Everybody from the First Citizen
to the meanest street urchin, swept up in waves of nervous jubilation and
scripted ecstasy, has taken the event of the 50th anniversary to be
the herald of the 100th. Thus the deluge of fantasies as to what the
future entails.
I, too, have a vision for 2065, and it is this:
http://jonasdero.deviantart.com/art/Singapore-Ruins-308934161
But my future is, as always, anchored in another's past:
“... passionate debates took
place in an atmosphere of material decay. Despite the brilliance of its
scholars Constantinople by the close of the fourteenth century was a
melancholy, dying city. The population which, with that of the suburbs had
numbered about a million in the twelfth century, had shrunk now to no more than
a hundred thousand and was still shrinking. The suburbs across the Bosphorus
were in Turkish hands. Pera, across the Golden Horn, was a Genoese colony. Of
the suburbs along the Thracian shores of the Bosphorus and the Marmora, once
studded with splendid villas and rich monasteries, only a few hamlets were
left, clustering round some ancient church. The city itself, within its
fourteen miles of encircling walls, had even in its greatest days been full of
parks and gardens, dividing the various quarters. But now many quarters had
disappeared, and fields and orchards separated those that remained. The
traveller Ibn Battuta in the mid-fourteenth century counted thirteen distinct
townlets within the walls. To Gonzalez de Clavijo, in the first years of the
fifteenth century, it was astounding that so huge a city should be so full of
ruins; and Bertrandon de la Broquière a few years later was aghast at its
emptiness. Pero Tafur in 1437 remarked on its sparse and poverty-stricken
population. In many districts you would have thought that you were in the open
countryside, with wild roses blooming in the hedgerows in spring and
nightingales singing in the copses.
At the south-east end of the city
the buildings of the old Imperial Palace were no longer habitable. The last
Latin Emperor in his extremity, after selling most of the city’s holy relics to
Saint Louis and before pawning his son and heir to the Venetians, had stripped
the lead off all the roofs and disposed of them for cash. Neither Michael
Palaeologus nor any of his successors had ever had money enough to spare to restore
them. ... Nearby the Hippodrome was crumbling; the young men of the nobility
used the arena as a polo-ground. Across the square the Patriachal Palace still
contained the Patriarch’s offices; but he no longer ventured to reside there.
Only the great cathedral of the Holy Wisdom of God, Saint Sophia, was still
splendid; its upkeep was a special charge on the state revenues. ...
The Venetians had a prosperous
quarter down by the harbour; and the streets allotted to other Western traders,
the Anconitans and the Florentines, the Ragusans and the Catalans, and to the
Jews were close by. There were warehouses and wharves along the foreshore, and
bazaars in the area where the great Turkish bazaar still stands. But each
district was separate, many of them surrounded by a wall or a palisade. ...
There were still a few fine mansions and monasteries and nunneries scattered
through the city. You might still see richly clad lords and ladies riding or
carried in litters through the city, though it grieved de la Broquière to see
how small was the escort that accompanied the lovely Empress Maria as she rode
from the Church of the Holy Wisdom to the Palace. There was still merchandise
in the bazaars and on the wharves, and Venetian or Slav or Moslem merchants,
who preferred to do business in the old city rather than with the Genoese
across the Horn. There was still a yearly inflow of pilgrims coming, mainly
from Russia, to admire the churches and the relics that they contained. The
state still maintained hostels to house them, together with such hospitals and
orphanages as it could now afford.”
(- Runciman, S., “The Fall of Constantinople, 1453”,
Cambridge, 2010, pgs 9-11)
But Byzantium was so much more than a city, however splendid, however magnificent, that One City was.
Byzantium, c. 565 AD
So much more, that is, until its twilight.
Byzantium, c. 1355 AD
And even more to the point, unlike Byzantium, glorious and sublime, magnificent and subtle, we
have neither art nor intellect – only market-grubbing crassness and brute
utilitarian calculus.
But
a little more about the Byzantine Empire. While modern dictators' dreams of
thousand-year Reichs have thus far failed to materialise, this was one of the
few entities in world history that literally lasted for a thousand years.
I
suspect that, in our own way, we shall die hard, like Byzantium. Byzantium
suffered but had this extraordinary capacity for bouncing back. Beginning with the
glory days of the founder Constantine and the great Justinian, Byzantium came back
from the dark ages of the 600-700s with the epic victories of Basil II Emperor,
called “Bulgaroktonos” (the “Bulgar-Slayer”); from the depredations of the
Mediterranean Normans* and the disastrous battle of Mantzikert in the 1000s
with the deft diplomacy of the Komnenoi emperors, such as Alexios; from the
ravages of the Latin West's Fourth Crusade^ with the recovery of
Constantinople by the Nicaean House-in-Exile.
It
was only in 1453 that the final triumph of Turcoman arms was assured, that the
thousand-year empire was finally extinguished as a political entity.
The victorious Sultan, Mehmed II, enters a city - to recast it anew in Osmanli imperial splendour
And yet, we bear in mind that
Byzantium was also granted repeated extensions of life by events far beyond her
control – the sudden arrival of the Mongoloid hordes that disrupted the Arab
caliphate’s plans for assault on her, the blitzkrieg of Tamerlane's hosts which
forced Sultan Bayezid from besieging her beloved Constantinople. If the survival
chances of such a great empire floated on the eddies and currents of history
and fate, what can one expect for the tiny city-state trading republic? What of
SG100, when we have as witness BZ1000?
--------------------
Footnotes:
* The Normans (Norsemen),
those Scandinavian tribes amongst whom can be counted the Vikings, spread far
across Europe during the second half of the first millennium AD, settling
across such far-flung places as the Kievan Rus (Ukraine), northern France (the
eponymous region of Normandy - later conquering England in 1066), and Sicily.
^ The Crusaders of the Catholic
faith, hailing from the Western European states, were en route to the Middle
East to war against Islam when they got mixed up in Imperial politics. Having
failed to receive promised funds from the Byzantines, they turned against
Byzantium and seized Constantinople in 1204, and thence proceeded to carve up
the Byzantine Empire:
