Another searching glance.
‘You know about Constantine’s battle standard?’
‘The labarum,’ Abby said. She remembered something Dr Gruber had said at the Landesmuseum in Trier. ‘The chi-rho symbol that he saw in his vision. He turned it into a golden standard surrounded by jewels.’
She waited for him to reply. But Nikolić had folded his arms and was staring at her, as if he expected something.
‘You wanted to know something from the age of Constantine that is extremely valuable? A treasure of the first historical significance which has been lost for centuries?’
The penny dropped. ‘You’re saying the poem could refer to the actual labarum. The trophy that Constantine’s army carried?’
He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘But what happened to it?’ Michael asked. ‘A treasure like that can’t just have got lost – I mean, the Byzantine Empire lasted until almost five hundred years ago. Isn’t it in a museum somewhere?’
‘You think because something is important people look after it? Even Constantine’s tomb, in Istanbul, has not survived.
When the Turks conquered Constantinople they destroyed his mausoleum, which was the Church of the Holy Apostles, and built their own mosque on the site.’
He turned to the map on the wall and drew a line with his finger across the Balkans, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.
‘This region has been the frontier for more than two thousand years. Alexander the Great? To the east and south, his empire stretched as far as India and Egypt. But to north and west, it went through Kosovo. The Roman diocese of Moesia – modern Serbia – was tossed back and forth between the eastern and western emperors; when the western empire fell in 476, this city Singidunum – Belgrade – was a fortress looking down on the barbarians across the Danube. Then the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians through to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. You know one of the reasons we fought Croatia in the nineties? Because they were western Catholics, and we were eastern Orthodox – a legacy of the division of the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century. A frontier means wars. So yes – things get lost.’
He pulled a book off one of the shelves and flipped through it. ‘This is a Byzantine account of Constantine’s life, written in the ninth century. After describing the labarum and its use at the Milvian Bridge, the author says, “It still exists today, and is kept as the greatest treasure in the imperial palace, for if any enemy or evil force threatens the city, its power will destroy them.”’
‘So that was’ – Michael did the sums – ‘twelve hundred years ago. Nothing since?’
‘Constantinople was sacked in 1204 by the army of the Fourth Crusade. Many of its treasures were lost or hidden; some were brought back to Venice by the crusaders. The Byzantines reconquered the city, but it fell to the Turks for good in 1453. They would have taken whatever was left.’
‘So it could be in Venice … or Istanbul … or hidden somewhere else completely?’
‘Venice was looted by Napoleon, Paris by the Nazis, Berlin by the Soviets, and Moscow by anyone with money.’ Nikolić gave a sad smile. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi. Or, if you like me to translate as a professional historian: shit happens.’
A bell-tree chime sounded from his computer. ‘It is time for my class. I am sorry I cannot help you more.’
They let themselves out on to the street. Trolley buses sat by the kerb, their drivers clustered round the doors smoking. Michael checked his watch.
‘Perhaps Gruber can tell us more.’
XXXII
Constantinople – May 337
I HURRY DOWN the alley, then up an avenue lined with plane trees. They’re only saplings now, but one day they’ll shade the whole street. If the city lasts that long. The empire is littered with half-finished cities built to flatter different emperors’ vanity. I’ve seen them alclass="underline" Thessalonica, Nicomedia, Milan, Aquileia, Sirmium – even Rome is ringed with hippodromes that never staged a race, mausoleums whose occupants were waylaid elsewhere. Will another emperor stand to live in a city named after his predecessor?
My footsteps quicken, driven by the pace of my thoughts. I remember what Constantine told me, the day he dragged me to the palace. The Christians spit and scratch, but they don’t bite. And I remember Flavius Ursus’s parting shot from the far shore of the Bosphorus, waiting for Constantine to die. Have you wondered why Constantine asked someone who knows nothing about the Christians to investigate the death of a bishop?
Was Constantine playing me for a fool? Did Eusebius put him up to it? Even if I was going to find out anything, they must have been sure I’d bury it. I’ve been burying Constantine’s problems all my life.
There are two factions. They have various names for each other, but the easiest way to describe them is as Arians and Orthodox. The Arians follow the doctrine of a priest called Arius, that Christ the Son of God was created out of nothing by the Father. The Orthodox maintain that to be fully God, Christ must be the same eternal substance as his Father.
I’ve heard all this before.
Nicaea – June 325 – Twelve years earlier …
I never understood the arguments. So far as I know, no one ever asked if Apollo was co-eternal with Diana, or whether Hercules was of the same substance as Jupiter. My brothers and I never sat in our cave enquiring into the nature and persons of Mithra. We made the sacrifices, we performed the rituals the way we were taught. We trusted the gods to know their own business.
But the Christians are different: a nitpicking, hair-splitting, prying bunch who spend endless hours asking unanswerable questions – purely, I think, for those moments of joyous insight when they discover they have something else to argue about. It drives Constantine to distraction. He needs the Christians praying for his continued success, not squabbling over technicalities like lawyers.
‘A united empire needs a united religion,’ he complains to me one day. ‘A divided church is an affront to the One God.’
And an affronted God might decide to look for a new champion.
The Christians can agree that their God has three parts – a father, who is like Jupiter; the son, Christ, he fathered by a mortal woman to do his work on Earth, like Hercules; and a spirit messenger, who I think must be like Mercury. Why these have to be one God, and not three, no one ever explains. But they spend endless hours debating the relationship between them, in the same way that senators speculate about the changing fortunes of the court favourites.
One of these intellectual busybodies is a priest called Arius, from Alexandria. Trying to describe his god, he’s said something so outrageous that half the Christians will have no truck with him; the other half have leapt to his defence, and suddenly the Church is at war.
‘I’ve spent twenty years uniting the empire so the Christians can live in peace,’ Constantine laments. ‘And within a year of my victory, they’re trying to tear it apart again.’
What did you expect? I want to say.
In war, Constantine always looks for the decisive battle. So he applies the same logic to the Church: he summons all the contestants to his palace at Nicaea to do battle and declare a winner that everyone will recognise.
‘The question is so trivial, it doesn’t merit this controversy,’ he says hopefully. ‘I’m sure we can settle it without fuss.’
The palace stands on the shore of a lake, looking west. Nicaea’s a modest town among fertile hills: the great profusion of Christians who’ve descended from across the empire can barely squeeze inside its walls. There are two hundred and fifty bishops, twice as many priests and presbyters, plus all the servants, attendants, hangers-on and baggage they bring. The only room big enough to hold the council session is the great hall of the palace, where carpenters have erected twin banks of tiered seating. On the opening morning of the council, the bishops take their seats, ranked on either side of the hall like spectators in the hippodrome.