The Walls of Constantinople

by B. Granville Baker

The unsuccessful issue of the Saracen attacks upon Constantinople cast a shadow upon the lustre of their army, and revived both in the East and West the prestige of the Roman sword. A truce of thirty years was ratified at Damascus in 677, and the majesty of the Commander of the Faithful was dimmed by the necessity of paying tribute, fifty horses of a noble breed, fifty slaves and three thousand pieces of gold.

A yet more barbarous enemy appeared before this section of the city walls in Leo the Armenian’s reign. Rumours of their approach had reached the city, and it was heralded by vast clouds of dust raised by the feet of innumerable flocks of sheep and goats who accompanied these adventurers wherever they went. They pitched their leathern tents on the plain and heights outside the Golden Gate, where their strange aspect startled those who held watch and ward over the city. These barbarians were clad in furs, they shaved their heads and scarified their faces, of luxury they knew nothing, and their sole industries were violence and rapine.

Finding all his efforts against the stout walls of the city unavailing, King Crum, the leader of these hordes, offered up human sacrifices under the Golden Gate. But this failed to propitiate his gods, and one day a receding cloud of dust announced the departure of these savage enemies.

Another foe knocked at the portal of the Golden Gate and tried his strength against the wall in vain, though sometimes more successful in the open field. A new power had arisen on the banks of the Danube in the days of Constantine III—the Bulgarians.

Whence they came and what their origin is still a matter of conjecture best left to those whose business it is to find out. Suffice it to say that they appear from time to time and trouble the peace of the Eastern Empire, or on some rare occasions act as its allies. Their history is strangely stirring. Theodoric, in his march to Italy, had trampled on them, and for a century and a half all traces of their name and nation disappear from the historian’s ken. In the ninth century we hear of them again on the southern bank of the Danube. Their return to the North from whence they came was prevented by a stronger race that followed them, whilst their progress to the West was checked by more powerful nations in that quarter. They found some vent for their military ardour in opposing the inroads of the Eastern emperors, and may lay claim to an honour till then appropriated only by the Goths—that of having slain a Roman emperor in battle.

It came about in this fashion. The Emperor Nicephorus had advanced with boldness and success into the west of Bulgaria and destroyed the royal court by fire. But while he lingered on in search of spoil, refusing all treaties, his enemies collected their forces and barred the passes of retreat. For two days the Emperor waited in despair and inactivity, on the third the Bulgarians surprised the camp and slew the Emperor and great officers of the Eastern Empire. Valens had, after the Emperor’s death at the hands of the Goths, escaped from insult, but the skull of Nicephorus I, encased with gold, served as a drinking vessel.

Before the end of the same century a better understanding had been established, and the sons of Bulgarian nobles were educated in the schools and palaces of Constantinople; among them was Simeon, a youth of royal line, of whom Luitprand the historian says: “Simeon fortis bellator, Bulgariæ prœcrat; Christianus sed vicinis Græcis valde inimicus.” Many Bulgarian youths are even now being educated at the Robert College.

Simeon was intended for a religious life, but he abandoned it to take up arms; he inherited the crown of Bulgaria and reigned over that country from the end of the ninth to well into the tenth century. His hostility to the Greeks found frequent expression, and he and his host appeared before the walls of Constantinople. On classic ground at Achelous, the Greeks were vanquished by the Bulgarians, thereupon Simeon hastened to besiege the Emperor in his own strong city. Simeon and the Emperor met in conference—the Bulgarians vying with the Greeks in the splendour of their display, though combined with the most jealous precautions against unpleasant surprises, and their monarch dictated the terms on which he would agree to peace. “Are you a Christian?” asked the humbled Emperor Romanus I. “It is your duty to abstain from the blood of your fellow-Christians. Has the thirst for riches seduced you from the blessings of peace? Sheath your sword, open your hand and I will give you the utmost measure of your desire.”

Soon the successors of Simeon by their jealousies undermined the strength of the kingdom, and when next they went forth to meet the Greeks in battle Basil II found no great difficulty in defeating them. A terrible home-coming theirs; through snow and ice the remnant of Bulgaria’s manhood struggled on in little bands of a hundred at a time, following the voice, each company, of a single leader, as they groped their way through the darkness. For they were blinded. They had escaped from the clemency of a Christian emperor, by whose orders only one man in a hundred retained the sight of one eye. The King of the Bulgarians died of grief. His people lived on, contained within the limits of a narrow province, to wait in patience for revenge. The visitor to Sofia, the new capital of a new Bulgaria, should not fail to inspect the museum, carefully and skilfully arranged by King Ferdinand. There he will find, among a host of interesting matter, pictures illustrating the history of the country. Of these works none is more strikingly pathetic than one which represents the return of those sightless Bulgarian warriors.

As after the crushing defeat inflicted on the inhabitants of Bulgaria by the Goths, the country silently and forcefully waited to regain its strength. Another century and a half elapsed after the victory of Basil Bulgaroktonos before the Bulgarians regained offensive power. During this interval they existed as a province of the dominions of Byzantium, and no attempts were made to impose Roman laws and usage upon them.