When the younger Theodosius extended the walls he made the Golden Gate a part of them, but kept it as the state entrance to the city. Distinguished guests were met there—ambassadors, visiting princes, at least one Pope. Holy processions burned their incense under that archway. Through it passed emperors in splendour when they came to the purple, or when they returned victorious from war. No gateway in Europe can have seen so much of the pomp and glory of the world. Now the arches are blind, save for one small postern in the centre, and that was nearly choked by an earthquake in 1912. One Roman eagle still looks down from a high marble cornice upon the moat, empty of all but garden green, and upon a colony of Turkish gravestones that stand among cypresses where the Via Egnatia started away for the Adriatic.
On the other side lies a silent enclosure whose own day has come and gone since the last emperor passed through the Golden Gate. This is the fortress of the Seven Towers—three of which were built by the Turkish conqueror and connected by curtains with the city wall. In the towers are passages and cells as black as the subterranean maze of Blacherne, and they were used for the same purpose. Many are the stories of captivity in this high-walled place that have been told and remain to be told. One of them is briefly legible, in Latin, in a stone of the southeast tower, where it was cut by a Venetian in the seventeenth century. It used even to be the fashion to clap an ambassador into prison there when war broke out between his country and the Porte. Turkish state prisoners, of course, perished there without number. And one sultan, Osman II, when he was no more than eighteen, was barbarously put to death there in 1622. And all that blood and bitterness, which was so desperately the whole of reality for so many breathing men, is now but a pleasant quickening of romance for the visitor who follows a lantern through the darkness of the towers or who explores the battlements of the wall, grassy and anemone-grown in the spring, from which a magnificent view stretches of the sea and the city and the long line of ruined turrets marching up the hill.
Outside the land walls
If every ended drama of human greatness must come at last to a view, the road around the land walls of Constantinople can do more for the man who walks it than any such road I know. Other cities have walls, it is true. Other walls have moats. Some of their moats contain water, too, while this moat contains only water-wheels and vegetable-gardens. And how much more greenly do the vegetables grow, I wonder, because of all the dead men that have fallen under the ramparts? Other ramparts wear as picturesque a verdure, and blossoming fruit-trees have the same trick of setting them off in the spring. And cypresses are no monopoly of Constantinople. But no such army of cypresses faces other walls, from such a camp of strange grey stones. Nor in any Eternal City does water play so magical a part of background. The landscape is most dramatically accidented where you look past the high terraces of Blacherne toward the landlocked brightness of the Golden Horn. A view is also to be admired down the valley of the Lycus, of the whole city stretching to the sea. But the noblest perspective is the simpler one where the road, avenue-like between the moat and the cypresses, dips and rises and dips again toward the Golden Gate and the Marmora, till a last marble tower stands superbly out of the blue. The contrast of sea and cypresses and tawny stones, always perfect, here takes an insensible colour, I suppose, from the thought of the sentinels who called from tower to tower in old Byzantine nights; and of all the horsemen and banners that have ridden against those walls; and of what they did for the other end of Europe—the walls—till civilisation was safely planted there; and of something yet more intangible, that is deepest and strangest in human fate.
A last marble tower stands superbly out of the blue