The Byzantines

by Thomas Caldecot Chubb

A CRUSADE THAT WENT ASTRAY

More than 750 years ago—the exact date was May 24, 1203—a mighty and crowded armada sailed away from the beautiful island of Corfu just off the northwest corner of Greece.

It headed southward toward a brilliant blue sea.

The weather was balmy. The myrtle was in bloom. The leaves on the twisted gray olive trees flashed silver. The sky was fine and clear. The wind was gentle and favorable. Indeed, it barely ruffled the water. But it filled hundreds and hundreds of sails of every possible color. Red sails. Golden sails. Lavender sails. Green sails. Orange sails. And sails of a wonderful bright yellow. Even Geoffrey of Villehardouin, a bold French baron and famous historian who was one of the passengers, could not say how many they were. But he did know that they took his breath away.

“I, Geoffrey,” he scratched out slowly, “to my knowledge have not ever lied by one word, and I bear witness that never was yet seen so fair a sight. As far as the eye could reach, there was no space without sails, and ships, and vessels.”

Certainly there were enough ships to cover miles of ocean. Flat, broad-beamed palanders, built especially to carry troops and horses—the 4,500 knights with their fiery steeds, the 9,000 esquires, and the 20,000 foot soldiers who made up the expedition.

Swift galleys to protect the mighty convoy. These galleys had oars as well as sails, and they lashed the waters to foam as they hurried about their tasks. There were even some fat, slow merchant vessels. Just as it is today, business was business in the Middle Ages, even when you went to war.

But business or no business, the men crowding the rails were carried forward by another, nobler purpose. And before each of them had left his drafty castle in Normandy or France or Italy, he had sworn this solemn oath: “I will put on the cross, and march to redeem the land where Jesus lived, and where He died for us.”

Once before it had been redeemed by Godfrey of Bouillon and the other saints and heroes of the First Crusade. But then the famous Arab leader Saladin had won it back, and not even Richard the Lion-Hearted, the knightly king of England, could defeat Saladin.

“We will succeed where Richard failed. Deus vult! God wills it!”

The crusaders had a plan. Instead of landing on the enemy-held beaches of Palestine, they would sail to Egypt and fight their way across the desert and up through the famous Gaza strip, about which we read even today, to Jerusalem. The back door would be easier than the front door. They could not fail.

Their hearts, therefore, were high as they sailed along the rugged coast with its deep inlets and its violet mountains—past rocky Ithaca, the legendary home of the wily Ulysses; past yellow beaches where the ancient Greeks drew up their craft before they sailed to rescue Helen of Troy; finally, past the southernmost tip of Greece where the storms were supposed to meet. Then suddenly something happened. Instead of continuing toward the Holy Land, the mighty fleet altered its course and turned north. What possibly could be the reason? The leaders knew, but most of the fighting men were puzzled.

Soon a whisper ran from lip to lip. There was a new destination. Constantinople the Golden—the fabled Byzantium! The capital of the Greek, or Eastern Roman, Empire! The legendary El Dorado city with its glitter and its glory which was set on the Bosporus, a narrow little body of water that divides Europe from Asia, separating the West from the East.

It was the tough old doge of Venice who had changed the crusaders’ minds for them. Henry Dandolo was eighty years old and blind, but he knew that ducats did not grow on trees, and he was just as eager to get back the money he had loaned them as any Venetian merchant over whom he ruled. The crusaders had promised to give the Venetians four silver marks for each man and two silver marks for each horse that they transported to the East, but now after months of borrowing and begging and promising instead of paying, they still owed them 34,000 marks. What could be done about it?

Facing the knights and barons in the great, glittering church of Saint Mark, the old doge stroked his white beard and had an answer. “You are fighting men. Pay us back with fighting. The king of Hungary has taken Zara from us. Take it back again and give it to us.”

They did, but even then the Venetians were not satisfied.

“There is a richer prize ahead. Win us Constantinople. Capture it for us, and we will really call quits.”

The leaders agreed. The Holy Land would have to wait a while to be redeemed.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the excitement of the crusaders when they heard the magic name of Constantinople. For they all knew about the fabulous city. Minstrels told about it in the long sagas they sang before huge crackling fires on winter nights. They spoke of its shining metal towers and called it Micklegarth, or Bigtown.

Its fame was also spread throughout the West by Russian traders. In those days, the Russians were like the vikings who roved the oceans from America to the Greek Sea. They had enslaved the backward Slavic tribes of Kiev and Moscow and once a year, when the ice melted, these snub-nosed, green-eyed marauders made their vassals cut down huge trees and hollow them into boats. Aboard these, they floated down the great rivers, and then sailed across the foggy Black Sea and up the Bosporus until they reached the enormous city, the biggest they had ever seen. There they traded honey and marten skins and dried fish and even caviar for pepper and brocades and carved ivory and delicate enamels. These Russians, too, were dazzled by Constantinople and had their own name for it. They called it Tsargrad, or Caesar City.

But long before there were Russians or any other kind of vikings, the city had amazed our ancestors. “I see before my eyes something I had often heard about but would never believe!” exclaimed Athanaric, a guttural-speaking king from the forests of Germany. “Look at the walls. Look at the buildings, look at the harbor filled with ships! Look at the men of every nation crowding the alleys and bazaars. Look at the disciplined soldiers! Surely God himself must be the emperor!” said Athanaric.

The mighty Charlemagne, who had been crowned emperor of the West, once sent an embassy to Constantinople to discuss the possibility of marrying the Byzantine empress Irene. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, a learned Spanish Jew, was astonished at its splendor. It was richer, he said, than any other city in the world. Why, the ordinary merchant wore garments of silk ornamented with gold and precious stones! He rode about his business on horseback as a prince does!

It was the city of Justinian, the great lawgiver, whose book of laws was still studied in the crusaders’ own cities of Paris and Bologna 700 years after his reign.

Only the wisest of them knew that he was much more than a lawgiver. A tall towheaded country boy from what is modern Yugoslavia, he was more than just one of the great Byzantine emperors. He was one of the great rulers of all time. It was his generals who reconquered Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain, and almost restored the ancient Roman Empire. It was he who ordered the most famous architects of the time to build the church of Santa Sophia. Most of the finest Byzantine mosaics were done during his reign, and the Orthodox Christian Church was first firmly established then. The Age of Justinian was the first great age of the Byzantine Empire when its power affected the whole Mediterranean world.

It was the city of great soldiers like the cruel Basil the Bulgar Slayer, who had cold-bloodedly blinded 15,000 of his Bulgarian enemies, but who had permanently broken the power of these wild raiders; like John Kercuas, an Asia Minor Napoleon; and like Nicephorus Phocas, who had rolled back the Arabs, the deadliest foes of the Byzantines, whether they fought on camel back or on a warship at sea.

It was the city of foxy Alexius Comnenus, and his dark-eyed daughter, Anna, who wrote even better histories than Villehardouin.

The crusaders knew about him! By his quick thinking and crafty talking this same Alexius, Emperor Alexius I, had not only persuaded their grandsires and great-grandsires of an earlier crusade to stay out of Constantinople, but he had also talked them into fighting the Turks for him. He had even talked some of them into becoming his vassals. He had received the leaders in the Sacred Palace, however, and they told the other barons what they saw there. From then on Constantinople was a city of marvels to the men of the Middle Ages. They also began to covet its wealth.

To be sure, not all the crusaders were happy at the thought of attacking another Christian city, especially when they remembered how angry the Pope had been at the taking of Zara, also a Christian city. But the doge of Venice had an answer for every objection.

The Byzantines, the people of Constantinople, were not really true Christians at all, he said. They were heretics.

The crusaders were not conquering Constantinople; they were restoring it to its rightful ruler. On board was the young Alexius, who ought to sit on the throne as Alexius IV. Alexius was a worthless young man, but his father had been emperor until he was deposed and blinded by his own brother.

Besides that, how could the crusaders pay back Venice all they owed her if they did not take Constantinople?

The young Alexius not only promised that he would settle all their debts if they took the city for him, but that he would give them enough money to go on to their destination. He said that he would ride with them at the head of a Byzantine army of 10,000 soldiers. He promised that as long as he lived he would equip and maintain out of his own treasury 500 of their knights.

A majority of the brave knights were convinced by these arguments and by the thought of all the fighting men and gold. Among them was Geoffrey of Villehardouin who tells us most of what we know about the Fourth Crusade.

It took almost a month to make the voyage. After the crusaders rounded the tip of Greece, they sailed past the remains of ancient Sparta, past Athens, and at the island of Andros they stopped for water. A little later, they drifted past the site of the ancient town of Troy. Finally, they touched at Abydos on the historic Dardanelles, where they raided the countryside and filled their holds with grain. “Great was the need thereof!” muttered Geoffrey.

On June 23, 1203, they dropped anchor within sight of Constantinople. The snow-covered Thracian mountains lay to the west, and grape-colored Asia Minor to starboard. “And be it known to you,” scratched out Villehardouin, his pulses beating, “that no man among us was so hardy that he did not tremble.” For in every direction, there was nothing but high walls and towers and rich palaces and mighty churches.

The next morning banners and pennants were flown from the castles of every ship. The coverings were taken from the shields. The bulwarks were made ready for action. Then the sailors weighed anchor and spread sails to the wind.

“Thus we passed before Constantinople and so near that we shot at their vessels. There were so many people on the walls and towers that it seemed as if there could be no more people in the world.”

Four weeks later the city was in their hands, and although Geoffrey and his fellow crusaders did not realize it, this event marked a turning point in history. For 900 years Constantinople had stood proudly and safe, ruling her empire and giving orders like a queen. But from now on she would be at the mercy of others.

That is not what Geoffrey and his companions were thinking about as they rode into the fabled streets, however. They were remembering all they had heard about the magic city. They were wondering if even half of it was true.

BYZANTIUM,
CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD

They found that it was true indeed.

On that hot July day when the crusaders and Venetians at last forced their way with young Alexius into Constantinople, it was neither as rich nor as powerful as it had been when the earlier Alexius let the leaders of the First Crusade cool their heels outside its gates more than a hundred years before.

But if you wanted to find a more fabulous city, you would have had to go all the way across Asia to distant Cathay. There, of course, was Khansa (modern Hangchow), which was so enormous that it took one medieval traveler three days merely to cross from one side of it to the other. There, too, was Khan Baliq (modern Peking) where “twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round” just to make a playground for the Chinese Son of Heaven, or emperor. But since Marco Polo would not even be born for another fifty years, most of the crusaders knew very little about Cathay, that is, if they had even heard of it at all!

Their idea of a big city was London with its gloomy smoke-blackened houses, and in those days London was really a little town. Even Westminster Abbey was a mile in the country and surrounded by green fields. Or Paris with its streets so narrow that you could hardly see the sky between overhanging gables, and with the great Cathedral of Notre Dame not yet finished. Paris hardly extended a mile in any direction. Or Bruges with its bent and wizened wool merchants and the damp smell of its canals. Even Rome, the most famous city in the West, could not have had much more than 30,000 inhabitants. Most of these were ruffians and bandits who robbed pilgrims, fought each other, and even battled the Pope from castles made of marble stolen from the ancient monuments.

But Constantinople, at the crossroads of the world, gleamed in the sun and was proud and mighty. Even then it had a population of at least 800,000. Possibly a million people lived there.

They were of every kind and race, for like modern New York, the Byzantine city was a melting pot.

Swarthy Armenians looking for the fortune that had enabled more than one of their number to mount the Byzantine throne.

Intellectual Greek scholars moving toward the lecture room with a precious copy of Plato or Aristotle under their arms.

Blond-haired Anglo-Saxons, described by one who saw them to be “tall as palm trees.” Ever since William the Conqueror had ruled in England, they had come in growing numbers to join the famous Varangians, or imperial bodyguard.

Russian traders bursting out of their own Saint Mamas quarter in the city to drink the unfamiliar Greek wine which made them quarrel and brawl.

Strikingly handsome Asbagians from Colchis, the land of the legendary Golden Fleece, and probably of rich placer gold mines almost like the ones in California.

Jewish merchants from the Pera quarter, on the other side of the Golden Horn. They were not allowed to live in the city itself which they had to reach by water, and they were often oppressed and persecuted; but they were rich, benevolent, and pious.

Unwashed, but shaven Bulgarians, who wore an iron chain for a belt.

Wild, half-Mongol Patzinaks, and somewhat more civilized Khazars from the Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Dark-eyed Asiatics with pointed beards and black hair, and usually wearing turbans, who had come by camel caravan from Syria or even Baghdad.

Iranians. Spaniards. Copts from ancient Egypt. Ethiopians from fabled Axum. Franks and Lombards. In the old days, there might also have been Indians and men from China, but no longer. Bankers and sea captains from Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa. The latter in particular looked about them nervously. They could not help wondering what their fate would be now that their archenemy and rival, Venice, had taken over.

Finally, there were the Byzantines themselves. Proud and haughty noblemen with strange titles you could hardly pronounce. These noblemen moved through the streets arrogantly and did not seem to know that their great days were over. Sometimes a slave walked beside them, carrying a bright-colored umbrella or parasol. Lovely ladies, beautifully dressed, jeweled and painted, and probably with a smile for the tall, fair-haired northerners. Byzantine families, the wife on a donkey, the husband and children on foot. Fierce-eyed monks, of whom there were more than 30,000, and priests who swarmed everywhere, led by their hegumens and archimandrites. And, of course, the famous Byzantine peddlers with their purposely ragged clothes, gesticulating hands, and whining cries. The place was still a happy hunting ground for hucksters.

“The city guarded by God”—the name given by the Byzantines to Constantinople—was big enough to hold all of them and splendid enough to make them glad that it could.

A medieval traveler said that the circumference of its walls was eighteen miles, and although he was probably just as good at telling tall stories as present-day travelers are, he may have been right. At least if you included such flourishing suburbs as Galata (once called Sycae, or Figtrees) and Scutari (formerly Chrysopolis, or Gold City). Galata (like Pera) and Scutari were separated from Constantinople by the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, respectively, which were narrow bodies of water, not as wide as the Hudson River or the East River at New York City.

Constantinople itself was large enough. Like old Rome, New Rome (for that was its official name; Constantinople, or Constantine’s City, was only a nickname which had stuck) sprawled over seven rolling hills and down to every body of water it could find.

THE GREAT PALACE IN CONSTANTINOPLE

That was what a visitor remembered most about Constantinople: One was never far from the water. It was shaped like a hitchhiker’s thumb pointed toward the shore of Asia Minor, and it was bounded by sea on every side except where the thumb joined the hand. On the north was the famous Golden Horn—an arm of the Bosporus—which is still a wonderful harbor. It is so deep that ships can moor with their prows against the warehouses ashore and still be comfortably afloat. On the north and northeast was the narrow Bosporus with its twisting channel and its dangerous currents. Jason and his Argonauts had supposedly sailed through the Bosporus. On the southeast and south was the Sea of Marmara. On the Marmara shore there were many small man-made harbors, at least one of which was reserved for the emperor. Through the Sea of Marmara, one could reach to the Dardanelles, the Aegean Sea, and finally the Mediterranean; and then on to Egypt, the Red Sea, and India in one direction, and to Spain and even England in the other.

Guarded by these seas and by the great walls which protected it from the west, some of which still stand, was an Arabian Nights’ fantasy of lovely vales and gardens, glittering roofs and towers, and, of course, resplendent buildings that were beyond anything that the adventurers from the cold and foggy north could even imagine.

Among the crusaders was another knight who could write as well as fight. His name was Robert of Clari.

“I do not think,” said Robert, “that in the forty richest cities of the world there is as much treasure. In fact, the Greeks said that two-thirds of all the wealth there is, is in Constantinople. The rest is scattered elsewhere.”

Then he went into details.

Most glittering of all, he noted, was the Palace of Bukoleon. “Within it,” he said, “there were fully five hundred halls, all connected with one another and all made with gold mosaic. In it, there were fully thirty chapels. One of them was called the Holy Chapel, which was so rich and noble that there was not a hinge or band or any part such as is usually made of iron that was not all of silver. And there was no column that was not of jasper or of porphyry or some other precious stone.”

The Palace of Bukoleon had got its name from a statue showing a fight between a bull and a lion. It had been the Great, or Sacred, Palace of the earlier emperors. It covered 25 or 30 acres and was really a collection of buildings, for a Byzantine palace was never a single edifice.

There were too many buildings in the Great Palace to tell you about all of them. Among them was the Daphne Palace. It was the oldest one, having been built by Constantine the Great when he founded the city. There was the Building of the Nineteen Beds where the emperor could hold a state dinner for 218 important people. Another building was the Chalké where the emperor received his parade troops. It was 650 feet long, and in the old days it was guarded by Khazars with drawn bows. It got its name because its roof was a huge sheet of polished copper. A fourth building was the Magnaura, or Fresh Breeze, Palace where the empress went in stately procession to take her ceremonial baths.

It was at the Magnaura Palace that an Italian visitor discovered what the Byzantines would do to impress strangers. Liutprand, the bishop of Cremona, was led before the emperor, whom he found seated upon a golden throne. There he was told to bow himself three times, each time with his face to the ground.

He did so; then he looked up. No emperor.

By a clever device, the latter had been lifted to the ceiling, and now clad in entirely new clothes, he looked down upon the bishop. In the meantime, gilded mechanical birds began to sing, and gilded bronze lions beat the ground with their tails and roared terribly with open mouth and quivering tongues.

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!

THE EMPIRE UNDER JUSTINIAN 550 A.D.

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.