No part of it was busier than the long avenue that started at the Augustaion, or Emperor Square, in front of Santa Sophia, and went three or four miles to the city walls. It was called the Mesé, or Midway, and it was really like a modern midway in the variety of wares it offered.
Here, for example, under its colonnades and porticoes were the workbenches of the goldsmiths. In plain sight of everybody, they manufactured lovely gold boxes, gold jewelry, and intricate enamel. Near the goldsmiths were the money changers with their long tables or banks heaped with the coin of every nation. Next came the provision sellers, those who sold every kind of food from meat and cheese to bread and honey. The sellers of silk had their booths between the Forum of Constantine and the Taurus Forum, with its tall column and statue of Theodosius. The perfume sellers did their business in front of the Great Palace. In other places—but I could not name them all—there was a bazaar so filled with gleaming wares that it was called the house of lamps, a street of the tinsmiths and coppersmiths, a bazaar for household goods, a pig-and-sheep market, a cattle market, and, of course, a horse market.
Noisier than all the others, and more filled with bargaining in twenty Near East languages was the fish market, located on the quays by the Golden Horn.
The Mesé was a respectable place and one was safe, at least in daylight, when visiting the booths and markets; but to go anywhere else in the city was another matter. To be sure, there was nothing in the world as magnificent as the glitter and the gold of Caesar City. But outside of the native quarter in a city in Algiers or Morocco, there were no slums like the slums of Constantinople. They spread all over, covering acre after acre of ground, and they made up a miserable network of filthy side streets and dark, damp, and dirty tenements. There was absolutely no sanitation. The gutters were the only sewers. Household refuse, including spoiled meat and vegetables and ancient and decaying fish, were thrown out of slitlike windows to be trampled under foot by every passerby. In rainy weather the mud was more than ankle deep. One can imagine how it smelled.
Here lived the working population of the city—porters with calluses on their hands and padded coats, donkey drivers with shrill cries and quick, short steps like those that can be seen even today in many a city in the Balkans. Carpenters. Water carriers. Day laborers. Here too lived an even more wretched riffraff who lived off doles and charity, when they didn’t live off murder and crime. Here was the poor creature with sore eyes who sat with his wooden begging bowl in front of a church or on the sunny side of a square. Here was a one-eyed scoundrel who would cut throats for a copper obol. Yet sometimes they gathered together and formed a mob that marched to the Hippodrome and demanded a new emperor, and more than once they got what they wanted.
This was what Constantinople was like in the late Middle Ages and for 600 years before that. But it was also much more than a seething pot of emperors and rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves.
It was the capital of a very famous empire which took over the eastern half of the old Roman Empire and became known as the Byzantine Empire because it stood on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. In spite of all its enemies, this empire lasted 1,123 years and eighteen days. And at a time when half a dozen other empires crumbled, including ancient Persia and ancient Rome!
THE EMPIRE UNDER JUSTINIAN 550 A.D.
Sometimes it was a very big empire indeed. Under the mighty Justinian it ruled from the Euphrates, which flows into the distant Persian Gulf, to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Nile in one direction and the Crimea of South Russia in the other to Switzerland. It ruled all of Italy, and all of the Balkans, and all of Asia Minor, and all North Africa.