As historical landmarks, these churches are of very great value, and if Byzantine history were more generally studied they would enjoy wider fame. They enable the historian to fix a date, to give a local habitation to many events and scenes, to grasp a solid fragment of a form assumed by the life of humanity, and to feel how thoroughly real that life was. In them one touches hands that have vanished, and hears the echoes of voices that are still. The Church of S. Irene, which, under Turkish control, has been employed both as an arsenal and as a museum, carries the mind back to the foundation of the city. Indeed, there is reason to think that it was one of the Christian sanctuaries of Byzantium before the town was transformed into the capital of the East, for two early authorities assert that Constantine only enlarged and beautified the church in order to make it match its new surroundings. But be that as it may, it is certain that, since the destruction of the Church of the Holy Apostles to make room for the Mosque of Sultan Mehemet, S. Irene has been the only sanctuary in the city that can claim connection with Constantine. Within its walls, it is said, the General Council summoned by Theodosius I. to restore the orthodoxy of the Church and Empire in 381 held its meetings. Occasionally, when S. Sophia for any reason was not available, S. Irene served as the patriarchal church, and is therefore sometimes designated the Patriarchate, and the Metropolitan Church. It was burned to the ground during the Nika riot, but was included by Justinian in the splendid restoration of the buildings destroyed on that occasion. It was ruined again by the earthquake of 740, and once more restored by Leo III. the Isaurian. To it, therefore, is attached the memory of the hero who defended Constantinople in the second siege of the city by the Saracens, a service to the world as important as the defeat of the same foe on the field of Tours by Charles Martel fourteen years later. “At this time,” to quote Professor Bury, “New Rome, not Old Rome, was the great bulwark of Christian Europe, and if New Rome had fallen it might have gone hard with the civilised world. The year 718 a.d. is really an ecumenical date, of far greater importance than such a date as 338 b.c. when Greece succumbed to Macedon on the field of Chæronea, and of equal importance with such dates as 332 b.c., when an oriental empire (Persia) fell, or of 451 a.d. which marked the repulse of the Huns.”
Another church of historical interest is S. Saviour-in-the-Chora (country), now Kahriyeh Djamissi, and popularly known as the Mosaic Mosque, on account of the remarkable mosaics it still contains. It was clearly in existence previous to the year 413, as thereafter it stood within the line of the Wall of Anthemius, and could not then acquire the distinction of being situated “in the country.” Accordingly, it is a topographical landmark as regards the original extent of the city, only second in importance to Isa Kapou Mesdjidi, which we have seen indicates the line of the Constantinian Wall, the position of the first Golden Gate, and the situation of the Exokionion. Like every church with so long a life, S. Saviour-in-the-Chora has known many changes. It saw its best days in the fourteenth century, when it was thoroughly renovated by Theodore Metochites, and invested with the splendour which still glows upon its walls, and makes it one of the most beautiful of the old churches of the Byzantine world.
Not less interesting historically is the Church of S. John the Baptist (Mir-Akhor Djamissi), situated in the quarter of Psamatia. It was founded about 463 by Studius, a Roman patrician who, like many other persons, when old Rome was tottering to its fall, fled from the West to the East, as when New Rome neared its end, some thousand years later, men escaped from the East to the West. The church was attached to a large monastery belonging to the order of the Acœmetæ or Sleepless Monks, who were so named because they celebrated Divine service in their churches day and night without intermission. According to the original constitution of the society the members of the order represented various nationalities, Greek, Latin, Syrian, and were divided into companies which passed from hand to hand, in unbroken succession, the censer of perpetual prayer and praise. They sought thus to make the worship of God’s saints on earth resemble that of the assembly gathered from all nations and peoples and tongues that serves Him without ceasing in heaven.
Even thus of old Our ancestors, within the still domain Of vast cathedral or conventual church Their vigils kept; where tapers day and night On the dim altar burned continually, In token that the House was evermore Watching to God. Religious men were they; Nor would their reason, tutored to aspire Above this transitory world, allow That there should pass a moment of the year, When in their land, the Almighty’s service ceased.
As might be expected from the number and zeal of its inmates, the monastery of Studius was highly venerated, and wielded immense influence. Its abbot ranked first among the abbots of the capital, and to it the Emperor was bound to pay an annual State visit on the 29th August, one of the Baptist’s festival days. On that occasion the Emperor usually came by water in the imperial barge from the Palace beside the Hippodrome, and landed at the Gate (Narli Kapoussi) on the shore below the monastery, where the abbot and his monks waited to receive the sovereign. In this monastery the Emperor Isaac Comnenus in 1059, and the Emperor Michael VII. in 1078, assumed the monk’s cowl. The former even served as porter at the monastery gate, and so happy was he in his retirement from the pomps and vanities of the world, that when his wife, who had taken the veil at the time of his abdication, visited him, he said to her, “Acknowledge that when I gave you a crown I made you a slave, and that I give you freedom when I took it away.” His wife’s last command was “that her body should be buried in the cemetery of the Studion as a simple nun, with no sign to indicate that she was born a Bulgarian princess and had been a Roman empress.”
No monks in the history of Constantinople showed themselves so independent of ecclesiastical and State control as the monks of the Studion. Enough to recall the fact that in the controversy which agitated Constantinople and the Church at large for over a century (725-842), as to the lawfulness of using pictures and statues in religious worship, the monks of this monastery were the boldest and most determined opponents of the Iconoclast emperors. The abbot Theodore, who for many years led the opposition to the imperial authority in that matter, is one of the great figures of the Eastern Church. Eight occupants of the Byzantine throne found him a man who for conscience sake defied all their authority, rejected all their favours, and endured any suffering they chose to inflict. When the Synod, held in 815, ordered icons to be banished from the churches, Theodore and his monks carried the sacred pictures in procession through the streets, and gave them an asylum in his monastery. Nor was he only stern. He caused the rejection of the treaty of peace with Crum, the King of Bulgaria, because of the demand it contained to surrender the fugitives from that monarch’s hard rule, many of whom had become Christians. To do so, Theodore argued, would be to make void the gracious words, “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” He held the view that no monk should keep slaves, and condemned the persecution of the Paulicians, urging that they who are ignorant and out of the way should be instructed, not persecuted. There is a prevalent impression that the pages of Byzantine history contain nothing but the recital of the life of a servile and ignoble community, of a race of men who trembled at the nod of any despot and were void of all independence of thought and action. That such a spirit often prevailed is undoubted. But if the Byzantines had the faults of our human nature, they were not altogether without some of its virtues. And whatever our opinions on the questions, political or ecclesiastical, that divided parties in Constantinople, may be; although we may think that good men in that city did not always take the wisest course; it is but common justice and fair play to recognise that there also was found, in the face of great difficulties, what we admire elsewhere—a sense of the rights of conscience, some demand for freedom of thought, the feeling that right and truth are the supreme authorities over human life, and that rulers, like other men, should do justly and love mercy. There, as well as elsewhere, men and women were found who preferred to suffer and to die rather than prove faithless to their convictions.
The monastery of Studius is, moreover, celebrated for its attention to hymnology, counting its great abbot Theodore, his brother Joseph, and two monks, both named Simon, among the writers of sacred poetry. It had also a scriptorium in which the Scriptures and other religious works were copied. It was, moreover, famed as an “illustrious and glorious school of virtue,” and thither youths of the higher classes of society went for a part of their education. One of the attractions offered by the school was the facility with which students in an institution so near the fortifications could get out of the city to hunt in the open country. The relics preserved in the church drew devout pilgrims to its shrine from far and near. Many Russians visited the monastery on that account, and even entered the order of the Acœmetæ to live and die beside the sacred remains. The humble tombstone of one of these Russian monks is built in the base of the modern wall enclosing the ground behind the apse. It bears the inscription, “In the month of September of the year 1387, fell asleep the servant of God, Dionysius a Russian; on the sixth day.” The honour of burial in the cemetery in which the Sleepless were at last laid to rest was accorded also to men distinguished for their public services, as in the case of the patrician Bonus, who bravely defended Constantinople in 627 against the Avars and the Persians, while the Emperor Heraclius carried on his daring campaigns far away in Persia itself.
SS. Sergius and Bacchus (Kutchuk Aya Sofia) and S. Sophia still reflect the splendour of the spacious days of Justinian the Great; days in which men still dreamed of the restoration of the Roman Empire to its ancient bounds; days in which the justice which Rome had developed was codified and enthroned to be the eternal rule of all nations that seek to establish righteousness between man and man. The former sanctuary was built by Justinian, probably in 527, as a thank-offering to the martyrs to whom the church was dedicated, for having saved him from the death to which he had been sentenced, on account of his implication in a plot against the Emperor Anastasius. No wonder that, when the lustre of the imperial diadem shed light upon the full meaning of his deliverance, his saviours became the objects of his special gratitude and veneration. The erection of the church was one of the first acts of his reign; he placed it in the immediate vicinity of his residence while heir-apparent, and at the gates of his palace when Emperor; to it he attached a large monastery, endowed with his private fortune. There cleaves therefore to the building the personal interest that belongs to anything done in a man’s most earnest mood. Among the historical associations that gather around the edifice is the fact that it was the church assigned to the Papal Legates at the Court of Constantinople, for the celebration of Divine service in the Latin form. Originally, indeed, that distinction belonged to the basilica of SS. Peter and Paul which stood beside SS. Sergius and Bacchus. The special regard cherished for the two great apostles in the West would naturally make a church dedicated to them in Constantinople the most acceptable religious home for the Roman clergy on a visit to the city. But the basilica of SS. Peter and Paul soon disappeared, under circumstances of which we have no record, and then SS. Sergius and Bacchus, virtually a part of it, was placed at the disposal of Latin priests. This fraternal custom was often interrupted by the quarrels which, from time to time, rent Eastern and Western Christendom even before their final separation, but it was restored whenever the two parties were reconciled. Pope John VIII., for instance, thanks Basil I. (867-886) for granting the use of the church again to the Roman See, in conformity with ancient rights. Among the Papal representatives in Constantinople was Pope Gregory the Great (590-614), while still a deacon, and at a time when the ecclesiastical rivalry between the Sees of Old Rome and New Rome was keen. It must have been with something of the feeling that sprang from personal acquaintance with scenes and men in the rival metropolis that he protested, when Pontiff, against the assumption of the title “œcumenical bishop” by the Patriarch John the Faster in 587, and that he adopted in contra-distinction the well-known style of the Popes “the servant of the servants of God.” Pope Vigilius spent several unhappy years (547-554) in Constantinople, in controversy with Justinian and the patriarch of the day, and in the course of the dispute had occasion to flee to the Church of SS. Peter and Paul, for refuge from the Emperor’s displeasure. Notwithstanding the right of sanctuary, Justinian gave orders for the arrest of the Pope in his place of retreat. But when the officers sent for that purpose appeared, Vigilius, a man of uncommon size and strength, clutched the pillars of the altar, and refused to obey the imperial summons. Thereupon, the officers pulled him by his feet and hair and beard, to force him to let go his hold. But the bishop held fast, and could not be moved until the pillars to which he clung gave way, and threw him and the altar to the ground. This was too much for the indignation and sympathy of the spectators who crowded the church. Coming to the rescue, they put the assailants to flight, and left the Pope master of the situation. It was only after a distinguished deputation, led by Belisarius, waited upon him next day, warning him that resistance to the Emperor’s authority would be vain, and assuring him that submission would prevent further ill-treatment, that Vigilius came forth from the church. This was in 551. The church was attached to a large and rich monastery known as the monastery of Hormisdas, after the name of the district in which it stood. Like the members of other monasteries in the city, the monks of this House took their full share in the theological controversies of their day.
