about his death, Moschos completed his travel memoirs. The Spiritual Meadow received an ecstatic reception across the Empire. Within a generation or two it had been translated into Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and a variety of Slavonic languages; to this day many of its anecdotes are common currency among monks and peasants across the Orthodox world.
Most surviving Byzantine texts from the period have a curiously opaque quality: we read either of the flitting shadows of a hundred upstart emperors, rising suddenly through palace coups and disappearing equally rapidly via the assassin’s dagger; or else of saints so saintly as to be virtually beyond comprehension. Nor, for all its often hypnotic beauty, does the surviving corpus of Byzantine art much help in visualising the world that gave it birth. There are the great mosaics at Ravenna with their celebrated portraits of Justinian and Theodora accompanied by their retinues of eunuchs and admirals, generals and bishops, courtiers and sycophants; the same intrigue-ridden court familiar from the written sources. But away from these two isolated Ravenna panels, Byzantine art is strictly non-secular, strictly transcendent. Across the broken apses and shattered naves of a hundred ruined Byzantine churches, the same smooth, cold, neo-classical faces of the saints and apostles stare down like a gallery of deaf mutes; and through this thundering silence the everyday reality of life in the Byzantine provinces remains persistently difficult to visualise. The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated.
Yet through the pages of The Spiritual Meadow one can come closer to the ordinary Byzantine than is possible through virtually any other single source. Although it often seems a fairly bizarre book – an unlikely fricassee of anecdote, piety and strange miracles – as a historical text it adds up to the most rich and detailed portrait that survives of the Byzantine Levant immediately before the advent of Islam. Through its pages forgotten monasteries rise suddenly from the sand; even a great metropolis such as Byzantine Alexandria – from which not one building, indeed barely one wall, has survived – is brought back to life, peopled by credible characters, villains and eccentrics.
Most intriguing of all are the tales which tell of the more humble folk, the sort who normally slip through the net cast by the historian. One typical story tells of a muleteer from Rome whose donkeys trample and kill a small child at an inn. He takes ship to the Holy Land and flees to the desert, where he is overcome by remorse and tries to kill himself. Only when a lion refuses to savage him does he reconcile himself to the possibility of divine forgiveness. We meet a repentant Alexandrian grave-robber who claims he was seized by a corpse whose shroud he had tried to steal (he was not released until he promised to take up a more respectable profession); a novice who, overcome with desire, pays a visit to the brothel in Jericho (he is quickly struck down by leprosy); a merchant’s wife from Ascalon who is forced to prostitute herself after her husband’s ship goes down.
Some of the figures are oddly familiar. One story revolves around a Byzantine version of Fr. Christophoros, an animal-loving monk from a suburban monastery outside Alexandria who not only feeds the monastery’s dogs, but also gives flour to the ants and puts damp biscuits on the roof for the birds. Other characters are rather more exotic than anything you are likely to find today, such as the monk Adolas who ‘confined himself inside a hollow plane tree’ in Thessaloniki, cutting ‘a little window in the bark through which he could talk with people who came to see him’.
Moschos is an unpredictable narrator. He was a champion of Orthodoxy at a time when it was challenged by a dazzling variety of heterodox currents circulating through the caravan cities of the East, and Monophysites, Jews, Manicheans, Zoroastrians and Gnostics all receive short shrift from a man whose tolerance of the beliefs of others was clearly every bit as limited as that of his modern successors on Mount Athos. Yet there is also a carefree scholar-gypsy feel to The Spiritual Meadow, and an endearing lightness of touch and gentle sense of humour evident in its stories. One of my favourite tales concerns a novice from Antinoe in Upper Egypt ‘who was very careless with his own soul’. When the novice dies, his teacher is worried that he might have been sent to Hell for his sins, so he prays that it be revealed what has happened to his pupil’s soul. Eventually the teacher goes into a trance, and sees a river of fire with the novice submerged in it up to his neck. The teacher is horrified, but the novice turns to him, saying: ‘I thank God, oh my teacher, that there is relief for my head. Thanks to your prayers, I am standing on the head of a bishop.’
Of course to the modern eye much of the world described in The Spiritual Meadow is not just curious: its beliefs and values are so strange as to be virtually incomprehensible. It was a world where eunuchs led the imperial armies into battle; where groups of monks were known to lynch and murder pagan ladies as they passed in their litters through the fashionable bazaars of Alexandria; where ragged, half-naked stylites raved atop their pillars; and where dendrites took literally Christ’s instruction to imitate the birds of the air, living in trees and building little nests for themselves in the upper branches.
But what is perhaps most surprising about the Eastern Mediterranean as it emerges from the pages of Moschos is the fact that it is Christian at all. In the popular imagination, the Levant passes from a classical past to an Islamic present with hardly a break. It is easy to forget that for over three hundred years – from the age of Constantine in the early fourth century to the rise of Islam in the early seventh century – the Eastern Mediterranean world was almost entirely Christian. Indeed, at a time when Christianity had barely taken root in Britain, when Angles and Saxons were still sacrificing to Thor and Woden on the banks of the Thames and in the west the last Christian Britons were fighting a rearguard action under a leader who may have been called Arthur, the Levant was the heartland of Christianity and the centre of Christian civilisation. The monasteries of Byzantium were fortresses whose libraries and scriptoria preserved classical learning, philosophy and medicine against the encroaching hordes of raiders and nomads. Moreover, for all the decay, the Levant was still the richest, most populous and most highly educated part of the Mediterranean world: three quarters of the revenue of the Byzantine exchequer came from the eastern provinces. They contained the main centres of industry and within living memory their ships and caravans had conducted a hugely profitable trade with the Orient; even in the chaos of the late sixth century that trade had still not entirely disappeared. There was nothing in the West to compare with this high Eastern Byzantine culture. In the late sixth century, Byzantium was still the focus of the entire Eurasian land mass.
It was not to remain so for long. John Moschos was an almost exact contemporary of Mohammed. When Moschos died in 619, the Empire was still ruled, however shakily, from the Veneto to Southern Egypt. But a few years later, Moschos’s young companion Sophronius saw the eastern half of the Byzantine dominion shatter and fragment. In his old age Sophronius was appointed Patriarch of Jerusalem, and it was left to him to defend the Holy City against the first army of Islam as it swept up from Arabia, conquering all before it.
Fresh from the desert, the Arabs were not very adept at siege-craft: when stalled outside Damascus, the great army of the Prophet had to borrow a ladder from a nearby monastery to get over the walls. But with the Imperial legions already ambushed while crossing the River Yarmuck, there was no prospect of relief for Jerusalem. After a siege lasting twelve months Sophronius prepared to surrender, with only one condition: he would hand Jerusalem over to no general. The Holy City would surrender only to the Caliph himself.
On a February day in the year 638 A.D., the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding upon a white camel. The Caliph wore the filthy robes in which he had conducted his campaign; but the Patriarch was magnificently dressed in his robes of Imperial silk. Sophronius handed over the keys of the city and through his tears was heard to murmur: ‘Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet.’
He died, heartbroken, a few months later. He was buried in the ruins of the Monastery of St Theodosius; in the next niche lay the body of his friend, teacher and travelling companion John Moschos. Sophronius had faithfully honoured his friend’s last
