We all know of the great empires of history, the names roll off the tongue easily—Roman, Byzantine, British, Spanish, Chinese, Mongol, Persian, Alexander the Great, Ottoman, etc—we’ve read the history texts at school and seen countless historically bastardised film interpretations, but what of the myriad of little and little known and often ephemeral (small “e”) empires of the distant past? Not so familiar. I’ve always marvelled at the idea of these lesser, obscure imperial entities and been intrigued by how they managed to exist (and persist) at all side by side with the aforementioned “big boys”, the powerful and by definition expansive empires🄰.
Regional map, 1265: Byzantine, Eurasia, Black Sea (image: University of Texas Libraries (U Texas at Austin))
Byzantine’s successor states: Take for instance the Trapezuntine Empire, more commonly called the Empire of Trebizond…who outside of the learned medievalist has ever heard of it, let alone be confident of pinpointing its location on any world atlas? Time to fill in a few gaps in the general knowledge caper. Imperial Trebizond consisted mainly of several small portions of land in the region known as the Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea🄱. The “empire” had its origins in the sack of Constantinople and dissolution of the Byzantine Empire by crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Byzantine’s eclipse provided the opportunity for the creation of five new rump states from its existing territory – what became the empires of Trebizond, Nicaea and Thessalonica and the despotates of Morea and Epirus.
Trebizond imperial flag: Double-headed eagle (associated with ports and harbours)
This didn’t happen by osmosis, in the case of Trebizond the empire came about when the Komnenos brothers (Alexios and David), descended royally from Komnenian Byzantine emperors, seized Trebizond and the surrounding province of Chaldia with the military support of their formidible relative, Queen Tamar of Georgia. The elder brother had himself crowned emperor of Trebizond (Alexios I)🄲. Emperor Alexios, styling himself Megas Komnenos🄳, also laid claim to the Byzantine throne however the Trebizond rulers lost out to the more militarily accomplished Nicene Empire in that contest. Michael VIII Palaiologos of Nicaea became emperor of the restored Byzantine Empire (aka Latin Empire) in 1261 and the Palaiologan Dynasty ran the empire right up to Constantinople’ fall to the Ottomans in 1453.
A nominal “empire”: Trebizond was something of an outlier when it comes to classic empire material…for a start, aside from acquiring Erzurum to its south in the early 14th century and the coastal enclave of Sinope in eastern Anatolia🄴, there was no expansive growth as we saw with ancient Rome and Great Britain, the Pontus-based “empire” failed abjectly to expand its borders in any lasting way. Nor was it an empire with a conglomerate structure (or if you like, the necessary political configuration), ie, a situation where a dominant central power controls peripheral (outer) client states or colonies, Trebizond acquired no vassal states to speak of subordinate to its power [“A Glossary of Political Economy Terms: Empire”, (Auburn University), www.auburn.edu/]. It lacked the military force to realise these goals by conquest. In short the Trapezuntine Empire was an empire in name only🄵.
Alexios I of Trebizond and his army (depicted by an unknown artist)
Last Greek empire standing:The only really stand-out achievement of the Trebizond Empire was its staying power. Despite its disadvantages —positioned within the sphere of influence of more powerful states such as the Seljuk Turks; the destabilising roles of Genoa and Venice; the decimation of the Black Death; the instability of civil war (which allowed the Genoese and Turks to further encroach territorially on a weakened Trebizond)—the empire survived for so long, from its founding in 1204 to its ultimate conquest by the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II in 1461—257 years, 22 emperors (including two empresses)—even outlasting the supposedly impregnable Constantinople which fell in 1453, as well as outliving the other Byzantine successor states in the region🄶. For this reason imperial Trebizond is sometimes called the last “Greek empire”.
Scholars point to a number of factors contributing to the empire’s surprising longevity. One is a favourable geographical location, the Pontiac Mountains behind Trebizond provide an advantageous natural barrier to invaders with designs on the mini-state. The capital city of Trebizond, built to resemble a kind of “mini-Constantinople” complete with imitation Hagia Sophia church, was further protected by the erection of impressively strong walls and fortifications [‘Trebizond’, The Byzantine Legacy, www.thebyzantinelegacy.com].
Trebizond’s Hagia Sophia
The inestimable value of Mongol patronage and strategic alliances: But above all else what permitted Trezibond to continue to survive in such a turbulent world was its commercial importance, and what permitted its commerce to thrive was the expansion west and southwards of the all-conquering Mongol Empire. The Mongols’ capture of Baghdad and the eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 resulted in the terminus of the lucrative Silk Road being diverted to Trebizond, making the city-state a funnel between east and west trade and enriching the small empire [Michael Goodyear, ‘Empire of Trebizond’, 21-May-2019, World History Encyclopedia, www.worldhistory.org]. The other critical practice to preserve Trebizond’s independence was marriage diplomacy, of which the Komnenian rulers were very adept. Trebizond rulers formed alliances with rivals, defusing potential threats to the empire by arranging the marriage of many of its (beautiful) princesses to the Byzantine royalty and to Black Sheep and White Sheep Turkomen (nomadic Turkish confederations) (Goodyear).
Trebizond continued to pay tribute to the Mongols as a vassal state which guaranteed its continued protection under the all-powerful Turco-Mongol warlord Tamerlane (or Timur), but once he departed the scene (beginning of the 15th century) and Mongol power waned, the Ottoman Turks re-emerged as the greatest danger to the tiny empire’s survival.
Map of city citadel, Trebizond (source: armenica.org)
Endgame for Megas Komnenos: The tipping point for the Ottomans to decisively move on Trebizond seems to be Emperor David Komnenos’ intrigues with European powers with the purpose of launching a new crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet II laid seize to Trebizond in 1461 and after a concerted sea and land blockage, it compelled David, bereft of any sign of relief from his Christian allies, to surrender the citadel-city almost without a single sword needing to be drawn in anger. The fall of Trebizond, the final Greek outpost, as one historian noted, also extinguished the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, nearly 1,500 years after its beginnings [Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, (1993, 2nd edition].
‘Conquest of Trebizond’ (Cassone work 1461, by Apollonio di Giovanni di Tommaso)
Postscript: Trebizond under the Ottomans became the modern city of Trabzon, which during WWI was captured by the Russians. Interestingly, following the war a proposition was made at the Paris Peace Conference for an independent Pontiac Greek state (the would-be “Republic of Pontus”) including Trabzon and most of the post-Trebizond space. While the key figure at the talks US President Wilson supported its creation, the Greek prime minster didn’t, fearing the mini-state would be too vulnerable to withstand any Turkish attempt to absorb it, and the proposition was lost.
🄰 of course the reality was that most of them didn’t persist for long
🄱 plus several even smaller enclaves on the Crimean Peninsula
🄲 his brother, David, became commander of the state’s imperial army
🄳 Megas means “great” or “grand”. After 1282 Komnenian emperors added basileus and autokrator to their list of royal titles
🄴 the Komnenos emperors managed to lose Sinope twice, the first time to the Nicene Empire and the second time for keeps, to the Sultanate of Rum
🄵 although it did meet some of the criteria for an empire, it had a flourishing commerce and wealth (mainly from its silver mines) and it possessed an entrenched ruling class
🄶 the fate of Theodoro (it’s Crimean enclaves) managed to be postponed even longer than that of Trebizond, they were not absorbed into the Ottoman Empire until 1475
The ancients, the Greeks and Romans, perceived the world of their day as one with the Mediterranean at its centre, surrounded by the conjoined land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia, comprising what the Greeks called oikouménē, the known, inhabited or inhabitable parts of the worldⓐ. This envisaged world was “a curious place where legends and reality could co-exist” [Vedran Bileta, “3 Legendary Ancient Lands: Atlantis, Thule, and the Isles of the Blessed”, The Collector, 03-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com]. The Greeks believed that at the northernmost extremity of the existing world lay a fabled island called Thuleⓑ. The originator of this belief was 4th century BC Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille, Fr.) who claimed to have visited and discovered Thule on a voyage beyond Britain to the northern sea and the Arctic. Pytheas introduced the idea of Thule—far distant and encompassed by drift-ice and possessed of a magical midnight sun—to the geographic imagination. Other ancient writers enthusiastically took up Pytheas’ fantastical notion, notwithstanding that the account of his journey (On the Ocean) had been lost to posterity…Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) described Thule as “the most remote of all those lands recorded”; Virgil (1st century BC) called the island Ultima Thule, (“farthermost Thule”, ie, “the end of the world”).
Thule, as Tile (1539 map) shown (with surrounding sea-monsters) as located northwest of the Orkney islands
Seeking Thule: The loss of Pytheas’ primary source text, the description of his voyage, led countless generations that followed him to speculate as to where the exact location of Thule might be. Many diverse places have been misidentified as Thule…the Romans thought it was at the very top of Scotland, in the Orkneys; Procopius (6th century AD Byzantine historian), Scandinavia; early medieval clerics located it in Ireland while both the Venerable Bede and Saxon king Alfred the Great asserted that Iceland was really Pytheas’s Thule, as did the famous 16th century cartographer Mercator. Other candidates advanced over the millennias include Greenland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, “north of Scythia”, Smøla (Norway) and Saaremaa, an Estonian island.
Smøla island (Norway)
Other conjectures on Thule’s whereabouts have been meaninglessly vague, eg, Petrarch (14th century Italian humanist scholar): Thule lay in “the unknown regions of the far north-west”, supposedly inhabited by blue-painted residents (Roman poets Silius Italicus and Claudian), a probable conflation with the Picts of northern Britain. Thule, from as early as the 1st century AD on, “became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly”…an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown” (F. Salazar, “Claiming Ultima Thule”, Hakai Magazine, 08-Sep-2020, www.hakaimagazine.com).
The Thule neighbourhood? (image: worldatlas.com)
Thule has continued to attract the interest of explorers right up to modern times. Continent-hopping scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Iceland, writing it up as the real “Thule”. Famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen having explored the Arctic region, produced an account of Pytheas’s ancient Arctic expedition, hypothesising that Thule was in fact a Norwegian off-shore island that the Greek voyager had identified [Nansen F., In Northern Mists, Vols I & II, (1969)]. Greenlandic-Danish explorer and Eskimologist Knud Rasmussen underlined the case for Greenland as the location by naming the trading post he founded in NW Greenland “Thule” or “New Thule” (later renamed in the Inuit language, “Qaanaaq”)ⓒ.
Thule Society, emblem
Thule Society: In the aftermath of World War 1 Thule provided stimulus of a very different kind for extreme-right racist nationalists in Germany. An emerging Munich-based secret occultist and Völkisch group named itself after Pythea’s mythical northern island. The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) propagated a form of virulent anti-Semitism which fed early Nazism in Bavaria, it also preached Ariosophy (an outgrowth of Theosophy), a bogus ideology preoccupied with visions of Aryan racial superiority, a key component of the later Nazis’ ideological frameworkⓓ. Out of the Thule Society came the ultranationalist Germany Workers’ Party (DAB)which in a short time transformed into the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party). A number of Thulists (eg, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg) became prominent in the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich [David Luhrssen, Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (2012)].
Endnote: Hyperborea’s remote utopia Greek mythology throws up a parallel legend to that of Thule in the Hyperboreans. These were mythical eponymous people living in Hyperborea (hyper = “beyond”, boreas = “north wind”ⓔ). Their homeland was perpetually sunny and temperate (despite lying within a cold, frigid region), and Hyperboreans were divinely blessed with great longevity, the absense of war and good health…in other words, a utopian society [‘Hyperborea’, Theoi Project – Greek Mythology, www.theoi.com]. As with Thule, locating this paradisiacal northern land has proved elusive to pinpoint with the ancient scribes and geographers agreeing only that it lies somewhere on the other side of the Riphean Mountains (which themselves have been variously located). Homer described Hyperborea as being north of Thrace, some other classical geographers had it beyond the Black Sea, vaguely somewhere in Eurasia, perhaps in the Kazakh Steppes. Herodotus (5th century BC) had it in the vicinity of Siberia, while for Pindar (fl. 5th century BC) it was near the Danube. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) identified the Hyperboreans with the Celts and Britain, Plutarch (fl. 1st century AD) , with Gaul.
Hyperborea, imagined (image: greek-mythology.org)
ⓐ which, they believed, itself was surrounded by an unbroken chain or body of water
ⓑ a belief shared by the Romans who saw Thule as the extreme edge of orbis terrarum
ⓒ from 1953 to 2023 the northernmost US Air Force base (NW Greenland) was called the Thule Air Base
ⓓ Thule was symbolically important to the right wing nationalists, a pseudo-spiritual home of Aryanism, further “proof” of the mythic origins of the “Germanic race”
THE street names around Macquarie University in the northwest of Sydney have an unambiguously militaristic ring to them. Many, many bear the names of historical battles, wars and military campaigns. In particular the battles of two 19th century wars, the Crimean War and the Napoleonic Wars, figure heavily in the street configurations – there’s Balaclava Road, Waterloo Road, Talavera Road, Vimiera Road, Taranto Road, Busaco Road (actually misspelt as the correct spelling of the Peninsula War battle is “Bussaco”), Trafalgar Place, Nile Close and Crimea Road itself. Then there’s Culloden Road, Abuklea Road, Libya Place and Agincourt Road on the Marsfield side, and Khartoum Road, all from various other wars involving the British and English imperialists. Khartoum also lent its name to a very atypical cinema that existed in the North Ryde area long before the university, tech industry or shopping centre came along. The part of North Ryde, which is now called Macquarie Park, was largely green-belt bushland before the 1960s, punctuated by pockets of agriculture, Italian market gardens, citrus orchards and farms, plus an incongruously-placed greyhound racing track on the site of the future university campus. At the time the area which backs onto the Lane Cove National Park had not been developed commercially and its attractive natural surrounds drew the Northwood Group of artists to it who painted the orchards, market gardens, farms and waterways.
Nestled in among all of these market gardens and bushland was the Khartoum Open-Air Theatre, North Ryde’s first licensed cinema. Located on the corner of Khartoum and Waterloo Roads and carved out of a former orchard, it looked like the type of run-down picture house you’d encounter in a country town rather than in Sydney suburbia. The less than majestic Khartoum, held its first public screenings in early 1938. Debut feature for the theatre on opening night was Cecil B DeMille’s The Plainsman.
≜ ‘The Plainsman’ (1936)
The picture theatre’s knock-up construction from timber and corrugated iron earned it an affectionate (and not inaccurate) nickname from locals, “The Shack”. Roselands “Theatre Beautiful” it was not! The entrance section and projection booth were made of timber. “Open-air” really meant open-air with an obvious lack of shelter. The structure had a partial roof but most of the seating was exposed to the elements – the covered (padded) seats cost the princely sum of 1/6d while the uncovered (and less comfortable wooden) seats went for 1/-.
≜ Khartoum Theatre, an undisguisedly rudimentary open-air cinema absolutely devoid of any “bells and whistles”
The theatre’s owner was one Mr N Johnstone and was later partnered by Jack Peckman who doubled as projectionist. The Khartoum functioned as a two-man operation. At intermission or between double features the theatre would regularly provide an unorthodox form of entertainment for the patrons, wood chopping contests (in keeping with the bush ambience?). On wintry nights, if heating was needed, fires were started in 44-gallon drums (wonder if anyone alerted the local fire brigade?)(‘Khartoum Theatre’, www.cinematreasures.org)
Despite its primitive and seemingly incommodious facilities the Khartoum maintained a steady patronage from locals even after the North Ryde Skyline Drive-In, just one block away, opened in 1956. The greater threat however, not only to the Khartoum but to cinemas everywhere, was the arrival of television. (‘Cinemas of the 20s and 30s’, City of Ryde, www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/).
North Ryde Drive-In (photo: David Kilderry/ Drive-Ins Downunder)
“The Shack” managed to keep going at North Ryde—longer than many of the other, conventional cinemas, in the Ryde district—until 1966 when it closed down, bringing an end to 28 years of big screen entertainment in the former orchard. The Wild One with Marlon Brando was the feature chosen for the final screening on closing night in 1966 (‘Sydney’s lost cinemas: Ten of the best which enchanted audience before biting the dust’, Brian Kelly, The Daily Telegraph, 07-Sep-2016, www.dailytelegraph.com.au).
Khartoum Theatre, North Ryde, 1938-1966, one screen, 480 seats
As a kid I was wholly immersed in what film critics call ”epic films“…those mega-large scale productions with sweeping scope and spectacle, unfettered extravagance, lavishly costumed, a cast of thousands (actual persons, not a computer-generated substitution of a multiplicity of images for people en masse), exotic locations, loosely set in a far ago historical context which could be Biblical, could be Viking sagas, Sinbad the Sailor/Arabian Nights adventures, 16th century pirates, Spanish Conquistadors in the New World, 12th century Crusaders venturing forth for the Holy Land or from countless other pages in the chronicles of history. Even movies which mix myth with history like the Robin Hood sagas or the Arthurian legend drew me to their flame. But it was the world of antiquity, in particular the BC era as interpreted on celluoid screens large or small that most fired my imagination. My all-time favourite viewing entertainments back then were “sword-and-sandal” movies. Yes okay I admit that when we got a TV set in the late Fifties, watching Westerns started to consume the lion’s share of my leisure time, but by circa 1960 there was just so many damn TV westerns, “horse operas”, “oaters” call them what you like monopolising air time on the box, that you had to be discerning to avoid them (which I wasn’t!).
King of Kings (1961): dubbed “I was a teenage Jesus” by critics upon its release
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The Peplum:
This quintessential term in the epic film lexicon comes from the garment worn by Greek women in the Archaic era, the peplos. What the Hellenic women of antiquity called a peplos—a long outer robe or shawl which hung from the body in loose folds and sometimes was drawn over the head—is a far cry from how moviemakers in the mid-20th century conceived the garment. Peplaⓐ in the Greco-Roman cinematic universe were a much sexier affair, mini-length tunics to show off shapely legs (and worn by both sexes).
Peplum fashionistas
In that less prescriptive age when no one fretted much about the adverse physiological (or psychological) effects on juveniles of their maxing out in front of the idiot box 12 hours a day, my penchant was to get as much Hollywood epic blockbusters into me as I could manage—this included such classic Hollywood biblical and historical fodder as Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments and Spartacus —seeing them in the picture theatre and again on television when they turned up there. If I had to nominate one ancient world epic flick as my all-time favourite though, I’d probably plump for the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts movie– admittedly a smaller scale ‘indy’ production without the big name star drawing power (maybe more “epic-lite?”). It’s stellar appeal lay in part, like its more famous fellow Greek myth story, “The Odyssey”, in the adventure-packed extravaganza of its Classical heroic tale, its virtuous protagonist’s quest and ultimate triumph against the longest of odds stacked against him. But what elevated Jason and the Argonauts above the pack for my 11-year-old self was undoubtedly the film’s fantasy special effects. I was captivated by the myriad of fearsome legendary creatures created by Ray Harryhausen’s ground-breaking SFX wizardry—though to more discerning adult eyes they must have looked decidedly “hokey” and “stilted”—the glorious highlight of which was the iconic scene where Jason single-handedly battles the frenetic army of animated sabre-wielding skeletons – and emerges triumphant of course!
Jason and the Argonauts (1963): Harryhausen’s Special FX
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At some point in my juvenile years I developed a special fondness for Italian-made sword-and-sandal ⓑ flicks, something which I find hard today to rationalise. These are films, made primarily between the late Fifties and the mid Sixties, with trite, ludicrous and meaningless translated titles like Goliath and the Vampires, Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, Samson Against the Sheik and Ursus in the Valley of the Lions.Most are set in ancient Greece, sometimes in Rome or elsewhere within the Empire (occasionally somewhere more exotic), and characteristically with storylines and events riddled with anachronisms.
Ursus finds himself in the Amazon in this 1960 entry
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The sword-and-sandal formula
Robert Rushing defines the peplum as “depicting muscle-bound heroes…in mythological antiquity, fighting fantastic monsters and saving scantily clad beauties”. Sloppily dubbed into halting English, atrociously woodenly acted, scenes lacking continuity, the plots are ludicrously formulaic, typically involving a superhuman strong man hero who stereotypically runs through his repertoire of superhuman feats of strength, triumphing over all foes while rescuing a beautiful but defenceless heroine (typically wearing the briefest peplum imaginable) and sometimes liberating the oppressed masses to boot at the same time. Unlike Hollywood’s lavish epic spectacles (Quo Vadis?, Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, etc.) , these Italian homegrown peplums were decidedly low-budget flicks which zeroed in on the hero’s beefcake attributesⓒ. (‘Sword-and-Sandal’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org). The Italian cinematic peplum was indeed a curious passion of my pre-teen to early adolescent years.
Hercules (1958) with Steve Reeves: prototype for the Italian sword-and-sandal film
Hercules by another name
The ur-peplum was Hercules (Italian title: Le Fatiche di Ercole), released in 1958, starring American bodybuilder-turned-actor Steve Reeves, an instant hit which pocketed >$5,000,000 profit for the producers and backers and unleashed a steady stream of sequels starting with Hercules Unchained. As a variation to Hercules, other strongman protagonists were added to subsequent peplum movies, including Samson, Goliath, Ursus and Italy’s own folk hero Macisteⓓ. By 1965 the peplum was pretty much passé in Italy, with the void quickly filled by Spaghetti Westerns and Eurospy films.
My fascination with this Continental movie sub-genre was even more remarkable and unfathomable because, even then, I knew that the films were egregiously badly put together! Watching them was like being drawn against your better instincts to look at something as horrific as a car crash…you know it’s wrong but you just can’t resist the temptation. The unequivocal fact that the sword-and-sandal pictures were such thoroughly execrable, absolute turkeys of films perversely had precisely zero impact on my satisfaction quotient during my early impressionable years!
This 1964 ”Sword-and-sandaller” Maciste Contre Les Hommes De Pierre was released in English as Hercules Against the Moon Men, (“Hercules meets Sci-Fi”)
Footnote: Now at an age where I am hurtling towards senectitude I find the grainy and tired-looking footage and the equally tired storylines so unappetising that I couldn’t even stuck it out for 10 minutes, let alone stay the course of a peplum…but even with my profoundly diminished enthusiasm I still hold a soft spot for the deeply flawed sub-genre…I guess that’s simply nostalgia kicking in – the remembrances of things past which seemed better then (ie, in my youth) than they do now guided presumably by a more mature, more measured outlook.⿻⿻⿻
The sub-genre’s popularity in the early ’60s prompted the Three Stooges to get in on the act with a slapstick, farcical take on the Italian peplum The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962)
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ⓐ plural of peplum
ⓑ “sword-and-sandal” and “peplum” are used interchangeably to describe this sub-genre, both terms have a disparaging connotation. The sorcery component of the sub-genre was something I could take or leave
ⓒ so to have the lead convincingly looking the part, professional bodybuilders, athletes and wrestlers were transformed into actors and cast as the Herculean-like protagonist
ⓓ Maciste as strongman in the peplum films was resurrected from a previous incarnation in the silent era of Italian cinema
