All language subtitles for Byzantium The Lost Empire_4

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
and 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.

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 ending.

As it fell, Byzantium's ornaments
its arts and peoples

settled on the West like sparks
from a burning forest parks

that lit the Western World.

I'm standing high above the Golden Horn
in Istanbul, in modern Turkey.

I'm standing right on the edge
of Europe, too.

That's Asia over there.

Now, eight hundred years ago
from here to the great blue sea

was the most famous palace in the world

lts wealth, its beauty

its sacredness was the envy of people
from Iceland to China.

Only the angels in heaven
the Byzantines had said

knew the date of the ending
of this dazzling city

the capitol of the Empire Byzantium
which they called Constantinople.

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
Sultans 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.

The emperors moved their palace here
to Vlackany, right 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.

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.

Savior Ankora, St.

Savior in the fields
In the last centuries of Byzantium,

the city's greatest icons
were in this church

waiting to be paraded around the walls
in times of siege.

St. Savior's was Byzantium's
last master work

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 was stored, here
alongside the holy pictures.

It's said that on the last night
of Byzantium, on the 28th of May, 1453,

as the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos
was praying,

the Virgin Mary came down from heaven

and asked him to return the crown to her,

as God withdrew protection
from his holy city.

Above the door, in shining gold an image
of the church's greatest benefactor

Theodore Methokitis, Prime Minister
and High Chancellor of Byzantium.

Look at him, with his turban

and his caftan - the very model
of an Eastern gentleman.

Yet, Theodore and the Byzantines
were a very ancient people,

the living remnants of the world
of Greece and Rome.

Even by Theodore's day though by the
1320s, the great Chancellor had come to

the conclusion that Byzantium's ancient
heritage was quite exhausted.

But, all one really had to do,
was to wait and pray and silently endure.

His church was a meditation on eternity.

Theodore's artists have given 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, resplendent, 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 in 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 Byzantium
in its final years.

The idea that like 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, will come to an end.

So when the emperor went onto
to the walls and took with him

the most ancient icons of his faith,
and he 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.

By the 1400s, many of Byzantium's
brightest minds had left

the gathering gloom and darkness
of the crumbling city,

and settled in a fresh, new town beneath
the mountain tops 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 Caliope his Italian wife,
where Jews, and Greeks, Byzantines

and Italians; Greek and Latin
could live happily together.

One of the lovely things about Mistra
is how small it is, how tiny, how human.

Everything, here, is democratic.
As you walked down the street,

you'd have bumped into everybody.

You might have seen Italian merchants.

You might have seen
beautiful Queen Caliope,

walking amongst the flowers.

And you 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 Plethon.

In Plethon's time,

Mistra was already fineness, 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.

Here, Plethon founded the last 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 while,

Western visitors to Mistra witnessed

the last flowering of the living world
of ancient Greece.

This is the estate of a grand Byzantine
nobleman. Not much left of the garden,

just a few wild herbs, a little spinach.

But, you know, Plethon must have lived
in a house, like this.

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
merchant classes,

they would have built a smaller house.

But this, this is grand.

Look at the 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 chain,

that hung right down there with
a big pot on it,

and two great stones underneath.

Everything was cooked there.

If they wanted to roast anything
they'd send 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 gotta think of, here,

is little cubicles with 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.

Plethon was very proud of it.

He said that even great Queen Caliope,

herself, would have lived in a house
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 gotta think, old Plethon sitting,

perhaps in the evening light,
looking out over the valley of Sparta,

what would he have done?

Well, he scribbled letters to the Duke.

Plethon was very worried
about the condition of Byzantium.

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.

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. Sofia.

There's not much left, here, now,
just Christ, up there on the wall,

and a few beautiful fragments of marble.

Most of the church
has been stripped out completely.

There's even a little double-headed eagle
still up there,

a double-headed eagle
of the last Emperors of Byzantium.

But, the real treasure is, here,
on the floor.

Look at this.
You see that?

That stone, there, that purple stone,
that's Imperial porphyry.

That's a stone, well,
it's a whole magical stone of Byzantium.

When this church was built, it hadn't
even been mined for a thousand years,

yet 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 stone, was probably the very stone
where the last Emperor of Byzantium

was crowned, Constantine Palaiologos.

The last ruler of Mistra was crowned,
here, on the sixth of January 1449.

Three years later, he died fighting
on the walls of Constantinople

as the Turks took the city.

In the 13th Century, a family of nomad
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
that same family conquered

most of the territory of Byzantium, and a
large part of Southeast Europe, too.

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 sultans.

In those days, Edirne was a hectic,
international city,

the city of great mosques, hospitals,
concert halls,

munitions works and grand bazaars.

This is one of the colleges of learning,
at Edirne.

In sultan Mehmet's time, there were
many of them, here,

and they formed a circle like
a university around the court.

It 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.

Old Plethon 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

But 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.

The West had 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, were split apart
six centuries before.

So, the Emperor John had sailed with
his theologians and his bishops,

not his generals or his admirals.

In all, some seven hundred people
on the sea, the scholars of Byzantium.

Plethon, too, had come especially
from Mistra,

in Greece, as had many of his pupils.

The most extraordinary thing about this
gathering, that there were

bishops and priests from all the cities
of the ancient East,

all the cities founded 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.

The emperor, and his retinue,
rode away from danger,

over the mountains and down
to the central plain of Italy.

Here, perhaps, at Florence,
they might forge their union

with the West that Byzantium
so desperately needed.

And, here, too, they were memorialized
in the frescos of the Benozzo Gozzoli

painted in the townhouse
of the Medici family,

the bankers who were sponsoring
this council of the churches.

That's John VIII, John Palaiologos
from Mistra, Emperor of Byzantium,

come to the West to seek aid.
He'd ruled twelve years, at this point.

And, 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 jewelers liked it; 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 haughty
sarcastic people who seemed

to be laughing at jokes they wouldn't
share with the Florentine,

the untaught, 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
that 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,

was like only at the top
of a vast pyramid of power.

In Byzantium
everything resided in the one man.

Now, in the West, here it is,
after 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 and immature.

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.

On the sixth of June, 1439,
the 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,

and whichever of his Greeks
decided to turn up that day.

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, it seemed.

Now, the brightest of all these Greeks,
was Plethon.

He taught practically all the people
in the Greek delegation.

He came straight from Mistra.

He was very old; he was eighty,
and he was as charismatic as ever.

He gave lectures, here,
and the effect was amazing.

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.

Disillusioned, disappointed, the Emperor
John died a few years later.

He was buried here, in the monastery
of Christ Pantecrat,

Christ Lord of Earth and Heaven.

And at the same monastery, Genadius,
the theologian, preached that the union

with Rome would bring down the wrath
of God upon Byzantium.

Meanwhile, at Edirne, the new,
young Turkish sultan, Mehmet,

had taken up the Ottoman throne.

In Constantinople, the new emperor,
John's brother, Constantine,

soon discovered that he now had a
dangerous and most impatient neighbor.

In April 1452, there was a huge row
at the court of sultan Mehmet II.

Byzantine ambassadors had turned up
complaining that the young man was breaking

all his father's treaties. He was, too

He was building a huge castle right
next door to Constantinople,

called the Cutthroat.

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.

Listen to this, these are 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."

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 thrown out the gates.

Byzantium was at war.

Mehmet was actually very touched
by Constantine.

After all, the Ottomans and Byzantines
had lived side by side

for a very long time.

They'd fought together in wars,
they'd intermarried.

But, Mehmet
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 its 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 evacuate.

You may have anything but the city.

For the city,
I would rather die than live."

On the evening of the twenty-eighth
the sultan Mehmet 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 the city,

its gold and silver, its silks and furs.

All I want are 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 Mohammed is his prophet."

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 Mehmet to order

the final assault upon the city.

The cannons, large as dragons,
it was said,

bore 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 Byzantine's

to fight on two fronts at once.

On the city walls, the Byzantines parade
the holy icon of the virgin,

the city's sacred shield, just as they
had done for a thousand years and more.

Every hall, each crack of weakness
in the ancient walls,

were strengthened by the prayers
of priests, the women and the children.

There's the emperor ordering the wall's
repair 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 widower,

the last emperor would leave no heir.

On the last day of Byzantium,
an eerie quiet fell over the city.

Mehmet had told the Turks to rest,
for a whole day, before the last assault.

He gave the emperor time to walk
with all that was left of the armies

and nobles of Byzantium, once again
into the great church, and there,

after all their arguing in Florence,

the Greeks and the Latins joined together
in a last service.

And the emperor went to the altar
and was given the last rites.

Then, he walked back to the palace,

and there he made a speech
to his commanders.

A speech, you might say that it was the
last speech of the ancient world.

He encouraged them not to be frightened
when the Turks attacked.

He said that their ancestors,
the ancient Romans, were terrified

when Hannibal's elephants had charged
towards them, but 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.

It was those beliefs of mind
that stem back to Greece and Rome

and fueled the modern world.

And, then, Constantine,
the eleventh 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.

But, Constantine died fighting
by the city gates.

"The city is taken," he's supposed
to have cried, "And I'm still alive."

But he ran off, towards the battle,
and into the flash of legend.

The man, then, killed ten pashas
and sixty soldiers with his lance.

And, at the end, poor Constantine
was toppled from his horse

and cried to God Almighty, the Creator
of the Universe.

And the Turks cut off his head
and stuck it on a pole.

As he rode through the streets
of Constantinople

on the first day of the Turkish conquest,
sultan Mehmet found whole districts

of the sacred city derelict and abandoned
saw hovels and graveyards built

amongst the ruins
of its legendary palaces.

He was awed, though,
by the imperial church of St.

Sofia and declared its venerable shell
to be a building made for God.

So, the church of St. Sofia,
the Church of the Divine Wisdom,

was converted to
the Mosque of Al-el Sofia,

the Mosque of the Divine Wisdom.

Images of old Byzantium had glimmered
at the edge of Asia for a thousand years.

Now, new ghosts, new legends, and new
peoples came to haunt its fabled stones.

Legend tells that Mehmet
rode into St. Sofia on his war horse

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 funerary
mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror,

was put up in its place.

Yet, Mehmet, a humane
and sympathetic man,

still wondered at this ancient, ruined
city and its unyielding inhabitants.

The most eminent Byzantine left alive
inside the city,

was Genadius, the theologian.

Mehmet visited him, here,
in the monastery of Christ Pantacret.

"Who were the people of this crumbling,
ancient city?" the sultan asked him.

And what, exactly, was their faith?

Like most of the inhabitants
of this most stubborn city,

Genadius would only answer for 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 Go�s kingdom on this earth.

Mehmet was pleased enough
with the old boy's answer

to give the penniless church a bag of
gold, made Genadius its leader,

to give him a white mule,
and to give him authority, too,

over all the Christians of his empire.

It was an arrangement that lasted
for four centuries.

As for Genadius' beloved monastery, well

its church became a medressa,
an Islamic public school.

One Zarich became a very famous preacher
in this city.

Now, when Mehmet first
came to the church,

his quick eye had noticed the great lion
of stones sarcophagi

along the aisle, there.

In fact, they were the tombs,
the sarcophagi,

of 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 a slab of stone,
laid in that trench over there.

For centuries pilgrims had 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, Zarich's school
became a mosque.

The district became quite poor.

The mosque sold off its great, white,
shining marble pillars

and put in these bulks of stone, instead.

And the great screen, the altar screen,
from the church whose golden panels

now stand on the high altar of St.
Mark in Venice, were turned into that,

a minvah, a pulpit for reading the Koran

So, it almost 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 lmperial Byzantium.

There are still descendants
of the Byzantines, today,

the dwindling community
of the ancient heart of one

of the largest cities
in the modern world.

Their worship, in their sole surviving
ancient church, is guaranteed

by the proclamations of ancient sultans
hanging on its walls.

Their church has 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.

Scattered, too, from myriads
of monasteries of far flung churches,

pale shadows of the ancient,
earthly Empire of Byzantium.

Most of Constantinople's ancient churches
though,

were soon converted into mosques.

This little 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 centers
of this city's neighborhoods,

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 center
of a mighty empire,

just as it had been
a thousand years before.

Just before the conquest of
Constantinople, a radical young bishop,

called Bessario, Plethon's most
brilliant pupil,

had returned to Italy and he 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, Bessario 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,

memory of old Byzantium.

Bessario spent his life making
a memorial for Byzantium,

by founding an academy of scholars.

You know, I suppose Bessario
brought his academy, here,

when it got very hot
in the summer months.

His academy was a group of people
who he'd 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 Plethon had introduced
Plato to the West.

The Renaissance was beginning,
this is early renaissance building.

For a few years, this was
the coolest place on the planet.

So, you gotta think, perhaps,
this was the place too,

where one day in the summer, 1452,
Besarrio sat down to write to Mistra.

He was writing a letter of condolence
to Plethon's sons.

The old man had died with the Spring
flowers in June, of that year.

Bessario wrote a letter,
such a letter.

He said that Plethon 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, Bessario 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.

Bessario was an enabler, a producer,
a 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 lliad,

made by a refugee from Mistra.

And, in the front
of this beautiful volume,

is a picture of Homer
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 Bessario's academy.

Part of the modern world, its science
and its scholarship was started

by these exiles from Byzantium.

Plethon and Bessario first taught the
West all Plato's heady individualism

that so fills the modern world.

Bessario, too, 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 the universal order that
stretches back through Byzantium,

through Rome and 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,

at Varonets, 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 center 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, all the
bad people struggling to get out.

Good and bad, plus and minus,
past and future, with heaven above,

and hell below,
and pure energy in the center.

A structured, universal order that

the modern world still understands
and uses every day.

And, if there's nothing there
then you can see even the modern world.

Just look at those demons,
as black as SS Officers,

prodding their victims towards the ovens.

That's a hell we made reality.

Look at that, over there, in paradise,

the tree of life,
the center of man's wisdom,

the very plant of the god Gilgamesh
six thousand years ago in ancient Uru and

Mesopotamia searched for.

To him, the elixir of life
was understanding.

For us, perhaps, it's penicillin.

Then, again, there's something here

that's 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.

Nowadays, Constantinople, 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.

Ruins are often melancholy,
but they should seldom 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.

If 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.

We think of Byzantium,
too as a flash of silver,

as a dream of jewels, as an image
of a god sitting on a golden throne,

and of an emperor sitting,
in his palace, in his imitation.

Think of the culture that gave us
the rule of Roman law

and the image of a Holy Mother,
much beloved, caressing a baby child.

And think of Byzantium, too,
this extraordinary empire set between

the East and West whose very ending set
those two things far apart.

But, in whose own time gave
so many good ideas to both of them.

When sailing from Byzantium,
listen to the city's fading sounds.

Visit, in your mind, its golden images
and all the shadows of its history.

And as you wave goodbye,

you'll discover that you could never
really leave the past behind.