Ancient History > Articles > Last Stand of the Byzantines

The church was very small - only a little larger than a big garden shed. It had a domed, red-tiled roof and round arcaded windows. It lay quite alone in the rocky fields below the village, and was built from stone the colour of haloumi cheese. It was hemmed in on either side by tumbling terraces of silver-grey olive trees.

The sun was slowly sinking over the hills at the end of a hot day in the Peloponnese, and there was a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; from the higher slopes, the tinkle of goat bells cut through the drowsy background whirr of cicadas as a pair of shepherd children led the long-horned flocks through the dry heat of the long dry grass back in for the night.

We had been sitting in the shade of the ilexes, watching the shadows lengthen and the sun go down for some time before the old man appeared, carrying in his hand a huge primeval key. He turned the key in the wards of the old Byzantine lock and, with a great creak, the door opened.

After a fortnight in the Peloponnese we had become used to seeing wonders in the most unexpected places; but nothing prepared us for what lay inside. After all, this village - Geraki - did not feature in any of our guide books and we had stumbled on it quite by chance as we drove towards the coast where we were due to spend the night.

It took a few seconds for our eyes to adjust from the bright light of the olive groves to the darkly frescoed gloom of the interior. Slowly, out of the shadows, there appeared an entire, glittering Byzantine court. Despite the modest size of the church, and its remote and rustic situation, the wall paintings inside portrayed a courtly world of alluring brilliance and sophistication.

The last rays of the sun, pouring through the narrow doorway onto the foot-polished stone floor, illuminated a pair of youthful, confident and wide-eyed Byzantine soldiers: a young, swaggering St George astride his white charger, and standing at ease slightly to his left, leaning lightly on his spear at the end of the arcade, a dazzlingly handsome St Demetrius with dark-tanned skin, a mail coat, a bow slung over his shoulder and a single rather dandyish earring glinting from his right lobe.

Above the two men, lay a line of roundels containing portrait heads of worldly-looking empresses - Theodora, Helena, Irene - all wearing crowns of large glittering pearls and court robes of gilded silk set against the dark, imperial purple of the Constantinople palace. Elsewhere, in the apse and narthex, spectators on biblical scenes, stood ranks of Byzantine courtiers: exarches and tetrarchs, prefects and governors, thassolocrats and polemarchs, a Grand Logothete and a Chartophylax, swarms of aristocratic Paleologi and Cantacuzene.

These portraits were all so astonishingly life-like and realistic that you found yourself fighting to restrain a gasp as you stared eyeball to eyeball with a soldier who could have fought the Turks on the walls of Constantinople, or a bejewelled society lady who may have known the last Byzantine Emperor. They were portraits so humane, whose handsome faces seemed so startlingly contemporary in their features and expressions, that you had to keep reminding yourself that these sitters were not from our world, that they had not just wandered in from the better drawing rooms of Athens or one of the more fashionable beaches of Spetses. For all their grandeur, and the fact that they wore the dress of the fourteenth century, the emotions that played on their lips were utterly modern and immediately recognisable.

There was none of the otherworldly religious asceticism that you sometimes find in early Byzantine mosaics of sunken-cheeked desert fathers or long-bearded hermits so unreasonably saintly they are barely human. This, you knew immediately, was the art of an urbane and worldly society that valued beauty, elegance and sophistication. It was also a world that had no doubts as to its own value: there was no hint of anxiety or vulnerability in these smooth, self-assured neo-classical faces.

There was certainly no indication, from the untrammelled confidence in these young and beautiful faces, that this was also the art of a society on the verge of defeat and extinction.

Our journey to Greece had begun, oddly enough, in New York.

Earlier this summer the Met staged one of the most magnificent exhibitions of ecclesiastical art ever mounted - Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261-1557. In room after room many of the greatest masterpieces of late Byzantium - huge icons and altar pieces, gospel books and imperial scrolls, tympanums and tomb covers - were brought together, convincingly demonstrating the brilliance of the final great flowering of the art of the Byzantines before the janissaries of the Ottoman armies finally crushed the dwindling legions of the Empire in 1453.

The show was the third of a trilogy of spectacular exhibitions of Byzantine art which the Met has mounted over the last two decades. In the two previous shows, which dealt with the late antique and early mediaeval periods, almost all the greatest masterpieces had been work from the capital: Constantinople. What was very striking about the third and final show was that many of the finest icons and frescoes came from two sites in Greece about which I knew little.

Towards the last days of the Byzantine Empire, the heavily-fortified citadels of Mistra and Monemvasia in the Peloponnese grew to be increasingly important. As the Turks closed in on Constantinople, slowly whittling away the last Greek possessions in Anatolia, many of Byzantium’s nobles, and a disproportionate number of its savants, artists, writers, philosophers and intellectuals, fled to the Morea where life was less edgy and uncertain, and where there was far greater intellectual freedom. Here princes of the imperial family ruled over a prosperous province where flourished the great neoplatonist Plethon and his friend George Scholarios. Together they brought about a great revival in the study of Plato and the thinkers of classical Greece.

Plethon in particular was an extraordinary figure: a freethinker who left Constantinople to study both the teachings of Aristotle and Kabbalistic mystical lore under an Ottoman Jew named Elisaeus. He also probed the mysteries of Zoroastriansim and the teachings of the Brahmins of India. All this- but especially the teachings of Plato and Pythagoras- was a torch that Plethon later handed on to the Italians, so stimulating the beginnings of the Renaissance in Western Europe: it was in honour of Plethon that Cosimo de Medici founded the Academy at Florence. Indeed when Marsiglio Ficino published his translations of the Enneads of Plotinus, his introduction contained a tribute to Plethon “the second Plato”.

The citadel of Mistra, rising on a great spur of rock in the foothills of the Taygetus mountains, not far from the site of ancient Sparta, was the centre of the court and the church; Monemvasia was its port and the focal point of Byzantine commerce in raisins, salt, silk and especially wine. Monemvasia was the source of much of the wine drunk in medieval England, and in time the English changed the Greek name to one more easy on English ears and tongues, so that Monemvasia became Anglicised to Malmsey- as if was somewhere in Wiltshire, perhaps a suburb of Malmesbury. When the Duke of Clarence, younger brother of King Edward IV of England, met his celebrated end by drowning “in a butt of Malmsey” he did so sinking into a barrel of Byzantine retsina.

The combination of this stirring of memories from childhood history lessons, the fabulous richness of the treasures displayed in the Met exhibition along with the tantalising pictures of the citadels from which they came, proved an irresistible combination: on our return from New York, we got out an atlas and a guide book and began working out an itinerary for the summer.

The Greek specialists, Simply Travel, owned several simple but wonderfully situated villas in Sparta, the Mani and on the southern shores of the Morea. We ended up booking a beautiful one with a pool, perched up on the edge of a hillside olive grove overlooking the blue waters of Navarino Bay and the beaches of Pylos. We poured over maps and worked out a route through Mistra and Monemvasia which would combine enough beach time and swimming for the children, with enough frescoes, forts and basilicas for the grown-ups.

Unusually, everything worked out perfectly and it proved one of our happiest-ever family holidays. Two weeks later, looking out onto grey northern skies, it has already receded into memory so that it seems now like a rather distant dream: the smell of grilling fish and the taste of hot, sweet Greek coffee; bare-footed children playing in the moonlight under the trees of the beach-side tavernas; diving for sea anemones off the deck of an old wooden caique; a village festival to celebrate a miraculous icon; calamari grilling over charcoal and Greek salads of feta and fresh tomatoes swimming in olive oil; the cicadas grinding in the olive groves; the view from the peaks of the Taygetus down to the towers of the deep Mani; and the warm blue waters of the Aegean, so clear in Navarino Bay that from a motor boat you can still see the wrecks of Ottoman galleys lying on the sea bed, hundreds of feet below.

As you drive south from Nauplia, you begin to understand quite why the Peloponnese made such an effective place of refuge. For all that the water is clear and the beaches easy and inviting, the interior is rugged in the extreme. Even today, no one has tried to construct a metalled road along the coast between Argos and Monemvasia: the hills are simply too steep and impassable. As in classical times, you still have to swing inland and wind your way through the passes of the Taygetus.

It is one of the most spectacular roads in Europe. You leave the cliffs and promontories and blue sea gulfs behind, and corkscrew inland, past the roadside shrines with their solitary icons and flickering candles. At first you pass under bare hillsides whose rocky soil is too dry for vines and can only support gorse, and occasionally olives. But as you rise, the air becomes cooler and you find yourself in hanging river valleys where the mountains widen into a cascade of terraces with groves of orange and citrus trees protected by windbreaks of cypress. The houses of the mountain villages are wooden and white washed, and vines tangle up their projecting balconies and tumble over the lattices and the trellising. Ilexes and oleanders line the roadside; tall yellow mulleins and apricot hollyhocks spring up in the screes above.

Then the mountains close in again and you find yourself winding in elaborate S -bends up into wild and remote territory through tangles of conifer forests alongside narrow switchback roads defended by the ruined towers of the Despots of the Morea. Orthodox monasteries hang like swallows nests from the crevices of the rock face; only monks and mountaineers and the occasional shepherd boys pass this way. Even the most powerful Byzantine Emperors had trouble controlling these mountains or monitoring the blood feuds which thrived between the different clans of the Taygetus. As the fourteenth century Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos wrote to his friend Euthymious: “It seems to me that it is the fate of the Peloponnesians to prefer civil war to peace. Even when there appears to be no pretext for such war they will invent one of their own volition; for they are all in love with weapons. If only they would use them when they are needed, how much better off they would be. In the midst of it all I spend most of my time trying to reconcile them with each other.”

We arrived at Monemvasia late in the evening. Spiralling down out of the mountains, we debouched out of a river valley and saw the great fortress rock rising sheer and white out of the ocean, connected with the mainland by a fragile tidal causeway. On three sides the cliffs are so steep that habitation is impossible, but on the fourth, a small ledge juts out into the ocean, defended by two land walls and a sea wall. It is in this small space, sheltered under the lee of the cliff, that the impregnable Byzantine port was built, an impregnable fortified town which would continue to hold out against the Turk even after the Fall of Constantinople.

A single gateway – too narrow to allow cars into the town - leads into a maze of narrow alleys, steep cobbled streets and vaulted tunnels, opening up into the occasional square or piazza in a manner not unlike the old city of Jerusalem. Domed Byzantine churches face onto large white-washed Ottoman merchants houses with red tiled roofs; above rise the campanile of the churches and the towers of the city walls.

It was cool now, so after leaving our bags in a wonderful mediaeval room of Hotel Malvasia, we headed straight up the zigzag goat path leading to the citadel at the top of the rock, where the double-headed eagle, the standard of the house of Palaiologos, once fluttered over the city. It was easy to imagine these last Byzantines peering out from their towers, scanning the distance, beyond the great birds of prey wheeling in the thermals, waiting for the sails of the inevitable fleets of Ottoman galleys to appear over the horizon to the East. On the terraces of the hillsides of the mainland, the vines would have been ready for the harvest, while below in the harbour would have bobbed the ships of the Venetians with the winged lion on their sails, dwarfing the occasional trading bark from Norwich, Whitby and York. Perhaps from up hear you could the cries of the sailors as the barrels of Malmsey were rolled down into their hold of the boats, and the shipwrights scraped the barnacles off the hulls, the better to escape the Barbary corsairs and Greek pirates who preyed on Latin shipping.

The sun was sinking, and we were hot from our climb. The water – as still and as silver as a pool of mercury in the evening light- looked inviting. We headed back down the path and made straight for the jetty below the sea walls, ready to dive in before the smell of grilling mullet lured us out again for supper.

We saved Mistra for last.

Three days later, on our final morning in the Morea, we rose early and climbed into the ruined city just after opening time. Below in the Vale of Sparta a slight mist shrouded the chequer board of olive groves. It was a Sunday and from modern village far below, the silence was broken by a single male, bass voice chanting: the village priest at his matins. There was no sound of cars, no tour groups, nothing of the 21st century. The chanting, still sung in the language of Byzantine Empire, seemed like a lifeline of tones and syllables linking us still with the fourteenth century glory days of Mistra.

All around, clinging to the steep green slopes of the ruined city, lay a litter of great palaces and monasteries, libraries, refectories and scriptoria, drinking fountains and aqueducts, fortress walls and frescoed churches, all now completely deserted. Between the ruins grew cypresses and oleanders, hibiscus, myrtle and wild roses. It was a beautiful place; but also, inescapably, a sad one: a last bastion which failed to hold, full of hope and culture and artistry; but one which ultimately proved as vulnerable as the rest of the empire.

Here then was the last stand of the Byzantines. After everything else had gone, Mistra represented the last gasp of a civilisation that had resisted extinction for more than thousand years since the fall of the Rome and the demise of the Western half of the Empire. It was here that the last double headed eagle fluttered over the gnarled contours of the Mistra acropolis and domes of its churches waiting until, on the 29th May 1460, seven years to the day after the Fall of Constantinople, the army of Mehmet the Conqueror wound its way down the slopes of Mount Parnon. The citizens of Mistra could only look out helplessly across the valley and watch as the white tents of the great Ottoman army were erected throughout the Vale of Sparta, along the entire length of the city walls, their impossible struggle finally over.

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