"In sixty days, by order of the sceptre loving Emperor,
Konstantinos the Eparch added wall to wall."
A Latin inscription makes the same record almost in the words of the contemporary chronicler Marcellinus Comes—
"Theodosii jussis gemino nec mense peracto
Constantinus ovans haec moenia firma locavit
Tam cito quam stabilem Pallas vix conderet arcem."
This addition was a new wall, in front of that of Anthemius, with 192 towers, and a moat without, forming tiers of defence. It was this magnificent series of bulwarks which, in the words of the historian of the walls, "so long as ordinary courage survived and the modes of ancient warfare were not superseded, made Constantinople impregnable, and behind which civilisation defied the assaults of barbarism for a thousand years."[5]
Theodosius II. reigned till 450. The later part of his reign was disturbed by the Nestorian controversy, in which the bishop of Constantinople himself involved the Church. The denial by this prelate of the title Theotokos (Mother of God) to the Blessed Virgin Mary was no obscure attack upon the reality of the Incarnation as the Church had always received it; and the people of the city as well as the clergy received the new teaching with disgust. Eastern and Western bishops united against the heresy, and in 431 the third General Council of the Church at Ephesus condemned it and its author, and again defined the Catholic faith. The party of Nestorius was not suppressed, though he was himself deposed, and in the sixth century it became the great agent of Christian missions in the East.
Hardly was this false teaching rejected before a new heresy arose. Eutyches, a monk of Constantinople, denied the existence of two natures in Christ, and after a dispute which shook the Church for twenty years his teaching was at last condemned by the fourth General Council, which met at Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus. The Council also emphasised the importance of the position now held by the New Rome by enacting that it should be "magnified in ecclesiastical matters even like the elder imperial Rome, as being next to it." This rule was accepted by the Emperor Marcian, and the power it gave to consecrate the metropolitans of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus was supported by the State as a badge of supremacy. The emperors who followed Marcian were all more or less concerned in the theological strife which the opinions of Eutyches had raised. The Monophysites, as the party which rejected the decisions of Chalcedon came to be called, was constantly rising into power in the Court. The imperial crown was worn in turn by four adventurers, who deposed prelates and attempted to reconcile parties at their will. In 482 the Emperor Zeno, with the advice of the patriarch Acacius, put forth the Henoticon (form of union), which was intended to reconcile the Monophysites to the Catholic Church. The controversy was far from stilled by this inept document; and when in 484, Felix, the pope of Rome, with other Western bishops, wrote to the patriarch Acacius, declaring him deposed from his office, and separated from the communion of the faithful, a schism was caused in Constantinople itself. While the majority of the clergy and people treated the Roman decree with contempt, some of the monks, and especially the Akoimetai (an order which kept up perpetual worship by succession of worshippers, and thus received the name of "sleepless"), refused communion with their own patriarch. The Henoticon had divided the Church. The patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria were Monophysite; Jerusalem and Constantinople were orthodox.
The reign of Anastasius, the son-in-law of Leo, whose wife was the widow of his predecessor Zeno, was regarded by the orthodox as an era of persecution. Himself a man of piety and virtue, he was greeted by the people in the Circus on his accession with the cry, "Reign as you have lived!" He added to the defences of the city a great wall stretching from the Marmora to the Euxine, some thirty-five miles from Constantinople; but he unhappily turned to theology, and widened the gulf which the Henoticon had made between the Emperors and the Church. In November 512, the streets again ran with blood shed by the people for the cause of religious truth. Amid these years stained by crime and folly, the imperial city was again and again in danger from external as well as internal foes. At the beginning of the reign of Anastasius the Isaurians who had been driven from the city rebelled, and for five years there was war, ended only when, in 498, Isaurian captives were led in triumph through the streets. Eleven years before, Theodoric the Goth had stood before the gates, but turned back from the massive strength which he could not overthrow. He was now ruler of Italy. And even in the East, Huns, Romans and Goths again and again threatened the capital. Anastasius dabbled in theology to the end, made overtures to Pope Hormisdas which came to nothing, and died at the age of eighty-eight, regretted by none.