Part 2

Part of the palace group, too, was the renowned church of Santa Sophia. It was known as the Great Church, and although it was not as big as Saint Peter’s in Rome, it was one of the largest sacred buildings ever made by man. Even today, with most of its mosaics covered with whitewash—this was done by the Turks—it is like nothing else in the world. To Robert of Clari, its great height, equivalent to a modern eighteen-story building, its many chapels, its lacelike balconies, and its beautifully carved pillars made it like the work of an enchanter. Its dome was so vast that the architects had to try twice before they could make one that would not fall down. When they did, it was so graceful that it seemed to be floating on air.

But what impressed Robert of Clari most of all was its more-than-Oriental splendor. The principal altar was beyond price, he said. The altar table was 14 feet long. It was made of gold and precious stones crushed up together. Above it was a solid silver canopy held up by solid silver columns. The whole ceiling was overlaid with pure gold. Robert did not even speak of the mosaics which we now know were as fine as any ever made, but he did say that there were more than 200 chandeliers. Each of these had twenty-five or more lamps, and was hung from a silver chain as thick as a man’s arm.

Last but not least of the palace buildings was the Hippodrome, or Circus. This was a tremendous stadium about 2,000 feet long and 600 feet wide. On three sides of it were thirty or forty rows of seats, and at the north end was the Cathisma, or balcony, where the emperor and empress sat in state. It must have held 100,000 people.

In the days of old the Hippodrome was the center of almost every kind of citizen activity. Here were held wildly exciting chariot races during which the Green and Blue factions (they were like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States) forgot their politics to bet on their favorites, and were ready to fly at each other with stones or swords if the wrong one got ahead. Here there were wild beast fights, bearbaiting, acrobatic feats, performances by clowns, jugglers, trained dogs, and even a trained, gilded crocodile. But not fights by gladiators, for the Christian Byzantines did not think it was right for one man to kill another in the name of sport.

Here, too, the emperor-elect stood to hear the crowds proclaim him, and it was here that more than once he had to face the people and promise to obey his own laws. Some very bloody riots, called the Nika revolt, started at the Hippodrome, and it was there that they were put down with a loss of 30,000 lives.

But Robert of Clari did not limit his sightseeing to the Great Palace and its grounds. He went everywhere. He visited the new Palace of Blachernae by the Golden Horn and saw that it was almost as splendid as the Bukoleon, even though it had _only_ twenty chapels and two or three hundred chambers! He stood at the Golden Gate with its two life-sized elephants made of copper. This gate was only opened when the emperor, called the Augustus, returned from a victory. Then he was taken through it seated on a golden throne on a golden four-wheeled chariot. The clergy scattered incense, and the crowd shouted, “Life eternal to our holy Augustus!”

Robert also saw the Gate of the Golden Mantle with its shining globe which was supposed to protect the city from being destroyed by lightning. A statue on the globe proclaimed in large letters: “Anyone who lives in Constantinople a year can be rich enough to afford a golden mantle like the one I wear.”

He saw the great monument to Justinian. It towered into the air, and on top of it was a bronze statue of this mighty emperor. He was on horseback and wore a headdress very much like that of an Aztec chieftain.

He also saw the holy relics with which the city was filled—two pieces of the true cross, the head of the lance that pierced Christ’s side, two of the nails used in the Crucifixion, a vial containing the Saviour’s blood, the tunic that He wore on the first Good Friday, the crown of thorns itself, and the famous “handkerchief of Edessa” on which His portrait had been imprinted by a miracle.

Last of all, Robert of Clari gawked at the two columns each of which prophesied the city’s doom. “Even our coming was predicted,” he said.

But no one in Constantinople understood what the ships and soldiers on the columns meant until the crusaders were actually there. Then the frightened people realized that short-haired warriors with iron swords would come from the West to conquer them. By that time, it was too late.

But there was much more to this Byzantine city than palaces and monuments and churches. It was a city of people as well as the city of the emperor, and it was all noise and excitement, hustle and bustle, and activity.

No part of it was busier than the long avenue that started at the Augustaion, or Emperor Square, in front of Santa Sophia, and went three or four miles to the city walls. It was called the Mesé, or Midway, and it was really like a modern midway in the variety of wares it offered.

Here, for example, under its colonnades and porticoes were the workbenches of the goldsmiths. In plain sight of everybody, they manufactured lovely gold boxes, gold jewelry, and intricate enamel. Near the goldsmiths were the money changers with their long tables or banks heaped with the coin of every nation. Next came the provision sellers, those who sold every kind of food from meat and cheese to bread and honey. The sellers of silk had their booths between the Forum of Constantine and the Taurus Forum, with its tall column and statue of Theodosius. The perfume sellers did their business in front of the Great Palace. In other places—but I could not name them all—there was a bazaar so filled with gleaming wares that it was called the house of lamps, a street of the tinsmiths and coppersmiths, a bazaar for household goods, a pig-and-sheep market, a cattle market, and, of course, a horse market.

Noisier than all the others, and more filled with bargaining in twenty Near East languages was the fish market, located on the quays by the Golden Horn.

The Mesé was a respectable place and one was safe, at least in daylight, when visiting the booths and markets; but to go anywhere else in the city was another matter. To be sure, there was nothing in the world as magnificent as the glitter and the gold of Caesar City. But outside of the native quarter in a city in Algiers or Morocco, there were no slums like the slums of Constantinople. They spread all over, covering acre after acre of ground, and they made up a miserable network of filthy side streets and dark, damp, and dirty tenements. There was absolutely no sanitation. The gutters were the only sewers. Household refuse, including spoiled meat and vegetables and ancient and decaying fish, were thrown out of slitlike windows to be trampled under foot by every passerby. In rainy weather the mud was more than ankle deep. One can imagine how it smelled.

Here lived the working population of the city—porters with calluses on their hands and padded coats, donkey drivers with shrill cries and quick, short steps like those that can be seen even today in many a city in the Balkans. Carpenters. Water carriers. Day laborers. Here too lived an even more wretched riffraff who lived off doles and charity, when they didn’t live off murder and crime. Here was the poor creature with sore eyes who sat with his wooden begging bowl in front of a church or on the sunny side of a square. Here was a one-eyed scoundrel who would cut throats for a copper obol. Yet sometimes they gathered together and formed a mob that marched to the Hippodrome and demanded a new emperor, and more than once they got what they wanted.

This was what Constantinople was like in the late Middle Ages and for 600 years before that. But it was also much more than a seething pot of emperors and rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves.

It was the capital of a very famous empire which took over the eastern half of the old Roman Empire and became known as the Byzantine Empire because it stood on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. In spite of all its enemies, this empire lasted 1,123 years and eighteen days. And at a time when half a dozen other empires crumbled, including ancient Persia and ancient Rome!

Sometimes it was a very big empire indeed. Under the mighty Justinian it ruled from the Euphrates, which flows into the distant Persian Gulf, to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Nile in one direction and the Crimea of South Russia in the other to Switzerland. It ruled all of Italy, and all of the Balkans, and all of Asia Minor, and all North Africa.

Sometimes the empire was so small that it was little more than the city itself.

But whether it was big or little, it was almost always the most important and the strongest nation west of China. Sometimes it was the only important one!

How did it get that way?

How was it able to keep strong when so much of the rest of the world was breaking into pieces?

What did it do for the world? For it did a great deal.

Why should you and I care about Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire?

I will try to tell you.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CONSTANTINOPLE

The beginning o£ the story took place a long time ago, and not even in the same land.

Back in the days when our ancestors still dressed in skins and hides and had just given up stone weapons for bronze, a group of people moved out of central Europe to the north of Italy. They stayed there for a thousand years, made pottery and grew beans, beets, barley, and millet and finally learned how to use iron. They also grazed cattle and herded sheep, and so one day when they learned that the coastland from the Tiber River to the Bay of Naples was so lush with tall green grass that it was called Vitelia (the name Italy comes from mispronouncing this), or Calfland, they moved south again.

There they settled in the rugged blue hills, and there they became the various Italian tribes. Most important of these to our story were the Latins. For reasons of safety, these Latins, like the others, lived in the craggiest places they could find, but they always came down to the _campania_, as the level land was called, to fatten their lowing herds. And in 754 B.C., according to Roman legend, twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, decided to stay there. They became chieftains of a band of robber cattle-herders, and at the exact spot where the twins said they had been nourished as babes by a she-wolf (who some say was a woman named Lupa, the Latin word for “wolf”), they founded a small town of mud-and-wattle houses.

They named it Rome after Romulus, the older twin. Little did anyone dream that one day it would be one of the most famous cities in the world! Still less did anyone imagine that the Romans would march out of it to conquer the world!

But that is just exactly what they did. In the beginning, they had troubles and trials. In fact, an old story says that when the Gauls from France invaded the city, the capital was saved only when a gaggle of geese cackled and warned the senators.

But the Romans were stubborn, good fighters, well-disciplined, and no matter how bitterly they battled each other in more than one bloody civil war, they always stood together when they faced an enemy. By the time of Julius Caesar 700 years later, they had reached the English Channel in one direction and the Caspian Sea in the other. When Trajan was emperor (about 100 A.D.), practically every part of the known civilized world was included in their empire. Of the eighty-two countries in the United Nations at the time this book was written, all or a part of at least thirty were in Trajan’s empire, and a great majority of the other fifty-two countries are in lands, like America, that hadn’t been discovered. They were ruled by one man.

What is more, soon all the inhabitants of all these lands were Roman citizens. _Civis Romanus sum._ I am a Roman citizen. This could be said by longhaired Celts walking the heather in Britain; by Berbers in the Atlas Mountains in Africa; by haughty Spaniards (Trajan himself was born in Spain); by Gauls in France, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Arabs; even by Scythians and Sarmatians from South Russia, and by Germans from across the Rhine.

This was a great achievement that had never happened before, but it also made a lot of difficulties.

Take size alone. The Roman Empire was now too big to manage. In those days, you couldn’t fly a general (or a tax collector, or an imperial officer, or the emperor himself) from York, England—that’s where Constantine the Great was when he started toward Rome to become the Roman emperor—to the Persian border in a matter of hours. You couldn’t even put him on a fast train. The Roman roads were famous, but the only way you could travel them was on foot, on horseback, or in a litter or chariot. And from one end of the empire to the other was 3,000 miles!

Two centuries after Trajan, an emperor called Diocletian decided to do something about it. Diocletian was the son of a freed slave, but he became the first absolute ruler the Roman Empire ever had. Before that the emperor was merely _princeps_ (from which the English word “prince” is derived), or first citizen. But once Diocletian had all this power, he proceeded to divide it up. He appointed a co-emperor (a second Augustus) with an assistant emperor called a _caesar_ to help him, and put him in charge of the Roman Empire in the West. Diocletian himself, with his own _caesar_, kept the East. Although he was still head emperor and the other emperor was supposed to obey him, the Roman Empire was now divided into two parts.

About forty years later, another emperor took an even more important step. Constantine the Great decided that the empire needed a second capital as much as it needed two rulers, and since he was a Christian emperor—actually he was the first Christian emperor—he decided it must be a Christian city.

He looked around him carefully. First he thought of Nicomedia (now Ismid in modern Turkey) where Diocletian had had his camp; but it had been the capital of a heathen king. Then he considered ancient Troy, for the Romans were supposed to be descended from the Trojans. He even began to build walls there. But one day somebody reminded him of the ruined city of Byzantium with its wonderful location.

“That is the place!” he cried.

On foot, with lance in hand and followed by a solemn procession, he marched over pleasant hills and valleys that were still covered with vines and greenery.

As they tried to keep up with him his panting courtiers asked him how big he planned to make the place.

“I shall walk,” he replied, “until God, my invisible Guide, bids me to halt.”

An emperor could get things done in those days. Not much more than four years from the day, hour, and minute that Constantine ordered his architects and engineers and builders to get to work, the city was completed and ready to live in. It was equipped with theaters, public baths, senate houses, a university, courts of justice, granaries, palaces, and magnificent private dwellings, many of them the very ones described by Robert of Clari. It had broad squares, paved avenues, classic porticoes, and aqueducts that brimmed with clear, cool water. It was decorated with marbles, statues, and priceless works of art; at the emperor’s command, the cities of Greece and Asia Minor had been rifled of their most precious treasures to make sure of this.

It was filled with people too. Constantine invited (that was the same thing as _ordered_) senators to move from Rome. He presented costly buildings to his favorites. He confiscated the estates of many of his rich subjects, especially in Asia Minor, and gave the income to those of his subjects who agreed to live in the new city. Of course, a lot of people came of their own accord. They wanted to get in on something good.

It was lucky indeed that Diocletian and Constantine had taken these steps. For suddenly the Roman Empire began to quake and tremble. All through recorded history and long before, the barbarians from the northern swamps and forests of Europe kept pouring down upon the lands to the south of them. As a matter of fact, the Romans, as well as the Greeks whom Homer wrote his poems about, were from the north. When Homer spoke of the “golden-haired Achaeans,” he was talking about the Greeks. But the men around the Mediterranean—the original Greeks—were dark, as they are today. The Achaeans came from the north.

For a long time Roman might had kept these tribesmen back, and civilization and a comfortable life had flourished. As many men lived in peace or happiness as ever have before or since.

But now all at once Rome grew weak almost as fast as it had grown powerful, and the barbarians rode again. Almost immediately they were able to cross the frontiers whenever they wanted to. Soon the empire couldn’t hold them off at all.

Less than a century after Constantine, Alaric the Goth marched into Rome and burned a great deal of the city. Forty-five years later another tribe, the Vandals, destroyed the rest. We get the word “vandalism” from the Vandals. It means the willful destruction of something beautiful, which is what the Vandals did. After the Vandals other Germanic tribes, with their horned helmets and their long yellow hair, came streaming in, bringing their women and children with them. They were followed by the Mongolian Huns and Avars.

In 476 A.D., one of the barbarian chiefs decided it was foolish to pretend any longer. He deposed the then Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a Latin name meaning “Romulus, the little Augustus”), and proclaimed himself king of Italy. Thus ended the Roman Empire in the West.

If it had not been for Diocletian and Constantine, it would also have ended the Roman Empire everywhere. It might have ended Western civilization, too.

But the emperor of the Roman Empire in the East stood safe behind his mighty walls, and he announced as quickly as possible that he was now emperor of the whole Roman Empire. He ordered this barbarian king of Italy and all the other barbarian kings to acknowledge him as emperor and overlord.

Many of them did.

That is probably the most important thing to remember about the Byzantines. They considered themselves Romans. Most people in the West called them Greeks, and indeed they spoke Greek and were Greek in many other ways. They were also Orientals in their splendor. But for at least the first 900 years of their history they thought of themselves as Romans and were proud of it. Their emperor was still the Augustus, and his other title _autokrator_ was a Greek translation of the Latin _imperator_, or commander in chief. Even when he later took the proud title of _basileus_, a Greek equivalent for the Persian “king of kings,” he was _basileus tou Romaion_, king of the Romans. To call him “Greek emperor,” as did some Westerners, was to use a fighting word.

The second most important thing to remember about the Byzantines was that Constantinople never fell into the hands of the enemy. This means that the empire never fell into the hands of the barbarians, for in those days the capital was even more important than it is today, and so in spite of all the lands it governed, Constantinople _was_ the empire. As long as it stood, the empire stood. The Byzantines had plenty of troubles, and more than once saw the turbans and scimitars of the Arabs, and the felt hats and yellow faces of the followers of some steppe-riding khagan, right beneath their walls. But except when he was invited, no foreign invader had ever set foot in the streets of Constantinople until Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari came with their fellow crusaders.

It is a fact that for century after century, when almost every other important city in the world was sacked and looted over and over again, the Byzantines were able to make and keep Constantinople safe. It was a place of refuge for men and for ideas and for the civilization the Greeks and Romans had given them and for the ideals of Christianity in the midst of a stormy world.

THE HOLY AUGUSTUS

The Byzantines were able to keep Constantinople safe because they were one of the few peoples living in the time between the fall of Rome and modern days who had a strong government and one that worked. The rest of the Roman Empire had been divided by conquest into a good hundred or more independent units. These were ruled by kings, princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, and some cities were even free republics headed by wrangling priors. Their boundaries were always changing, and nobody ever knew just who was governing whom today, and who would be tomorrow. But the eastern half of the Roman Empire had a single government which was almost always orderly.

The Byzantines were able to do it because they had a fine army, and when they needed it, a swift and deadly navy—to say nothing of a diplomatic corps with a well-paid staff of skillful, highly trained diplomats.

They were able to do it because of their Christianity. After Antioch (in Syria) and Alexandria (in Egypt) had been captured by the Arabs, Constantinople was the most important Christian city except Rome. And as far as the Byzantines were concerned, the state worked for Christianity, and Christianity worked for the state.

Finally, the Byzantine Empire was able to stand firm and to last so long because the Byzantines could afford to spend what they needed to. Their government was tremendously expensive. Their army and their navy with its _strategoi_ and _drungariuses_ (generals and admirals) cost them a lot of money and so did their extravagant ambassadors. The church with its own mighty army of high officials and lesser functionaries was very expensive too.

But as long as the Byzantines were not only able to support emperor, army, navy, diplomats, and the church, but were _willing_ to do so, the Byzantine Empire flourished and was great. It was only after they began to economize, when a lot of Byzantines decided they were spending too much on the army, that their troubles began.

At the head of the government was the emperor, and he was certainly the most absolute ruler there could possibly be. Even in the earliest days of the empire, he was chief of the Byzantine state, commander in chief of the army and navy, the only one who could make laws, and the head of the Byzantine courts. In other words, he was equivalent to the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court of the United States rolled into one.

When he became _basileus_, he was even more than that. The Great King was master and owner as well as sovereign, and his subjects became slaves. They had to humble themselves on the ground before him, and foreigners had to as well. Beside that, he was the head of the Byzantine church (now known as the Greek, or Orthodox Eastern, Church), and in this connection took on another title, _isapostolos_, which is Greek for “equal to the Apostles.”