§ 3. LEGENDS.
Many of the points in this celebration of the wonders of S. Sophia seem to be traceable to the writer’s absorbing traditions of the work of Basil—who built like a goldsmith at his new church—into his account. In the destructive rapacity of the Crusaders and the interregnum that followed while they occupied S. Sophia we find such a satisfactory cause for this half-mythical retrospect undertaken in all good faith that we cannot think it was written until after the Frankish ascendency.
We need not suppose that the Anonymous invented even the wildest of these stories; such stories grow up as a matter of course, and to-day various forms of some of them are told within the walls of many other buildings. The accounts given by the Russian pilgrims (see Chapter [VI]) agree so closely in many respects with the Anonymous description that we might think the writer had been their guide in the church. That the stories were widely told in Constantinople at this time is proved by the account of S. Sophia given by El Harawi, an Arab traveller, who visited the city in the thirteenth century. “Here is also Agia Sophia, the greatest church they have. I was told by Yakub Ibn Abd Allah that he had entered it: within are 360 doors. And they say one of the angels resides there; round about this place they have made fences of gold, and the story they relate of him is very strange.”[230]
This story of the angel recalls the Wingless Victory of the Athenian acropolis, but it is probably more closely related to the “Angels of the Churches” in the Revelation. An interesting reference to this thought is made by Palladius in his Life of Chrysostom. Before he left S. Sophia for ever the patriarch entered it saying, “Come let us pray and say farewell to the Angel of the Church;” but, adds his biographer, “the Angel departed with him.” We give here an account of the church from a thirteenth-century English MS., in the British Museum, Vit. A. xx. 14, which refers to the more commonplace part of the story as told by the Anonymous. “That famous city is endowed with wonderful and inestimable wealth. In it may be seen the famous church Agia Sophia, that is the Holy Wisdom; an angel of God appeared and taught the workmen as they were building. Underneath the church in its cisterns there is refreshing water, some of which is salt and some of it rainwater. The church below is borne on one hundred and seventy-three columns of marbles, and above on two hundred and forty-six. Round the choir from the top to the bottom it is covered with silver gilt. And this same choir has an altar ‘starred’ (stellatum) all over with most wonderful and precious stones. In the church are lamps of the purest silver and gold, and their number cannot be counted. The church is opened and closed by seven hundred and fifty-two double doors, and there are windows innumerable. There are seven hundred prebendary priests, of which three hundred and fifty take each week in turn. Now the Patriarch of Agia Sophia has in that city one hundred metropolitans and archbishops, and each metropolitan has seven suffragans in the same city.”
The idea of competition with Solomon’s Temple and the Tabernacle would be sure to suggest itself, and, once received, it would be justified by many assertions; indeed a tendency to imitate the biblical accounts may be detected in the Anonymous author. For instance, we have Justinian’s intention to cover the floor with silver, the description of the gold vessels for the altar, and the “sea” for the priests. Justinian’s oft-quoted speech on entering the completed church may be assigned to this leading idea, which we find expressed as early as the sixth century by Corippus, the poet-bishop, who says, “Praise of the temple of Solomon is now silenced, and the Wonders of the World have to yield the preeminence. Two shrines founded by the wisdom of God have rivalled Heaven, one the sacred Temple, the other the splendid fane of S. Sophia, the Vestibule of the Divine Presence.”[231] Glycas, who tells many of the stories given by the Anonymous, continues the idea further. Justinian, he says, set up a statue “representing Solomon as looking at the Great Church and gnashing his teeth with envy.”[232]
In the Book of Proverbs we read, “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” This was also seized upon, and Michael Psellus speaks of S. Sophia as “the very beautiful temple, the incomparable home which the Divine Wisdom built in His own name and which He raised on seven pillars.”[233] Modern writers, Tournefort, Von Hammer, &c., have delighted to point out that the church has 107 columns; indeed, with a little humouring, 108 may be counted. The symmetrical number of the workmen employed according to the Anonymous may be matched in a legendary account of the building of S. Luke’s, according to which there were twenty-four protomaistores, each of whom had twenty-four workmen under him.
The story of Justinian mixing money with the earth is parallel to the account, given by Vasari, of Brunelleschi’s scheme for building the dome of S. Maria del Fiore in Florence. It is impossible that the church should have been flooded with water, as described by the Anonymous. There appears to be no basis for the supposition that the great dome was gilt outside. In the texts of Codinus the dome is said to be of ivy-wood (κισσηρίνος): this is evidently somebody’s misreading for pumice-stone (κισήριον).
The stones were actually supposed to be specifics for diseases by the Russian pilgrims and others. Clari the Knight of Amiens[234] (1200) speaks “of the Minster (Moustier) of S. Sophia, and the riches which were there.... There are vaults all round over the church, which are carried on large columns, very rich; for there is not a column but is of jasper, or porphyry, or some precious marble, and every column has a medicinal quality; some keep off Mal des rains, some Mal du flanc, and other diseases: and there is nothing in this minster such as a hinge (gons) or band (verveles) generally of iron, which is not of silver.”
Codinus concludes his account of the church with a story, which may be classed with a large series, as “the gratitude of employers to their architects;” imprisoning and blinding them, or cutting off their hands. It is in a sense one of the truest of stories! The master workman of the great church, “Ignatius (sic), owing to the great favour which his work won for him from the people, was shut up by the emperor in his statue in the Augusteum.” To parallel other tales this must be the artist’s own work which is the instrument of his torture. Here he would have died of hunger had it not been for his faithful wife, who threw to him a rope besmeared with liquid pitch; afterwards fire destroyed all evidence of his flight.
We have also the customary tales of statues found in the ground when the church was begun. Gyllius, quoting from Suidas, says that Justinian discovered more than seventy statues of the Greek deities, the figures of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and eighty statues of Christian princes and emperors. The travels that bear the name of Sir John Mandeville relate that once when an emperor made a grave in S. Sophia, “they found a body in the earth, and upon the body lay a plate of gold, that said thus in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, ‘Jesus Christ shall be born of the Virgin Mary, and I believe in Him.’ It was laid there 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, and is still preserved in the treasury of the church. And they say that it was Hermogenes, the wise man.”
The legends were not forgotten after the taking of the church. Sandys, the English traveller, who was in Constantinople about 1610, tells us that “one of the doors was famed to be the ark of Noe, and is therefore left bare in some places to be kissed by the devoted people,” and “the total number of doors was said to be as many as the days of the year.”
When this, the church of the world, fell into the hands of the Turks, many stories came to the West, or arose there without coming. The poetry of the Fall required the miraculous salvation of the priest celebrating mass, and the prophecy of his return as told by Theo. Gautier. It also required a massacre in the church, the riding in of the proud conqueror, and the mark of his blood-stained hand, which indeed is still pointed out some twenty feet above the pavement! Mijatovich, in his history of the last of the emperors, regards the massacre as unhistorical.
An English romance almost contemporary with the Fall tells us how the Turks took possession,
“For to let theyr hawkys fly
In the chirch of Saint Sofy.”