, see Harris 1995. For studies of speciic places, see Croskey 1988 for Russia and Browning 1975 for England. For the fate of those Greeks who stayed in the city, see Inalcik 1969/70 and in the greater Aegean, Vacalopoulos 1980. For more speciic case studies of individual locations, see Bryer & Lowry 1986.

Adam J. Goldwyn

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94 Adam J. Goldwyn

tine territories, Greeks wrote lamentations for a variety of lost cities and leaders,5 [b]ut perhaps for no other single event in history were so many laments composed in Greek as for the fall of Constantinople.6 Indeed, in the immediate atermath of the conquest, the survivors turned to the genre of poetic lament the elegy, the monody and the threnody to mourn the loss of the Queen of Cities.7 hese laments, moreover, reinterpreted the Citys symbolic meaning in the Byzantine imagination by using this highly stylized and formulaic genre, practiced since an-tiquity,8 to salvage what they could of their existing personal, religious, and po-litical ideologies and to fuse them with an emergent ideology forged from their experience of the sack and its atermath. In her taxonomy of lamentation in Greek literature, he Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Margaret Alexiou identiies several elements which shape and deine the genre. She identiies, for example, gods, cities, and men as the three subjects of lamentation in ancient and medieval Greek in general.9 For lamentations about the conquest of Constantinople in particular, these themes are represented in, for gods, descriptions of the destruction of religious sites, relics and clergy; for cit-ies, Constantinople; and for men, the emperor himself, Constantine XI Palaiolo-gos. In addition to these thematic concerns, the lament comes with a speciic set of structural conventions as well: common forms such as the solo lament and the imagined dialogue between the living and the dead are attested in the laments about Constantinople.10 he various poems which comprise the sub-genre of lam-entation about Constantinople share many other rhetorical, thematic and symbolic elements. But the poems are much more than simple amalgamations of convention-al forms and themes. Rather, it is through the sophisticated manipulation of these generic constraints in their laments that the authors express their own personal an-guish and ofer an individualized interpretation of the events themselves and their ramiications in the lives of the irst generations of post-Byzantine Greeks. he Death of Constantine Dragases ( ), for example, demonstrates this skillful manipulation of generic conventions to repre-

5 For examples of poetic lamentation for the cities of Trebizond, Palaiokastro, and Cordylos, see Recueil de chansons (ed. Legrand), 7779. 6 Alexiou 1974, 86. Nor were these lamentations conined only to Greek; for an analysis of lamentation in Slavic languages and Romanian, see Dujev 1953 and Grecu 1953; for a translation and analysis of two lamentations in Armenian, see Sanjian 1970. Many of the laments in Greek are collected in La Caduta di Constantinopoli 342403, (ed. Lambros) 190269, 190271, and Testi Inediti 321337. For a taxonomy of the diferent types of these laments, see Beaton 1980, 95102. 7 For the roots of these genres in classical literature, see, for elegy, Garner 2011, and, for monody, Kirk-wood 1974. 8 Indeed, Beaton 1980, 96, notes that the formulae for laments are so universal that they may or may not have been originally composed about the city they depict. For a similar example, Pertusi 1976, 490, notes that a lament depicting Constantine wandering in the west originally used the names of John V Palaiologos

and Manuel II Palaiologos. It was only ater the fall that Constantines name was substituted for theirs. 9 Alexiou 1974, viii. 10 Alexiou 1974, 131.

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 95

sent the worldview of those Greeks who survived the fall. Drawing on the laments for Hector at the end of he Iliad, Alexiou identiies a conventional tripartite struc-ture in solo laments in the Greek tradition: he mourner begins with a prelimi-nary address to the dead, then remembers the past or imagines the future in a pre-dominantly narrative section, and inally renews her opening lament.11 he Death of Constantine Dragases seems to follow this structure; indeed, it begins with just such a direct address:

Lament, Christians of the East and West,

lament and cry for this great loss.12

he convention suggests that the address be directed at the dead;13 here, instead, the author directs it at Christians of the east and west, thus playing on the very notion of death: though they are still alive, the poet suggests, without Constanti-nople, they are essentially the dead to whom the poem is dedicated. he poem then narrates the past by describing the last heroic deeds and death of Constantine Palaiologos (in this poem referred to by his maternal surname), concluding with the lines:

hey cut of his head, planted it on a spike,

and buried his corpse beneath a laurel tree.14

In ending so abruptly, the poem does not complete the ring composition with the conventional closing imperative of mourning. Instead, the suddenness of the con-clusion stylistically re-enacts the subject matter of the poem: the end of the poem is as sudden, unexpected and inal as the fall of the city and, indeed, even the cutting of of the head itself. Much as Hector is a metonym and symbol for all the citizens of Troy, and as his death presages the fall of the city, so too does Constantines death represent the death of the citys inhabitants, even the metaphorical death of its survivors. But the lack of an ending serves yet another purpose, for the poem ends not on the severing of the head, but on the laying of the body beneath a laurel tree. he inconclusiveness of the poem, therefore, may also be an allusion to the legends sur-rounding Constantine Palaiologos: that he would rise again in the future to free the Greeks from the Ottomans.15 he lack of an end to the poem thus suggests that the story it is telling of the fall of Constantinople, of the death of the emperor is not

11 Alexiou 1974, 133. 12 Recueil de chansons 75: , / - . All translations are my own. 13 See Alexiou 1974, 133, for the references to he Iliad. For Byzantine examples, see, for instance, Recueil de chansons 78. 14 Recueil de chansons 76: , , / . 15 See Nicol 1992, 95108, for an outline and sources of the various myths about his resurrection. For modern poetic iterations, see, e.g., George Zalokostas T (he Sword and the Crown) in Zalokosta 1903, 207; Vizyenos (he Last Palaiologos) in George Vizyenos 1967, 57; Odysseas Elytis (Death and Resurrection

96 Adam J. Goldwyn

necessarily over.16 In form and content, then, the lament manipulates the conven-tions of the genre to relect the writers mindset: shock at the stunning suddenness and inality of the conquest mixed with the hope of a future renewal that would sustain him in the uncertain period during which the lament was composed. Another lament, the Invocation of Constantinople ( -),17 also plays with the structural conventions of the lament to relect the particular circumstances of the works composition. his poem falls into the cate-gory of the imagined dialogue between the living and the dead and describes the landing at Tendeos of a ship of survivors leeing Constantinople meeting those who have not yet heard the news. From a historical perspective, the poem is an interest-ing example of the way news both good and bad traveled in the pre-modern period: chance meetings, word of mouth and rumor.18 As a work of imaginative lit-erature, the poem fuses this historicity with the conventions of the literary lament to depict life for the Greeks ater the fall of the city as a form of life ater death. Rather than a dialogue between the living and the dead, the dialogue is between a ship of survivors, who stand in here for the dead, and those who have not yet heard of the fall, who stand in for the living. Indeed, the language used to introduce the ship suggests this very theme: the in-terlocutors at Tenedos ask the ship of survivors: Ship, from where have you come and from where do you descend? to which the ship of survivors replies: I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness.19 hough is a nav-igational word in the context of sailing, it also means to die or to descend to the underworld. Both and are similarly related to death; the former as something separate and thus generically evil, but also, in a Christian context, as someone separated from Church in either life or ater death, and so devoted to per-dition20 and the latter as literally darkness, but with a metaphorical connection

of Constantine Palaiologos) in Elytis 1997, 277); Kostis Palamas (he Kings Flute) in Palamas 1967. 16 Similarly, Beaton 1980, 102, argues that part of the songs function is to deny the inality of a historical event, though he claims that, rather than a literal hope for the citys recovery, they express the lasting

belief of singers in the value of their culture, to which the historical loss of the capital, and the actual pos-

sibility of its future recovery, are of secondary importance. his helps to explain how the songs of the fall of Constantinople have remained part of the tradition, and were sung at least up until the beginning of this

century not as a slogan for a political ideal, nor out of nostalgia for a lost golden age, but as an airmation of the changelessness of current attitudes and values. While this may be true of the poems reception, the

original authors (and audience), holding a more Biblical view of historical causation, may have been speak-

ing more literally.

17 Of either Cypriot (according to Kriaras) or Cretan (favored by Pertusi) origin (Pertusi 1976, 485). 18 Alexiou 1974, 144, notes that [a]lthough the dialogue conforms to a formulaic pattern common in Greek folk song, there is evidence that the meeting of the ships was a historical event. Pertusi 1976, 484, ofers a more detailed analysis of the probability of this historical meeting and the primary source upon which this reading is based.

19 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 366: , ; / . 20 PGL, sv. .

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 97

to death, Hades, and the aterlife. he poem, therefore, suggests that life ater the fall of Constantinople is a form of death. Rather than beginning with imperatives, as the previous poem did, the Invoca-tion of Constantinople begins with a diferent rhetorical convention, which Alex-iou describes as initial hesitation, a traditional beginning for a lament in which the speaker begin[s] by expressing anxiety lest he should fail to ind words adequate for the occasion. his initial hesitation is most frequently expressed by means of questions.21 Ater opening by describing the subject of the lament, that is, the sorrows that have fallen upon the Greeks because of the citys fall, the poet writes: Who said it? Who sent the message? When did the news come?22 he poem then provides the answers to these questions by using stock images and de-scriptions to describe irst the death of Constantine, then the fates of the citys in-habitants, and, lastly, the fate of Hagia Sophia.23 Both he Death of Constantine Dragases ( ) and he Invocation of Constanti-nople ( ), then, manipulate the conventions of the lament and employ classical diction and rhetorical techniques to metaphorically represent life ater the fall of the city as a form of death also worthy of lamentation. Where these poems achieved their pathos through the sophisticated manipula-tion of convention and rhetoric and through the polysemous usage of metaphorical language, Andronikos Kallistos Monody on Wretched Constantinople ( ), one of the few works in the genre of certain au-thorship and relatively certain date,24 achieves its pathos through its directness and lack of igurative language. his is not to say that the work lacks artiice; indeed, the careful structuring of ring composition, the juxtaposition of opposite imagery and pessimistic irony are the main vehicles for the authors expression of his despon-dency (which, by extension, comes to represent the despondency of his generation

21 Alexiou 1974, 161. See 161 for an analysis of this theme in Greek tragedy and 235, n. 34, for a list of examples drawn from elsewhere in ancient literature. he use of questions in lamentation is not limited to the Greek tradition; for an analysis of questions as a rhetorical device in Jeremiah, see Brueggemann 1973. 22 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 366: ; ; ;; A similar formula is employed for greeting strangers in he Odyssey, for which see 1.170 and 3.71, 7.238, 9.252 and 10.325, etc. for similar formulae. For a more elaborate use of questions as an introductory rhetorical move, see La Caduta

di Constantinopoli 344. 23 For laments about the fate of Constantine, see he Death of Constantine Dragases ( - , in Recueil de chansons 74) above, and hrenody for Constantinople ( - , in Testi Inediti 326) below. he one added detail omitted from the he Death of Constantine Dragases but included in Invocation of Constantinople is that in the latter poem, Constantine, in direct dis-

course, speciically refuses to surrender, lest, ater torturing him, they cut of my head and plant it on a stake ( , , La Caduta di Constantinopoli 370), which is almost what, according to the former poem, indeed happens. For similar descriptions of the fates of the

citys inhabitants, cf. Manuel Chrystonymos Monody on the Sack of Constantinople ( , in Testi Inediti 322); for the destruction of Hagia Sophia, cf. Christonymos and About Hagia Sophia ( , in La Caduta di Constantinopoli 396). 24 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 354.

98 Adam J. Goldwyn

of exiles): the irst half of the work praises the citys virtues, while the second part demonstrates how each of these virtues becomes a liability during the conquest and its immediate atermath. he lament begins with a description of the city:

In size, the City simply surpassed all those of the east, in beauty those of the west also. It had walls

so strong and unyielding against enemies that one could never ind [walls] that compare to them.

he moat was wide and deep and fortiied with baked bricks, it seemed like another river to those

passing by. here was another strong wall beyond thatmuch greater still.25

he focus in the poems opening lines is the glory and strength of the city; the mea-sure by which this is expressed, however, is the strength of the citys defenses, which, given the context of the lament, suggests an irony of false optimism, since those very walls which are depicted as so strong and powerful are, ultimately, unable to defend the city and its inhabitants in the events described later in the poem.26 Kallistos then describes some of the citys other wonders, its churches, public baths, and hippodrome, before describing its geographical position between the Continents:

For only this one you would see greeting both continents. Europe had her, but Asia was very close, it

was as far away as the width of the strait, and she was almost sufering and cursing the strait greatly

for causing this separation. But it was happy to see again the City, so well located, and it made its

pleasure its own. And there were two seas, the Propontis and the Pontos, which provided the City

with not few of its products, and the region is wealthy and fertile like no other. he whole country-

side is lat, surrounded by mountains and drawing water from rivers and decorated from full lakes

that there was abundance everywhere in the City.27

Again, Kallistos uses irony to ofer a false optimism about the city. One should not curse the geographic division of the city between the continents, he suggests, but should rather celebrate it, since this valuable geostrategic position is the very source of the wealth which he described earlier. So, too, in his description of the land and waters which bring abundance to the City from everywhere, Kallistos presents a glorious and laudatory depiction of the city.

25 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 356: , . . , , , , , , . 26 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 483, notes that at the time of the conquest the walls non erano in buone condizioni. his could either be the refugees nostalgic view of his lost home or another moment of pessi-mistic irony.

27 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 358: . , , , . -, , , . , , .

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 99

Kallistos then moves away from this more conventional praise of the city to de-scribing the emotions and psychology of travelers approaching and leaving the city:

One thing I will say to everybody: that everyone coming into the city who had spent time oten

there or anyone born and raised there who was satisied with its goods, when he let the city for

some reason, he immediately missed her as though he had never wholly tasted it, and was com-

pelled to turn around and look towards her again as long as the place allowed it; the place allowed

it for a long time. Someone coming towards the city, but still quite a distance away, asked everyone

[about her], and the story they all told was the goods of the city and there was a competition

among them making it a point of honor to know or tell the most [goodly things] until they arrived

in the city and its beauties were evident and sadness and anger disappeared and happiness illed

their senses and excited them, and chains of joy entangled them.28

Kallistos praise of the city concludes with the formulaic image of the city as mirror image of the cosmos and a description of the citizens piety:

One would, comparing the city with the heavenly spheres, say that the sun had taken possession of

the most beautiful temple of Gods Sophia, that the moon [had taken possession of ] the church of

the Holy Disciples, and the stars [had taken possession of ] the other holy churches, other parts he

matched with other parts of heaven, in which both the true God was celebrated in hymns and the

faith was undiluted and there was no godly dogma which was not followed well by them.29

Kallistos irst praises the physical nature of the city its monuments, buildings and environs and then its spiritual virtues. Ater depicting it as the mirror of the heavens and its people as extremely devout, though, the tone of the poem shits abruptly:

But these things are long gone and a slave, alas, the empress has become. How could one sing trag-

ically about this pain? It was day but darkness and clouds came over the City, harsh war came [was

lowing] to the City by land and sea, the inidels war machines struck the walls and it fell upon the

earth in many places.30

his transition undermines each of the citys virtues, in turn demonstrating how each in fact contribute to the citys fall a reversal metaphorically represented by the day which turns dark and cloudy at the poems transitional moment. he praise

28 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 358: , , , , , , . , , , , , , . 29 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 358360: , , , , , , , . For similar examples, see Pertusi 1976, vol. 2, 374. 30 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 360: , , , . ; , , , .

100 Adam J. Goldwyn

of the mountains and the expansive plains surrounding the city and the praise of the straits and the seas which bring the city its prosperity become inextricably linked with the invasion itself, which came by land and by sea. he city walls, whose power, height, grandeur, and unequaled ability to repel invaders were the subject of the poems opening eight lines, are torn to the ground in a single line. he chains of joy which envelop the traveler as he enters the city are re-contextualized here as the chains of slavery for all those who are taken as booty and enslaved; ultimately, the lively conversation about the goodness of the city is itself transformed into a lament and threnody for the city.31 he moment of greatest pathos occurs in the poems concluding section, which begins and concludes with the poets wish for his own death. In between he asks: What will you do, poor Andronikos? Where will you go? To which city?32 he middle section of the poem detailed the joy of travelers as they enter the city, talking animatedly among themselves. In the concluding section, though, Kallistos demands silence: Alas, be silent; there really is no hope for us any longer.33 Most potently, Kallistos inverts the meaning of the previous verses about the travelers. In the earlier section, they eagerly walked towards the city; here, in contrast, Kallistos laments his life in exile: there is no city to go back to. In the earlier section, the departing traveler gazes back as long as he can, trying as long as he can to remember the city. his, too, is, metaphorically, what Kallistos is doing when he memorialised the city in prose. But, unlike the departing traveler, who is compelled to turn back, Kallistos has no choice; he is doomed to walk, an exile, always apart from his city. hus, Kallistos ironically inverts all the tropes of his praise of the city to demon-strate the culpability of each in the citys destruction. From a metatextual perspec-tive, moreover, Kallistos inverts the ideology of living death that was evident in the poems discussed previously . Kallistos is all too aware of his status as a survivor, is all too aware that he is alive. Unlike the previous poems, which represented the sur-vivors as dead, Kallistos focuses on how alive he really is, and how much he regrets that fact:

Now one must ask to die, and I above all seek this out. What will you do, poor Andronikos? Where

will you go? To which city? Under which master, vexing your own and dear ones? Of which masters

of oratory will you make use? O my ill-fated life. O bitter orphanage.34

31 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 360. 32 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 360: , ; , ; 33 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 360: . 34 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 360: , . , ; , , , ; . .

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 101

Kallistos focuses on the practicalities of life as a refugee: inding a new home, a new job. Indeed, his focus on life is found in these last two sentences: the irst lamenting his life of misfortune, the second lamenting being a survivor when ones parents (and city) are dead. his focus on the misery of life is emphasized in the works conclusion, which takes the form of a conventional gnomic lament, which provides consolatory and proverbial wisdom about life and death using antithetical similes, which compare and contrast the world of nature with the world of man without referring to the actual fact of death.35 Kallistos gnomic lament, though it uses such contrasting imagery, opens with a direct address to death before moving on to an otherwise typical gnomic statement:

O death, death, now ind me quickly. For it is a blessed fate, who did not come to the fortunate ones,

but who immediately came to the unfortunate mortals when called. O how he turns away from the

despised with deaf ears, he does not want to hear their sorrowful tears.36

Rather than referencing death obliquely, as the convention dictates, Kallistos ad-dresses it with two vocatives. Kallistos follows the oppositional imagery of the conventional gnomic lament by juxtaposing the blessed and good fortune with the unfortunate and despised, deafness with hearing. But through the content of the gnomic statement and by preceding it with a direct address to death, Kallistos sharpens the pain and hopelessness of his survival. Kallistos inverts the generic conventions of the lament to articulate a pessimistic and ironic view of the citys fall and the future of its exiles. hese structural inver-sions mirror Kallistos inversion of traditional Biblically-derived theories of histor-ical causation. he exile from Eden and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis and the prophetic writings of Jeremiah and, to a lesser extent, Jonah, all ofer examples of societies destroyed by God as punishment for the sins of the in-habitants. he sins of the inhabitants bringing about divine wrath and, ultimately, the destruction of cities, was a powerful idea in the Byzantine world-view. Constan-tinople could be thus seen as one more example of this kind, and this is relected in the central moment of the lament, when Kallistos praise of the city reaches a peak. He describes it in loty spiritual terms as a mirror of the heavens, and its people as particularly pious.37 By immediately following this with his narrative of the citys fall and the brutal impact of the conquest on the very people whom he just praised,

35 Alexiou 1974, 127. 36 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 362: , , . , , . , . 37 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 484, notes that Il Callisto esagera; questo certo non il quadro morale che della citt fanno altri scrittori, specie occidental. his is another ambiguous moment in the text which could indicate either sincere nostalgia or a pessimistic irony. Given the placement of this scene at the cru-

cial transitional moment between praise and catastrophe, the moment wherein God should, according to

religious views of divine protection, come to the citys aid, the latter seems more likely.

102 Adam J. Goldwyn

Kallistos undermines the traditional Biblical (and thus Byzantine) notion of histo-ry by divorcing piety and divine favor from historical causation. Many of the other laments depict a similarly nostalgic vision of Byzantium before the conquest as an idealized empire with a pious emperor governing pious subjects from a lourishing capital, all protected and prospering under divine fa-vor. In reiterating this sentimental view of the city before the fall, the poets set up a paradox at the heart of this ideology: how could the city have fallen if it was, indeed, a city of pious people under divine protection? he laments, and the new post-Byzantine ideology they put forth, are one means of articulating a solution to this problem. In the hrenody for Constantinople ( ), a reworking of a lament attributed to Matthew, metropolitan of Mira,38 the anonymous poet adheres to the Biblical view of historical causation: he argues that almost every previous emperor was a sinner and that, therefore, God punished them:

All were deceitful, all without goodness, and only three or four were just.

hey slaughtered one another oten each year,

ascending to the throne against Gods will.

Some others were heretics, others denied the holy spirit,

others once were atheists and others were iconoclasts,

schismatics and corrupt, imbued with envy,

without the fear of God, hated by all;

Enemies of Christians, of every monastery:

For this they also received the wrath of the Lord,

And they lost their empire from carelessness.39

For Kallistos, there could be no hope for the future since there was no connection between piety and political prosperity. For the author of the hrenody for Con-stantinople, who follows Biblical notions of historical causation, the hope remains that should the people become pious, God will reward them. hus, ater the author describes the sinfulness of the emperors, he writes:

nd we poor wander in foreign realms

and we only console ourselves and take courage again.40

38 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 364. he poem can be dated by the reference in line 37 to Michael of Wal-lachia (15581601, ruled 15931601). As such, it ofers a relatively late (albeit based on an earlier version) example of Byzantine history at odds with the previous nostalgic histories.

39 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 388: , , / - . / , / . / , , / , / , , / , / , / . / . 40 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 388: . / - .

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 103

his courage stems speciically from faith in the divine, since he rejects the possibil-ity of human success in the endeavor:

And so we are let in futile hope

taking courage from our oracles and many schemers

who write superluous words and are worth nothing

and talk about the Hungarians who prattle on, latter and call to rally.

nd with such thoughts we spend our time

and our enemy keeps getting stronger.

We have conidence in the Venetians, the Hungarians and Michael

to retake our empire and give it back to us.41

he author notes that it is futile to place ones hope in the other European powers before reiterating again that it was divine anger at human sin that was the cause of the citys fall:

How we chained ourselves in sin!

Woe to our people, to what state has it come

As we miserable ones fell to the Turkish masses!

How angry you are, Lord, with the creations of your hands,

and you have delivered us into the hands of your enemies!42

he poem concludes with a plea directed at the proper source of hope:

Give us Forgiveness and deliverance from our sins,

arranging everything towards an advantage.43

Unlike Kallistos, who saw no hope for the future at all and, in fact, begged for death, the author of the hrenody is somewhat hopeful. And unlike Kallistos, whose focus is solely on the misery of this life and who consistently makes no claim to divine favor, the author of the hrenody concludes by suggesting that the sorrows of this life are leeting anyway, and that the survivors should put their faith in the glories of the next one:

41 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 390: , / , / / , , . / / , / . / , , , / . he allusion here is to a prophecy in Pseudo-Methodios of Patra (Pertusi 1976, 488). 42 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 390: ! / , , / ! / , , , / ! 43 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 390392: / - .

104 Adam J. GoldwynAnd instead of this temporary and earthly empire,

Give us the one of heaven, which is chosen and divine.44

he world-views presented in this lament and in Kallistos, therefore, ofer two dif-ferent solutions to the destruction of Constantinople. Kallistos viewed Constan-tinople almost as a utopia, a relection of the heavenly spheres populated by pious people and blessed with natural abundance. In the atermath of the citys destruc-tion, he looks at the world around him and inds his future uncertain and unhappy; he is sad for those who have died and sadder still for those who survived and are now driven into exile. Whereas Kallistos sees only the meaninglessness of human agency in the citys destruction, Matthew of Mira sees the unfolding of a Divine Plan. His Constantinople is not Kallistos utopia, but is rather a new Sodom and Gomorrah: cities of sinners destroyed by god for their transgressions. hus, where Kallistos ends on a note of bitter hopelessness, Matthew of Mira ends on a hope-ful and optimistic note, suggesting that there is an alternative to the fallen world around him in the heavens. Another lament ofers a unique insight into the integration of the Biblical idea of historical causation and city sacking into the Byzantine tradition. he lament exists in two manuscripts which have diferent openings but are the same thereater. he irst iteration, called the hrenody for Constantinople ( ), begins by quoting Psalm 79:45 Let me speak the words of holy David when he lamented Jerusalem: God, the foreigners have invaded your inheritance; they turned Jerusalem to rubble.46 his opening quotation implies the parallel, which will be made explicit later, between the destruction of Jerusa-lem and that of Constantinople. Moreover, as those familiar with the psalm would know, the link between the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the sinful ways of the Jews is one of its recurrent themes. he author instead quotes from the pro-phetic Book of Daniel: It is because you are just in all ways towards us, and you have delivered us into the hands of the most hateful lawless heretics, and to an un-just and most wicked king on the whole earth because of our sins.47 hus, in the irst passage, the author invokes the conquest of Jerusalem; in the second, he claims that the cause of the misery is Gods punishment for their sin. In so doing, he ofers a traditionally Biblically based view of the divine causation of city sacking.48

44 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 392: K , / -, . 45 In the Masoretic numbering, 78 in the Septuagint. 46 Testi Inediti, 326: . 47 Testi Inediti, 326: . 48 Another hrenody for Constantinople ( ) makes the same compari-son between Constantinople and Jerusalem. Most of the poem follows the conventions of the traditional

lament, as Kallistos does, for example calling Constantinople the mirror image of the heavens, describing

the citys beautiful interior, and giving a description of Constantine Palaiologos inal heroic moments. In

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 105

he introduction to the second version, When Constantinople was Sacked ( ), begins diferently: It was 6961 years ater the creation of the world, 1453 since the birth of Christ, on Tuesday the 29th of May.49 he author does not put himself in the Biblical context, but rather ofers historical dates. Subsequently, moreover, he evokes the popular legends surrounding the fall rather than its Biblical antecedents, describing the legend that, since the city had been built by a Constantine son of Helena, that it would fall during the reign of an-other Constantine son of Helena. He continues with another popular myth, that of an eclipse which serves as a harbinger of the citys fall. hus, even though the inal parts of the two versions of the poem are identical, the difering opening sections put the focus on two diferent aspects of the same narrative: for the former, the focus is on sin as the cause of the fall, for the latter, Constantine himself. he rest of the narrative, then, can be read through these two diferent foci. he separate narratives converge with Constantine looking over the walls and seeing the onrushing Turks. Looking back inside, he sees a princess entering the temple. Constantine goes down to her and she says to him:

Since this miserable City was entrusted to me, many times have I saved it from divine anger. But

now I prayed to my son and God, and yet a decision was made, that you will be surrendered into

foreign hands, because the sins of the people have lit the anger of God. and you go to die, for

thus God commanded.50

his section maintains the dual foci of the lament: on the one hand, it invokes Gods wrath at the sin of the people as the cause of the fall of the city; on the other, it heightens the tragic pathos of Constantine, a good yet doomed man. And, unlike the Biblical example of the sinning king of Nineveh, who turns away Gods wrath through repentance, Constantine repents his sins but is unable to avoid his fate: Because for my sins I have been stripped of imperial honor and even lose my own life.51 As with the queens condemnation, Constantines reply invokes sin as the cause of the citys fall while also ofering a moment of human pathos for the emper-or, a pathos further emphasized by the kings magnanimity, piety and bravery, not only in this lament, but in every other one as well. he conclusion of the lament, too, uses two stock images: the preservation of the relics in Hagia Sophia and the death of Constantine and the delivery of his

this lament, the author personiies Constantinople as Lady Seven-hills ( ), and it is she who delivers much of the lament in monologue (La Caduta di Constantinopoli 378). 49 Testi Inediti 326: , , , , . 50 Testi Inediti 328: , , , - , . , . 51 Testi Inediti, 328: .

106 Adam J. Goldwyn

severed head to the Turks. In About Hagia Sophia ( ), the poet de-scribes how three ships were sent to France containing the cross, the gospels and the holy altar, lest they be captured by the Turks. he poem ends on a hopeful note, with the archangel telling the icon of the heotokos and the other icons:

Calm down, queenly mistress and you, icons, do not cry,

over the years, in time, everything will be yours again.52

Similarly, an untitled folk song from Asia Minor describes how Constantine en-trusted a trustworthy general to lock the doors of Hagia Sophia, and how it re-mained safe thereater:

he years came and passed, times came and went.

he key was forgotten, and it stayed locked.

It needs an artisan from heaven and a worker from earth.53

he shared conclusion of the lament under consideration similarly uses this meme: ater the fall of the city

neither the crown nor the scepter were found there, because the lady heotokos had taken them

away to guard them, until the poor race of Christians received pity. Some Christians related this

later, having been present where they saw this miracle.54

his optimistic note, however, is not where the lament ends. Rather, it concludes on the more pessimistic note of the emperors death: He was defeated, and they cut him and his nobles down, and they brought the head of the pitiful king to the sultan, and he rejoiced greatly.55 he end of this lament, therefore, weaves together two common strands in the larger corpus of laments: the pathos of Constantines inal moments and death and the fate of the citys holy relics. Both of these themes, moreover, have signiicant metaphorical power. Constan-tines death serves as a metonymy for the fall of the city that bears his name, and his death serves as a paradigmatic example of the deaths of the citys other inhabitants. he preservation of the relics (and the many legends surrounding Constantines resurrection), moreover, represent the conviction that though the city has fallen, the religion it embodied and the people who still adhere to it will endure, even (as the three ships carrying the relics suggest) as they are dispersed as exiles and refu-gees.

52 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 396: , / , , . 53 La Caduta di Constantinopoli 400: , , / , . / . 54 Testi Inediti 330: , . , , . 55 Testi Inediti 330: , , .

I come from a cursed land and from the depths of darkness 107

In his chapter Tradition and the Individual Talent in Folk Poetry of Modern Greece, Beaton describes the two-part process of composition in folk literature: the formation of the relatively standard groups of formulas, image-patterns and narratives which are so consistent all over the Greek-speaking world and the in-ventiveness of the individual singer in choosing among these traditional elements and varying them within certain limits.56 hough Beaton is speaking about the Greek tradition generally, these same principles apply to the particular case of laments about Constantinople. A catastrophe on the scale of the sack of Constan-tinople (as with any event great or small) afects each person diferently depending upon a range of causes, from proximity in time and place to the event to ones own personality and unique experience. hus, within the context of a single event there are a multitude of experiences. It is no surprise, then, that this same principle is found within works about a single event: within the structural conines, outlined by Alexiou, and from the range of traditional images, motifs, and stories, difer-ent authors were able to articulate a personal vision and individual response to the citys fall. hese laments, moreover, reveal the authors attempts, as representatives of the irst generations of post-Constantinopolitan Greeks, to forge a new identity as a diaspora community of refugees. Some, such as Andronikos Kallistos, ofered a pessimistic and hopeless vision of life for the individual survivor under these cir-cumstances (though, ironically, Kallistos would go on to a distinguished career, irst in Bologna and later in England).57 Many other writers were more optimistic, seeing the hand of God in the citys fall and, they hoped, in the citys eventual resur-rection. he numerous laments which depict the protection and preservation of sa-cred objects, oten through divine means, attest to this lingering hope. Ultimately, both strands contain kernels of truth: for centuries ater the fall of Constantinople, the life of the individual Greek was diicult and oten full of hardship; neverthe-less, the culture, its religion and artistic production endured and even thrived.

56 Beaton 1980, 69. 57 According to Barbera 1995, 296, Kallistos was one of the irst Greeks to teach Aristotle at an Italian University in the Renaissance starting from at least 1458 onwards. Barbera further notes that Secund-inus complemented Callistus on how far his career had progressed ater so little time in Italy (396). For Kallistos time in England, see Harris 1995, 1402 and 146 and, for a more detailed biography, see Cammel-li 1942.

108 Adam J. Goldwyn

MEDIEVAL GREEK TEXTS

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Recueil de chansons populaires grecques, ed. E. Leg-

rand. Paris 1874.Testi Inediti e poco noti sulLa Caduta di Constantino-

poli ed. A. Carile. Bologna 1983.

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