As I’ve said before, I’m no history buff, so forgive me if I’m a little glib about such matters. But let’s talk Ottomans, shall we? And Persia, Byzantine culture, St. Mark and so on. We have to, because of Swann, who brings up Persia incessantly, and always in conjunction with storms (tempêtes), which I initially took to mean having something to do with Balbec and the sea. But no.
Though of course I knew Proust often mentioned Venice in the Recherche, I didn’t understand how vital the connection was to Venice until I made the link from Cambrai to Venice via the Moors on the Torre del’Orologgio,. Only then was I able to draw the connection to Persia and the influence of Byzantine design via the cathedral. Many of the treasures in the basilica came from plundering Constantinope during the Crusades.
At that point, I began to focus on The story of St. Mark, which brought me round to the storms Swann kept referring to. And from that, back to Persia. If it sounds like a circle of inquiry, it was.
Briefly- St. Mark’s relics came to Venice by way of the sea during a huge storm, from Persia.
The longer story is as follows:
In 282. two Venetian merchants In Alexandra Egypt decided they would smuggle the relics of St Mark back to Venice, as churches were being plundered by the Muslims at that time. The relics were put in a basket and covered with cabbage leaves and pork so they could pass through undetected- pork anathema to those of the Islamic religion.
In order to steal him away, they had to cover him in pork and bacon so the Musliims wouldn’t look in to parcel containing him.
You can see them covering their noses here, as I imagine the package didn’t smell so great.
The voyage home was rough- the ship passing through terrible storms. Some say the saint appeared and saved the sailors from shipwreck.
Here he is arriving in the port at Venice.
St Mark became the patron saint of Venice, taking the place of St Theodore. The basilica was built to house his relics.
I find the last sentence of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower particularly significant in relation to this story of St. Mark:
“And after Françoise had removed her pins from the mouldings of the window-frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as would have been a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done no more than precautionally unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold.”
As to the Persian connection? There had long been a conflicted relationship between Persia and the Byzantine Empire, with much influence upon the culture – at least a few hundre years before St Marks’ relics were taken. Hence, the Byzantine influences, by way of Persia, that we see in the architecture (domes, lattices, metalwork and etc), the mosaics, artistic styles, and so on.
In 1453 the Eastern Roman Empire ended when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, It then became known as the Byzantine Empire. The Ottomans were also at war with the Venetian Republi. In 1479, Sultan Mehmet II brokered a peace treaty with the Venetian Republic, after which time relations normalized somewhat.Venice wasn’t that far away from Constantinople- and commercial ties developed, with lots of importing of goods and materials. So there you have it.
Here’s the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet, pictured in a painting by the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini)
One other interesting point about this painting – the head-dress. The Sultan would have worn a turban at this time. The fez didn’t become a symbol of the Ottoman Empire until the early 19th century. I was wondering about this because of the oddly placed mention of a man with a fez just near the end of Swann’s Way (immediately prior to Place Names: The Name).
“So Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the ‘first person’ in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped with a fez.”
Odd, that Proust would choose to close Swann’s Way with the mention of a fez, and close In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” with the section cited above about a mummy in linen wrappings embalmed in a vesture of gold. The sense of connection to Venice, to the Ottomans, to Byzantine Culture and to the story of St. Mark in such conspicuous placement in the volumes can’t be a coincidence. The idea of St. Mark as St. Marcel, author of the book, may at first seem far-fetched, but there’s something there. I just feel it in my bones, haha (speaking of relics…)