Transcription
This is the story of the ending of a civilization, of the breaking of a way of life, the story of a nation facing extinction. None of the choices that its people made—the story of the ending of the Empire of Byzantium and of the beginnings of the modern world. [Music] The last years of the Empire of Byzantium were filled with stress and beauty. Faced with enemies, looking for friends, and always waiting for the end, as it fell, Byzantium—Zoar Nimmons—its arts and people's settled on the West like sparks from burning forests, sparks that lit the Western world. [Music] [Music]
I'm standing high above the Golden Horn in Istanbul, in modern Turkey, standing right on the edge of Europe—that's Asia over there. Now, eight hundred years ago, from here to the great blue sea was the most magnificent Palace in the world. Its wealth, its beauty, its sacredness was the envy of people from Iceland to China. [Music] Only the angels in heaven, the Byzantines have said, knew the date of the ending of this dazzling City, the capital of the Empire Byzantium, which they called Constantinople. Oh, late in the Middle Ages, though, in the last two centuries of Byzantium, when the Crusaders had half destroyed the city and with the armies of the Turkish Sultan's closing in upon its walls, you didn't need to be an angel to know the end was very close. The broken Empire of Byzantium prepared to face its destiny. [Music]
The Emperors moved their palace here to Blachernae, and I write on the city walls here. They could face all their enemies—the Turks, the Westerners. Here, too, was a great Church and a most sinister prison where half a dozen Emperors were executed or blinded in terrifying family feuds. [Music] Just like the Emperors, Jesus, Mary, and all the saints had also moved out onto the city walls. This is the great monastery church of St. Saviour in Chora—Saint Saviour in the Fields. In the last centuries of Byzantium, the city's greatest icons are in this church, waiting to be paraded around the walls in times of siege. St. Saviour's was Byzantium's last masterwork, the jewel box set beside the city walls. Inside these little city churches, many people found their individual answers to the most terrible dilemma that any culture has to face: the threat of annihilation, of the death of a nation. The imperial crown restored here alongside the holy pictures. [Music]
It's said that on the last night of Byzantium, on the 28th of May 1453, as the Emperor Constantine Palaeologus was praying, the Virgin Mary came down from heaven and asked him to return the crown—in return, God withdrew protection from his holy city. [Music] Above the door, in shining gold, an image of the church's greatest benefactor, Theodore Metochites, Prime Minister and High Chancellor of Byzantium. Look at him with his turban and his cloud—a very model of an Eastern gentle. Yet Theodore and the Byzantines were very ancient people, the living remnants of the world of Greece and Rome. [Music] Even by Theodore's date, the 1320s, the great Chancellor had come to the conclusion that Byzantium's ancient heritage was quite exhausted. Little one really had to do was to wait and pray and silently endure. His church was a meditation on eternity. Theodore's artists gave us one of Byzantium's finest images, perhaps one of the greatest paintings ever made. I say that because it's a painting about humanity, about the value of humankind. What's going on? That's Christ in the middle, we spend white; he's burst through the gates of Hell. He's got the hands of Adam and Eve—that's all of us—and he's pulling them from the grave. It's the hands—look at the hands—it's the hands; that's got the urgency of them, the hands that are insisting upon this resurrection, not from earthly empires, but from the value of humankind itself. It was those ideals that drove this engine in his final years. The idea that night, the kingdom of heaven, Byzantium was not a kingdom of this world. It was a belief in the inevitability that the world came—had a beginning and will come to an end. So in the Emperor went on to the walls and took with him the most sacred icons of his faith and knew that he would die. He also knew that he was right. Many Byzantines believed that if an enemy ever broke through these vast old city walls, the very statues of the ancient Emperors would come alive and drive the invaders from the city. For them, Constantinople was a sacred city, the center of the world, inviolable. Yet they, too, could see the Turkish armies drawing ever closer and their ancient city descending into ruin. [Music]
By the 1400s, many of Byzantium's brightest minds would lift the gathering gloom and darkness of the crumbling city. He settled in a fresh new town beneath the mountaintops of southern Greece, a sparkling town on a hilltop close to the ruins of ancient Sparta, a town called Mistra, a miniature kingdom ruled by the Emperor's brother, Theodore, and Queen Clara, his Italian wife. Where Jews and Greeks, Byzantines and Italians, Greeks and Latins could live happily together. [Music] One of the lovely things about Mistra is how small it is—have tiny human—everything here is democratic. As you walk down the street, you'd have bumped into everybody. You might have seen Italian merchants; you might have seen beautiful Queen Clara ofa walking amongst the flowers; and he might have seen the retired Emperor John here to visit his family, now a monk, buzzing busily from church to church. But the hub of Mistra's life was a charismatic teacher from Constantinople, a follower of Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, a man called Phrantzes. In Phrantzes' time, Mistra was already famous; it was a little paradise, they said. The men were handsome, the women were beautiful, and the stones were from ancient Sparta itself. But everybody knew that they were doomed. [Music]
Here, Phrantzes led the lost academy of Greek philosophy. Here, he taught future patriarchs of Constantinople and future Cardinals of the Church of Rome, as well as they mingled with philosophers of late Byzantium. For a brief one, Western visitors to Mistra witnessed the last flowering of the living world of ancient Greece. This is the estate of a grand Byzantine woman. How much is left at the garden, Mistra? Few wild herbs and little spinach. But you know, Phrantzes’ house—it really corresponds to the old philosophers’ way of thinking about things. Upstairs, the noble family; downstairs, the servants and the animals. The third class would have been the merchant classes, lived in a bit of a smaller house. But this—this is a granny-looking fireplace, great big flue going up through the wood ceiling and the tiles to the outside, just like a modern fireplace, with a big canopy coming down the front. Those two holes there supporting the wood that held the cooking shan, they’ve hung right down there with a big pot on it, with two great stones underneath. Everything was cooked there; they wanted to roast anything, they sent it out to a local bread oven. Now, all the rest of the activity of this house went on in one big room. What you’ve got to think of here is little cubicles, the curtains around the lavatory, the beds—any little private areas that people wanted. This was a very simple life because these were leading men of Byzantium. Phrantzes was very proud of it. He said that even great Queen Clarisse elf, who would have lived it ours like this, actually had given up the soft and decadent ways of the Italians and taken up our own innocent behavior, he said. So you’ve got to think of old Plato sitting, perhaps in the evening, right, looking out over the bay of Sparta. What would he have done? Well, he scribbled letters to the Duke. He was very worried about the condition of his engine; he thought the world needed reformation, and he came out with all these amazing ideas from ancient Greece. He was a bit of an old fascist, really—a lot of his ideas were terrible—but he was a magnetic character. People loved him—like all professors, they loved listening to him and didn’t take a word of notice of what he said. [Music]
At the heart of Mistra was the court, and at the heart of the court, this little pretty church, named after the great old court Church of Constantinople, St. Sophia. [Music] It’s not much left here now—just Christ out there on the wall and a few beautiful fragments of marble, as the church has been stripped out completely. There’s even a little double-headed eagle still up there, the double-headed eagle of the last Emperors of Byzantium. But the real treasure is here on the floor. Look at this—see that—that’s stone there—that purple stone—that’s Imperial porphyry—that’s a stone, and it’s a half-magical stone of Byzantium. When this church was built, it hadn’t even been mined for a thousand years. Yeah, little chippings of it were taken around the world and set in floors like this. It was the stone in which Roman emperors had been born, in rooms that were covered in it. This, though, was probably the very stone where the last emperor of Byzantium was crowned. Constantine Palaeologus, the last ruler of Mistra, was crowned here on the 6th of January 1449. Three years later, he died fighting on the walls of Constantinople as the Turks took the city. [Music]
In the 13th century, a family of nomads, Turkish shepherds called the Ottomans, packed their tents and rode out of Central Asia. Two centuries later, the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Turks, commanded by members of the same family, conquered most of the territory of Byzantium and a large part of Southeast Europe. The center of this enlarging Turkish Empire was a city at the borders of modern Greece and Turkey, the city of Edirne, the capital of the Turkish Sultan. [Music] In those days, Edirne was a hectic international City, the city of great mosques, hospitals, concert halls, munitions works, and Grand Bazaar. This is one of the colleges of learning at Edirne. In Sultan Mehmed’s time, there were many of them here, and they formed a circle like a university around the court—was an International University. There were Italians here teaching the Sultan’s children how to speak Greek. Byzantine Nobles sometimes sent their children here for a good education. Oh, Phrantzes came here as a young man. Here it was he met Persian fire worshippers who taught him all about their strange religion. Here it was, too, he first read the works of the ancient Greek Aristotle. Clearly, this dynamic international, rich, powerful Society was far more than a match for the poor old Empire of Byzantium. It was also clear that the ancient city of Constantinople had been engulfed by this adolescent multinational Empire. Constantinople lay at the strategic center of its trade routes and on the supply lines of the Turkish armies that were eating into Eastern Europe. That is why Byzantium was doomed. In 1438, the Emperor John VIII sailed out of Constantinople in a last attempt to beg aid from the reluctant West in his struggle with the Turks. After seventy-seven days at sea, the Imperial convoy arrived at the friendly port of Venice. [Music]
The West—that always said that military aid for Constantinople was dependent upon Byzantium's reunion with the Church of Rome—the churches of the East and West, Greek and Latin, who split apart six centuries before. So the Emperor John that sailed with its theologians and his bishops as his general was always at Lourdes, in all some 700 people on the sea, the scholars of Byzantium, Phrantzes to become especially from history in Greece, as many of his pupils. [Music] The most extraordinary thing about this gallery is that there were bishops and priests from all the cities of the ancient East, all the cities found it by Greece and Rome, the cities of Alexander the Great, the cities of the seven wonders of the world—all had their representatives at the Council, all at once and all together. It was as if the old world had come to meet the new. But there was plague abroad in northern Italy. Two Byzantine bishops perished in the first weeks of negotiations. [Music] The Emperor and his retinue rode away from danger over the mountains and down to the central plane of its loop. Here, perhaps of Florence, they might forge that union with the West, the Byzantium so desperately needed. [Music] And here, too, they were memorialized in the frescoes—have been not so God silly painted in the town house of the Medici family, the bankers who were sponsoring this Council of the churches. That’s John VIII—John VIII Palaeologus from Mistra, Emperor of Byzantium, come to the West to seek aid. He brought twelve years at this point when he got here. The Florentines—those dedicated followers of fashion—thought he was a knockout. They had never seen turbans like that or crowns like that. The Jews liked the—the Florentine weavers liked it, the painters liked it. This was a man whose dress and demeanor influenced fashion here almost for a century. They didn’t like him much, though. They thought all the Greeks were wholly sarcastic people who seem to be laughing at jokes they wouldn’t share with the Florentines, you know. At all really, what they were experiencing actually was a typical Greek thing; it was the full force of the Divine Right of Kings. See, in the West, that had rather diminished—the West that had pinched the idea of the emperor had now taken to electing Western emperors; they were confirmed by popes; there was common law, power in the West that seeped down and down and down away from the man who now is like only at the top of a vast pyramid of power. In Byzantium, everything resided in the one man. Now, in the West, and here it is—out for a stroll in the country—Cosimo and the other seven hundred Medici, all on their horses. This is entirely reversed. I mean, here you’ve got a man who is a banker, a politician, a multinational businessman. You might say the West was entirely different. The central disagreement then was about these different attitudes to power in East and West, about power and precedence amongst the Lords of earth and heaven. Most of the Byzantines, though, were insulted at the very idea of arguing about God, whose Majesty and dignity was beyond all human understanding. They thought that the clever Roman clerics they faced each day were simply impertinent, immature. [Music]
After a year of recrimination and debate, the Emperor John, still desperate for military aid, simply ordered his delegation to agree to most of the West's arguments. [Music] On the 6th of June 1439, a great act of Union was signed in Florence Cathedral, right under the huge beautiful brand-new dome—an act of union between two churches, between the Pope of Rome and his assembled clergy, the Emperor of Byzantium, whichever of his Greeks decided to turn up that day. [Music] The real buzz in Florence, though, wasn’t in the great Cathedral; it was in the streets. The Byzantines were here—these weren’t the old school teachers that rich Florentines paid to teach their kids—these were the geniuses, the brightest minds of Byzantium, and here they were carrying all the wisdom of the ancient world. As seen now, the brightest of all these Greeks was Platonic writings—all the people in the Greek delegation. He came straight from Mistra; very old, he was 80, and he was as charismatic as ever. He gave lectures here, and the effect was amazing. [Music]
Back at Constantinople, though, the union with Rome caused riots. Italian priests were insulted in the city's churches, and Western Europe sent no aid. [Music] [Applause] Disillusioned, disappointed, the Emperor John died a few years later and was buried here in the monastery of Christ Pantocrator—Christ, Lord of Earth and heaven. [Music] And at the same monastery, Gennadios the Theologian preached that the union with Rome would bring down the wrath of God upon Byzantium. [Music] Meanwhile, at Edirne, a new young Turkish Sultan, Mehmed, had taken up the Ottoman throne. At Constantinople, the new Emperor, John’s brother, Constantine, soon discovered that he now had a dangerous and most impatient neighbor. In April 1450, there was a huge rail at the court of Sultan Mehmed II. Byzantine ambassadors had turned up complaining that the young man was breaking all his father’s treaties. He was—he was building a huge castle right next door to Constantinople called the Topkapi. It was the first stages in his planned attack upon the city. And now, in his reply to these ambassadors, he tried to scare the pants off them. Listen to this—these were his very words: “Have you the right or the power to control my actions on my own territory? Inform your king that I am very different from my father; that my resolution surpasses all my ancestors. This time you can return in safety, but the next man who delivers a similar message to me will be flayed alive.” [Music]
Back in Constantinople, the new Emperor Constantine XI reluctantly composed his reply. “It is clear,” he said to the Sultan, “that you desire war more than peace, so let that be your desire. I release you from all your oaths and treaties with me, and in closing the gates of my city, I tell you I will defend my people to the last drop of blood.” The Turkish mosques in Byzantium were shut; the Turkish troops who were sightseeing in the city were phoned out the gates. Byzantium was at war. [Music] Mehmed was actually very touched by Constantine. After all, the Ottomans and Byzantines had lived side by side for a very long time; they fought together in wars; they intermarried. Mehmed was also very determined. Listen to his reply: “I shall take your city,” he tells Constantine, “or the city will take me. If, however, you admit defeat and withdraw, I will give you Mistra and his province, and we shall be friends. If you deny me peaceful entry, however, I shall slay you and all your Nobles; I shall slaughter the inhabitants of your city and allow my troops to plunder it. The city itself is all I want, even if it is empty.” Constantine’s reply was brief: “You may have anything you want of me other than the city. I will not flee from it, nor will I give it back to you. You may have anything but the city; for the city, I would rather die than live.” On the evening of the 28th, the Sultan Mehmed addressed his armies, standing assembled outside the city walls. “I give you,” he said, “the capital of the ancient Romans, the summit of power and glory, the center of the world. I give over to you the men, women, and children of this city, its gold and silver, its silks and furs. All I want—the buildings and the walls.” It really was the standard offer of a medieval commander to his troops before the final assault, and they roared in agreement. “There is but one God,” they said, “and Muhammad is His Prophet.” [Music]
On the fringe of empire, high in the mountains of northern Romania, contemporary Byzantine artists made precious records of the fall of Constantinople. Here’s the Turkish armies waiting for Mehmed to order the final assault upon the city. The cannons—large as dragons, it was said—brought down from Edirne to pulverize the city’s vast old walls. The Turkish Navy fighting all along the Golden Horn, forcing the tiny armies of the Byzantines to fight on two fronts at once. On the city walls, the Byzantines paraded the holy icon of the Virgin, the city’s sacred shield, just as they had done for a thousand years and more. Every hole, crack, and weakness in the ancient walls are strengthened by the prayers of priests, the women, and the children. There’s the Emperor ordering the walls repaired with rocks and stones, and the Empress, too, with her ladies. Here, though, the artist is in error; there was no Queen. Constantine XI—Constantine of Mistra—was childless and a widow. The last Emperor would leave no heir. On the last day of Byzantium, an eerie quiet fell over the city. Mehmed had told the Turks to rest for a whole day before the last assault. It gave the Emperor time to walk with all that was left of the armies of nobles of Byzantium once again into the great church. From there—after all their arguing at Florence—the Greeks and the Latins joined together in a last service, and the Emperor went to the altar; was given the last rites. Then he went back to the palace; there he made a speech to his commanders—a speech, you might say, it was the last speech of the ancient world. He encouraged them not to be frightened when the Turks attack. He said that their ancestors—the ancient Romans—were terrified when animals—elephants—charged towards them; they hadn’t run away because they were human beings, people with will and mind and not given to animal desires, and that he and his commanders had mind and will and God and belief upon their side. Was those beliefs have mined the stem back to Greece and Roman fuel the modern world, and then Constantine XI of that name went with his men back to the outskirts of his empire, to the walls now of his city, and there he died—the ruler of Rome, the king of Christendom, and the Emperor of Byzantium. What actually happened to him is a mystery. Turkish historians tell us only that the Emperor was very brave—the Constantine died fighting by the city gates. “The city is taken,” he’s supposed to have cried, “and I’m still alive!” and he ran off towards the battle.
Into the flash of legend, the man then killed ten caches and 60 soldiers with his lance. And at the end, poor Konstantin was toppled from his horse and cried to God Almighty, the creator of the universe. The Turks cut off his head and stuck it on a pole. [Music] [Music]
As he rode through the streets of Constantinople on the first day of the Turkish conquest, Sultan Mehmed found whole districts of the sacred city derelict and abandoned, saw hovels and graveyards built amongst the ruins of its legendary palaces. He was, though, awed by the imperial church of St. Sophia and declared its venerable shell to be a building made for God. [Music]
So the Church of St. Sophia, the church that the divine wisdom was converted to the mosque of Aya Sofya, the mosque of the divine wisdom. [Music] Images of old Byzantium had glimmered at the edge of Asia for a thousand years. Now new ghosts, new legends, and new people came to haunt its faded stones. Legend tells that Mehmed rode in two cents off here on his warhorse and placed his finger in this magic column and spun the church around to face Mecca for the call to prayer. History tells that the Sultan ordered the tomb of Constantine the Great, the founder of Byzantium, to be demolished, along with the burial church of the ancient Emperors. And this Great Mosque, the funeral Mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror, was put up in his place.
Yet Mehmed, a humane and sympathetic man, still wondered at this ancient ruins city and its unyielding inhabitants. The most eminent Byzantine left alive inside the city was Gennadius the theologian. Mehmed visited him in his monastery of Christ Pantocrator. Who were the people of his crumbling ancient city, the Sultan asked him? And what exactly was their faith like? Most of the inhabitants of this most stubborn city, Gennadius would only answer himself. "You may not call me a Greek," he said, "because I do not believe as those ancient pagan people once believed. You might call me a Byzantine because I was born in this city, but I prefer simply to call myself a Christian." He might also have added that he considered himself to be an exclusive member, a leading light of the society that was God's kingdom on this earth. [Music]
Mehmed was pleased enough with the old boy's answer to give the penniless church a bag of gold, make Gennadius its leader, to give him a white mule, and to give him authority over all the Christians of his empire. It was an arrangement that lasted for four centuries. [Music]
As for Gennadius, his beloved monastery's wealth, its church became a madrassa, an Islamic public school, and he himself became a very famous preacher in this city. Now, when Mehmed first came to the church, his quick eye had noticed a great lion of stone sarcophagi along the aisle. There, in fact, they were the tombs; the sarcophagi were the last kings of Byzantium. John of Florence was buried here, his brother, their Queens. These he took for his new palace in the city. He also took the slab of stone laid in that trench over there. For centuries, pilgrims have believed that that had been the very slab of stone on which the body of the Lord Jesus Christ had laid after the crucifixion. They said you could still see Mary's tears upon it, glistening like pearls over the centuries. Gennadius' school became a mosque; the district became quite poor. The mosque sold off its great white shining marble pillars and put in these bolts of stone instead. And the great screen, the altar screen from the church, whose golden panels now stand on the high altar of some marks in Venice, returned into that a minbar, a pulpit for reading the Koran. So it all seems to have gone, doesn't it? But there's still something here. If you lift the carpets of the mosque and go through to the ancient floor underneath, then you'll see a memory of Imperial Byzantium. [Music]
There are still descendants of the Byzantines today, the dwindling community at the ancient heart of one of the largest cities in the modern world. [Music] [Music] Their worship in this sole surviving ancient church is guaranteed by the proclamations of ancient sultans hanging on its years. [Music] But every community's simple to me. [Music] Their church survived schism and poverty for a while; the deep distrust of Rome led them towards Calvinism. But here they are still in their holy city with their own faith. [Music] Scattered to four myriads of monasteries and far-flung churches, pale shadows of the ancient earthly Emperor of Byzantium. [Music] [Music]
Most of Constantinople's ancient churches were soon converted into mosques. The Siddal mosque was once a chapel in the ancient palace of Byzantium, endowed with lands and properties. These converted churches were transformed into self-financing Charitable Trusts, the religious and financial centres of the city's neighbourhoods and the means by which Constantinople was converted to Islam and revived under Turkish rule. Constantinople was to become a rich and thriving city once again, the centre of a mighty empire, just as it had been a thousand years before.
Just before the conquest of Constantinople, a radical young bishop called Bessarion, a most brilliant pupil, had returned to Italy and had been made a cardinal of Rome. Some historians detect his portrait in this tragic bearded figure talking with Italian friends, chic young men of the Renaissance, painted by Piero della Francesca. Here at Rome, Bessarion did what Byzantines had done at Constantinople for centuries: he made a villa by the city walls. This villa, one of the first in the modern Western world, the memory of old Byzantium. Bessarion spent his life making a memorial for Byzantium by founding an academy of scholars. No, I suppose Bessarion bought his Academy here when he got very hot in the summer months. Its Academy, it's a group of people who had gathered around him. Some were exiled Byzantines; many of them were Europeans, but everybody who could help him hold the identity of Byzantium together for as long as possible—poets, artists, writers, translators, all sorts of people—couldn't have been that difficult to find people because this was a really fashionable idea. Dear old Plato had introduced Plato to the West. The Renaissance was beginning; this is early Renaissance building. For a few years this was the coldest place on the planet, so you've got to think perhaps this was the place to where, one day in the summer of 1450, Bessarion sat down to write to Maestro. He was writing a letter of condolence to Plato's sons; the old man had died with the spring flowers in June of that year. Vasari and wrote a letter, such a letter, he said that Plato had been his teacher, his father, and his friend. It was one of the last authentic letters of the ancient world. After that, Byzantium became something to be seen in libraries and museums. Above all, Bessarion preserved the dream. He gathered the pure air of Mistra, the ideals of Constantinople, the energy of ancient wisdom, and made a single beauteous image of that most complicated Empire. [Music]
Bessarion was an enabler, a producer, the preserver of ideas and images, the assembler of the largest Byzantine library the world has ever seen, a collection whose fragments are still stored in the great libraries of the West. The man was Mr. Byzantium. He supported huge numbers of fellow exiles; he also used to place refugees all over Europe in jobs. This is a handmade Greek text of Homer's Iliad, made by a refugee from Mistra, and in the front of this beautiful volume here's a picture of her wearing a Byzantine hat. The West had seen nothing like this flood of wisdom that was pouring from Byzantium—Homer, ancient Roman law, and a myriad of other texts—and they'd seen nothing like Bessarion's Academy. Part of the modern world, if science in his scholarship was started by these exiles from Byzantium. Plethora and Bessarion first taught the West old Plato's idea of individualism that so fills the modern world. [Music]
Vissarion told a Westerner about an ancient text that inspired Columbus to sail west from Europe on the east wind to America. There is, though, a deeper and yet more fundamental legacy: a vision of a universal order that stretches back through Byzantium, through Roman Greece, to the Bible in the most ancient East; a vision that still fills the world today; a vision that exiled Byzantine artists drew out for us in dazzling detail. But Voronet, the most beautiful of Romania's lonely monasteries—see that cross there in the middle? That's the cross of our Lord standing on the holy throne of Byzantium, the centre of the world. To the left, to the left is good paradise; there's all the lords and ladies of Byzantium pressing through the pearly gates. On the right, hell; the Turks and everybody else with a Bab, he was struggling to get out. Good and bad, plus and minus, past and future, with heaven above and hell below, and pure energy at the centre; a structured Universal order that the modern world still understands and uses every day. And if there's nothing there that you conceived in the modern world, just look at those demons as black as SS officers trotting victims towards the ovens; that's a hell we made reality. Look at that over there in paradise, the Tree of Life, the centre of man's wisdom, the very plant that the god Gilgamesh, six thousand years ago, an ancient king in Mesopotamia, searched for—to him, the elixir of life was understanding. Frost, brauch is penicillin. Then again, there's something here, this unique above all the bustle of the world—the lords and ladies, the gods and demons coming through and behind the very scroll of time itself, the Lord of the universe, the heart of the atom, heaven's order in a grain of sand. Byzantium's fundamental legacy: this image of a universal structure, the universal order is as basic to the order of the modern world as is DNA to every individual in it. [Music]
Nowadays, Constantino, heart of old Byzantium, is called Istanbul, an old Byzantine phrase that simply means "the city inside." The modern city, though, the past is disappearing. [Applause] Ruins are often melancholy, but they should serve to make you angry. The end of Byzantium wasn't really brought about by the Wicked West or the terrible Turk. Things pass, as the poet said. The Cowboys had never shot the Indians; the Great Plains would not be filled with shining teepees and herds of buffaloes. Nonetheless, we should honor the past and cherish it; it's a memory, a solid memory of our beginnings. [Applause]
You think of Byzantium—there's a flash of silver, as a dream of jewels; there's an image of a God sitting on a golden throne; enough, an Emperor sitting in his palace in his imitation. Think of the culture that gave us the rule of Roman law, the image of a holy Mother, much-beloved, caressing a baby child. And think of, as an tiem to this extraordinary Empire, set between the East and West, whose very ending set those two things far apart, but in its own time gave so many good ideas to both of them. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
When sailing from Byzantium, listen to the city's fading sounds, revisit in your mind its golden images and all the shadows of its history. And as you wave goodbye, you'll discover that you can never really leave the past behind. [Music] You