Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire

by William Holden Hutton

A few words may suffice to explain and date the events of the latter part of the twelfth century.

Manuel up to his death in 1180 retained all the appearance of a victorious Emperor, though he suffered a severe defeat in 1176, at Myriokephalon in Phrygia, from the Seljukian Turks. Crusading princes, the Turkish Sultan Kilidji Arslan, and the Christian King, Amaury of Jerusalem, visited him at Constantinople, and were received with ostentatious splendour. Alexius II., his son and successor, was a boy of thirteen, and in two years the streets of the imperial city witnessed a desperate encounter between his supporters and those of his sister Maria, which swept up to the walls of S. Sophia. Then Andronicus, the cousin of the Emperor Manuel, was recalled from banishment, and he signalised his acquisition of power by a massacre of the Latins in the city. From this he proceeded to slay every one who stood in his way, till, in 1183, having murdered the young Alexius, he seated himself on the throne. For two years he continued a course of crimes greater than those that any sovereign ever committed, till a popular insurrection crowned a descendant of the great Alexius. Andronicus, though the vilest of men, had made a serious effort to reform the administration and reduce the influence of the nobles. His fall left the Empire to its fate.

The miserable end of the wickedest of the Emperors, as it is told by a recent writer from the pages of Nicetas, may well serve to illustrate the horrors with which the Empire in its fall was only too familiar.

He was confined in the prison called after the Cretan Anemas, who was first imprisoned there by Alexius Comnenus. "He quitted it only to die at the hands of his infuriated subjects. On the eve of his execution he was bound with chains about the neck and feet, like some wild animal, and dragged into the presence of his successor, Isaac Angelus, to be subjected to every indignity. He was reviled, beaten, struck on the mouth; he had his hair and beard plucked, his teeth knocked out, his right hand struck off with an axe, and then was sent back to his cell, and left there without food or water or attention of any kind for several days. When brought forth for execution, he was dressed like a slave, blinded of one eye, mounted upon a mangy camel, and led in mock triumph through the streets of the city to the Hippodrome, amidst a storm of hatred and insult, seldom, if ever, witnessed under similar circumstances in a civilised community. At the Hippodrome he was hung by the feet on the architrave of two short columns which stood beside the figures of a wolf and a hyena, his natural associates. But neither his pitiable condition, nor his quiet endurance of pain, nor his pathetic cry, "Kyrie eleison, why dost Thou break the bruised reed?" excited the slightest commiseration. Additional and indescribable insults were heaped upon the fallen tyrant, until his agony was brought to an end by three men who plunged their swords into his body, to exhibit their dexterity in the use of arms."[24]

Isaac Angelus was little more worthy of his position than the man whom he displaced. He gave himself to enjoyment, to building, to luxury of every kind. He lost Bulgaria and Cyprus, and when his own general, Alexis Branas, turned against him and led his troops to besiege Constantinople, it was saved only by Conrad of Montferrat, the husband of the Emperor's sister Theodora, who was then in the city on his way to the East.

The troops of Branas assembled outside the walls and attacked, but were driven back from the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapoussi): the famous icon of the Blessed Virgin, believed to have been painted by S. Luke, was carried round the walls: then a sortie led by Conrad scattered the rebels and brought the revolt to an end. But Isaac was incapable of ruling. He retained his throne with difficulty for ten years. At length in 1195, when he was on the way to the Bulgarian war, he was betrayed by his brother Alexius. He was not, as would have happened two centuries before, made a monk: he was imprisoned in a monastery, blinded, and left to die in peace. No one foresaw his restoration.

Alexius III., called also Angelus Comnenus, was no wit better than his brother, but he had a clever wife, Euphrosyne, in whom the worst characteristics of the Eastern Empresses were reproduced. Her profligacy and extravagance completed the ruin of the Empire, and when the fourth crusade turned its arms against the city it fell an easy prey.

It has been well said of the rule of the early Byzantines—during the period, that is, that extended from the foundation of the city by Constantine down to the death of Michael VI. and the end of the Macedonian dynasty—that no other government has ever existed in Europe which has secured for so long a time the same advantages to the people. There was a general security for life and property; there was a magnificent system of law; there was a genuine and commanding influence of religion; and municipal government was, for the age, well developed. But this can only be accepted with considerable qualifications. If the government itself did not change, the dynasties often did; if there was a good code of laws, there were terrible and barbarous punishments, and there were often periods of mob-rule; if there was a sound system of municipal government, it was far from a complete check on the excesses of imperial power.

But the most striking characteristic of these centuries, when all deductions have been made, is the stability of the government. As the city and the Empire were ruled under Isaac Comnenus, so, save for changes more superficial than real, had it been ruled under Justinian. The new families of merchant princes that had grown up and lined the Bosphorus with their houses, were as much in touch with the old system as the old families had been. Trading interests had become stronger and stronger with each century, and trading interests are in the main conservative. But the century and a half that followed the accession of the Comneni told inevitably in favour of further changes. First there was the slow and terrible advance of the Turks, cutting away strip by strip the outskirts of the Empire. Then there was the exhaustion proceeding from the constant passage through the Empire of crusaders, often pillaging, always contending, a continual drain upon the material resources of the land. More important still was the great and rapid increase of dynastic contentions. As ever, internal dissension was the real cause of the self-betrayal which gave up Constantinople in 1204 to the robbers of the West.

The condition of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century has been the subject of more than one exhaustive examination. We must briefly summarise what is known of the capital at this period of its greatest riches, and perhaps its greatest weakness. First and most prominently, it was a great commercial centre. Subordinate to its commerce were its art, rich and wonderful though that was, its military power, even its popular and all-embracing religious spirit. Commerce influenced all these. It gathered together all the nations of the earth, and it inspired them with greed for its treasures. Constantinople was, as it still is to some extent, in spite of the revolutions wrought by railways and by steamships, the most important outlet of commerce in the world. All the traffic of Asia naturally came that way; the great caravans of Central Asia, the trade of Palestine, Asia Minor, Persia, even Egypt, journeyed naturally to the New Rome. So naturally was Constantinople the centre of trade that she acted as a sort of universal banker. Her coins were in use in India and in distant England.