Blachernae Palace
George had spread the reports across a narrow table beneath the west window, and the room was small enough that the lamp smoke stayed in it. Isidoros had already had his hour and gone back to the city. A servant set down a jug of wine and four cups, wiped his hands on his apron, and slipped out into the passage.
George waited until the latch had settled. "Joseph is old and wants order," he said, resting his fingers on one of the cups without lifting it. "Markos Eugenikos is the one you should measure. He argued for talks when your brother still hoped for a council, but since Demetrios he has gone harder. He is to be the next metropolitan of Ephesus."
"Ephesus." Constantine picked up the jug and filled George's cup first, then his own. The wine smelled of resin. "A great see under Turkish hands."
George nodded. "And a useful one. It would give him more weight than he already has. He writes hymns too, and people know his name outside the schools." He glanced toward the door. "He reads well, remembers what he reads, and I have never heard that he takes gifts."
Constantine drank. The wine had gone warm near the hearth and tasted of pitch. He set the cup down when the knock came.
Joseph entered first, bent but steady, one hand resting on a stick worn smooth by years of use. Mark followed a pace behind him, younger by decades, dark-bearded, his sleeves drawn over his hands against the chill in the corridor. George bowed them toward the table. Constantine stepped forward and received the Patriarch's blessing, then inclined his head to Mark.
They sat. The old man took the chair nearest the brazier without apology, and Mark, after a brief look around the room, chose the one that left him facing the door.
They began with the usual courtesies. Joseph asked about the day's liturgy and the damage to the churches. Mark said little at first, only that more people had come than expected. George answered where he had to, and for a while the talk stayed on safe ground.
Constantine let it go on long enough to take their measure. Joseph was warm, almost relieved to be there. Mark kept his hands inside his sleeves and weighed his words before he gave them.
Then Constantine set his cup down beside the lamp.
"I will speak plainly. My brother John thought union with Rome might buy us the help we needed, and he was not wrong about the need. The Pope sent men and gold. Burgundy bled with us. Sigismund marched south and died on the road. At Edessa and after it, Latin help stood in the line with ours."
Mark drew breath to answer. Constantine raised a hand.
"Let me finish."
He leaned his forearms on the table. "John spoke to Rome under pressure. We took the City back. The Turk has been driven from most of what he held in Europe, and what remains will not stand long. So when we speak now, we speak with room to breathe. I want the schism examined again, now that the terms are different."
Joseph's face changed at once. "Then we must begin making arrangements," he said. "When do we go? I am old, but I will go if I must. These things cannot be settled by letters alone."
"There will be no voyage to Italy," Constantine said.
Joseph blinked. Mark's eyes narrowed, and his face shifted into the look of a man rethinking a problem from its beginning.
Constantine went on before either could speak. "I will write to Pope Eugene that the council should be prepared in three stages. First, a commission in Italy. Then one here, at Thessaloniki. Both sides put their points in writing, line by line, and say where they can yield and where they cannot. After that, the full council will be held in Constantinople."
Joseph's hand tightened on the stick. For a moment he only looked at Constantine. Then he said, quietly, "If they come here, we meet as a Church in her own house."
The old man reached for the cup at his elbow and spilled a little on the board when his hand shook. He smiled anyway. George moved the ink sheets back from the wet ring. Mark had expected resistance from him and did not get it.
Joseph began at once with practical questions: how many legates, who would preside, which matters would be opened first, whether the first exchange would be written confessions or disputed articles. Constantine answered where he could and did not pretend to know where he could not. George would draft the letter. Bessarion would sound Rome before the messenger reached it. Scribes would be named once the first reply came back.
Mark waited until Joseph had finished. "And if they come here only to dictate?"
"The Pope himself asked for preliminary commissions," Constantine said. "He will accept ground here once he has ground in Italy. Bessarion writes from Rome often enough that I know the temper of that court."
Mark's gaze dropped to the report sheets under George's hand and then came back. "These are not small matters, Majesty."
"I know that." Constantine rubbed his thumb over a splinter in the table edge. "I am not asking you to settle the procession tonight, or purgatory, or Rome's claim over every altar under the sun."
He looked at Mark over the lamp. "You know the phrase Ieros Skopos?"
A faint weariness crossed Mark's face. "Who in this city does not?"
"When I spoke with the Athonite monks, I used that phrase and told them to begin with the count: which churches still have priests, which villages still baptize their own, which bishops can still write to us. That weighs more with me than quarrels between factions."
Mark looked at him for a moment, then said, "Majesty, peace bought with false confession is not peace."
No one answered at once. A coal shifted in the brazier and broke, sending up the smell of ash and hot iron. Joseph lowered his eyes. George reached for the jug and filled the Patriarch's cup without being asked.
"I am not settling doctrine over a supper table," Constantine said. "I want the work begun before men stand under one roof and start shouting articles at each other. If the points are written first, we will know which can move and which cannot."
He turned the matter before Mark could answer. "George tells me Ephesus is to be yours."
"If the appointment stands."
"A great title but difficult ground." Constantine drew one of the sheets across the table and turned it so the light caught it. "Tell me about Anatolia. What is left of our clergy there?"
Mark's face changed at that. The caution remained, but it gave way to work. "Fewer than twenty sees still function. Some have a priest and no bishop. In the south there is a bishop who rides from village to village because there is no place left to seat him. Once there were many times that number, and roofs over all of them."
The room had gone quiet enough that the wind at the shutter could be heard dragging grit across the sill. Constantine looked down at the film on his wine and saw, for a moment, the road east of Sofia: stripped barns, wells chalked white, priests left with only two villages to bury.
"Then give me a register," he said. "Every surviving see, every bishop, every priest. The villages with believers and the villages without. If a church roof still stands but no lamp is lit beneath it, write that down as well."
Mark answered after a pause. "I will send a reckoning of the surviving sees and clergy. They are mine to answer for."
"Good." Constantine nodded once. "One more thing. I will give the Patriarchate two hundred Greek Bibles from my presses, to be placed where it judges best. After that, more can be had at a price low enough for monasteries and priests."
Joseph's head came up quickly enough that the stick knocked against the leg of his chair. "Two hundred? You are generous, Majesty."
"They will come up from Glarentza soon."
The old man sat back and breathed out through his nose, as if air had been taken from him and then returned. Mark did not move. He watched Constantine over the lamp, and his eyes settled briefly on the clean paper beneath George's hand before lifting again.
George said, "Mark, His Majesty hears you are a hymnographer as well. If there are texts you want preserved cleanly, the presses can do that work."
Constantine let the offer stand. "If you wish it, we can print them."
Mark's mouth tightened, though not rudely. "Thank you, Majesty. Priests can copy them if they want them. My work should not be spread by favour."
Joseph rose slowly after that, using the stick and the table together. He was pleased enough not to hide it. Mark bowed, less stiffly than he had on entering, but kept his sleeves over his hands. George walked them to the door. When it opened, cold corridor air came in with the smell of lamp oil and damp mortar. Mark went out last, and before the latch fell he looked once more at the stack of clean paper on the table.
By the time the clergy were gone, the wine had gone flat. Constantine washed his face in cold water from a basin, changed the dust-stiff tunic beneath his cloak, and crossed the palace to a smaller dining room on the inner side, where the walls still held the day's chill.
They had laid no feast there: bread, olives, a platter of eels, beans dressed with oil, and a dish of pickled leeks set out between the lamps. The room smelled of wax and the mildew that lived in the palace stone, no matter how many fires were lit. George sat at Constantine's right. Across from them, Lukas Notaras had taken the place of honor among the city men, with two former officials from Demetrios's years beside him and another noble lower down the table, his cuffs shiny with wear.
They began where men always began when they wanted something later: with praise. To the recovery of the City, to the guns at Blachernae, to the new muskets, to the ships in the Horn. Notaras did it well; he had a rich man's restraint and a voice that did not waste itself. The others followed his lead until the cups had gone around once and the bread was torn.
Then one of the former officials, a man with a heavy signet and a scar along his jaw, said that his family's lands west of Selymbria had been taken by the Ottomans and passed from one sipahi to another, and that now, with the land back in Roman hands, they would surely be restored to their lawful owners.
Another took it up at once: rents from Thrace, storehouses near the Hebdomon road, a vineyard in Macedonia. Under Demetrios, he said, there had been no confidence and no certainty. George Izaoul had been the only man trusted from one month to the next.
Notaras set down his cup. "Demetrios grew suspicious of every table he sat at," he said. "Most of us served because someone had to keep the customs, the granaries, and the pay lists going. That is the plain truth of those years."
The meaning was clear enough. We kept things going, Constantine heard, and so we should still have a place. He wiped the fish oil from his thumb with a piece of bread and ate it before he answered.
"All land recovered from the Ottomans returns first to the crown," he said.
No one moved. The lamp nearest Notaras hissed where a drop of oil touched the wick. One of the lesser men lowered his eyes to his plate and kept them there.
Constantine let the silence sit a little longer, then said, "Why do empires decline?"
The question caught them wrong-footed. Notaras's face did not change. The others looked at one another instead of at him.
Constantine answered before anyone else could. "Because frontiers become private incomes. Because a district begins feeding a household before it feeds the army that keeps the road open. Because taxes are bargained away in rooms like this one while walls go unrepaired, bridges fall, and villages empty." He lifted his cup and found the wine sourer now than it had been earlier. "We have just spent a year marching through burned fields and half-dead towns."
He set the cup down. "Recovered land will be measured again and entered under new themata. Governors will be appointed, and revenues, offices, and grants assigned by service, competence, and loyalty, not because a man remembers where his grandfather's boundary stones once stood."
The noble with the scar opened his mouth. Notaras stopped him with two fingers laid lightly on the board.
Constantine turned to Notaras then, because the others had come under his shelter and would understand better if the blow fell there. "You are a wealthy man," he said. "No one disputes it. While this city thinned out, your factors did good business abroad—in Galata, on Chios, in Italy too, I expect. I do not call that treason. I call it a measure of where men believed safety and profit still lay while these cisterns silted and these walls went without mortar."
Notaras took the words without flinching, though his shoulders drew in slightly beneath the cloak. "Men sent coin where they thought it would not burn," he said.
"Yes," Constantine said. "And I mean to send it where it will build roads, hulls, and mines."
George had been waiting for the moment. He untied a packet and began passing the sheets along the table. Thick, clean paper, ruled in careful columns, each with the eagle in black at the head and a block of figures below. The men took them as if they had been handed writs.
The papers listed new enterprises under the crown seal: a yard on the city for hulls and warships; the extension of the Chalkidiki mines and washworks; new printing houses and paper mills tied to Thessaly cotton; an imperial trade fleet to carry grain, paper, and metal under armed convoy. Beneath each heading stood the terms of subscription, the sums required, the share in freight or output, and the guarantee of repayment through the Logarion.
"If you want profit, subscribe here," Constantine said, touching the top sheet with one finger. "The crown is building. Wealth that builds with it earns under seal."
The former official with the shiny cuffs had begun reading before Constantine finished. He ran a nail down the column for the yard and asked, too quickly to be acting, whether the subscriptions there were tied only to new construction or to freight after launching as well.
George answered with figures. The room shifted at once. One man drew back; another bent closer to the lamp; Notaras still had not looked down.
The man with the shipyard paper asked a second question, this time about timber and whether the yard could take heavier keels than the old galleys. George turned the page and showed him where the new slips were marked, and from there the questions came in series: wages, the source of the oak, whether ropes and sailcloth were counted in the subscription or separate. George answered each one without looking up from the columns.
Constantine let them read. Around the lamps, the papers cast a dull white light into their faces. Wax ran down one candle and hardened in ridges on the bronze stand.
"Service under Demetrios is not held against any man here," he said after a while. "But no one is getting old privilege back simply because he remembers having it. Work with me, and there will be profit. Bring me pedigree and old rents, and the answer will remain the same."
The lesser noble at the end of the table set a finger on the line for the mine works and bent closer to the lamp. The man beside him kept reading the tables. Only Notaras remained still long enough for the pause to show. Then at last he reached out, took the packet between two fingers, and drew it toward him across the board.
The world maps of Book Two are live on the site! From 1428 to 1437. Every border shift, every new banner. Scroll through year by year and watch the empire take shape.
empirerewritten.com/world/maps
Timeline updates coming in the next few days, so stay tuned!
A few historical notes on this chapter.
Markos Eugenikos or better known as Mark of Ephesus, was a real figure, and his elevation to the metropolitan see of Ephesus in 1437 is on the historical calendar. In our timeline he went to the Council of Ferrara-Florence, refused to sign the union with Rome, and became the saint the anti-unionist party rallied around for the rest of the century. The line about peace bought with false confession is the kind of thing the real Mark wrote at length.
Patriarch Joseph II was also a real man, old by the late 1430s. He died at Florence in our timeline before the union was signed.
Lukas Notaras is another fascinating figure. In our timeline he was Constantine XI's megas doux at the fall in 1453, and is supposed to have said he would rather see a Turkish turban in the city than a Latin mitre: a line that's almost certainly later propaganda. Here, with the city retaken and the religious question reframed, he's neither hero nor villain. He's a wealthy man with foreign factors who has to decide whether to put his money behind a state that is suddenly serious about building things.