The Serpent Column in an Ottoman miniature from the Surname-i Vehbi - Wikimedia
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As our medieval travellers made their journey across the Mediterranean and into the city of Constantinople, they did so against a rich historical backdrop, and they were very much aware of it. Not always fully informed, fair enough. Not always entirely accurately informed - who is? - but conscious of the landscape and material culture around them as echoes of past greatness. Constantinople its youthful glory. The legendary kings of the Ancient Greek city-states as they gathered before the walls of Troy. They passed through ruins of a grand past that populated their world.
Not that they seem to have thought themselves to be alive in dark times or dark ages, not that they wrote of their world as being fallen from past grandeur that could never be recovered. It was just this part of the eastern Mediterranean that they seem to have considered a faded reflection of what it once was, able now only to boast of greatness that it had once produced but could no longer match.
What Clavijo and the other Castilians were going to experience - what we will experience through them - was a taste of that greatness, and in particular, certain structures and artifacts whose stories stretched back even beyond the past our guides imagined for them.
They would do that, and they would look to continue their journey in search of Timur the conqueror.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers, its merchants, envoys, and monks. Frequently, some combination thereof. And this is a podcast that has a patreon. So if you are enjoying what you hear and want to support it, you can go to patreon.com/humancircus and on a pay-what-you-can/will-basis enjoy ad-free, early, and extra listening while also helping me out in a very substantial way. This time, my thanks go out to Stanley and to Paul. Thank you both very much!
And now, to our story.
When last we spoke, the Castilian embassy of Enrique III had departed on its way to Timur. It was making its way across the Mediterranean, dipping into history, strange weather, and politics as it went. Through the record they left, we followed Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and the rest as they visited Rhodes and Lesbos. On each, they just missed the respective rulers of those islands who were off making coastal raids, or else threatening them. They gave us an entryway into the story of the Gattilusi and their place in the world of Byzantine politics, a quite profitable place that would secure a few generations of regional prominence. The travellers lost their sails and saw lights in the sky.
This episode, they’ll travel to Constantinople in its final Byzantine decades.
After they left Lesbos and its Gattilusi governance, our Castilian travellers journeyed on. They were closing in on the imperial city.
Facing foul weather, they sought shelter, and they just happened to do so near the ancient city of Troy where they could see parts of its walls, turrets, and palaces still standing, some of it reduced to rubble, a faint echo of that epic story still imprinted on the land and stretching all the way back from the sea and up into the foothills.
Some of those aboard went for wood and water to a nearby island, a place thought to have once been owned by King Priam and the site where his assailants had brought ashore their ships. They found vineyards and fruit trees. They found game-birds and rabbits, and the ruins of a great castle. But the place was uninhabited, and not because it had lain empty since the combined kings of the ancient Greek world had laid waste to it after years of siege warfare. This was more recent trouble, an outburst of the seemingly interminable competition between Venice and Genoa that had resulted in the island being disarmed and depopulated.
Our travellers waited out the bad weather on Tenedos. Simply stopping there was safe enough. They weren’t in any danger of being hustled off by hostile Venetians.
They were stuck for two weeks on the island, but they did have some company, a ship of Greeks that had come from Gallipoli with a cargo of wheat for Chios, a ship that had come from Gallipoli where, they were told, a great pestilence raged. Not a reassuring thing to hear while they waited out the weather, but there was little to be done but bide their time and gaze over at Mount Athos towering above, to hear from those Greeks, of the monastery there with its black-robed monks who took “no wine, nor meat, nor oil, nor fish with blood.” There were no women, nor cats or dogs, nor any tame animal that could bear young. So they heard from the sailors who’d set out from Gallipoli.
On Wednesday, the 22nd of October, they were able to depart and after a day of waiting for the right wind, a frequent traveller’s pastime, to enter the Dardanelles, the strait that separated, as the travellers put it, the lands of the Greeks from those of the Turks, the strait that would carry them to Constantinople, its landscape alive with the legend of Troy.
There was a castle positioned high up on a hill facing the sea. The Genoese had raided it just over a year before. That very same castle, known as “the end of roads,” was said to have been occupied by Troy’s enemies; they’d made camp there and dug three great tunnels leading toward the city. Further along the coast, there was a tower, said to mark the fullest extent of the city of Troy at a distance of 60 miles from its other extent. Either more a mark of the city’s rule and influence than its physical structures or a tremendous exaggeration.
By Saturday, they were off of Gallipoli, or Gelibolu, an Ottoman holding on the north side of the strait that had first been taken in 1354. Due to a weakening of the walls by an untimely earthquake the Byzantine chronicles said, no reference to any such environmental intervention being needed in the Ottoman sources.
When Clavijo and the others came along, the city was seen as the key for the Ottomans to retain all that they had gained to the north of the strait. The travellers found the port in the hands of Bayezid’s eldest surviving son, strongly fortified and home to an Ottoman fleet. And the traces and consequences of the Timurid assault on those Ottomans were elsewhere too. There was a cape where certain Ottoman forces had fled after the fighting and were said to have converted it into an island for their protection. The text still refers to it as a cape though, so I’m not sure how much stock its author put in that story.
On Sunday, the 21st of October, Clavijo was in the Sea of Marmara and passing Marmara Island itself, noted in the text for providing Constantinople with the marble for which it was famous. And the next Wednesday, the ambassadors and their luggage transferred to a boat and went on to Pera, north across the Golden Horn from the imperial city. There is a note of urgency to text here, of the importance of pressing their journey forward, gathering intelligence, and making contact with the emperor. They were about to enter Constantinople.
They were separated from it by only that narrow waterway which is now spanned by multiple bridges. They were in Pera, in the text, “a small city, but well peopled and surrounded with a wall, and … contain[ing] good and handsome houses.” It was peopled, we read, with a mix of Greeks and the Genoans who ruled it. Its walls ran close to the water along the shore, and up round its hilltop tower, though not so high a hill as that outside the city, the one from which the Ottomans had in the past conducted their siege of both Pera and Constantinople. Between those two, in that narrow lane of water, “the best and most beautiful in the world,” our text said, ships were safe, protected from the winds and, if both sides of the water were ruled with the same mind, from any enemy who may want to trouble them. Every day, ship traffic ran across it.
Pera, the text tells us, was how it was known to the Genoans, Galata to the Greeks, though indeed both names are Greek in origin. Our author has it as having been built by the Genoans some 95 years earlier, after they had purchased land for the purpose from the Byzantine emperor, land calculated as that which you could wrap a bull’s hide around if cut into strips. But in this the text’s author was quite mistaken. Before it was known as Pera or Galata, back in the 6th century, Justinian I had called it Justinianopolis, and before that, it had been Sycae. As for Genoan presence in the city, that went back to at least the 940s in terms of a trading presence, but settlement concessions dated only to 1155, still rather further back than the 1300 that our guide gives us.
Clavijo and the other envoys would remain in Pera from October the 24th to November 13th, more than enough time to get to know the place. Enough time certainly to see its two “very handsome” monasteries, that of St. Paul and that of St. Francis. They were shown wondrous things at those places, shown bones of St. Andrew, St. Nicholas, St. Basil, and St. Ignatius, clothes of St. Francis, and an arm each of Mary Magdalene and St. Stephen. An arm and a head of St. Anne. They heard of legal struggles over the relics. Of a finger taken by the Byzantine emperor that there were efforts to regain and reunite with its matching hand. Of items taken by the Latins during their occupation of Constantinople, some of which had been recovered since.
Clavijo and the others had more than enough time to see of Pera what they wished. But they weren’t strictly limited to its confines. They were going to Constantinople. A great city of high walls and towers, and a beautiful cistern of cement, marble, and nearly 500 pillars, but it was not by this point a well-populated place. Where you might expect it to be densely-peopled, the spaces within its walls were actually dotted with many enclosures where grain and fruit were grown. Only close to the sea was it busier, where the traffic of trade yet hummed.
It was a city of grand churches and monasteries, but many of them lay in disuse and ruin. Still, our author wrote, “it seem[ed] clear that, in former times, when the city was in its youth, it was the most renowned … in the world.”
On Sunday the 28th of October, they were going to see what was left of that youthful splendour.
That was the day when the ambassadors were sent for by Manuel II Palaiologos. You didn’t just drop in on the Byzantine Emperor, not even in the year 1403. You let him know you were there, and then you waited.
So it had been for the Castilians. They alerted the emperor’s people to their presence, and on the 28th they received word. They went by boat from Pera and arrived in Constantinople itself to find a welcoming crowd on the shore complete with horses to carry them to the palace. There, they found the emperor himself freshly returned from mass.
He received them in a lofty chamber covered with carpets, one of which, the author noted, was made of leopard skin. He received them and conversed with them for a time, exchanging pleasantries, and then he dismissed them with a stag that one of his hunters had brought in. It appears to have gone smoothly enough and that impression was reinforced two days later, when the ambassadors sent round a request to the emperor. They desired to see his great city, and the churches and relics it contained. Would he kindly order that it be shown to them?
It was the emperor’s son-in-law that was dispatched to show the visitors about the city. Ilario, a Genoan who was married to one of Manuel’s illegitimate daughters. I imagine that playing tour guide for visiting Latins was something the emperor’s people were fairly commonly called upon to do. I wonder if Ilario himself was often burdened with the task, if being such an outer appendage of the imperial family meant it was one of his regular chores, if he ever tired of it.
Whatever way he felt about it, Ilario had the job. And where did he take his tour on their first day in the city? To the churches, of course.
The first thing he showed them was the church of St John the Baptist, also known as St John of the Stone, and Clavijo and the others were impressed. They noted the great square before it, its cypress trees and its beautiful fountain beneath a canopy set on pillars of white marble. They noted the richness of the figure over the doorway and the marvellous mosaics on the walls and floors, well worked in gilt, blue, white, green, and red. They noted the chapels with their silvers and silks. They saw the withered arm of St John, all skin and bone, its joints adorned with precious stones. And there were still more relics to be seen, but the visitors didn’t get to see them, not on that day.
In an amusing detail, the text’s author writes that the emperor usually held the keys and was away hunting that day. He had been thoughtful enough to give the keys to his wife before heading out, but hadn’t remembered to give her the right one for the relics room. Travel is ever troubled by such missed opportunities, doors that are locked on just the day you’re there, but the ambassadors moved on. They would have other chances to see those relics. For now, they had more churches on the itinerary.
At the next one, dedicated to St Mary, they passed between cypress, walnut, and elm trees. They passed an image of St Mary herself, set between ones of the emperor and empress, and at her feet, representations of thirty castles and cities with their names written in Greek. Places over which the church had in the past enjoyed privileges due to a gift from Emperor Romanus who lay within, his monument once covered in precious stones and metals but since looted during the Latin occupation. It had been 200 years since those initial days of looting, but they hadn’t been forgotten.
There at St Mary’s, the Castillians were shown around by the church’s many monks. They were shown the adjoining monastery’s many cells, the gardens, waters, and vineyards that put them in mind of a large town. They were shown John the Baptist's other arm, and this one was not withered. It was “fresh and healthy.” It was missing a thumb though, and there was a story there, a story not limited to this source.
It was said that while the body of John the Baptist lay in Antioch, in the time of idolatry, there had been a dragon that had troubled the people, and it had, absolutely true to form, demanded to be fed a yearly human sacrifice. So it had gone on for years, with each victim chosen by drawing lots. This time, a man of the city, not a Christian, was saddened to see his daughter chosen. Seeking to avoid the unavoidable, he brought her to a group of Chistian nuns, telling them he had heard that God performed many miracles through the saint’s body. He wished to believe, to see the saint’s body, and to venerate it. And they allowed him access to do so.
The troubled man threw himself upon the saint’s arm in worship, and as he pressed his face against it, he bit off its thumb and held it in his mouth. He took his leave from the body and the nuns, apparently without their noticing. Then, when the time came to hand his daughter over to the dragon, he leapt into action, hurling the severed thumb into the monster’s expectant mouth. The dragon promptly fled, and at the sign of this miracle, the man converted. Having your daughter saved from a dragon by the thumb of a dead man was one of those moments that could really make you take stock and reassess.
Clavijo and the others visited one more church on that same day, but as is often the case when one travels, this one seems to have left less of an impression for all of its white marble and rich mosaic charms, its gardens and fountains. They retired to Pera, to return another day. After this break, we’ll be joining them on their return. We’ll be visiting one more church, this one a pretty special one, and also a particular pair of monuments that spoke of histories older than that of the eastern Roman Empire.
...
When they went back to the city, the ambassadors visited yet another church, but this one stood out from the rest. How could it not? It was the then thousand year old church of Sancta Sophia, the Hagia Sophia.
In front were nine white marble pillars, the largest Clavijo had ever seen. It was said that a palace used to be perched above them where the patriarch would meet with his clergy. And nearby, a high column with an armoured knight on horseback. The Column of Justinian, with chains attaching the horse to the pillar. So it wouldn’t fall, our author said, or be moved by the wind. So it wasn’t made off with by Venetians one might otherwise think.
The visitors marvelled at the beauty of the chapel at the entrance, and then within, at the church itself, “the loftiest, most rich, and most beautiful that can be seen in the whole world,” they thought. Its high dome, requiring good eyes to see from below and supported by arches of jasper and white stone, was decorated with fine mosaic work, and everywhere were exquisite ornaments of jasper. Beneath the church were cisterns and subterranean chambers, “strange things, wonderful to see.”
All of this was stunning. However, it was still only human work. The one wall of white stone in the church was another matter. On it could be seen figures - Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist, and others - not drawn, painted, or carved by human hands but appearing naturally in the rock itself, miraculously, as if the stone, through its veins, itself gave birth to the images. They appeared, quote, “as if they were in the clouds of heaven, and as if there was a thin veil before them.”
It was clearly a wondrous sight, and one which affected the visitors deeply. Bringing them sharply back to the present, they noted that there were several crumbling structures nearby, several doors leading to the church that had fallen in ruin and disuse.
The ambassadors next visited the hippodrome, the thousand year old marble pillar-ensconced centre of sport, politics, and social life in the city. And they encountered objects that were rich with stories to tell.
The Castilians wrote about the hippodrome. They described the space and the spot at which the emperor sat to view the jousts and tournaments. It doesn’t sound like they witnessed any such event themselves though, for those days of glorious clashes and races were long past. To quote Thomas F. Madden, “In [this] greatly depopulated city, the ruined hippodrome became an open area for impromptu gaming, markets, and meetings.” Clavijo and the others would not be watching chariot races.
What they would see were the three copper serpent figures twisted round one another like a long, upright rope, the heads forming a kind of tripod at the top. They saw what is generally known as the Serpent Column, and they told a story of how the city had once been beset by snakes that had killed and poisoned as they pleased, and how an emperor had performed an enchantment over the copper figures so that no snake had harmed anyone there ever since.
It was a good story, but the column had a more intriguing history even than that. It would start, as unlikely as it may sound, with the 479 BCE defeat of Xerxes’ army at the Battle of Plataea by the combined forces of the Greek city-states, after which the Serpent Column, then topped with a bowl or cauldron, was dedicated by the victors as an offering to Apollo at Delphi. There it seems to have sat for centuries, alluded to by Herodotus, reinscribed after being deeply involved in stories of Spartan treachery and/or arrogance, and detailed in Pausanias’ 2nd century CE Description of Greece.
It seems to have been brought to Constantinople by Constantine himself in the early 4th century along with other such holy items, an interesting move in a Christianizing empire. Eusebius, a contemporary historian and Bishop of Caesarea, wrote of the arrival there at the hippodrome of the Delphic tripods, and the early 5th century historian Sozomenus wrote that the famous one dedicated by the Spartans and the Greek cities after their victory over the Persians was among them. And there would be regular mentions by travellers all through the centuries of what very well may have been our column. It appears to have been converted for a time into a fountain, and a traveller not many years after Clavijo would be told it had occasionally flowed with water, milk, and wine.
One peculiar turn in the Serpent Column story is the failure of the 1204 crusaders to include it among the looted objects they shipped back to Latin Europe. It has sometimes been said that the crusaders were told that same story of an anti-snake enchantment that our ambassadors were, that they opted for a better-safe-than-sorry approach and looked elsewhere for enrichment. More likely perhaps, they simply viewed it as a functional object that they themselves enjoyed making use of. It was not to them a priceless artifact of Ancient Greek religion but a fountain in the hippodrome. Had it been without such obvious utility or adorned with decorative plating, as its neighbour the Walled Obelisk was, it doubtless would have shared that monument’s fate and been stripped of its riches.
Over the years, the column, which had lost its connection to Apollo, became increasingly connected to the snake story. It was said to contain snake venom sealed inside that either warded off snake attacks in the city or healed those once bitten when they touched it.
At some point, the column began to suffer damage. The first missing jaw has frequently been blamed on Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. In a story repeated by Edward Gibbon, among others, Mehmed the entering conqueror strikes it with a mace as a show of strength. He is sometimes said to restrain himself from destroying it completely lest serpents devastated the city. But then a 15th century historian told of Mehmed having a nearby mulberry tree torn down just to ensure it didn’t harm the column, and it would not be until the 16th that there was any mention of visible damage from travellers to the city, so the story seems unlikely. As time went on, various other figures were blamed, sundry sultans or viziers, but it may simply have been a wayward oaken pole, thrown during a round of the equestrian sport jereed that did the damage. Or maybe it was something else.
The next alteration to the Serpent Column was perhaps more mysterious and more forceful. The morning sun of October 21st, 1700, revealed just a coiled stump of the column, those three heads now nowhere to be seen. The circumstances may have been mysterious, but the list of suspects wasn’t hard to put together. You just had to cast your eyes over to the nearby Ibrahim Pasha Palace and its guests.
That was where the Polish ambassador was staying in 1700. The Ottoman defeats of the late, very late, 17th century had seen the War of the Holy League concluded with the signing of the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, but details remained to be sorted out as Sultan Mustafa II sought peace with his central European adversaries. Such was the situation when the Polish ambassador arrived in April of the following year, an extremely belligerent Polish ambassador.
The balance of power was not what it once was. You could see that from the fact that the ambassador was staying in the city, there at that palace, instead of across the Golden Horn where such foreign visitors had stayed since Byzantine times, where our Clavijo and the other Castilians stayed. You could see it from the way the Polish ambassador’s guard marched in, 600 strong and wearing Turkish armour taken from fallen Ottoman soldiers outside Vienna. It was hardly a declaration of good will, and indeed, there would be no good will.
Not many weeks after his arrival, the ambassador ordered the killing of a local Polish convert to Islam, the body left decapitated in the hippodrome. Not exactly a secret, but then his hosts couldn’t afford to disturb the peace process just then. There was night after night of drunkenness in the palace that had spilled out into the hippodrome, and this went on from April until October.
The ambassador had already left and was on his way home when the Serpent Column from Delphi was vandalized, some his men making their own last preparations for departure. The event was recorded like this:
“...at the time of the evening prayer, all three of the bronze serpents in the Hippodrome, which had stood firm for 1,500 years, broke all together at their necks and fell to the ground; yet there was no question of their being struck and smashed, for there was not even anyone nearby. They broke with a noise as if a powerful man were chopping down trees, and people who heard the noise reported what had happened.”
No one around, no question of someone doing any striking or smashing, but people heard a noise, specifically the noise of a powerful man chopping down trees. So it sounds like there were in fact at least a few people around, and at least one of them was chopping something.
So you can make of that what you will. But it should be noted that the contemporary traveller Aubry de la Mottraye, who was in the city, wrote that the Ottomans had chosen to overlook the affair for the sake of peace, just as they had the previous murder, and that it was thought the missing heads had been carried off by some of the Polish ambassador’s men. The English antiquarian Edmund Chishull thought likewise. At the distance of 300 years, I’m inclined to agree.
You can still visit the stumpy remains of the Ancient Greek Serpent Column with the inscription on its lower coils in Greek. “Those who fought the war,” and then the list of 31 beginning with the Lacedaemonians, Athenians, and Corinthians, and continuing all the way down to the Siphnians, Amprakiotans, and Lepreans.
You can also see one of those missing heads, one which seems to have come off before that night in 1700 and is held in the Istanbul Archeology Museum. As to the other two, those were likely taken out of the city by the remnants of the Polish ambassador’s entourage. Maybe they were immediately sold on the lucrative market for such things. Maybe they were tucked away somewhere. Maybe they were destroyed, immediately or since. Perhaps we’ll find out at some point what became of the rest of that 2500 year old sacred object.
Startlingly, the Serpent Column was not the oldest artifact that Clavijo saw that day. Nor was it the one he seems to have been most taken by.
What really seems to have struck our travellers most there in the hippodrome was not the offering from Delphi. It was a certain arrangement of stone, quite near where that artifact stood among other statues and columns, there in the centre where chariots would have once rushed past down either side. There were two blocks of marble, one atop the other, then four of copper, and then an immense stone at least 6 lances high and tapering to a point. It did not seem to be fixed in any way and filled the ambassadors with awe that it could have been placed there like that, so high that it could be seen from the sea. There was an inscription written round the base, a dedication to some great act or individual, but the ambassadors didn’t know who or what that was. Clavijo and the others couldn’t read Greek, and as it grew dark, they couldn’t wait around to have it read to them. They would have to return to Pera without learning about the stone’s history. But we don’t.
We have the advantage of knowing what Clavijo did not. We can read the Greek inscription, or at least it is not too late and dark yet to have it read for us. It reads, in translation:
“Only Emperor Theodosius dared to erect the four-sided column which had lain heavy on the earth for a long time. Proculus was summoned, and this so enormous column was put up in thirty-two suns.”
We can also read the Latin, again in translation:
“Formerly difficult, I was ordered to obey the peaceful masters and to raise the palm after the tyrants were dead. Everything gives way to Theodosius and his eternal offspring. In this way conquered and mastered in thrice ten days, under Proculus the Prefect, I was raised to the high air.”
Where Clavijo couldn’t, we know that the tapering stone which so caught the travellers’ attention had been placed there around 1,000 years earlier by Emperor Theodosius to celebrate his triumph over the usurper/emperor Magnus Maximus. Unsuccessful usurpers were not to be mentioned by name in such things, so we don’t see Maximus set in stone. And we almost don’t see Proclus either. The name Proculus had been removed some time after his fall from grace in 392 CE but then replaced when his opponents in turn fell in 395.
We also know that the stone was actually even older still than Theodosius, Maximus, and Proculus. It dates back not to Constantinople and the Byzantine empire at all, not to the years 1400 or even 400 common era, but to 1454 BCE, to the Egypt of Thutmose III, sixth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. I wonder what Clavijo would have made of that. Given how impressed the ambassadors had been to find it raised there at all, I think they would have been quite taken to hear of the road the stone had taken to appear there before them.
Clavijo had other experiences in Constantinople. He visited other churches. But I won’t relate them all. Besides, the outside world was in the meanwhile intruding. There was a day when trouble sparked off between Venice and Genoa, as it rather tended to do. There had been violence, a clash between fleets. The galley which the ambassadors had intended to take to Constantinople that day was made busy with other matters. They sent word to Ilario that they wouldn’t be making it that time.
Their time in the city was winding down. There were more relics, churches, and stories - more had been seen at the Hagia Sophia alone than the travellers could note down - but I won’t be covering all of it. Our travellers are moving on.
They had been in the city for three weeks, failing to find a ship that would take them on to Trebizond, and their need was becoming more pressing as winter neared and the seas worsened. Finally, on the 14th of November, they left on a galley under the command of a Genoan captain. They were at last on their way.
And that’s where we’ll finish up for today. If you are listening on the Patreon, please do keep listening. If not, thanks for listening. I’ll be back soon with more of the journey of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and his Castilian comrades, and I’ll talk to you then.