THE IMPERIAL CITY
"The city, signori! Behold the city!"
The cry rang from the mastheads of the fleet. Men dropped their
shipboard occupations and ran to the rails. Lord and knight, sailor
and sergeant, squire and varlet, all heeded the magic words. After
months of travel and toil and sorrow and heartache and
disappointment, the goal of their efforts was at hand.
Constantinople lay before them, a bright blur across the level
surface of the Sea of Marmora, where the European and Asiatic coasts
approach to form the gorge of the Bosphorus, through which the waters
of the Black Sea escape to mingle with the Mediterranean. Majestic
and serene on her unrivalled seat, she viewed these newcomers with
the calm dignity that had been born of nine centuries of imperial
rule.
Since Constantine first traced the boundaries of the destined capital
of the Eastern half of the Roman world, in the year 328 A.D., a score
of conquerors had dared to assail the mighty walls that had been
strengthened and extended by Emperor after Emperor. The barbarian
hordes which submerged Europe in the latter days of Roman dominion in
the West, when the old Latin civilisation was tottering to its
fall--Huns, Avars, Gepidi, Goths, Vandals, Varings, Tartars,
Vlachs--and the later half-savage Slavic races, which absorbed the
Asiatic flood and with it the lust for conquest--the Russians, the
Bulgarians, the Serbs--had stormed against Constantinople time and
time again. In the first dawn of Islam's might, when the hardy Arab
tribes swept all before them in a mad rush of fanatic faith in
victory, Constantinople hurled them back--twice. The rude Western
warriors of the first three Crusades viewed with jealous awe the
tremendous fortifications which girdled the Imperial City's matchless
wealth.
Save only the capitals of the two Moslem Caliphates, Bagdad and
Cordova, no cities of the Middle Ages approached it in grandeur, size
or riches, and it exceeded these two even as they exceeded such
huddled towns as London and Paris. A million people worked and lived
within its municipal jurisdiction. All that was precious, all that
was worth while in the literature and philosophy of Imperial Rome and
Republican Greece, was collected in its libraries and monasteries.
The art of Phidias, of Praxiteles and a long line of men not unworthy
to call them masters, embellished its streets and palaces. Here only
in the tumultuous mediæval world the lofty principles of Roman law
were the accepted guide to justice. The cramping hand of the feudal
system had not been permitted to thwart trade and commerce. Schools,
police, posts, theatres, organised machinery for charitable and
benevolent work, the requisites of an established society, were
present and in being.
But there was a reverse to this picture of orderly magnificence.
Like so many states which had preceded it, like the Elder Rome, whose
name and prestige it had inherited, Constantinople was suffering from
the decay of age, and this decay was working from the top downwards.
With the tightening of the Imperial power and the relaxation of the
supervision of the Senate, the way had been made easy for the despot.
If an able Emperor assumed the purple buskins, the Empire prospered.
If a sot, a degenerate, a fool or a selfish man won the Imperial
dignity, the Empire crumbled. For several centuries now Byzantium
had been crumbling. An Emperor occasionally arrested the slow
deterioration, but the dry rot of over-centralised authority was
spreading its contamination with inexorable virulence.
The Empire was dying, slowly but surely. The hammer-blows of the
Saracen states on the East were driving in its boundaries in Asia
Minor and blotting out the sturdy peasantry, who had been the
mainstay of armies that had upheld the traditions of the Roman
legions for centuries after the Roman Eagles had given way to the
Cross. The line of the northern frontier, fixed by Trajan at the
Danube, long since had receded to the Rhodopes, and year by year the
vigorous Slav peoples pushed farther and farther into the domains of
the Empire. On the shores of the Marmora and in the surrounding
country in Europe and Asia Minor there still remained a belt of
prosperous towns and farming communities. And no amount of
misgovernment and incapacity could take away from Constantinople
itself the commercial supremacy which came from its situation at the
juncture of the trade routes between Asia and Africa and Europe.
But this Empire, against which was launched the comparatively feeble
forces of the Fourth Crusade, was a husk, a sham, a thing of empty
pomp, massive and imposing to outward seeming, inwardly a rotten core
ready to fall to pieces at the first vigorous push which pierced the
exterior covering. It seemed incredible that such could be the case.
The knights and soldiers of the host experienced the same dumb awe
which gripped the Crusaders of Godfrey de Bouillon and Frederick
Barbarossa. As the vast skyline of the city loomed clearer and
clearer over the water, their astonishment was changed to fear. For
the first time they appreciated the full extent of their undertaking.
"St. Cuthbert be my guardian, Messer Hugh!" gasped Ralph. "But that
is no city! It is a whole country by itself!"
"Ay, Ralph, never saw I the like!" assented Hugh. "Venice is but a
village compared to this. There must be as many people in it as in
all England."
"You say truth, Hugh," said Matteo, beside them. "I doubt if
England--ay, or Northern France, holds more souls than you could
count in Constantinople and its suburbs."
Their galley was close in-shore, and the panorama of the Marmoran
coast unrolled itself before them. For miles back they had passed a
succession of well-built towns and villages, the larger ones walled
and gated against attack. Interspersed between were villas and
palaces, farmsteads and monasteries. Hugh noted that none of the
frequent churches had towers such as were common in France and
England. Instead there were light, soaring domes, which gave an
effect of ease and spaciousness to the smallest structure. People
clustered on the shore to watch the fleet pass, but there were no
evidences of panic fear. Farmers worked in the fields and fishermen
cast their nets. Now and then the sweet chime of church-bells came
to their ears, and sometimes they saw religious processions passing
along the roads.
"It would seem that they set much store by religion," observed Hugh.
"Sure, Messer Hugh, I thought they were idolaters or somewhat of that
like," said Ralph. "They are never Christians, are they?"
Matteo laughed.
"Your view would please the Pope and his Cardinals, I make no doubt,
Ralph," he answered. "But I hold it is as needful to be fair in
matters of religious controversy as in, let us say, a question of
knightly deportment. The Greeks are schismatics, in sooth; yet the
practise of their version of Christianity is as the breath of life to
them. They like nothing better than a close dispute over some item
of the Creed or mayhap the definition of a phrase that will help
nobody nearer to Heaven by knowing."
"What is the chief difference between their belief and ours?" asked
Hugh.
"Nay, there you would draw me beyond my depth," laughed the jongleur.
"Seriously, comrade, as near as I could ever make out, 'tis largely
in the question of their worship of pictures--ikons they call
them--of the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord and His Saints. And of
course, there is the matter of their claim to be independent of the
Holy Apostle of Rome."
"Beyond question, they are in gross error," said Hugh seriously.
"Let us hope we may succeed in winning them to perceive the light of
grace. But when I look at those walls and towers I could doubt that
even so puissant a host as ours may ever pass them."
Before Hugh, as he spoke, loomed the White Castle, the immense
fortification which linked the land walls of Constantinople with the
sea walls fronting the Bosphorus. Above the frowning barriers,
crowded with people, showed a mass of towers and pinnacles,
stretching away as far as the eye could see. In this end of the city
were the poorer quarters, the slums and the haunts of the lowly.
Their houses were jammed close together, and off the main
thoroughfares the streets were narrow and dark. Yet there were
frequent open spaces. Here a church, there a monastery, beyond a
nunnery or a tree-bordered cistern fed by aqueducts which were laid
under-ground from the distant hills of Thrace. Beyond all these
again showed the eastern quarters of the city, perched on their six
hills and the valleys between. The seventh hill--for like Imperial
Rome, Imperial Constantinople boasted her seven hills--was in the
southwestern quarter.
It was impossible for the eye to take in everything, but Hugh saw all
that he could. What caught his attention first was the walls,
ponderous, girt with hundreds of towers. To the landward they rose
tier above tier, three lines of impenetrable bulwarks, fronted by a
moat as broad and deep as a river. On the seaward face they were
built at the water's edge with ledges of boulders to guard their
foundations from the dash of the waves. At intervals, too, the
serried array of the seaward towers was broken by the gap of a
harbour, protected by a jetty and guarded by fortifications
constructed in the sea with the same careful weight as those which
owned a firm bed on land.
Hugh had never seen such walls. In France, England and Italy he had
seen castles built in the new fashion of splendour combined with
strength which men had brought home with them from the Holy Land
after contact with the master-masons of the Saracens. But neither in
Western Europe nor in Paynimry were there walls like those which
encircled Constantinople. They were the outstanding achievement of
engineering in mediæval times. For fourteen miles they marched, from
forty to more than one hundred feet high, and on the land side
presenting a series of defences two hundred feet wide. They were
like cliffs, giving an effect of permanence and endurance, monuments
of the skill and pertinacity of man. When Hugh saw them they had
lasted for nine hundred years, and although he did not know it, they
were to last seven hundred years longer.
His wonderment showed in his face.
"By St. James!" he said reverently. "They were men who built thus!
How can our puny numbers avail against such barriers?"
"I know not, Hugh," returned Matteo. "An God wills us victory, it
may be! But I have seen the walls of Antioch, and I tell you that
though men say they could not be built again in our day, they are as
nothing to what you see. Constantinople is a virgin city. No enemy
hath ever forced her."
"What is that yon?"
Hugh pointed across the houseroofs to a towering structure which
dwarfed the nearby buildings. In front of it a slender column of
stone soared aloft like an upraised finger, crowned by a brazen
statue which must have been more than lifesize to show at that
distance.
"That is the Gate of the Forerunner, for so the Greeks call St. John
the Baptist. It is an arch so wide and high that a galley such as
ours could pass through it with sail spread and oars pulling. Before
it is the Column of Constantine, erected to the memory of the great
Emperor who founded the city anew. And beyond the Column is the
Forum of Arcadius, whereon is the Church of the Forerunner. Look!
You may see the dome sparkle in the sun. On the left hand, that
enormous building is the Baths of Arcadius. You may not see it from
here for the houses but close by the Forum of Arcadius there is a
wondrous statue of the Lady Helen of Troy, a demoiselle of the old
Greeks about whom they sing a romaunt that is right pleasant to hear.
It is a statue older even than the city, they say."
The fleet drew in closer to the walls, keeping just out of range of
the military engines that stood ready on every tower and curtain.
Sometimes the Greeks who watched the hundreds of ships shook their
swords and shouted hoarse challenges, to which the host gave answer
in expressions of defiance. For the most part the passage was made
in silence. Hugh looked and looked to his heart's content, and so
did every man in the fleet who had energy to drag himself to the
rail. Even those unfortunates who were sick with scurvy begged their
comrades to help them to a view of the marvellous spectacle.
As they passed on, the buildings within the walls became less dense.
Open spaces were more numerous. Groves of trees, tall, stately
cypresses and cedars, grew about palaces as fair as the visions of a
dream. Marble, onyx, jacinth, porphyry, sandstone, granite, picked
out with copper, bronze, silver and gold, these buildings gleamed as
though they were encrusted with jewels. Fountains played in their
gardens, for aqueducts built by many Emperors since the days of Old
Rome insured Constantinople a bountiful supply of water, and an
elaborate system of stone-walled sewers laid underground furnished
ample drainage and guarded the city from the terrible epidemics which
at intervals decimated the insanitary cities of the West.
Hugh pointed to building after building, fascinated as a child, and
Matteo described them to him. That was the Church of the Theotokos
Hodegetria, founded by the Empress Pulcheria, where was treasured the
ikon of the Virgin painted by the hand of St. Luke, the palladium of
the city, which was brought out in times of crisis to lead the armies
and revivify the failing spirits of the citizens. Involuntarily,
Hugh bowed his head and crossed himself.
"God send Our Lady has turned against these people," he said
devoutly. "Else we may fight in vain."
"An relics will win for them, the Greeks must be invincible," replied
Matteo. "It has been said that the reason why their city hath always
withstood siege is that the number and sacredness of the relics
furnish a Divine aid which transcends the might of men."
The jongleur continued, and pointed out the Church of St. George,
with its monastery, a rambling collection of buildings set in the
midst of broad grounds; the Atrium of Justinian, a beautiful marble
portico on the hill overlooking the Bosphorus and the Marmora,
enshrining a porphyry statue of the Emperor's wife, Theodora, which
he had erected as a memorial to her and a lounge whence the citizens
might view the sunsets and in which they might seek relief from the
heat of the sun. Church and palace and bath, one succeeded another.
"But that pile ahead! See, on the summit of the next hill!" cried
Hugh. "It is greater than them all!"
"It is, indeed," responded Matteo. "That is the Palace of the
Bucoleon, and it is the richest palace in all the world. In plain
truth, it is not one palace, but a group of palaces, with pleasure
gardens all about them. Moreover, it is in a way a fortress by
itself, for it is surrounded by a wall, and if the Emperor wishes, he
can shut himself off in it and at need defy the whole city. And
besides its several palaces, it hath quarters for soldiers, stables
built of marble, chapels and baths. It is a city in itself."
Hugh marvelled, but wonders crowded upon him afresh. In the distance
he saw St. Sophia, the Great Church or Cathedral of the city, its
high-flung dome poised in air as light as a bubble. Later he was to
marvel afresh at this glorious building, the most perfect religious
edifice which Christians ever built, already then more than six
hundred years old and destined to last like the city's bulwarks
through an additional seven hundred years of oppression, neglect and
abomination.
"The open space on which it stands," Matteo told him, "is called the
Augustaion. This side of it you behold the Palace of the Senate, the
building with the tall pillars. Beyond that again is the Palace of
the Patriarch, he who is, in a manner of speaking, the Pope of the
Greeks. On the southern side that long, flat structure is the Baths
of Zeuxippus. It contains pools of water as long as this ship, and
in winter it can be heated so that the cold does not penetrate. The
great roofless building at the opposite end of the Augustaion from
St. Sophia is the Circus, where the Greeks hold their sports and
games. All the people of the host might find seats in it, and there
would be room for as many more."
"Is there much more of the city than we can see from here?" asked
Hugh.
Matteo laughed.
"Hugh," he said, "we have not seen the half of it--nay, not the
quarter of it. Look away, and you will not be able to see across the
hills to the land walls, for they go inland from the White Castle,
where we first viewed them. So far you have passed along but one
face of the city. You will barely see the third as we round this
point."
Whilst he was speaking the fleet bore out from the shore in order to
pass the point of land which projects into the channel of the
Bosphorus to protect the entrance of the Golden Horn. On the top of
this point, a rugged hill covered with the palaces of patrician
families, stood the Column of Claudius Gothicus, its brazen plates,
chased in bas-relief, flaming back the rays of the sun, a mute
testimonial to the more virile days of the Empire, when subject
peoples bowed their necks to the Emperors and Triumphs passed through
the Golden Gate and up the colonnaded length of the Mesé to the
Augustaion. Round and round the column twisted the story of the
battles Claudius had won, the nations he had conquered, the benefits
he had showered upon Rome. Never a man who stared up at it from the
decks of the fleet far below perceived the ironic message which was
flashed from the brazen plates, the message of defiance of an Empire
which had ceased to conquer, which had ceased even to be Roman.
Around the point a new view burst upon Hugh. He found himself
looking down the close-built shores of the Golden Horn, that
matchless natural harbour which had done so much to facilitate the
commercial pre-eminence of the city. On either bank at the entrance
was planted a squat tower, and between the two was stretched a
weighty chain, which blocked the channel to hostile shipping. Beyond
the chain Hugh had a brief glimpse of another succession of walls and
towers, fronted by wharves packed with shipping. The perspective
seemed endless. As far as he could see the city filled the distance,
dense, populous, sullenly perturbed. Trails of smoke arose from
countless fires and chimneys: a bodyless, indescribable hum echoed
over the water; on the walls there was a gleam of arms and armour.
It was not until the fleet had come about and was making for the
opposite shore of the Bosphorus that Hugh bethought him of Edith. In
his wonder at the marvellous sights spread out before him, he had
forgotten for a moment that she was now separated from him only by
that narrow current of water and those grim walls that seemed to
threaten by their immobility. What was she doing? Had she stood,
perchance, in a window of her father's apartment in some wing of the
huge Palace of the Bucoleon, watching the fleet pass by? Had her
eyes, mayhap, been fixed on the tiny, crawling hull of the
_Paradise_, all unknowing of his presence? Did she still think of
him at all? Or had she become immersed in the brilliant life around
her to a point which shut out memories of the past?
An ache he had not felt in many a day began to gnaw at Hugh's heart,
but his mind was snatched back to the present by the splash of the
anchor overside and the shouts of the shipmen. The fleet had come to
rest in a cove on the Asiatic bank. Atop of a gentle slope which
ascended from the beach stood the Imperial palace of Chalcedon, a
resort of the Byzantine Emperors in summer or when they sought
relaxation in hunting. In the distance were tilled fields with the
corn unshocked.
Hugh turned for one last look across the strait at the outline of
Constantinople, dimming in the twilight. The city appeared to grow
as the light diminished, casting a monstrous shadow athwart the world.