I have long believed that to do a variation in fiction upon a given period, one must first try to grasp as much as possible about that period. Byzantium is well served by its historians, fractious as they might be amongst each other. I have been deeply enlightened and focused by their writing and-via electronic mail-by personal communications and generous encouragement offered by many scholars. It hardly needs to be stressed, I hope, that those people I name here cannot remotely bear any responsibility for errors or deliberate alterations made in what is essentially a fantasy upon themes of Byzantium.
I am happy to record the great assistance I have received from the work of Alan Cameron on chariot racing and the Hippodrome factions; Rossi, Nordhagen, and L’Orange on mosaics; Lionel Casson on travel in the ancient world; Robert Browning, particularly on Justinian and Theodora; Warren Treadgold on the military; David Talbot Rice, Stephen Runciman,
Gervase Mathew and Ernst Kitzinger on Byzantine aesthetics; and the broader histories of Cyril Mango, H.W Haussig, Mark Whittow, Averil Cameron and G. Ostrogorsky. I should also acknowledge the aid and stimulation I received from participating in the lively and usefully disputatious scholarly mailing lists on the Internet relating to Byzantium and Late Antiquity. My research methods will never be the same.
On a more personal level, Rex Kay remains my first and most astringent reader, Martin Springett brought his considerable skills to preparing the map, and Meg Masters, my Canadian editor, has been a calm, deeply valued presence for four books now. Linda McKnight and Anthea Morton-Saner in Toronto and London are sustaining friends as well as canny agents, and a sometimes demanding author is deeply aware of both of these elements. My mother guided me to books as a child and then to the belief I could write my own. She still does that. And my wife creates a space into which the words and stories can come. If I say I am grateful it grievously understates the truth.
… and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we were at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.
-Chronicle of the Journey of Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, to Constantinople
PROLOGUE
Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiendy so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.
In fact, on the night Apius breathed his last in the Porphyry Room of the Attenine Palace there was no rain in the City. An occasional flash of lightning had been seen and one or two growls of thunder heard earlier in the evening, well north of Sarantium, towards the grainlands of Trake-sia. Given the events that followed, that northern direction might have been seen as portent enough.
The Emperor had no living sons, and his three nephews had rather spectacularly failed a test of their worthiness less than a year before and had suffered appropriate consequences. There was, as a result, no Emperor Designate in Sarantium when Apius heard-or did not hear-as the last words of his long life, the inward voice of the god saying to him alone, ‘Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.’
The three men who entered the Porphyry Room in the still-cool hour before dawn were each acutely aware of a dangerously unstable situation. Gesius the eunuch, Chancellor of the Imperial Court, pressed his long, thin fingers together piously, and then knelt stiffly to kiss the dead Emperor’s bare feet. So, too, after him, did Adrastus, Master of Offices, who commanded the civil service and administration, and Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, the Imperial Guard.