The outer wall was built as an additional defence in 813, by Leo the Armenian (813-820), in view of an expected attack upon the city by the Bulgarians under Crum.
The territory outside the landward walls has indeed a charm of its own, in its quiet rural aspect, and in the glimpses it affords of distant blue water seen through dark groves of cypresses. But it cannot pretend to the splendid natural scenery which confronts the shores of the Sea of Marmora or of the Golden Horn, and makes the beauty of Constantinople famous throughout the world. This, however, is not altogether a disadvantage, for it allows the visitor to view without distraction the imposing line of bulwarks ranged across the promontory from sea to sea, and to appreciate calmly all their significance. On the other sides of the city, the fortifications which guarded the Queen of Cities are comparatively unimportant, and are easily lost sight of in the beauty of their surroundings. Here the walls and towers are everything. Here they attained their greatest strength; here they rendered their greatest service; here, like troops bearing the wounds and scars of a great campaign, they force the beholder to realise the immense debt which the civilised world owes to Constantinople for the strength, the valour, and the sacrifices devoted through long centuries to the defence of the highest life of mankind against terrible foes.
THE WALLS; THE TOWER OF ISAAC ANGELUS
Part of the old fortifications, now in ruins, stretching from the Marmora to the Golden Horn.
Nor does the scenery which the walls themselves present need to borrow attractions from any other source to render it the most picturesque and impressive spectacle of the kind in the world. The alternate courses of grey stone and red bricks in the structure of the fortifications; the long lines of wall ranged in ranks, and rising tier above tier to support one another in the terrible struggles they were called to maintain; the multitude of towers, marshalled to guard the city and Empire, great and small, of every shape, square, round, polygons looking in six, seven, or eight directions, some intact after all the storms of centuries, others bare, broken, fissured from head to foot, yet holding together; inscriptions recalling wars, earthquakes, names of men who have made history; towers crowned with ivy; trees interspersed between the walls or standing upon the summit, like banners; crenellated parapets affording glimpses of the blue sky behind, as though, in Oriental phrase, the ramparts rose to the very heavens; all this stretching for mile upon mile, from sea to sea, presents a scene of extraordinary beauty and grandeur, not less attractive because of the heroism and achievements of which it has been the theatre.
This is not the place for an extended history of the services which these walls, and the Empire of which they were the citadel, rendered as the shield of European civilisation. Enough to remember that the dread of them dissuaded Attila and his Huns from delivering an attack upon the city, although he approached as near to Constantinople as Athyras, now Buyuk Tchekmedjé, some twelve miles distant. Doubtless they often restrained the wrath also of other barbarous hordes. In vain did the Avars, in 627, beat against these walls between Top Kapou (Gate of S. Romanus) and the Gate of Adrianople (Charisius). In vain did the Arabs invest these bulwarks from the spring to the autumn of four successive years (673-677). As unsuccessful was the second siege of the city by the same foe for twelve months (717-718). These fortifications defied the Bulgarians both under Crum in 813 and under Symeon in 924. In 1203 they repelled the valour of the knights and barons engaged in the Fourth Crusade. They mocked the assaults of Sultan Murad, in 1422. And when they succumbed, at length, to the artillery of Sultan Mehemet in 1453, it was because their defenders were few and divided, and their assailants were armed with weapons before which ramparts of stone, alike in the West and in the East, crumbled to pieces, and old systems of society were swept away.
The battles fought directly before the walls of New Rome do not, indeed, give us the complete story of her warfare “per benefitio de la Christiantade et per honor del mundo.” On eight occasions, at least, the armies of the East Roman Empire were drawn up on the plain outside the Golden Gate to celebrate victories won on distant battlefields, and to enter the triumphal Gate of the capital with prisoners, standards, and spoils captured on hostile territory. To the shouts “Glory to God, who has restored to us our sovereign crowned with victory! Glory to God who has magnified you Emperor of the Romans! Glory to Thee All-Holy Trinity, for we behold our Emperor victorious! Welcome Victor! most valiant sovereign!” the triumphal car of Heraclius drove into the city, after his splendid campaign of seven years against the Persians; the campaign which brought the long struggle between Europe and Persia since 492 B.C. to an end. The same shouts rent the air, when Constantine Copronymus returned from the defeat of the Bulgarians, and twice again, when Basil II., by two murderous wars with that people, earned the title, the Slayer of Bulgarians, Bulgaroktonos. Theophilus, on two occasions, and Basil I. passed through the Golden Gate as victors over the Saracens. And Zimisces received the same honour for beating back the Russians under Swiatoslaf. These were great days in the history of the city, nay, of mankind, for they stayed the waves of barbarism that threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. But after all, it is when the enemy stands arrayed before the very capital of the Empire, and delivers assault after assault upon the citadel which guarded its fate and the destiny of Europe, that the struggle waged between civilisation and barbarism during the history of New Rome is fully recognised to have been, indeed, a struggle for life, and that we learn to appreciate what we owe to the Warden of the Gates to the Western World. To these walls may be applied the words in which Mr. Gladstone appraised the value of the services rendered by the Christian populations of the Balkan Peninsula, in a similar connection. “They are like a shelving beach that restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, is beaten by the waves; it is laid desolate; it produces nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing save a mass of shingle, of rock, of almost useless sea-weed. But it is a fence behind which the cultivated earth can spread and escape the incoming tide.... It was that resistance which left Europe to claim the enjoyment of her own religion, and to develop her institutions and her laws.”
Although inferior as military works to the other portions of the landward walls, great historical interest is associated with the fortifications between the Wall of Manuel and the Golden Horn, for they guarded the Palace of Blachernæ, the favourite residence of the Byzantine Court from the time of Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) until the fall of the Empire. As already intimated, the palace stood on the terrace buttressed by the Tower of Isaac Angelus and the chambered wall to the north of the tower, where the Mosque of Aivas Effendi is now found. The terrace was almost level with the parapet-walk of the fortifications, commanding fine views of the Golden Horn, and of the hills at the head of the harbour; and there the most splendid Court of the Middle Ages long displayed its wealth and pomp. What with the Crusades, and what with the relations, hostile and friendly, between the Italian Republics and the Government of Constantinople during the period of the Palæologi, it was in that palace that Western and Eastern Europe came into closest contact for good or for evil. On the hills and in the valleys seen from the western windows of the palace, the armies of the First Crusade encamped. To that residence came Peter the Hermit, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Normandy, Bohemond, Tancred, “the mirror of knighthood,” Count Robert of Paris, to wonder at the marvels of Byzantine Art, and to attempt the co-operation of the East and the West, in the great political and religious undertaking of the times. On the hill immediately in front of the walls the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade pitched their tents, and thence Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut, Henry his brother, Louis of Blois and Chartres, and Hugo of Saint Paul, led four divisions of the army against the wall erected by Leo the Armenian. The wall was held by Varangian troops, the imperial body-guard, recruited from England, Denmark, Norway, and Russia. “The assailants,” to quote the words of Ville-Hardouin, a witness of the combat, and the historian of the Crusade, “placed two scaling-ladders against an outer wall near the sea; the wall was furnished with Englishmen and Danes, and the attack was strong, and good, and hard. And by sheer force some knights and two sergeants mounted the ladders, and became masters of the wall. Fully fifteen reached the wall, and they fought hand to hand with axes and swords. And the men within returned to the charge and drove them (the assailants) out, right rudely, even taking two of them prisoners. And those of our men who were captured were led to the Emperor Alexis, and he was very highly delighted. So ended the attack by the French. And there was a considerable number of men wounded and of maimed; and the barons were very angry about it.”