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THE BYZANTINES
OTHER BOOKS ABOUT
MAJOR CULTURES OF THE WORLD
THE SUN KINGDOM OF THE AZTECS
by Victor W. von Hagen
THE ARABS
by Harry B. Ellis
THE BYZANTINES
BY THOMAS CALDECOT CHUBB
ILLUSTRATED BY _Richard M. Powers_
[Illustration: Byzantine people]
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK
_Published by_ The World Publishing Company
2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio
_Published simultaneously in Canada by_
Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-5919_
COWP
Copyright © 1959 by Thomas Caldecot Chubb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief
passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.
Printed in the United States of America.
For Rosamond Caldecot Chubb
CONTENTS
A Crusade That Went Astray 13
Byzantium, Crossroads of the World 22
The Roman Empire and Constantinople 39
The Holy Augustus 46
A Roman Army on Horseback 58
One Religion, One Church 68
Golden Bezants 81
The Byzantine Way of Life 93
Last Days of the Empire 107
CHRONOLOGICAL CHART OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND WORLD EVENTS 117
BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING 123
INDEX AND GLOSSARY 124
_Pronunciations for unfamiliar words are given in the Index_
THE BYZANTINES
[Illustration: Boats]
A CRUSADE THAT WENT ASTRAY
More than 750 years ago—the exact date was May 24, 1203—a mighty and
crowded armada sailed away from the beautiful island of Corfu just
off the northwest corner of Greece.
It headed southward toward a brilliant blue sea.
The weather was balmy. The myrtle was in bloom. The leaves on the
twisted gray olive trees flashed silver. The sky was fine and
clear. The wind was gentle and favorable. Indeed, it barely ruffled
the water. But it filled hundreds and hundreds of sails of every
possible color. Red sails. Golden sails. Lavender sails. Green sails.
Orange sails. And sails of a wonderful bright yellow. Even Geoffrey
of Villehardouin, a bold French baron and famous historian who was
one of the passengers, could not say how many they were. But he did
know that they took his breath away.
“I, Geoffrey,” he scratched out slowly, “to my knowledge have not
ever lied by one word, and I bear witness that never was yet seen
so fair a sight. As far as the eye could reach, there was no space
without sails, and ships, and vessels.”
Certainly there were enough ships to cover miles of ocean. Flat,
broad-beamed palanders, built especially to carry troops and
horses—the 4,500 knights with their fiery steeds, the 9,000 esquires,
and the 20,000 foot soldiers who made up the expedition.
Swift galleys to protect the mighty convoy. These galleys had oars
as well as sails, and they lashed the waters to foam as they hurried
about their tasks. There were even some fat, slow merchant vessels.
Just as it is today, business was business in the Middle Ages, even
when you went to war.
But business or no business, the men crowding the rails were carried
forward by another, nobler purpose. And before each of them had left
his drafty castle in Normandy or France or Italy, he had sworn this
solemn oath: “I will put on the cross, and march to redeem the land
where Jesus lived, and where He died for us.”
Once before it had been redeemed by Godfrey of Bouillon and the
other saints and heroes of the First Crusade. But then the famous
Arab leader Saladin had won it back, and not even Richard the
Lion-Hearted, the knightly king of England, could defeat Saladin.
“We will succeed where Richard failed. _Deus vult!_ God wills it!”
The crusaders had a plan. Instead of landing on the enemy-held
beaches of Palestine, they would sail to Egypt and fight their way
across the desert and up through the famous Gaza strip, about which
we read even today, to Jerusalem. The back door would be easier than
the front door. They could not fail.
Their hearts, therefore, were high as they sailed along the rugged
coast with its deep inlets and its violet mountains—past rocky
Ithaca, the legendary home of the wily Ulysses; past yellow beaches
where the ancient Greeks drew up their craft before they sailed to
rescue Helen of Troy; finally, past the southernmost tip of Greece
where the storms were supposed to meet. Then suddenly something
happened. Instead of continuing toward the Holy Land, the mighty
fleet altered its course and turned north. What possibly could be the
reason? The leaders knew, but most of the fighting men were puzzled.
Soon a whisper ran from lip to lip. There was a new destination.
Constantinople the Golden—the fabled Byzantium! The capital of the
Greek, or Eastern Roman, Empire! The legendary El Dorado city with
its glitter and its glory which was set on the Bosporus, a narrow
little body of water that divides Europe from Asia, separating the
West from the East.
It was the tough old doge of Venice who had changed the crusaders’
minds for them. Henry Dandolo was eighty years old and blind, but he
knew that ducats did not grow on trees, and he was just as eager to
get back the money he had loaned them as any Venetian merchant over
whom he ruled. The crusaders had promised to give the Venetians four
silver marks for each man and two silver marks for each horse that
they transported to the East, but now after months of borrowing and
begging and promising instead of paying, they still owed them 34,000
marks. What could be done about it?
Facing the knights and barons in the great, glittering church of
Saint Mark, the old doge stroked his white beard and had an answer.
“You are fighting men. Pay us back with fighting. The king of Hungary
has taken Zara from us. Take it back again and give it to us.”
They did, but even then the Venetians were not satisfied.
“There is a richer prize ahead. Win us Constantinople. Capture _it_
for us, and we will really call quits.”
The leaders agreed. The Holy Land would have to wait a while to be
redeemed.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the excitement of the crusaders
when they heard the magic name of Constantinople. For they all knew
about the fabulous city. Minstrels told about it in the long sagas
they sang before huge crackling fires on winter nights. They spoke of
its shining metal towers and called it Micklegarth, or Bigtown.
Its fame was also spread throughout the West by Russian traders. In
those days, the Russians were like the vikings who roved the oceans
from America to the Greek Sea. They had enslaved the backward Slavic
tribes of Kiev and Moscow and once a year, when the ice melted, these
snub-nosed, green-eyed marauders made their vassals cut down huge
trees and hollow them into boats. Aboard these, they floated down the
great rivers, and then sailed across the foggy Black Sea and up the
Bosporus until they reached the enormous city, the biggest they had
ever seen. There they traded honey and marten skins and dried fish
and even caviar for pepper and brocades and carved ivory and delicate
enamels. These Russians, too, were dazzled by Constantinople and had
their own name for it. They called it Tsargrad, or Caesar City.
But long before there were Russians or any other kind of vikings, the
city had amazed our ancestors. “I see before my eyes something I had
often heard about but would never believe!” exclaimed Athanaric,
a guttural-speaking king from the forests of Germany. “Look at the
walls. Look at the buildings, look at the harbor filled with ships!
Look at the men of every nation crowding the alleys and bazaars. Look
at the disciplined soldiers! Surely God himself must be the emperor!”
said Athanaric.
The mighty Charlemagne, who had been crowned emperor of the West,
once sent an embassy to Constantinople to discuss the possibility of
marrying the Byzantine empress Irene. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, a
learned Spanish Jew, was astonished at its splendor. It was richer,
he said, than any other city in the world. Why, the ordinary merchant
wore garments of silk ornamented with gold and precious stones! He
rode about his business on horseback as a prince does!
It was the city of Justinian, the great lawgiver, whose book of laws
was still studied in the crusaders’ own cities of Paris and Bologna
700 years after his reign.
Only the wisest of them knew that he was much more than a lawgiver.
A tall towheaded country boy from what is modern Yugoslavia, he was
more than just one of the great Byzantine emperors. He was one of the
great rulers of all time. It was his generals who reconquered Africa,
Italy, and parts of Spain, and almost restored the ancient Roman
Empire. It was he who ordered the most famous architects of the time
to build the church of Santa Sophia. Most of the finest Byzantine
mosaics were done during his reign, and the Orthodox Christian Church
was first firmly established then. The Age of Justinian was the first
great age of the Byzantine Empire when its power affected the whole
Mediterranean world.
It was the city of great soldiers like the cruel Basil the Bulgar
Slayer, who had cold-bloodedly blinded 15,000 of his Bulgarian
enemies, but who had permanently broken the power of these wild
raiders; like John Kercuas, an Asia Minor Napoleon; and like
Nicephorus Phocas, who had rolled back the Arabs, the deadliest foes
of the Byzantines, whether they fought on camel back or on a warship
at sea.
[Illustration: Man standing in boat]
It was the city of foxy Alexius Comnenus, and his dark-eyed daughter,
Anna, who wrote even better histories than Villehardouin.
The crusaders knew about _him_! By his quick thinking and crafty
talking this same Alexius, Emperor Alexius I, had not only persuaded
their grandsires and great-grandsires of an earlier crusade to stay
out of Constantinople, but he had also talked them into fighting the
Turks for him. He had even talked some of them into becoming his
vassals. He had received the leaders in the Sacred Palace, however,
and they told the other barons what they saw there. From then on
Constantinople was a city of marvels to the men of the Middle Ages.
They also began to covet its wealth.
To be sure, not all the crusaders were happy at the thought of
attacking another Christian city, especially when they remembered how
angry the Pope had been at the taking of Zara, also a Christian city.
But the doge of Venice had an answer for every objection.
The Byzantines, the people of Constantinople, were not really true
Christians at all, he said. They were heretics.
The crusaders were not conquering Constantinople; they were restoring
it to its rightful ruler. On board was the young Alexius, who ought
to sit on the throne as Alexius IV. Alexius was a worthless young
man, but his father had been emperor until he was deposed and blinded
by his own brother.
Besides that, how could the crusaders pay back Venice all they owed
her if they did not take Constantinople?
The young Alexius not only promised that he would settle all their
debts if they took the city for him, but that he would give them
enough money to go on to their destination. He said that he would
ride with them at the head of a Byzantine army of 10,000 soldiers. He
promised that as long as he lived he would equip and maintain out of
his own treasury 500 of their knights.
A majority of the brave knights were convinced by these arguments
and by the thought of all the fighting men and gold. Among them was
Geoffrey of Villehardouin who tells us most of what we know about the
Fourth Crusade.
It took almost a month to make the voyage. After the crusaders
rounded the tip of Greece, they sailed past the remains of ancient
Sparta, past Athens, and at the island of Andros they stopped for
water. A little later, they drifted past the site of the ancient town
of Troy. Finally, they touched at Abydos on the historic Dardanelles,
where they raided the countryside and filled their holds with grain.
“Great was the need thereof!” muttered Geoffrey.
On June 23, 1203, they dropped anchor within sight of Constantinople.
The snow-covered Thracian mountains lay to the west, and
grape-colored Asia Minor to starboard. “And be it known to you,”
scratched out Villehardouin, his pulses beating, “that no man among
us was so hardy that he did not tremble.” For in every direction,
there was nothing but high walls and towers and rich palaces and
mighty churches.
The next morning banners and pennants were flown from the castles of
every ship. The coverings were taken from the shields. The bulwarks
were made ready for action. Then the sailors weighed anchor and
spread sails to the wind.
“Thus we passed before Constantinople and so near that we shot at
their vessels. There were so many people on the walls and towers that
it seemed as if there could be no more people in the world.”
Four weeks later the city was in their hands, and although Geoffrey
and his fellow crusaders did not realize it, this event marked a
turning point in history. For 900 years Constantinople had stood
proudly and safe, ruling her empire and giving orders like a queen.
But from now on she would be at the mercy of others.
That is not what Geoffrey and his companions were thinking about as
they rode into the fabled streets, however. They were remembering all
they had heard about the magic city. They were wondering if even half
of it was true.
BYZANTIUM,
CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD
They found that it was true indeed.
On that hot July day when the crusaders and Venetians at last forced
their way with young Alexius into Constantinople, it was neither as
rich nor as powerful as it had been when the earlier Alexius let the
leaders of the First Crusade cool their heels outside its gates more
than a hundred years before.
But if you wanted to find a more fabulous city, you would have had
to go all the way across Asia to distant Cathay. There, of course,
was Khansa (modern Hangchow), which was so enormous that it took one
medieval traveler three days merely to cross from one side of it to
the other. There, too, was Khan Baliq (modern Peking) where “twice
five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled
round” just to make a playground for the Chinese Son of Heaven, or
emperor. But since Marco Polo would not even be born for another
fifty years, most of the crusaders knew very little about Cathay,
that is, if they had even heard of it at all!
Their idea of a big city was London with its gloomy smoke-blackened
houses, and in those days London was really a little town. Even
Westminster Abbey was a mile in the country and surrounded by green
fields. Or Paris with its streets so narrow that you could hardly
see the sky between overhanging gables, and with the great Cathedral
of Notre Dame not yet finished. Paris hardly extended a mile in any
direction. Or Bruges with its bent and wizened wool merchants and
the damp smell of its canals. Even Rome, the most famous city in the
West, could not have had much more than 30,000 inhabitants. Most of
these were ruffians and bandits who robbed pilgrims, fought each
other, and even battled the Pope from castles made of marble stolen
from the ancient monuments.
But Constantinople, at the crossroads of the world, gleamed in the
sun and was proud and mighty. Even then it had a population of at
least 800,000. Possibly a million people lived there.
They were of every kind and race, for like modern New York, the
Byzantine city was a melting pot.
Swarthy Armenians looking for the fortune that had enabled more than
one of their number to mount the Byzantine throne.
Intellectual Greek scholars moving toward the lecture room with a
precious copy of Plato or Aristotle under their arms.
Blond-haired Anglo-Saxons, described by one who saw them to be
“tall as palm trees.” Ever since William the Conqueror had ruled
in England, they had come in growing numbers to join the famous
Varangians, or imperial bodyguard.
Russian traders bursting out of their own Saint Mamas quarter in the
city to drink the unfamiliar Greek wine which made them quarrel and
brawl.
Strikingly handsome Asbagians from Colchis, the land of the legendary
Golden Fleece, and probably of rich placer gold mines almost like the
ones in California.
Jewish merchants from the Pera quarter, on the other side of the
Golden Horn. They were not allowed to live in the city itself which
they had to reach by water, and they were often oppressed and
persecuted; but they were rich, benevolent, and pious.
Unwashed, but shaven Bulgarians, who wore an iron chain for a belt.
Wild, half-Mongol Patzinaks, and somewhat more civilized Khazars from
the Ukraine and the Caucasus.
Dark-eyed Asiatics with pointed beards and black hair, and usually
wearing turbans, who had come by camel caravan from Syria or even
Baghdad.
Iranians. Spaniards. Copts from ancient Egypt. Ethiopians from
fabled Axum. Franks and Lombards. In the old days, there might also
have been Indians and men from China, but no longer. Bankers and
sea captains from Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa. The latter in particular
looked about them nervously. They could not help wondering what their
fate would be now that their archenemy and rival, Venice, had taken
over.
Finally, there were the Byzantines themselves. Proud and haughty
noblemen with strange titles you could hardly pronounce. These
noblemen moved through the streets arrogantly and did not seem to
know that their great days were over. Sometimes a slave walked beside
them, carrying a bright-colored umbrella or parasol. Lovely ladies,
beautifully dressed, jeweled and painted, and probably with a smile
for the tall, fair-haired northerners. Byzantine families, the wife
on a donkey, the husband and children on foot. Fierce-eyed monks, of
whom there were more than 30,000, and priests who swarmed everywhere,
led by their hegumens and archimandrites. And, of course, the famous
Byzantine peddlers with their purposely ragged clothes, gesticulating
hands, and whining cries. The place was still a happy hunting ground
for hucksters.
“The city guarded by God”—the name given by the Byzantines to
Constantinople—was big enough to hold all of them and splendid enough
to make them glad that it could.
A medieval traveler said that the circumference of its walls was
eighteen miles, and although he was probably just as good at telling
tall stories as present-day travelers are, he may have been right. At
least if you included such flourishing suburbs as Galata (once called
Sycae, or Figtrees) and Scutari (formerly Chrysopolis, or Gold City).
Galata (like Pera) and Scutari were separated from Constantinople by
the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, respectively, which were narrow
bodies of water, not as wide as the Hudson River or the East River at
New York City.
Constantinople itself was large enough. Like old Rome, New Rome (for
that was its official name; Constantinople, or Constantine’s City,
was only a nickname which had stuck) sprawled over seven rolling
hills and down to every body of water it could find.
[Illustration: THE GREAT PALACE IN CONSTANTINOPLE]
That was what a visitor remembered most about Constantinople: One was
never far from the water. It was shaped like a hitchhiker’s thumb
pointed toward the shore of Asia Minor, and it was bounded by sea
on every side except where the thumb joined the hand. On the north
was the famous Golden Horn—an arm of the Bosporus—which is still a
wonderful harbor. It is so deep that ships can moor with their
prows against the warehouses ashore and still be comfortably afloat.
On the north and northeast was the narrow Bosporus with its twisting
channel and its dangerous currents. Jason and his Argonauts had
supposedly sailed through the Bosporus. On the southeast and south
was the Sea of Marmara. On the Marmara shore there were many small
man-made harbors, at least one of which was reserved for the emperor.
Through the Sea of Marmara, one could reach to the Dardanelles, the
Aegean Sea, and finally the Mediterranean; and then on to Egypt, the
Red Sea, and India in one direction, and to Spain and even England in
the other.
Guarded by these seas and by the great walls which protected it from
the west, some of which still stand, was an _Arabian Nights’_ fantasy
of lovely vales and gardens, glittering roofs and towers, and, of
course, resplendent buildings that were beyond anything that the
adventurers from the cold and foggy north could even imagine.
Among the crusaders was another knight who could write as well as
fight. His name was Robert of Clari.
“I do not think,” said Robert, “that in the forty richest cities of
the world there is as much treasure. In fact, the Greeks said that
two-thirds of all the wealth there is, is in Constantinople. The rest
is scattered elsewhere.”
Then he went into details.
Most glittering of all, he noted, was the Palace of Bukoleon. “Within
it,” he said, “there were fully five hundred halls, all connected
with one another and all made with gold mosaic. In it, there were
fully thirty chapels. One of them was called the Holy Chapel, which
was so rich and noble that there was not a hinge or band or any part
such as is usually made of iron that was not all of silver. And there
was no column that was not of jasper or of porphyry or some other
precious stone.”
The Palace of Bukoleon had got its name from a statue showing a fight
between a bull and a lion. It had been the Great, or Sacred, Palace
of the earlier emperors. It covered 25 or 30 acres and was really a
collection of buildings, for a Byzantine palace was never a single
edifice.
There were too many buildings in the Great Palace to tell you about
all of them. Among them was the Daphne Palace. It was the oldest one,
having been built by Constantine the Great when he founded the city.
There was the Building of the Nineteen Beds where the emperor could
hold a state dinner for 218 important people. Another building was
the Chalké where the emperor received his parade troops. It was 650
feet long, and in the old days it was guarded by Khazars with drawn
bows. It got its name because its roof was a huge sheet of polished
copper. A fourth building was the Magnaura, or Fresh Breeze, Palace
where the empress went in stately procession to take her ceremonial
baths.
It was at the Magnaura Palace that an Italian visitor discovered what
the Byzantines would do to impress strangers. Liutprand, the bishop
of Cremona, was led before the emperor, whom he found seated upon a
golden throne. There he was told to bow himself three times, each
time with his face to the ground.
He did so; then he looked up. No emperor.
By a clever device, the latter had been lifted to the ceiling, and
now clad in entirely new clothes, he looked down upon the bishop.
In the meantime, gilded mechanical birds began to sing, and gilded
bronze lions beat the ground with their tails and roared terribly
with open mouth and quivering tongues.
Part of the palace group, too, was the renowned church of Santa
Sophia. It was known as the Great Church, and although it was not
as big as Saint Peter’s in Rome, it was one of the largest sacred
buildings ever made by man. Even today, with most of its mosaics
covered with whitewash—this was done by the Turks—it is like nothing
else in the world. To Robert of Clari, its great height, equivalent
to a modern eighteen-story building, its many chapels, its lacelike
balconies, and its beautifully carved pillars made it like the work
of an enchanter. Its dome was so vast that the architects had to try
twice before they could make one that would not fall down. When they
did, it was so graceful that it seemed to be floating on air.
[Illustration: Byzantium city]
But what impressed Robert of Clari most of all was its
more-than-Oriental splendor. The principal altar was beyond price,
he said. The altar table was 14 feet long. It was made of gold and
precious stones crushed up together. Above it was a solid silver
canopy held up by solid silver columns. The whole ceiling was
overlaid with pure gold. Robert did not even speak of the mosaics
which we now know were as fine as any ever made, but he did say that
there were more than 200 chandeliers. Each of these had twenty-five
or more lamps, and was hung from a silver chain as thick as a man’s
arm.
Last but not least of the palace buildings was the Hippodrome, or
Circus. This was a tremendous stadium about 2,000 feet long and 600
feet wide. On three sides of it were thirty or forty rows of seats,
and at the north end was the Cathisma, or balcony, where the emperor
and empress sat in state. It must have held 100,000 people.
In the days of old the Hippodrome was the center of almost every
kind of citizen activity. Here were held wildly exciting chariot
races during which the Green and Blue factions (they were like the
Democrats and Republicans in the United States) forgot their politics
to bet on their favorites, and were ready to fly at each other with
stones or swords if the wrong one got ahead. Here there were wild
beast fights, bearbaiting, acrobatic feats, performances by clowns,
jugglers, trained dogs, and even a trained, gilded crocodile. But not
fights by gladiators, for the Christian Byzantines did not think it
was right for one man to kill another in the name of sport.
Here, too, the emperor-elect stood to hear the crowds proclaim him,
and it was here that more than once he had to face the people and
promise to obey his own laws. Some very bloody riots, called the Nika
revolt, started at the Hippodrome, and it was there that they were
put down with a loss of 30,000 lives.
But Robert of Clari did not limit his sightseeing to the Great Palace
and its grounds. He went everywhere. He visited the new Palace of
Blachernae by the Golden Horn and saw that it was almost as splendid
as the Bukoleon, even though it had _only_ twenty chapels and two
or three hundred chambers! He stood at the Golden Gate with its
two life-sized elephants made of copper. This gate was only opened
when the emperor, called the Augustus, returned from a victory.
Then he was taken through it seated on a golden throne on a golden
four-wheeled chariot. The clergy scattered incense, and the crowd
shouted, “Life eternal to our holy Augustus!”
Robert also saw the Gate of the Golden Mantle with its shining globe
which was supposed to protect the city from being destroyed by
lightning. A statue on the globe proclaimed in large letters: “Anyone
who lives in Constantinople a year can be rich enough to afford a
golden mantle like the one I wear.”
He saw the great monument to Justinian. It towered into the air,
and on top of it was a bronze statue of this mighty emperor. He was
on horseback and wore a headdress very much like that of an Aztec
chieftain.
He also saw the holy relics with which the city was filled—two pieces
of the true cross, the head of the lance that pierced Christ’s side,
two of the nails used in the Crucifixion, a vial containing the
Saviour’s blood, the tunic that He wore on the first Good Friday, the
crown of thorns itself, and the famous “handkerchief of Edessa” on
which His portrait had been imprinted by a miracle.
Last of all, Robert of Clari gawked at the two columns each of which
prophesied the city’s doom. “Even our coming was predicted,” he said.
But no one in Constantinople understood what the ships and soldiers
on the columns meant until the crusaders were actually there. Then
the frightened people realized that short-haired warriors with iron
swords would come from the West to conquer them. By that time, it was
too late.
But there was much more to this Byzantine city than palaces and
monuments and churches. It was a city of people as well as the city
of the emperor, and it was all noise and excitement, hustle and
bustle, and activity.
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!
[Illustration:
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.
Sometimes the empire was so small that it was little more than the
city itself.
But whether it was big or little, it was almost always the most
important and the strongest nation west of China. Sometimes it was
the only important one!
How did it get that way?
How was it able to keep strong when so much of the rest of the world
was breaking into pieces?
What did it do for the world? For it did a great deal.
Why should you and I care about Constantinople and the Byzantine
Empire?
I will try to tell you.
[Illustration: Four people]
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CONSTANTINOPLE
The beginning o£ the story took place a long time ago, and not even
in the same land.
Back in the days when our ancestors still dressed in skins and hides
and had just given up stone weapons for bronze, a group of people
moved out of central Europe to the north of Italy. They stayed there
for a thousand years, made pottery and grew beans, beets, barley, and
millet and finally learned how to use iron. They also grazed cattle
and herded sheep, and so one day when they learned that the coastland
from the Tiber River to the Bay of Naples was so lush with tall
green grass that it was called Vitelia (the name Italy comes from
mispronouncing this), or Calfland, they moved south again.
There they settled in the rugged blue hills, and there they became
the various Italian tribes. Most important of these to our story
were the Latins. For reasons of safety, these Latins, like the
others, lived in the craggiest places they could find, but they
always came down to the _campania_, as the level land was called,
to fatten their lowing herds. And in 754 B.C., according to Roman
legend, twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, decided to stay there. They
became chieftains of a band of robber cattle-herders, and at the
exact spot where the twins said they had been nourished as babes by
a she-wolf (who some say was a woman named Lupa, the Latin word for
“wolf”), they founded a small town of mud-and-wattle houses.
They named it Rome after Romulus, the older twin. Little did anyone
dream that one day it would be one of the most famous cities in the
world! Still less did anyone imagine that the Romans would march out
of it to conquer the world!
But that is just exactly what they did. In the beginning, they had
troubles and trials. In fact, an old story says that when the Gauls
from France invaded the city, the capital was saved only when a
gaggle of geese cackled and warned the senators.
But the Romans were stubborn, good fighters, well-disciplined, and no
matter how bitterly they battled each other in more than one bloody
civil war, they always stood together when they faced an enemy. By
the time of Julius Caesar 700 years later, they had reached the
English Channel in one direction and the Caspian Sea in the other.
When Trajan was emperor (about 100 A.D.), practically every part
of the known civilized world was included in their empire. Of the
eighty-two countries in the United Nations at the time this book was
written, all or a part of at least thirty were in Trajan’s empire,
and a great majority of the other fifty-two countries are in lands,
like America, that hadn’t been discovered. They were ruled by one man.
What is more, soon all the inhabitants of all these lands were Roman
citizens. _Civis Romanus sum._ I am a Roman citizen. This could be
said by longhaired Celts walking the heather in Britain; by Berbers
in the Atlas Mountains in Africa; by haughty Spaniards (Trajan
himself was born in Spain); by Gauls in France, Egyptians, Greeks,
Syrians, Arabs; even by Scythians and Sarmatians from South Russia,
and by Germans from across the Rhine.
This was a great achievement that had never happened before, but it
also made a lot of difficulties.
Take size alone. The Roman Empire was now too big to manage. In
those days, you couldn’t fly a general (or a tax collector, or an
imperial officer, or the emperor himself) from York, England—that’s
where Constantine the Great was when he started toward Rome to become
the Roman emperor—to the Persian border in a matter of hours. You
couldn’t even put him on a fast train. The Roman roads were famous,
but the only way you could travel them was on foot, on horseback, or
in a litter or chariot. And from one end of the empire to the other
was 3,000 miles!
Two centuries after Trajan, an emperor called Diocletian decided to
do something about it. Diocletian was the son of a freed slave, but
he became the first absolute ruler the Roman Empire ever had. Before
that the emperor was merely _princeps_ (from which the English word
“prince” is derived), or first citizen. But once Diocletian had all
this power, he proceeded to divide it up. He appointed a co-emperor
(a second Augustus) with an assistant emperor called a _caesar_ to
help him, and put him in charge of the Roman Empire in the West.
Diocletian himself, with his own _caesar_, kept the East. Although
he was still head emperor and the other emperor was supposed to obey
him, the Roman Empire was now divided into two parts.
About forty years later, another emperor took an even more important
step. Constantine the Great decided that the empire needed a second
capital as much as it needed two rulers, and since he was a Christian
emperor—actually he was the first Christian emperor—he decided it
must be a Christian city.
He looked around him carefully. First he thought of Nicomedia (now
Ismid in modern Turkey) where Diocletian had had his camp; but it had
been the capital of a heathen king. Then he considered ancient Troy,
for the Romans were supposed to be descended from the Trojans. He
even began to build walls there. But one day somebody reminded him of
the ruined city of Byzantium with its wonderful location.
“That is the place!” he cried.
On foot, with lance in hand and followed by a solemn procession, he
marched over pleasant hills and valleys that were still covered with
vines and greenery.
As they tried to keep up with him his panting courtiers asked him how
big he planned to make the place.
“I shall walk,” he replied, “until God, my invisible Guide, bids me
to halt.”
An emperor could get things done in those days. Not much more than
four years from the day, hour, and minute that Constantine ordered
his architects and engineers and builders to get to work, the city
was completed and ready to live in. It was equipped with theaters,
public baths, senate houses, a university, courts of justice,
granaries, palaces, and magnificent private dwellings, many of them
the very ones described by Robert of Clari. It had broad squares,
paved avenues, classic porticoes, and aqueducts that brimmed
with clear, cool water. It was decorated with marbles, statues,
and priceless works of art; at the emperor’s command, the cities
of Greece and Asia Minor had been rifled of their most precious
treasures to make sure of this.
It was filled with people too. Constantine invited (that was the same
thing as _ordered_) senators to move from Rome. He presented costly
buildings to his favorites. He confiscated the estates of many of
his rich subjects, especially in Asia Minor, and gave the income to
those of his subjects who agreed to live in the new city. Of course,
a lot of people came of their own accord. They wanted to get in on
something good.
It was lucky indeed that Diocletian and Constantine had taken these
steps. For suddenly the Roman Empire began to quake and tremble. All
through recorded history and long before, the barbarians from the
northern swamps and forests of Europe kept pouring down upon the
lands to the south of them. As a matter of fact, the Romans, as well
as the Greeks whom Homer wrote his poems about, were from the north.
When Homer spoke of the “golden-haired Achaeans,” he was talking
about the Greeks. But the men around the Mediterranean—the original
Greeks—were dark, as they are today. The Achaeans came from the north.
For a long time Roman might had kept these tribesmen back, and
civilization and a comfortable life had flourished. As many men lived
in peace or happiness as ever have before or since.
But now all at once Rome grew weak almost as fast as it had grown
powerful, and the barbarians rode again. Almost immediately they were
able to cross the frontiers whenever they wanted to. Soon the empire
couldn’t hold them off at all.
Less than a century after Constantine, Alaric the Goth marched into
Rome and burned a great deal of the city. Forty-five years later
another tribe, the Vandals, destroyed the rest. We get the word
“vandalism” from the Vandals. It means the willful destruction of
something beautiful, which is what the Vandals did. After the Vandals
other Germanic tribes, with their horned helmets and their long
yellow hair, came streaming in, bringing their women and children
with them. They were followed by the Mongolian Huns and Avars.
In 476 A.D., one of the barbarian chiefs decided it was foolish
to pretend any longer. He deposed the then Roman emperor, Romulus
Augustulus (a Latin name meaning “Romulus, the little Augustus”), and
proclaimed himself king of Italy. Thus ended the Roman Empire in the
West.
If it had not been for Diocletian and Constantine, it would also
have ended the Roman Empire everywhere. It might have ended Western
civilization, too.
But the emperor of the Roman Empire in the East stood safe behind his
mighty walls, and he announced as quickly as possible that he was now
emperor of the whole Roman Empire. He ordered this barbarian king of
Italy and all the other barbarian kings to acknowledge him as emperor
and overlord.
Many of them did.
That is probably the most important thing to remember about the
Byzantines. They considered themselves Romans. Most people in the
West called them Greeks, and indeed they spoke Greek and were Greek
in many other ways. They were also Orientals in their splendor.
But for at least the first 900 years of their history they thought
of themselves as Romans and were proud of it. Their emperor was
still the Augustus, and his other title _autokrator_ was a Greek
translation of the Latin _imperator_, or commander in chief. Even
when he later took the proud title of _basileus_, a Greek equivalent
for the Persian “king of kings,” he was _basileus tou Romaion_, king
of the Romans. To call him “Greek emperor,” as did some Westerners,
was to use a fighting word.
The second most important thing to remember about the Byzantines was
that Constantinople never fell into the hands of the enemy. This
means that the empire never fell into the hands of the barbarians,
for in those days the capital was even more important than it is
today, and so in spite of all the lands it governed, Constantinople
_was_ the empire. As long as it stood, the empire stood. The
Byzantines had plenty of troubles, and more than once saw the turbans
and scimitars of the Arabs, and the felt hats and yellow faces of the
followers of some steppe-riding khagan, right beneath their walls.
But except when he was invited, no foreign invader had ever set foot
in the streets of Constantinople until Geoffrey of Villehardouin and
Robert of Clari came with their fellow crusaders.
It is a fact that for century after century, when almost every other
important city in the world was sacked and looted over and over
again, the Byzantines were able to make and keep Constantinople
safe. It was a place of refuge for men and for ideas and for the
civilization the Greeks and Romans had given them and for the ideals
of Christianity in the midst of a stormy world.
[Illustration: Man standing]
THE HOLY AUGUSTUS
The Byzantines were able to keep Constantinople safe because they
were one of the few peoples living in the time between the fall of
Rome and modern days who had a strong government and one that worked.
The rest of the Roman Empire had been divided by conquest into a
good hundred or more independent units. These were ruled by kings,
princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, and some cities were even free
republics headed by wrangling priors. Their boundaries were always
changing, and nobody ever knew just who was governing whom today, and
who would be tomorrow. But the eastern half of the Roman Empire had a
single government which was almost always orderly.
The Byzantines were able to do it because they had a fine army, and
when they needed it, a swift and deadly navy—to say nothing of a
diplomatic corps with a well-paid staff of skillful, highly trained
diplomats.
They were able to do it because of their Christianity. After Antioch
(in Syria) and Alexandria (in Egypt) had been captured by the Arabs,
Constantinople was the most important Christian city except Rome.
And as far as the Byzantines were concerned, the state worked for
Christianity, and Christianity worked for the state.
Finally, the Byzantine Empire was able to stand firm and to last so
long because the Byzantines could afford to spend what they needed
to. Their government was tremendously expensive. Their army and their
navy with its _strategoi_ and _drungariuses_ (generals and admirals)
cost them a lot of money and so did their extravagant ambassadors.
The church with its own mighty army of high officials and lesser
functionaries was very expensive too.
But as long as the Byzantines were not only able to support emperor,
army, navy, diplomats, and the church, but were _willing_ to do so,
the Byzantine Empire flourished and was great. It was only after
they began to economize, when a lot of Byzantines decided they were
spending too much on the army, that their troubles began.
At the head of the government was the emperor, and he was certainly
the most absolute ruler there could possibly be. Even in the earliest
days of the empire, he was chief of the Byzantine state, commander in
chief of the army and navy, the only one who could make laws, and the
head of the Byzantine courts. In other words, he was equivalent to
the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court of the United States
rolled into one.
When he became _basileus_, he was even more than that. The Great
King was master and owner as well as sovereign, and his subjects
became slaves. They had to humble themselves on the ground before
him, and foreigners had to as well. Beside that, he was the head of
the Byzantine church (now known as the Greek, or Orthodox Eastern,
Church), and in this connection took on another title, _isapostolos_,
which is Greek for “equal to the Apostles.”
But in spite of his great power, in many ways he was a democratic
emperor who was elected or at least chosen by a process carefully set
down by law. First he had to be named by either the senate or the
army. Then he had to be approved by whichever of those two bodies
that had not named him in the first place. Finally he had to be
hailed by the people. (This was true even when the emperor seized
power or when an emperor named his son co-emperor so that he would
be sure to succeed him. He still had to be approved and hailed.) But
once the emperor was elected, he was “the emperor chosen by God,” for
the Byzantines firmly believed that God guided them in everything
they did. From then on, it was not only treason but wicked and sinful
to oppose the emperor. That is, unless you were successful. If you
led a successful revolution, it meant that God had chosen you to take
the old emperor’s place!
The empress—the Augusta, or _basilissa_, as she was also called—was
almost equally important. To be sure, in the long history of the
Byzantine Empire, only three women actually mounted the throne to
rule in their own name, and only one of these amounted to anything.
This was the wicked Irene who wanted to marry Charlemagne and who
blinded her own son so she could stay in power. However, she did not
call herself empress. She called herself emperor of the Romans just
as if she had been a man.
But even though she rarely ruled, the empress was not shut up in a
harem, and many empresses had great power and even greater influence.
Ariadne, the widow of an early emperor, went before the people and
told them that her husband was dead. “Choose us a new ruler!” they
clamored. She named a palace official, and then she married him. He
was a very good ruler.
Zoe, the daughter of another emperor, did even better. She married
three men, and each in turn became emperor.
More than that. The nephew of her second husband persuaded her to
adopt him and name him her co-emperor. Then he had her hair shorn and
shipped her off to the Princes Islands, in the Sea of Marmara, as a
nun.
The crowds surged around the palace. “Where is our lovely lady,” they
shouted, “whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather ruled
before her?” The usurper had to bring her back, but even that did not
save him. He ended in a monastery himself.
Saint Theodora (the wife of an emperor and the mother of one) used
her influence to end a religious dispute that had disturbed the state
for more than 100 years, while another Theodora, who was far from a
saint, saved it from revolution.