Considering the Byzantine capital as the theater of thrilling deeds and notable achievements, it is probably unsurpassed in human interest except by Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. And the views one may have from the height of Galata’s tower are, historically considered, inferior only to those that so impress the spectator who stands on the ruin-crowned summit of the Palatine, the majestic portico of the Parthenon, and the sanctified heights of the Mount of Olives.
As I stood on the dizzy balcony which surmounts the lofty tower and beheld the magnificent vistas that opened up before me on every side, I realized as never before what a unique site was occupied by the City of Constantine. On the north are the cypress and palace-crowned hills of the winding Bosphorus and the delightful Sweet Waters of Europe, which are even more attractive than the rival Sweet Waters of Asia. On the south gleams the silver expanse of the Marmora, in which are mirrored the picturesque Islands of the Princes, over which hover so many morbid and voluptuous memories of the past. On the east across the Strait stand out in bold relief the Maiden’s Tower and the Golden City of Scutari, both wrapped in an atmosphere of heavy and exotic passion and “holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe.” On the hills laved by the glimmering waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, and bounded on the west by the historic plain of Thrace, proudly sits, half veiled by a tremulous amethystine haze, the peerless Queen of the East in all her majesty and shedding on the fascinated beholder a strange sense of mystery—seeming not a living, palpable thing, but rather a brilliant phantasm, or a rainbow dream of mystic remoteness.
Almost within a stone’s throw of where I stood was the Golden Horn sprinkled with hundreds of delicate, pointed caiques and bearing on its sapphire bosom ships of all sizes and flying the flags of all nations. It was up this famous stream that Byzas, the reputed son of Neptune, steered his frail craft nearly seven centuries before our era. And it was on the southern bank of this sheltered haven that the daring navigator, with his doughty Megarans, laid the foundation of Byzantium—named after himself—which was to play such a remarkable rôle in the world’s great drama.
A thousand years later—almost to a day—Constantine the Great abandons the city of Romulus and selects that of Byzas as the capital of the great Roman empire. On foot, with a lance in hand, the Emperor leads a solemn procession, and, under divine command—jubente Deo, as he phrased it—traces the boundary of the future metropolis. His assistants, astonished at the over-growing circumference of the destined capital, ventured to observe that the contemplated area of a great city had already been exceeded. “I shall continue to advance,” replied the Emperor, “until the Invisible Guide who precedes me bids me halt.”
It was across the Golden Horn that “blind old Dandolo”—that marvelous doge of ninety-seven years—led the Venetian forces against Constantinople and awakened the degenerate Greeks from “a dream of nine centuries—from the vain presumption that the capital of the Roman Empire was impregnable to foreign arms.” The marble mausoleum of this remarkable man—whose physical and mental powers were vigorous to the last—occupied a place in Santa Sophia until it was transformed into a mosque, and, even to-day, one may see in one of the galleries of the venerable fane a marble slab bearing in almost illegible characters the name of Henricus Dandolo.
And it was across the Golden Horn that Mohammed II passed when he entered the breached walls through New Rome as conqueror. But he was not able to effect an entrance into the ill-fated city without passing over the lifeless body of its noble defender, the valiant Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Byzantine Cæsars.[53]
For six centuries Constantinople had been an impregnable bulwark against the forces of Islam. For nearly twice that space of time she had successfully resisted the menaces and attacks of the barbarians of the north—Goths, Huns, Avars, Russians, Bulgarians, Chazars—and had proudly defied the power of Chosroes, Timur, Bayazid, Harun-al-Rashid, and other leaders of savage hordes from Persia, Arabia, and Central Asia. Unlike Old Rome, which frequently opened her gates to invaders from the north of the Danube, New Rome never once yielded to her Teutonic and Slavonian foes. Although besieged more than a score of times between the fourth and the thirteenth century[54] she was able to withstand every assault however furious or long continued. And this she did after the vast empire which once extended from the Tigris to the Guadilquivir had been so reduced that little was left of it but the capital itself, which, at the time of its capture by the Turks under Mohammed II, was scarcely more than a besieged fortress.
How the occupation of Constantinople by Mohammed the Conqueror, has complicated the political, military, and economic conditions of Europe for nearly five centuries is a matter of gloomy history. Owing to its matchless position it was long the natural center of the world’s commerce, the clearing house between Europe and Asia. Destined by nature itself to be the seat of two worlds, Constantinople must, as Freeman well observes, “remain the seat of imperial rule as long as Europe and Asia, as long as land and sea keep their places.”[55]
The transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, the foundation of Constantinople in 330 A. D., was one of the master-strokes in the history of civilization—indeed from the material and strategic point of view, I hold it to be the greatest. Rome, Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Berlin, Washington, became capital cities by the gradual acts of the rulers in the course of years. But in ten years Constantinople remade the center of the civilized world. Nothing so stupendous in civic origins has ever been accomplished before or since, for its effects have been maintained with rare and partial breaks for eleven, nay, for fifteen centuries. The foundation of Alexandria by Alexander, of Antioch by Seleucus have some parallels. Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, Delhi have had fluctuating histories. Peter’s creation of Petrograd was a splendid mistake, which has ended in hideous failure. But the creation of Constantinople marks Constantine as one of the truly great, beside Julius, Trajan, Charles and Washington.[56]
But more remarkable than anything that has yet been said of the Queen City of the Bosphorus is her marvelous continuity of imperial rule. From the time when Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, when, in the works of Dante,