In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads. Stanley Stewart
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icons were deployed about the walls, the faces of saints and prophets peering out from the antique gloom of the paintings. By the icon of St Barbara was a metal crutch, left behind by a lame man who had been miraculously cured. Elsewhere votive miniatures were suspended from threads in front of the more powerful icons, in the hope of a similar miracle. Legs were popular, as were ears and feet. But the faithful did not restrict themselves to requests for new body parts: Toy cars, models of new houses, and little aeroplanes represented prayers for material success and foreign holidays. One hopeful and rather brazen petitioner had hung a photograph, clipped from a glossy magazine, in front of an icon of St George. The photograph showed a shapely young woman in a bikini. I wasn’t sure if this represented the aspirations of a man seeking help with his love life or of a woman on a diet.
The church was founded by Princess Maria, an illegitimate daughter of Michael VIII, a Byzantine emperor who tended to dole out daughters to potential allies like subsidies. It was the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Mongols were pressing on his borders. He had already dispatched one daughter to the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of the districts to the north of the Black Sea. Maria had been engaged at a tender age to Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan and the governor of another of the four provinces of the Mongol Empire, the Il-Khanate of Persia.
The engagement was a long one and by the time Maria turned up for her wedding in Tabriz, the groom was dead. But Hulegu had graciously left his fiancée in his will to his son, Abaqa, and Maria was duly married to the man she expected to be her stepson. She spent fifteen years as Queen of the Mongols until, in 1281, Abaqa was assassinated by one of his brothers. Carefully sidestepping the advances of the assassin, who saw her as a part of his inheritance, she returned to Constantinople where her father, by now running out of daughters, promptly tried to marry her off again to yet another Mongol khan. For Maria this was one husband too many. Mongol romance had persuaded her of the merits of chastity. She became a nun and founded, or possibly rebuilt, this church sometime in the 1280s.
At the time of the Turkish conquest, some two centuries later, when icons of the Virgin all over the city were said to weep tears, Constantinople’s churches were converted to mosques. Even Haghia Sophia, for nine centuries the fairest church in Christendom, had minarets erected round the ancient dome like minders. Only Our Lady of the Mongols escaped this wholesale conversion. No one is quite sure why. It may have been that the parishioners were able to argue that a church built by the wife of a Mongol prince, inspirational figures to their distant cousins the Ottoman Turks, should be left in peace. Whatever the reason the firman or decree of Fatih, the Turkish conqueror, granting it unique leave to continue as a church, still hangs inside the west door. Our Lady of the Mongols is the only Byzantine church in the city that has continued its Christian career undisturbed.
While I browsed among the icons, Father Alexandros fussed about the old church like a conscientious housekeeper, straightening candlesticks, emptying the collection boxes, dusting the ledges of the iconostasis. He was very proud of his old church, and delighted that a foreigner was taking an interest in it. He kept breaking off from his chores to show me some detail of the place he was anxious I should not miss. He took my arm and led me across to the beautiful eleventh-century mosaic of the Virgin. ‘Theotokos Pammakaristos,’ he said, inclining his head as if he was introducing us. Through the grime of centuries the eyes of ‘The All-Joyous Mother of God’ were sad pools of light. He showed me Fatih’s firman written in loping Arabic script. Later he led me down a short flight of stairs into the crypt to sprinkle me with holy water from the well. On the fresco on the end wall the Madonna and Child hovered, as faint as ghosts. The church’s connection to the Mongols meant nothing to him; the point of Mouchliotissa for the Greek community was its connection to Byzantium.
The Syrian caretaker brought us tea in the courtyard where we sat in a long slab of sun on a ledge along the southern wall. I asked Father Alexandros about the future of the Greek community in Istanbul. ‘There is no future,’ he said blankly. ‘Greeks have been here for almost three millennia but in my lifetime I am seeing the end of it. Most of my friends have emigrated. My children will emigrate, to Athens, possibly to America.’ He was stroking the stone of the ledge as he spoke. The ancient mortar crumbled beneath his fingers. ‘This city is my home, home to our people, but it has abandoned us. Unless you are a Turk, it is impossible here. Greeks have no future in Constantinople.’
When the first tempest of Mongol conquest appeared to have abated in the middle of the thirteenth century, the princes of Christendom longed to know more about these Eastern apparitions who had come so close to overrunning Europe. A series of missions was dispatched, most led by Franciscan friars, to report on the Mongols and to enquire about the possibility of their conversion to Christianity. From the Pope down, European leaders nurtured the rather bizarre hope that the Mongol horsemen could be harnessed as allies to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land.
Two of these friars wrote accounts of their journeys, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. The latter produced the more interesting book, full of wry and colourful observations about the Mongol hersdmen who had so suddenly found themselves ruling most of the known world. His mission predates Marco Polo’s more famous journey to Cathay by almost twenty years; even Polo’s great English commentator, Sir Henry Yule, was obliged to admit that Friar William had written ‘a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo’s chapters’. But William suffered the fate of many worthy authors: a bad publisher. His book never achieved the circulation of Polo’s accounts.
We tend to think of Friar William now as an early explorer, and like the best explorers he had no idea where he was going, how he was going to get there, or what he should do once he arrived. When William left from Istanbul in the spring of 1253, he was setting off, like Jason and the Argonauts, into barbarian darkness. His journey took him from Istanbul across southern Russia and what is now Kazakhstan to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. It was the route I wanted to follow and I saw him, across seven centuries, as a travelling companion.
William set sail from Istanbul on one of the trading vessels that carried cotton, silk and spices from Constantinople to the ports on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Karaköy, round a watery corner from the Golden Horn, I found the modern equivalents of William’s ship, the Russian and Ukrainian freighters which ply the same route. The fall of Communism has given a new impetus to Black Sea trade, and Turkey has become a conduit for Western goods, from tinned tomatoes to Johnnie Walker whisky. Russians and Ukrainians, now as free to travel as Levi’s and Coca-Cola, come to Istanbul to savour the bright lights and to buy in bulk. They travel by freighter, the only kind of vessel able to cope with their excess baggage.
My telephone enquiries had been inconclusive and I had come to the docks to see if I could rustle up a passage. In pole position was a huge cruise liner called the Marco Polo. Had William had a more aggressive publisher this floating palace might have been named after him. Beyond Marco’s luxurious namesake the shipping degenerated spectacularly. There were a few European freighters, shouldering the docks like naval toughs, then a couple of Turkish ships, painted gunmetal grey. At the far end of the dock I came to the Russian and Ukrainian freighters, the shipping equivalent of MOT failures, held together by rust stains and a grimy coating of oil.
The last ship was the Mikhail Lomonosov, an ageing rust-bucket that seemed to be kept afloat by its mooring ropes. It had a limp deflated appearance that one did not like to see in a ship, as if someone had let the air out of its tyres. It listed. It sagged. It exuded black smoke from unpromising quarters, like the portholes.
I called up to a man in a naval smock leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway. He replied that they were sailing for Sevastopol on Monday, in two days’ time. He waved me aboard and I stepped gingerly onto the gangway, unsure if the ship could take my weight.
Dimitri introduced himself as the second mate. He had one of those narrow Slavic faces, very pale and very bony, that are permanently knotted in expressions of anxiety. I asked about cabins, and he summoned the accommodation officer by barking into a pipe in the bulwark behind him. The accommodation officer took me below, showed me a cramped cabin full of sacks of onions, which he assured me would be cleared out, and then took a hundred dollars off me in exchange for a grubby receipt written on the back of a beer mat.
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