Porphyry and Bones - Authors Note

 

Sharpe books tell me it becomes commercially unprofitable to publish paperbacks beyond a certain page count (perhaps especially for low volume niche historical fiction titles). For that reason the authors note at the back of Porphyry and Bones is shorter than I had originally intended. The blog is an opportunity to publish the full note and go into more depth on the history behind the fiction. Naturally there will be spoilers. 

Author's Notes

The necessities of the narrative prevented Porphyry Ash from including the fate of Loukas Notaras, so it was satisfying to revisit that point in time. As so often, contemporary sources differ on the exact events and motives for the sudden arrest and execution of the Byzantine Megas Doux and Ottoman Grand Vizier just a few days after Constantinople's capture. Chalkokondyles records that Loukas Notaras requested his son be executed first so he would know he had not reneged on his faith. That plea fell on deaf ears and Jacob Notaras disappeared into the palace school along with many other sons of Byzantine nobles.

Six years later, Jacob Notaras resurfaces in the historical record having escaped to Italy and approached Cardinal Bessarion for help. Bessarion brought him to the Council of Mantua in 1459 (Pope Pius's unsuccessful first attempt to organise a crusade). By then the Bank of St George had released the Notaras fortune to Anna and it appears Bessarion acted as family mediator. An arrangement was reached in January 1460 whereby Anna agreed to share the interest income with her brother. They reconciled enough that Jacob acted as Anna's representative for some of her petitions to the authorities of Siena and Naples.

In around 1474 Jacob married a woman called Zampeta. Much of the information about the Notaras family has survived thanks to the frankly dreadful relationship between Anna and Zampeta, which explodes across the testimony of several court cases following Jacob's death. In March 1489, Zampeta filed a petition before the judges of the Venetian Procurator alleging that shortly before his death in Ancona, Jacob sent his sister Anna "a box of law books of different kinds, both on parchment and on paper". She demanded that Anna hand over these works to her or be ordered to pay the sum of 120 ducats. Anna acknowledged receipt of this box but contended that she had purchased most of the books lent them to Jacob. Anna won this court case and on 8 May 1490, Anna filed a petition against Zampeta, alleging that she had entered the Ca Notaras and stolen a valuable copy of Petrarch, which Anna had bought from Thomas Palaiologos in 1462, valued at 51 ducats. The judge ruled in Anna's favour again.

Around this time Anna also attempted to publicly rehabilitate her father's name among the Byzantine diaspora. Ten years after its invention in Germany, Italy was in the grip of a mania for the printing press. Anna herself funded the first works dedicated to printing exclusively in Greek (the Kalliergis press in Venice) and she employed a humanist (John Moskhos) to write a pamphlet entitled 'A Funeral Speech in Honour of the Most Glorious and Most Honourable Grand Duke, the Late Lord Loukas Notaras' which was clearly an attempt to refute the public perception of her father as having been somehow disloyal or even a traitor.

The exact reason why the Sultan changed his mind about Loukas Notaras and ordered his execution varies considerably between sources depending on the axe it has to grind. In the case of Halil Candarli, the young Sultan clearly saw a chance to cement his grip on power. It heralded a dramatic shift in the way the Ottoman empire was run.

The first man to hold the title of Grand Vizier had been Halil Candarli's grandfather. By 1453, through its ninety-year history, the title had been held by just seven men, all ethnic Turks, of which four were members of the Candarli family. Following Halil Candarli's execution, Mehmed went through seven more Grand Viziers in less than thirty years and all but one of these were non-Turks sourced through the devshirme system.

Despite the seemingly high turnover of these Grand Viziers, one stands pre-eminent among them. The seminal biography of Mahmud Angelovic by Theoharis Stavrides is appropriately titled 'The Sultan of Viziers' and was a key source for this novel. The Serb-born Mahmud Angelovic became Grand Vizier in 1456. He was well connected - his cousin George Amiroutzes was chief minister in Trebizond and together they conspired the capture of that fortified city without a serious fight. His brother Mihail Angelovic was similarly placed in the Serbian court but there the Angelovic had to contend with the Brankovic family. A similar scheme to hand Smederevo to Ottoman troops failed. Mihail's imprisonment forced Mahmud Angelovic to attack and subdue Serbia in 1459. The open animosity between Mahmud Angelovic and Mara Brankovic is my invention, but I feel it quite plausible given this history between the families in their homeland.

Mahmud Angelovic fell from favour in 1468 over the misuse of power and possible embezzlement in newly conquered Karaman. I have shifted dates by four years to link that fall to the fictional plot in Ragusa. He regained the top office in 1472, the only Grand Vizier who Mehmed gave a second chance to - but that is a tale for another time...

Maut Bassa is not an invention. There really was communication between Venice and a traitor within the Ottoman court using that alias during this period. The first record in the Venetian state archives does not appear until December 1470, when the council convened to discuss a proposal from 'Maut Bassa' delivered via a go-between named Alessio Span.  The traitor had offered to hand over the Black Castle of the Dardanelles and the Ottoman fleet in return for an annual pension of 40,000 ducats and title to the Morea. Correspondence continued sporadically for four years but never amounted to anything. Who was behind Maut Bassa and whether the offer was genuine remains a mystery, but circumstantial evidence points squarely to it having been Mahmud Angelovic.

The abortive crusade of 1464, almost four hundred years after the first, represented the last attempt by a Pope to take up the cross and reconquer the Levant. Having found little interest from western princes and dukes, Pius II insisted on leading the effort himself, despite his failing health. He died, as I described, at the point of departure in Ancona. Most of his Cardinals must have breathed a sigh of relief. There was certainly no appetite to continue his legacy, which is probably the key reason for Bessarion's poor turnout in the subsequent conclave.

Tentative peace feelers were put out over the subsequent years, with Mara Brankovic and her sister Katarina running what historian Donald Nicol describes as 'a kind of unofficial foreign office' that maintained diplomatic relations and received ambassadors from Ragusa, Venice and Constantinople. In 1471 Mara personally accompanied a Venetian ambassador to the Porte for negotiations with the Sultan such was her perceived influence. Mara also intervened in Mehmed's appointment of a new Patriarch of Constantinople in 1465 when Symeon of Trebizond attempted to buy the position. There is ample evidence that she viewed her role as protectress of the Great Church in exile. Several monasteries including Chilandari on Mount Athos received incomes directly from her purse & Bulgaria's Rila Monastery obtained stewardship of the bones of St Ivan Rilski thanks to another of her interventions with her step-son. There is some evidence that she maintained a workshop of scribes and artists at her estate in Macedonia, not unlike Anna Notaras's financing of the Greek printing press in Venice. Unlike the characters in Porphyry and Bones, Anna and Mara probably never met, but their life histories hold several Plutarchian parallels.

If I have maligned the historical George Amiroutzes in my portrayal, it cannot be by much. Together with Gennadius (George Scholarius) and Plethon (George Gemistus), Amiroutzes was a member of the celebrated Greek delegation to the Council of Florence-Ferrara in 1437. Reportedly he was among the few members of the 600-plus delegation who could speak Italian. There is evidence from the papal sources that he took a bribe for his vote in favour of the church union. Subsequently he held high office in Trebizond (protovestarius, perhaps even megas logothetes) and played a controversial role in that city's surrender in August 1461. According to several sources he used deception to persuade Emperor David IV Comnenus to open the gates. He soon found himself a favoured member of Mehmed's court where he composed some minor philosophical works and translated Ptolemy's Geography for the Sultan. Additionally, he uncovered / fabricated correspondence between the captive Trebizond royal family and the Persian court which would see David Comnenus and his children executed in late 1463.

The account of the bigamous marriage between Amiroutzes and the widow of Duke Franco Acciaioli of Athens, is much repeated, as is the thuggish treatment of members of the Greek church in Constantinople which the Grand Vizier and his cousin employed to try and get their own way on the matter. Patriarch Joasaph did try to drown himself in a cistern, but this took place in Easter 1464 and was not directly connected to Amiroutzes. As well as a bigamist and traitor Amiroutzes was a gambler and is said to have died with a dice in his hand sometime around 1470.

The independence and behaviour of the Brankovic women in the novel might strike some as overly modern, but for the most part their actions are grounded in fact. Katerina Brankovic, Contessa of Celje, really did sell off her dead husband's lands in Hungary and then undertake a grand tour of Italy, Corfu and Ragusa before settling at her sister Mara's estate in Macedonia.

Equally their niece, Jelena Brankovic, escaped the fall of Bosnia aided by Ivanis Vlatkovic and carrying the bones of St Luke. As the Turks invaded, King Stephen Tomasevic sent his family members off in several directions, but Jelena and the King's mother were the only ones to escape the encircling Turk army. Jelena is more commonly known as Maria of Serbia. She changed her name from Jelena to Maria (Mara) when she married the Catholic king, but I felt it too confusing to have two characters with the same name and stuck with Jelena.

Aside from the phantom pregnancy, Jelena’s story in Frankincense follows the historical record. She lost the relics during her flight to Ragusa, recovered them with Ivanis’s help and was given sanctuary by the Ragusans on one of their islands (not necessarily Lokrum) while the Republic decided what to do with her. Eventually Venice received the bones in exchange for sanctuary at the monastery St Stephen Under the Pines in Spalento. Subsequently she left Spalento and lived with her aunts.

Later in life Jelena was involved in a number of contentious legal cases, defrauded Ragusa out of a sum of gold and was even imprisoned for a time. With all this in mind, schemes involving counterfeit relics and phantom pregnancies do not appear too far out of character.

The Croatian island of Lokrum has been the backdrop to several movies and receives thousands of visitors each year, but no one is permitted to stay there overnight on account of its famous curse (or the tourist board). The story of the monks bewitching the island with their upturned candles comes from a later time when the Benedictines were expelled from the monastery on Lokrum by the invading French army of Napoleon. Each day visitors arrive at Skalica, where Richard Lionheart was shipwrecked, walk the cloisters of the monastery, orchards and olive groves and swim in the Dead Sea, which really does have an underwater passage out to the sea. The subterranean guest-room tower is however fictitious.

The fall of Bosnia and the prospective crusade triggered a building spree in Ragusa, the result of which remains as Dubrovnik's signature walls. Although the city had long been fortified, the great defensive bastions of Fort Bokar, Minceta Tower and the incredible Walls of Ston were all products of this time. The Republic invited Michelozzo di Bartolomeo of Florence, who had been apprentice to Donatello & Cosimo Medici's favourite builder, to oversee this work, but he did not stay to their completion. The Rector's palace really was badly damaged in 1463 by a gunpowder explosion. Michelozzo submitted a design for the refurbishment but perhaps too much of Ragusa's funds had already been committed to defensive works. His bid failed and he returned to Italy.

Cardinal Bessarion's modest casina on the Appian Way can still be visited. That early scene was inspired by the famous painting of Pierro Della Francesca, 'The Flagellation of Christ'. It is one of the most enigmatic art pieces of the Renaissance. Among many theories as to its allegorical meaning, several agree that it relates to the fate of Constantinople under Ottoman control. Sultan Mehmed appears in the background overseeing the whipping of a bound Christ beside a helpless Byzantine Emperor. It is the three figures in the foreground whose identity sparks most debate, one of whom is a close physical match for Bessarion. There are several interesting books and essays analysing the painting, but my favourite is by Professor David King in which he links its hidden message to an astrolabe given by Regiomontanus to Bessarion in 1462. That astrolabe is now in a private collection but images of it can be seen on the Museo Galileo website. Its reverse contains the acrostic engraving which Anna and Mara solve.     

Plato and Platonic love form an important theme in the book. I thought it was particularly appropriate to the novel's historical setting since in 1463/64 Marsilio Ficino (inspired by Plethon's lectures in Florence) was in the midst of translating the entire corpus of Plato into Latin. It was Ficino's interpretation of Platonic love from which the modern sense of the term derives. The letter Anna writes to Mara in the story’s penultimate chapter is heavily based on Ficino's own letters to Giovanni Cavalcanti.

In 1465 there were no Greek orthodox churches in Venice, but just as in the story, Anna Notaras was pressing the Senate to change that. I accelerated historical events in the epilogue for dramatic effect. In reality, Anna was only granted leave to build a chapel on her own property in 1475. After twenty years, the Greek community in Venice finally had their temporary church, fittingly inside Anna's house. Eventually, in 1498, Venice further relented and agreed to the founding of the Scuola de San Nicolo dei Greci with its own church attached, San Giorgio dei Greci. Like Mara Brankovic, Anna Notaras had used her wealth and connections to preserve several significant ikons. Although Anna died in 1507 before the church was completed, she was able to gift in her will three such ikons to San Giorgio that modern visitors can still admire there: Christ in His glory surrounded by symbols of the 4 Evangelists and figures of the 12 Apostles; Christ Pantokrator; and an image of the Virgin Hodegetria.