"An you accept my counsel, you will not wait to establish your enemy beyond question," remarked Boniface. "I cry your pardon, fair sir, for the inconvenience you have been put to. Guards, release the young lord and his friend. I beg you will sup at my board to-night, Messer Hugh, and drown your memory of this error in my wine."
The Marquis rose as sign that the audience was over, and Villehardouin and other friends pressed close around the comrades. But before they passed out of the pavilion Hugh looked back once over his shoulder. The Young Alexius was resting his dark, shaggy head on the palm of one hand, elbow propped on the arm of the chair. Close by his shoulder leaned Comnenus whispering in his ear. Whether by accident or design, the eyes of both met Hugh's glance, and his spine tingled as though he had received an actual physical shock. Mere boy that he was, Alexius had in his sullen face all the inherent evil that was his heritage from the bloody license which had attended the ill-starred house of the Angeloi.
CHAPTER XVI
THE IMPERIAL CITY
"The city, signori! Behold the city!"
The cry rang from the mastheads of the fleet. Men dropped their shipboard occupations and ran to the rails. Lord and knight, sailor and sergeant, squire and varlet, all heeded the magic words. After months of travel and toil and sorrow and heartache and disappointment, the goal of their efforts was at hand. Constantinople lay before them, a bright blur across the level surface of the Sea of Marmora, where the European and Asiatic coasts approach to form the gorge of the Bosphorus, through which the waters of the Black Sea escape to mingle with the Mediterranean. Majestic and serene on her unrivalled seat, she viewed these newcomers with the calm dignity that had been born of nine centuries of imperial rule.
Since Constantine first traced the boundaries of the destined capital of the Eastern half of the Roman world, in the year 328 A.D., a score of conquerors had dared to assail the mighty walls that had been strengthened and extended by Emperor after Emperor. The barbarian hordes which submerged Europe in the latter days of Roman dominion in the West, when the old Latin civilisation was tottering to its fall—Huns, Avars, Gepidi, Goths, Vandals, Varings, Tartars, Vlachs—and the later half-savage Slavic races, which absorbed the Asiatic flood and with it the lust for conquest—the Russians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs—had stormed against Constantinople time and time again. In the first dawn of Islam's might, when the hardy Arab tribes swept all before them in a mad rush of fanatic faith in victory, Constantinople hurled them back—twice. The rude Western warriors of the first three Crusades viewed with jealous awe the tremendous fortifications which girdled the Imperial City's matchless wealth.
Save only the capitals of the two Moslem Caliphates, Bagdad and Cordova, no cities of the Middle Ages approached it in grandeur, size or riches, and it exceeded these two even as they exceeded such huddled towns as London and Paris. A million people worked and lived within its municipal jurisdiction. All that was precious, all that was worth while in the literature and philosophy of Imperial Rome and Republican Greece, was collected in its libraries and monasteries. The art of Phidias, of Praxiteles and a long line of men not unworthy to call them masters, embellished its streets and palaces. Here only in the tumultuous mediæval world the lofty principles of Roman law were the accepted guide to justice. The cramping hand of the feudal system had not been permitted to thwart trade and commerce. Schools, police, posts, theatres, organised machinery for charitable and benevolent work, the requisites of an established society, were present and in being.
But there was a reverse to this picture of orderly magnificence. Like so many states which had preceded it, like the Elder Rome, whose name and prestige it had inherited, Constantinople was suffering from the decay of age, and this decay was working from the top downwards. With the tightening of the Imperial power and the relaxation of the supervision of the Senate, the way had been made easy for the despot. If an able Emperor assumed the purple buskins, the Empire prospered. If a sot, a degenerate, a fool or a selfish man won the Imperial dignity, the Empire crumbled. For several centuries now Byzantium had been crumbling. An Emperor occasionally arrested the slow deterioration, but the dry rot of over-centralised authority was spreading its contamination with inexorable virulence.
The Empire was dying, slowly but surely. The hammer-blows of the Saracen states on the East were driving in its boundaries in Asia Minor and blotting out the sturdy peasantry, who had been the mainstay of armies that had upheld the traditions of the Roman legions for centuries after the Roman Eagles had given way to the Cross. The line of the northern frontier, fixed by Trajan at the Danube, long since had receded to the Rhodopes, and year by year the vigorous Slav peoples pushed farther and farther into the domains of the Empire. On the shores of the Marmora and in the surrounding country in Europe and Asia Minor there still remained a belt of prosperous towns and farming communities. And no amount of misgovernment and incapacity could take away from Constantinople itself the commercial supremacy which came from its situation at the juncture of the trade routes between Asia and Africa and Europe.