The Story of Constantinople

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Interior of S. Sophia.
Showing the Sultan’s pew and the stairs to the pulpit.

Constantinople

The Story of the old Capital
of the Empire by William
Holden Hutton, Fellow of
S. John Baptist College, Oxford.
Illustrated by Sydney Cooper

London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden, W.C.  ·  ·  1900

v

PREFACE

A word of introduction is necessary to explain the
nature of this sketch of the history of Constantinople.
It is the holiday-task, very pleasant to him, of
a College don, to whom there is no city in the world
so impressive and so fascinating as the ancient home of
the Cæsars of the East.

It is not intended to supersede the indispensable
Murray. For a city so great, in which there is so
much to see, a guide-book full of practical details is
absolutely necessary. For this I can refer the reader,
with entire confidence, to Murray’s Hand-book—and
to nothing else. But I think everyone who visits Constantinople
feels the need of some sketch of its long
and wonderful history. I have myself often felt the
need as I wandered about the city, or spent a long
evening, during the cold spring, in the hotel. I have
endeavoured, as best I could, to supply what I have
myself wanted. I do not pretend to have written a
history of the city “from the earliest times to the
present day” from the mass of original authorities
of which I know something. I have used the
works of the best modern writers freely, and I
should like here, once for all, to express my obligations.
I may venture to say that the list of books
I here insert will be found useful by anyone who
wishes to go further into the history than my little
book is able to take him. The ordinary standard
books are Professor Bury’s edition of Gibbon; Mr
Tozer’s edition of Finlay’s History of Greece; Professor
vi
Bury’s History of the Later Empire; Von
Hammer’s History of the Turks; and the Vicomte
de la Jonquière’s sketch of the same subject.

The authorities, in detail, for the history and
topography of the city are admirably summed up
in Herr Eugen Oberhummer’s contribution to the
Pauly-Wissowas Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft,
band iv., which can be purchased
separately as a “Sonder-Abdruck.” Among the
books which I have found especially useful I must
mention first Professor van Millingen’s Byzantine
Constantinople, The Walls, etc.; the Broken Bits of
Byzantium, by Mrs Walker and the late Rev. C.
G. Curtis, to whose kindness I owe very much, a
book which is now very rarely to be met with, and
ought certainly to be republished; Bayet, L’Art
Byzantin; Kraus, Geschichte der Christlichen Kunst;
Lethaby and Swainson, S. Sophia; Grosvenor, Constantinople;
Paspates, The Great Palace of Constantinople.
Among histories of particular periods there
are none more useful than Pears’ Conquest of Constantinople,
and Mijatovich, Constantine the last Emperor
of the Greeks. Among a mass of interesting and important
articles I should like to note that on Les Débuts
du Monachisme à Constantinople, by M. Pargoire in the
Revue des questions historiques, Jan. 1899.

The texts of the original authorities may be read in
the Bonn edition, and some of them, happily, in Professor
Bury’s admirable collection of Byzantine texts,
of which I have found the three volumes already published
most useful. I have referred in Chapter VII. to
the work of Gyllius, to whom we owe much of our
knowledge of the mediæval city.

I have referred to a great number of books of travel,
as may be seen; it is impossible here to particularise
them all.
vii

The limits of the series have compelled me to confine
myself chiefly to the story of Constantinople as a
mediæval town. Thus I have been reluctantly compelled
to leave out much that I should have liked to
say about Skutari, the Bosphorus and its palaces,
and the present social life and religious observances,
the Dervishes, the “Sweet Waters,” and many
familiar names.

For the same reason, I have dwelt very briefly on
much that is of great interest. I would gladly, for
instance, have said more about Iconoclasm, and something
about that great theologian, S. Theodore of the
Studium.

Practically, I may add that the advice of Murray’s
Guide is always to be taken; personally I have always
found the Hotel Bristol most comfortable in every way,
and I have no occasion to commend any other hotel,
because I have never felt tempted to leave it. It has
had varied fortunes, but it is at its best, I think, as
managed by Herr H. Güllering. I have myself
found a dragoman, except for the first day, unnecessary;
but I can strongly recommend Eustathios
Livathinos as a most pleasant companion. Jacob
Moses has also much experience.

I should add that in my spelling of names I have
usually adopted, for simplicity, the common use; but I
fear I have not even been uniform.

I owe very much to the kind offices of Lord Currie
and of Sir Nicholas O’Connor, Her Majesty’s Ambassadors
in 1896 and 1899, and to several members of
the Embassy, with a very special debt of gratitude to
Mr Fitzmaurice, C.M.G. I can never forget the
kindness of the late Canon C. G. Curtis, whose death
in 1896 was so great a loss to the British community
in Constantinople, to archæology, and to religion.

In several instances photographs taken by my friend,
viii
Mr J. W. Milligan, who was in Constantinople in
1896, have been of not a little use to my friend, the
Rev. Sydney Cooper, to whose illustrations this book
will owe very much more than half its interest.

W. H. HUTTON.

The Great House, Burford, Oxon,
S. Mark’s Day, 1900.

ix

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

TABLE OF EMPERORS

xiii

Constantinople

CHAPTER I
The History of the City in ancient
and mediæval times

1

1. Byzantium Before Constantine.

It is impossible to approach Constantinople without
seeing the beauty and the wonder of its site.
Whether you pass rapidly down the Bosphorus, between
banks crowned with towers and houses and
mosques, that stretch away hither and thither to distant
hills, now bleak, now crowned with dark cypress
groves; or up from the Sea of Marmora, watching the
dome of S. Sophia that glitters above the closely
packed houses, till you turn the point which brings you
to the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping and bright
with the flags of many nations; or even if you come overland
by the sandy wastes along the shore, looking across
the deep blue of the sea to the islands and the snow-crowned
mountains of Asia, till you break through the
crumbling wall within sight of the Golden Gate, and find
yourself at a step deep in the relics of the middle ages; you
cannot fail to wonder at the splendour of the view which
meets your eyes. Sea, sunlight, the quaint houses that
stand close upon the water’s edge, the white palaces,
the crowded quays, and the crowning glory of the
Eastern domes and the mediæval walls—these are the
2
elements that combine to impress, and the impression is
never lost. Often as you may see again the approach
to the imperial city, its splendour and dignity and the
exquisite beauty of colour and light will exert their old
charm, and as you put foot in the New Rome you will
feel all the glamour of the days that are gone by.

SERAGLIO POINT AFTER SUNSET

So of old the Greeks who founded the city dwelt
lovingly on the contrast of sea and land here meeting,
and hymned the nymphs of wave and spring, the
garden by the shore.

Strictly speaking the peninsula on which the city
stands is of the form of a trapezium. It juts out into
3
the sea, beating back as it were the fierce waves of the
Bosphorus, and forcing them to turn aside from their
straight course and widen into the Sea of Marmora,
which the ancients called the Propontis, narrowing again
as it forces its way between the near banks of the
Hellespont, which rise abrupt and arid from the European
side, and slope gently away in Asia to the foot of
Mount Ida. Northwards there is the little bay of the
Golden Horn, an arm as it were of the Bosphorus, into
which run the streams which the Turks call the
Sweet Waters of Europe. The mouth of the harbour is
no more than five hundred yards across. The Greeks
of the Empire spanned it by a chain, supported here and
there on wooden piles, fragments of which still remain
in the Armoury that was once the church of S. Irene.
Within is safe anchorage in one of the finest harbours
of the world.

South of the Golden Horn, on the narrow tongue
of land—narrow it seems as seen from the hills of the
northern shore—is the city of Constantine and his successors
in empire, seated, like the old Rome, on seven
hills, and surrounded on three sides by sea, on the
fourth by the still splendid, though shattered, mediæval
walls. Northwards are the two towns, now linked
together, of Pera and Galata, that look back only to
the trading settlements of the Middle Ages.

The single spot united, as Gibbon puts it, the prospects
of beauty, of safety, and of wealth: and in a
masterly description that great historian has collected
the features which made the position, “formed by
Nature for the centre and capital of a great monarchy,”
attractive to the first colonists, and evident to Constantine
as the centre where he could best combine and
command the power of the Eastern half of his mighty
Empire.

THERAPIA

“Situated in the forty-first degree of latitude, the
4
imperial city commanded, from her seven hills, the
opposite shores of Europe and Asia; the climate was
healthy and temperate, the soil fertile, the harbour
secure and capacious, and the approach on the side
of the continent was of small extent and easy defence.
The Bosphorus and Hellespont may be considered as
the two gates of Constantinople, and the prince who
possessed those important passages could always shut
them against a naval enemy and open them to the
fleets of commerce. The preservation of the eastern
provinces may, in some degree, be ascribed to the
policy of Constantine, as the barbarians of the
Euxine, who in the preceding age had poured their
armaments into the heart of the Mediterranean, soon
desisted from the exercise of piracy, and despaired of
forcing this insurmountable barrier. When the gates
of the Hellespont and Bosphorus were shut, the capital
still enjoyed, within their spacious enclosure, every production
which would supply the wants, or gratify the
luxury, of its numerous inhabitants. The sea-coast of
5
Thrace and Bithynia, which languish under the weight
of the Turkish oppression, still exhibits a rich prospect
of vineyards, of gardens, and of plentiful harvests; and
the Propontis has ever been renowned for an inexhaustible
store of the most exquisite fish, that are taken in
their stated seasons without skill, and almost without
labour. But when the passages of the straits were
thrown open for trade, they alternately admitted the
natural and artificial riches of the north and south, of
the Euxine, and of the Mediterranean. Whatever
rude commodities were collected in the forests of
Germany and Scythia, as far as the sources of the
Tanais and the Borysthenes; whatsoever was manufactured
by the skill of Europe or Asia; the corn of
Egypt, and the gems and spices of the farthest India;
were brought by the varying winds into the port of
Constantinople, which for many ages attracted the
commerce of the ancient world.”

There is no wonder that legend should surround the
beginnings of the imperial city of the East. Men from
Argos and Megara under the navigator Byzas founded
it about 657 B.C. But mythology made the founder
the son of Neptune the sea god, and said that Io,
changed into a heifer, swam across the narrow strait
that divides Europe from Asia, and so gave it the
name of Bosphorus, which means literally Oxford. The
Delphic oracle told men to settle “opposite the land
of the blind,” for blind were those men of Megara
who some years before had chosen Chalcedon on the
Asiatic shore instead of the matchless site on which
rose the city of Byzantium.

The early history can be briefly told. Byzantium
was the first of the cities of Europe to fall into the
hands of Darius. It was burned to the ground by
the Persians, rescued and rebuilt by Pausanias, was
threatened by the Ten Thousand on their retreat, and
6
saved by the eloquence of Xenophon. Two years it
was besieged by Philip of Macedon, and was saved by
the Athenians. When Rome first showed her power
in those lands Byzantium was her ally; but her
chequered fortunes ended their first epoch with destruction
at the hands of Septimius Severus in 196 A.D.
She waited then for a century till her real founder came.
Byzantine coins go back as far as the fifth century B.C.,
and there were in the early Middle Ages many surviving
memorials of pre-Christian times; of these there are
now left only the striking Corinthian column standing
on a high granite base in the garden of the old Seraglio,
which almost certainly commemorates a victory of the
Emperor Claudius Gothicus, some parts of the foundations
of the Hippodrome, an inscription in the Doric
dialect which formerly stood in the Stadium, and that
wonderful serpent column, which only came, it is true,
to the city after Constantine rebuilt it, but which was
centuries before in the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

2. From Constantine to Justinian.

The true history of the city begins with Constantine
the Great. It is said that he hesitated at first, like the
men of Megara, between Byzantium and Chalcedon,
when he came to choose a spot from which to rule the
East. But when he chose aright he founded a city
which has endured to this day, and which it is inconceivable
should ever be deserted again. The site on which
he built is about four miles long, broadening from less
than a mile where it fronts the Bosphorus to four miles
from where the Marble Tower now stands to the
Golden Horn. Seven hills and six valleys diversify
the ground. The seven hills as we see them now
stretch thus from east to west. First is that irregular
elevation ending at Seraglio Point, on which stand the
7
buildings of the old Seraglio, S. Irene, S. Sophia, the
great mosque of Sultan Ahmed, and the Hippodrome.
Second, and north-west of it, is the hill on which
stands the column of Constantine himself, now burned
and broken. On the third stands the great tower by
the War Office (Seraskierat), the mosques of Bayezid
and Suleiman. A valley descends northwards to the
Golden Horn; and across it runs the Aqueduct of
Valens, and on the other side is the hill marked by the
mosque of Mohammed the Conqueror. The fifth hill
stretches from the fourth almost to the Golden Horn,
and on it stands the mosque of Selim. The sixth hill,
divided from the fifth by a valley ascending from the
Golden Horn, has now the ruins of the palace called
by the people “the House of Belisarius,” and the
seventh extends from the south of the Adrianople Gate
to the Sea of Marmora. As the old foundation, so
the new planning of Constantine has its legend. It
is said that he traced the boundary of his city himself,
walking spear in hand and marking the line of the
walls; and when his courtiers asked him how far he
could go he answered, as though he saw a sacred
vision, “Until He tarries Who now goes before.”
He ascribed in his laws the founding to the command
of God.

He did not cover the whole ground of the Seven
Hills. It is difficult to trace with certainty the line of
the walls, but it would seem probable that they extended
from what is now the inner bridge across the
Golden Horn to a point on the Sea of Marmora about
midway between the gate of Daoud Pasha and the
Psamatia Gate. This would exclude part of the fifth,
sixth, and seventh hills; but it is improbable that they
were left entirely unprotected or completely excluded
from the city of Constantine. By the sixth at any rate
already stood the Blachernae, later to be the
8
famous palace of the Byzantine emperors. Sycae,
across the Golden Horn, was the name of what is now
Galata. It was at one time the quarter where the
Galatian mercenaries dwelt, and quite early in history
it had another division named Pera, or “across the
water.” The seaward walls remained as they had
been in old Byzantium, and they were repaired, and
brought forward to the point whence the new land
walls started. Of the remains of Constantine’s time
there are none that are not half destroyed or wholly
altered, but the Church of S. Irene still recalls the
days of its first founder, and the serpent column from
Delphi still stands in the Hippodrome where he
placed it.

The divisions of Constantine’s city are not easy to
recover. For municipal government it had, like
Rome, fourteen regions, two of which were outside
the walls, those (xiii.) of Sycae and (xiv.) of
Blachernae. From the Golden gate, which was not
far from the Marmora end of the land walls (the
name Isa Kapou Mesjidi still recalls the Holy Name
of Jesus which it bore), a road led to the Augusteum.
The Forum of Constantine stood outside where the
old Byzantine walls had been, and west of the
Hippodrome. The Hippodrome extended south-west
from the Forum of the Augusteum. North-east at
some distance stood the Church of S. Irene. The
Augusteum which, as Mr Bury says, we may translate
place impériale, had the Church of S. Sophia, begun
probably by Constantius, on the north; on the east
the Senate house, and some buildings of the Palace;
on the south the great Palace itself, built eastwards of
the Hippodrome and commanding the magnificent
view over the Marmora islands to the shores of Asia
and the snows of Olympus.

THE HIPPODROME AND MOSQUE OF AHMED

Of the splendour of the city of Constantine many


11
hints of description remain. Constantinople was
enriched, says one writer, by the spoils of all other
cities: Rome and Athens, Sicily and Antioch, were
robbed of treasures. Of all these treasures the most
wonderful, almost if not quite alone, survives. For
eight hundred years it had already stood in the
Sanctuary of Delphi, the serpent column with its
triple head, inscribed with the names of the Greek
city states which had triumphed on the field of Platæa.
Through all the changes of the sixteen centuries since
Constantine lived the column has still remained where
he set it. Its heads are now broken off, and one
may be seen in the museum; but parts of the inscription
on the coils might still be traced fifteen years
ago when rubbings were taken. The name of the
Tenians, whose trireme brought the news to the
Greeks of the Persian approach, may still be seen.
“For this service,” says Herodotus, “the Tenians
were inscribed in Delphi, on the tripod, among those
who had overthrown the barbarian.” Thus for nearly
two thousand four hundred years this memorial has
endured. Of all the wonders of the city of Constantine
there is none like it.

From Constantine to Justinian the history of the
city may be rapidly traversed, for no great builder
came between them to rival their work. It was on
May 11, 330 A.D., that the city of Constantine was
dedicated and received the name of New or Second
Rome. Throned in the Hippodrome, ever after to
be the centre of Byzantine life, Constantine gave
thanks to God for the birth of this fair city, the
daughter (so wrote S. Augustine), as it were, of
Rome herself. Grandeur, riches, dignity, he could
give to his new city: but before he died it was plain
that he could not bequeath to her a legacy of peace.

The early history of Constantinople is largely concerned
12
with the defence of the true Christian faith,
handed down from the Apostles, against the errors of
Arius. The Council of Nicæa (Isnik) in 325, summoned
by Constantine at a place not more than a day’s
journey from Constantinople, defined the being of the
Second Person of the Blessed Trinity as Ὁμοούσιον ,
of one essence (substance), with that of the Father,
but centuries passed before the false teaching was
overcome. It was natural that at Constantinople, the
seat of imperial government, the strife should be concentrated.
Thither the Arian leaders went to denounce
the great S. Athanasius of Alexandria to the Emperor.
It was there that Constantine gave his order to the
aged bishop Alexander that Arius should be admitted
to communion. There the bishop lay in
prayer before the altar in the apse of S. Irene, beseeching
God to spare him the profanation. There
that very day Arius met his awfully sudden death.

Under the sons of Constantine the imperial city
witnessed scenes of disturbance and persecution. As
soon as Constantius freed himself from the danger of
civil war, he threw himself warmly into the support
of Arianism, and “devoted the leisure of his winter
quarters,” says Gibbon, “to the amusement or toils of
controversy; the sword of the magistrate, and even of
the tyrant, was unsheathed to enforce the reasons of
the theologian”; and he refers to the happy passages
in which Ammianus Marcellinus records the results of
his disastrous activity, in language which loses nothing
in Gibbon’s English.

“The Christian religion, which in itself is plain and
simple, he confounded by the dotage of superstition.
Instead of reconciling the parties by the weight of his
authority, he cherished and propagated by verbal disputes
the differences which his vain curiosity had
excited. The highways were covered with troops
13
of bishops, galloping from every side to the assemblies
which they call synods; and, while they laboured
to reduce the whole body to their own particular
opinions, the public establishment of the posts was
almost ruined by their hasty and repeated journeys.”
The “opinions” indeed were far from original to
Constantius, but his support of Arianism rendered the
position of the Church in the imperial city dangerous
and uncertain. Five times was the bishop Paul
banished from the city. The Catholics rose in tumult,
and the streets of Constantinople saw for the first time
what they have often since witnessed, a massacre in
which not even the churches preserved those who fled
to them for refuge. Another fatal precedent had
already been set when Constantine died, by the murder
of many princes of his house. One of the few survivors
ascended the throne in 361, on the death of the
last of Constantine’s sons. This new Emperor was
Julian, whom later ages have named the Apostate.

Julian had been baptized and had “followed the way
of the Christians” till he was twenty. He had even,
it seems, taken minor orders as a reader. But he was
greatly attracted by the old Greek ideals, and had not
patience to study the Christian religion perfectly. As
Emperor he set himself seriously to revive Paganism,
which had received its death-blow from Constantine.

The pagan Emperor was above all things a pedant
and a doctrinaire. It is impossible to study his life or
his writings without a sense of his extraordinary self-conceit.
He was moral in life, sound and excellent
even to weariness in his platitudinarian sentiments; but
he was obstinate, and blind, and abnormally self-conscious,
as men of his mould always are. He was
so convinced that he was right that he was utterly
blind to the good deeds of Christians and deaf to their
arguments, even from the clearest thinkers. We see
14
in him not a trace of intellectual progress, even on his
own lines; we find him throughout intensely superstitious
and fond of dabbling in occult arts. As a
student, he somewhat hastily accepted certain conclusions,
and found himself a marked man in consequence.
From that moment he clung to his philosophy
with the tenacity of a limited mind; and we may be
quite sure the story is legendary that such a man
admitted on his deathbed the triumph of a religious
system which he had combated all his life.

Julian was brought up probably in Constantinople.
As Emperor he did not a little to increase the pride
and beauty of the city. Especially interesting to him
were the constitutional rules which Constantine had set
up in imitation of the old Rome, and he paid notable
respect to the office of the Consul, and enlarged the
powers of the Senate. Art and science he endeavoured
to foster by endowments for teaching in the schools of
the city, and in this he was followed by his successors.
Julian died a disappointed man in 363, and his successors
inclined to the Catholic party; but still
Arianism was strong, and its strength was felt not
least in Constantinople. Jovian proclaimed toleration,
Valentinian followed him, Valens professed Arianism.
While religions contended, the material prosperity of
the city continued to grow. In 378, when the Goths
drew near to besiege the imperial city, they turned
back, it is said, at the sight of its increased size. Already
people of every kindred and tongue poured into
the great mart for commerce and pleasure. At length,
says Sozomen, it far surpassed Rome both in population
and riches, and Eunapius thus describes its importance in
his day:—”Constantinople, formerly called Byzantium,
allowed the ancient Athenians a liberty of importing
corn in great quantities; but now not all the ships of
burden from Egypt, Asia, Syria, Phœnicia, and many
15
other nations can import a quantity sufficient for the
support of those people whom Constantine, by unpeopling
other cities, has transported thither.” Already
there began the custom, which has lasted so many
centuries, of building houses on wooden piles thrust out
into the sea. As the incursion of the barbarians became
more dangerous many took refuge in the capital; and
yearly the churches grew in importance, and the
monasteries attracted more religious.

“There were many structures which Constantine
had only commenced; and the completion of the
fortifications of the city had been left to Constantius;
Julian found it necessary to construct a second harbour
on the side of the sea of Marmora;[1] Valens was
obliged to improve the waterworks of the city by the
erection of the fine aqueduct which spans the valley
between the fourth and fifth hills. And how large
a number of hands such work required appears from
the fact that when the aqueduct was repaired, in the
ninth century, 6000 labourers were brought from the
provinces to Constantinople for the purpose.”[2]

But while the magnificent aqueduct of Valens
(364-378) still towers over the city, as one views
it from the heights of Pera, no other great building
was added till the reign of Theodosius the Great
(378-395), which marks the triumph of Catholic
Christianity and the great increase in the splendour
of the patriarchal and imperial abode. A contemporary,
Gregory of Nyssa, quaintly describes the results
of the theological interests which now surrounded
the throne. Not only did great preachers fill the
churches with attentive crowds, but the poor took
up the tale. “The city is full of mechanics and
16
slaves who are all of them profound theologians, and
preach in the shops and in the streets. If you
desire a man to change a piece of money for you
he informs you wherein the Son differs from the
Father; if you ask the price of a loaf you are told
by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father;
and if you enquire whether the bath is ready, the
answer is that the Son was made out of nothing.”
This was in the time of the Arian triumph. It was
the work of great preachers, as well as of the orthodox
Emperor, to recover the Church from the blows
she had received in the house of her friends.

The three great saints of the Eastern Church in the
fourth century were in different ways associated with
Constantinople. S. Basil of Cæsarea in Cappadocia,
(brother of S. Gregory of Nyssa) was a fellow-student
of the Emperor Julian, and died in 379.
He knew very little directly of the seat of empire;
he probably only twice passed through it; but his
writings, full in every page of lucid order and perspicuous
exposition, did much to vindicate the position
which the orthodox in Constantinople were struggling
to retain. Probably it was before his death that the
great preacher, S. Gregory of Nazianzus, was pleading
in the imperial city, and vindicated by his great
oration the worship of the Holy Trinity. The site of
his first preaching was commemorated by the building
of the Church of Anastasia, a name given to denote
the rising again of the Catholic faith of Nicæa. The
sixteenth century mosque of Mehmed Pacha, south-west
of the Hippodrome, preserves the position of
the church, which was destroyed in 1458. At first
the mission of S. Gregory was conducted amid scenes
of the greatest disturbance and at great danger to his
own life. His church was profaned, he himself was
stoned. But when Theodosius entered the city in
17
triumph he gave to S. Gregory the great church of
the Twelve Apostles, and himself sought to seat him
upon the episcopal throne. Humble, and weakened
by suffering, it was with reluctance that the saint
entered upon the heritage of the church; but he
records that when he entered the sanctuary the light
that burst forth on the chill November day cheered
him to give thanks before all the people for the
benefits which the Blessed Trinity had bestowed.
After a month of reluctance he was at length installed
as bishop. In May 381 the second General
Council of the Church was assembled by the order
of the Emperor Theodosius at Constantinople. It
reasserted the creed of Nicæa, emphasised the Catholic
teaching of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, and condemned
the heresy of Apollinaris. Its claim to be
ecumenical rests on its unanimous acceptance of “all
the nations and all the churches of the Christian world.”

By this council the precedence of the bishop of Constantinople
in the Church was assigned as next after that
of the Roman bishop, “because it is the new Rome.”

S. Gregory, attacked by critics for his acceptance of
the see, which he had so reluctantly received, withdrew
to Nazianzus. “The title of a saint had been added
to his name, but the tendencies of his heart, and the
elegance of his genius, reflect a more pleasing lustre on
the memory of Gregory of Nazianzen,” says Gibbon in
his inimitable way. The consecration of his successor,
a senator named Nectarius, who when elected had not
yet been baptised, is described by the same classic as
“whimsical,” but it served to bring peace to the
Church of Constantinople. The conquests of Theodosius
confirmed the security of the imperial throne,
and under the rule of the orthodox Emperor the
Church in the East regained her peace. By his order
all churches were given up to the orthodox, and his
18
edict condemned all those who taught heretical doctrines,
and “who, though possessing a sound faith,
form congregations separate from the canonical
bishops.” Under Theodosius the security of life and
property in the imperial city tended to a great increase
of wealth and population; and with that to a considerable
extension of the area occupied.

“Should the zeal of the Emperor to adorn the city
continue,” said the orator Themistius, “a wider circuit
will be required, and the question will arise whether the
city added to Constantinople by Theodosius is not
more splendid than the city which Constantine added
to Byzantium.”

“No longer is the vacant ground in the city more
extensive than that occupied by buildings; nor are we
cultivating more territory within our walls than we inhabit;
the beauty of the city is not as heretofore
scattered over it in patches, but covers the whole area
like a robe woven to the very fringe. The city gleams
with gold and porphyry. It has a [new] Forum,
named after the Emperor; it owns baths, porticos,
gymnasia; and its former extremity is now its centre.
Were Constantine to see the capital he founded, he
would behold a glorious and splendid scene, not a bare
and empty void; he would find it fair, not with apparent
but with real beauty.”[3]

The beginning of the fifth century witnessed the
great extension of the city which the orator so grandiloquently
describes in anticipation. Anthemius, who
ruled during the earlier part of the minority of Theodosius
II., built the great wall, a mile or in parts a mile
and a half to the west of Constantine’s wall, which
still extends from the Sea of Marmora to the so-called
“palace of Belisarius.” It was within the city now
rapidly growing, that the greatest preacher of the early
19
Church, began at the end of the fourth century to exercise
his marvellous influence over the crowds that
thronged the great church of the capital. Arcadius,
the son and successor of Theodosius I., having heard
of the splendid eloquence of John, a preacher of
Antioch, whom men came to call Chrysostom (the
golden-mouthed), nominated him to the throne of
Constantinople on the death of Nectarius in 397.

He set an example, which the clergy sadly needed,
of simplicity and asceticism; he was not only a reformer
but an organiser of missions, and above all a
preacher of righteousness. The Emperor and Empress,
Arcadius and Eudocia, were among his most ardent
admirers. He owed his nomination to the imperial
minister Eutropius; yet he denounced his vices at the
height of his power, and when he fell preserved him in
sanctuary from the rage of the people. But the
Empress and the courtiers soon grew restless under his
searching exposure of vice and worldliness. He was a
severe disciplinarian: bishops were ready to turn against
him, and the ladies of the court were determined to
avenge themselves on their censor. When he denounced
the Empress almost openly as Jezebel, it was
clear that peace could not long be maintained even in
appearance. Charges of heresy, complicated by his
charitable succour of some Eastern monks whom the
bishop of Alexandria had ill-treated and banished, led
to his condemnation by a council of his enemies at
Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus. When the citizens
heard this they surrounded the palace of their beloved
bishop and kept watch all night lest he should be seized,
but he gave himself up and was banished to Hieron
(now Anadoli Kavak) at the mouth of the Black Sea
on the Asiatic side. The people assembled round the
imperial palace with threats; an earthquake shook the
resolution of the Empress, and Chrysostom was brought
20
back in triumph to his throne. His position seemed
stronger than ever. Always ready to believe the best,
he accepted the Empress’s assurance of friendship and
repaid it with courtierlike expressions of respect. But
it was soon apparent that the friendship could not be continued
without a sacrifice of principle. Eudocia envied, it
would seem, the divine honours of the pagan emperors;
and the dedication of her statue in September 403 was
made the occasion of blasphemous and licentious
revelry. From the ambo of the great church S. John
Chrysostom denounced the wickedness of the festival,
while the sound of the disturbance could be heard as
he spoke. Men declared that he compared the
Empress to Herodias—”Again Herodias dances:
again she demands the head of John on a charger.”

The Empress demanded the punishment of the bold
preacher. Intrigues won over the Emperor, time-serving
bishops brought up ingenious distortions of
Church rules through which Chrysostom could be
punished. It was pretended that he was not legally
bishop, and at last the timid Emperor gave the order
to arrest him, an act which was accomplished, in a
scene of brutal disorder and violence, in the great
church itself on Easter Eve 404, when the sacrament
of baptism was being ministered to three thousand
catechumens.

Two months later he was sent into banishment, and
his adherents underwent a bitter persecution. They
appealed to the churches of the West for aid: Chrysostom
himself wrote to Rome, Milan, and Aquileia.
But the Emperor was not to be moved. In his
banishment at Cucusus, on the borders of Cilicia and
Armenia, the Saint exercised as wide an influence
as on his throne. Constant letters to Constantinople
cheered the loyal clergy, comforted penitents, aroused
faint hearts to devoted service of God. But his sufferings
21
in exile were at length made fatal by the brutality
with which he was hurried from place to place, and he
gave up his soul on September 14, 407, a martyr to
his zeal for righteousness. Thirty years afterwards in
438 his body was translated to the city where his
memory was still cherished. It came in triumphal
procession down the Bosphorus followed by crowds of
boats, and was laid in a tomb by the altar in the
Church of the Holy Apostles; the Emperor, Theodosius
II., praying for the pardon of God on the sins
of his parents.

Thus briefly the tale of Chrysostom may be told.
It is characteristic of the struggles through which the
Church of Constantinople had to pass during the years
of unchecked imperial power, when it was dependent
on the arbitrary authority of a sovereign who might be
weak and led by evil counsellors, or wicked and resentful
of any criticism of his deeds, but who had
always at his command a body of brutal soldiery, often
pagan and retaining of the old Roman tradition only
the implicit obedience to the commands of their ruler.
The name of S. John Chrysostom, loved and honoured
by the people in his life, has remained the chief glory
of the Church of Constantinople. It is said that his
tomb was rifled by the Crusaders in 1204, and his
head is shown among the relics of the Cathedral of
Pisa; but in countless ways his memory is still preserved
by the Church which he ruled. At the Cathedral
Church of the Patriarchate in the Phanar they point
to-day to a pulpit and a throne (of much later date)
as his; and the ancient liturgy of the East, used from
time immemorial in the Church of Constantinople, has
been given his name, as that of the most famous of the
holy prelates who used it.

The troubles of the Church, which centred round
the persecution and martyrdom of S. Chrysostom, were
22
followed by at least outward peace in religious matters.
The chief clergy of Constantinople became the mere
officers of the Court. But the dangers of the times,
when again and again the barbarian was at the gates,
turned men’s minds to the repair of the fortifications
and the completion of their circuit around the now
greatly extended city.

The work of Anthemius, regent during part of the
minority of Theodosius II., was eulogised by Chrysostom
himself. The office of Prætorian Præfect of the East
which he held, was honoured, said the great preacher,
by his holding it. He restored the defences of the
Empire after the weakness of Arcadius, “and to crown
the system of defence he made Constantinople a
mighty citadel. The enlargement and refortification of
the city was thus part of a comprehensive and far seeing
plan to equip the Roman State in the East for the
impending desperate struggle with barbarism; and of
all the services which Anthemius rendered, the most
valuable and enduring was the addition he made to the
military importance of the capital. The bounds he
assigned to the city fixed, substantially, her permanent
dimensions, and behind the bulwarks he raised—improved
and often repaired indeed by his successors—Constantinople
acted her great part in the history of
the world.”[4]

The two greatest interests of Constantinople have
always been the military and the ecclesiastical. The
Eastern churches have always looked, and look to-day,
on the New Rome as the centre of true religion
and sound learning. The theology of the Councils
is the theology of the great Church of Constantinople
and its patriarchs; and in the days of its bitterest
persecution, in the times when the infidel has ruled,
the strongest sentiment of the Greek people, who feel
23
that the city is still truly their own, is that of loyalty
to the unalterable faith and the immemorial liturgies
of the holy Orthodox Church preserved by the successors
of S. Chrysostom. But while the intense
intellectual keenness of the East and the chivalrous
conservatism of the ancient Greek families preserves
undisputed the dominion of religion, and the thronged
churches witness to a devotion which is perhaps more
conspicuous than in any city which lives on to our
day from the centuries of the Middle Ages, the
great city of Constantine can never cease to be the
home of a military power, where military science is
cultivated and the soldier’s life is the most prominent
before the eyes of the people. Even at the lowest
point of the Empire, the great city of the Cæsars
was always a military stronghold of the first class.
The streets have never ceased to be thronged with
soldiers, and the military pageants of to-day look
back for their origin and their necessity to the days
of Constantine and Theodosius and Anthemius the
wall-builder. It is said that to-day the city is more
completely defended than any other in Europe. More
than sixteen centuries ago it was the strength of the
walls of Anthemius and the size of the army and the
fleet that he gathered that turned back the army of
Attila. Just as the whole city was concerned in the
doings of the Church, its buildings, its festivals, its
councils, so were all the citizens bound to take part
in its military defence. The walls, like the churches,
belonged to all. Strict laws, from which no one was
exempt, and the power of levying special taxes besides
the due proportion of the city land-tax, made every
man liable to contribute. Characteristically the
Hippodrome had its share in directing the work. The
two factions of the Circus, the blues and the greens,
were charged with the direction; and it is said that
24
in 447 they furnished no less than sixteen thousand
labourers for the work.

The reign of Theodosius II. was the great age of
the construction of defences. The walls of Anthemius
were built in 413; in 439 the sea walls were extended
to include the part of the city now enclosed.
In 447, an earthquake, always the greatest enemy
of the fortifications and responsible even now for more
destruction than any other force, overthrew much of
what had been so lately built, with fifty-seven towers.
Attila was almost at the gates, and was dictating an
ignominious treaty of peace. But, as an inscription
which may be read to-day on the gate now called
Yeni-Mevlevi Haneh Kapoussi tells—

A Latin inscription makes the same record almost in
the words of the contemporary chronicler Marcellinus
Comes—

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
25
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
26
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
27
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.

He was succeeded by an illiterate but honest
Thracian soldier, Justin. Orthodox and straightforward,
he was welcomed by the people as a saviour and
a second Constantine. Under his rule peace was made
with the orthodox West, and the Church again had
rest.

With the death of Justin, 527, we reach the second
great epoch of the history of the imperial city.
Constantinople before the days of Justinian, when
Theodoric, about 461, was sent as a hostage to the
Imperial Court, et quia puerulus elegans erat meruit
gratiam imperialem habere, was the most glorious city
of Europe. Jordanes, the historian of the Goths,
tells how he marvelled at the wondrous sight. “Lo!
now I behold,” said he, “what I have often heard,
but have never believed, the glory of so great a city!”
Then turning his eyes this way and that, beholding the
situation of the city and the concourse of ships, how he
marvels at the long perspective of lofty walls. Then
he sees the multitude of various nations like the stream
flowing forth from one fountain which has been fed by
many springs; then he beholds the soldiers in ordered
ranks. “A god,” said he, “without doubt a god
upon earth is the Emperor of this realm, and whoso
lifts his hand against him, that man’s blood be on his
28
own head.” Thus the barbarian may well have spoken
when he had his first sight of the majesty of the
Empire and its civilization in its Eastern home.

YERI BATAN SERAI (CISTERN)

Within a few years there was a great change.
Earthquakes, rebellions, fires, compelled the rebuilding
of a great part of Constantinople, and Justinian
the Great, lawyer, theologian and organiser of victory,
left monuments as enduring in architecture as in the
other spheres of his activity. With the exception of
the churches of S. John of the Studium and S. Irene,
and the walls of Theodosius, there are to-day no great
works of the Christian period, save a very few of the
later Emperors, remaining in Constantinople except
those which Justinian built. His architects created
the Byzantine style which reached its magnificent
completion in S. Sophia. The finest of the cisterns
which astonish the traveller to-day are the work of
his age; and as we walk by the splendid walls that
29
extend from the Marmora to the Golden Horn, it is
along his triumphal way that we tread. The first book
of the “Aedifices” of Procopius, written to commemorate
his achievements in building, is even now
a handbook in little to the glories of Constantinople.

Leaving to our description of the city the still standing
work of the great Emperor, we must here shortly
sketch the reign which was for nine centuries the most
glorious memory of the Eastern Empire. Born in 482
or 483, Justinian was the son of a Dardanian peasant,
and was born at Scupi (Üsküp), “at the crossing-point
of great natural routes across the western part of the
Illyrian peninsula.” When his uncle Justin raised
himself to the throne in 518 he was sent for and
trained to succeed to, if not already to exercise, supreme
power. So long as Justin lived Justinian was his chief
adviser. When Vitalian, the orthodox Goth, whose
troops in the neighbourhood of the city seemed to
threaten the new dynasty, was murdered in the palace,
it was Justinian, for whose concern in the crime no
valid evidence has been produced, who rose to the
highest place in military as well as civil affairs. In
523 he married the beautiful Theodora, whose earlier
life has been covered with shame by historians whose
veracity is open at least to suspicion. She is described
by the bitter Procopius as everything that is vile; it is
probably true that her youth was disreputable; but it is
certain that she made the noblest atonement for the
past by the charity and piety of her later life and by
the courage and wisdom which were of profit even to
the Empire.[6] Of her beauty there is no doubt. Small,
pale as marble, but with brilliant eyes, the bitterest of
30
her enemies describes her; and when he uses the
language of compliment he declares of the statue
erected in her honour by the baths of Arcadius that
“the face is beautiful but falls short of the beauty of
the Empress, since it is utterly impossible for any mere
human workmen to express her loveliness.” Four
years after the marriage, which was one of unbroken
affection till the Empress died in 548, Justinian was
associated with his uncle on the imperial throne. On
April 1, 527, he became sole Emperor, and he reigned
till 565.

Constantinople under Justinian became again the
centre of Christian Europe. But before his power
was fully established it was threatened by the gravest
of the great insurrections with which the populace
showed its independence and its fickle levity. The
sedition arose in the Circus, and it was long the fashion
to believe that Constantinople was ruled entirely under
the sway of the factions of the Hippodrome. A more
critical investigation has shown that the demes (δῆμοι)
or parties were organised bodies intimately connected
with the court and the municipality. The demes had
two parts, military under democrats, and civil, or
political, under demarchs. The heads of each
faction were officers of the court and the army, and
the demes were fully organised for military purposes.
Not only were they, as we have seen, intrusted with
the building of the wall, but they provided, under the
Emperor Maurice, troops for the guarding of the long
walls; and Justinian himself, at the end of his reign,
used them in a similar way. It was to the demes, one
writer seems to show, that Justin owed his throne.
But while their military and political importance is now
fully recognised, we are still without an explanation of
how they became connected with the parties and
colours of the Circus.
31

However that may be, we find in the reign of Justinian
two large Circus parties, the Blues and the Greens,
with whom were merged as sub-divisions the Reds and
the Whites, who organised the races and had so much
liberty allowed them by the laws, that they were able
to defy emperors and set public order at defiance.
But the madness of their riot was not without a
method. To the demes or factions were allowed
privileges which seemed the last relics of the ancient
freedom of the Greek cities. “In the sixth century,”
says Professor Bury, “the outbreaks of the demes represent
a last struggle for municipal independence, on
which it is the policy of imperial absolutism to encroach.
The power of the demarchs had to give way to the
control of the præfects of the city.”

THE IMPERIAL QUARTER

On January 13, 532, there began an insurrection
called ever after the “Nika” (conquer), from the
32
watchwords of the insurgents, which threatened the
imperial throne, and went nigh to destroy the whole
city. The præfect of the city led to execution some
criminals belonging to both parties, three days before.
The Greens, during the celebration of public games in
the Hippodrome on Sunday, January 11, appealed to
the Emperor against Calapodius, the imperial minister,
and the most extraordinary dialogue occurred. “Be
silent, Jews, Samaritans and Manichæans,” cried Justinian’s
mandator, uttering imperial commands, but they
renewed their complaints, and finally passed into insults,
calling the Emperor tyrant and murderer. Justinian
determined to show his indifference to the mob by the
execution that night of criminals of both factions.
Two were rescued, and the two factions determined to
procure their pardon, and on the 13th, when the great
games took place, they appealed to Justinian, but in
vain. The two demes then declared themselves united,
and having no answer from the præfect whose house
they surrounded, they set fire to the prætorium,
and then in the night spread the fire over the
imperial quarter. The portico of the Palace, the
Baths of Xeuxippus, the Senate-house, and the
wooden church of S. Sophia were set on fire.
Next morning they marched to the Palace and demanded
the dismissal of the unpopular ministers. Justinian was
about to yield, and indeed had given the order, when
the insurgents determined to depose him. Anastasius
had left three nephews, Probus, Hypatius and Pompeius.
Failing to find the first the mob burned
his house. The two other brothers remained in safety
in the palace. Next day the greatest general of the
age, Belisarius, who had but recently returned from a
victorious campaign against the Persians, sallied forth
from the palace with a body of barbarian troops, Goths
and Heruls—for the garrison of the city could not be
33
trusted—and fierce fighting occurred for two days in
the streets. The clergy did their utmost to restore
peace, but were utterly unheeded, and in the evening
of the 16th the Church of S. Irene, built by Constantine,
was burnt, though not to the ground, and the Hospice
of Samson, which stood between it and S. Sophia,
were also destroyed. On the 17th, Saturday, the fire
spread still further, and almost all the centre of the
city was reduced to ashes. At night Justinian determined
to give up Hypatius and Pompeius to the mob,
hoping no doubt that if they were conspiring against
him they would be less dangerous outside than within
the palace. In spite of their reluctance he drove
them forth to their own houses. Next day, early on
the Sunday morning, the Emperor himself went down
to the Hippodrome and made what was little better
than an abject submission. He swore on the gospels
to forgive all that had been done, if order were now
restored. “The blame is not yours but all mine.
For the punishment of my sins I did not grant your
requests when first you spoke to me in this place.”
Some cried out that he swore falsely, and no heed was
taken of his words. A few hours later Hypatius was
proclaimed Emperor, and as the mob surrounded the
palace it seemed that there was nothing for the Emperor
but flight. It was then, when Justinian was
ready to yield and cross the Bosphorus to the safety of
Chalcedon, that Theodora showed herself worthy of
the purple. “No time is this,” she cried, “to ask
whether a woman should be bold before men or valiant
when men are afraid. They who are in extremest
peril must think of nothing but how best to meet what
lies before them. To fly, if ever it be expedient, would
now not be so, I declare, even if it preserved us. For
a man born into this light not to die is impossible; but
for one who has been Emperor to become an exile is
34
not to be endured. Let me never come to be without
this purple robe nor live that day when men shall cease
to call me their sovereign Lady. If you, Emperor,
wish to escape, it is no hard matter. Here is the sea,
and there lie the ships. But consider whether you
may not one day wish that you had exchanged your
mean safety for a glorious death. For me I love the
ancient saying, ‘How brave a sepulchre a kingdom is!'”

Thus Theodora proved herself fit mate for a Cæsar,
and worthy of her crown; and those who had
counselled flight now found courage to resist. While
Justinian’s men planned an attack, the followers of
Hypatius agreed upon delay, and he himself sent,
it would seem, to make peace with the Emperor. As
his messenger went, he was told that the Cæsar had
fled, and then the unhappy pretender took upon him
the dignity of Emperor. In a few hours Belisarius
led his troops upon the multitude assembled in the
Hippodrome, and before nightfall they forced their
way in with fire and sword, and of all the citizens
gathered in the Circus not one left it alive. Justinian
was not told till too late that Hypatius had been
willing to submit. The two brothers were dragged out
with contumely, and the next morning before daylight
they fell under the swords of the barbarian soldiers.
The Emperor, it is said, would have spared them,
but Theodora, “swearing by God and by him, urged
him to have them killed.” Zachariah of Mitylene
says that more than 80,000 persons perished in the
riot.

At midday on Monday, January 19, Constantinople
was at peace; but it was in ruins. Three distinct
conflagrations had reduced the grandest monuments of
the city of Constantine to ashes. On the first two
days of the riot all the buildings of the Augusteum
were destroyed, and with them S. Sophia, the “Great
35
Church,” only its baptistery, it would seem, being saved.
Two days later the buildings north-west of S. Sophia
were in flames, and among them the Hospice for poor
and sick folk, “founded in ancient times by a holy man
whose name was Samson,” and Constantine’s Church
of S. Irene. On the 17th
the buildings round the
Mesê, the street which
connected the forum
of Constantine with the
Augusteum, and the
“great porticoes leading
up to the agora named
from Constantine, and
many houses of rich men,
and large property, were
burned.” Thus, a great
part of what had been
the first Byzantium, which
was adorned with the
finest buildings of Constantine,
was utterly destroyed.
To one who
saw the blackened ruins,
they seemed like the
masses of molten lava
round the crater of a
volcano. To Justinian,
already a great law-giver, came the task of building
anew the imperial city.

THE BURNT COLUMN

The Emperor began at once with the rebuilding of
the Great Church of the Divine Wisdom. On the
23rd of February the work was begun: on December
26, 537, the new church was dedicated. “The procession,”
says Theophanes, who wrote from older
materials in the eighth century, “started from the
36
church of the Anastasia,” where S. Gregory of
Nazianzus had long preached to the men of Byzantium,
“Menas, the patriarch, sitting in the royal chariot, and
the King walking with the people.” In 558 the
eastern part of the dome with the apse was destroyed
by an earthquake and was rebuilt. Agathias, a contemporary
historian, thus describes the building and the
restoration:

“Now the former church having been burnt by the
angry mob, Justinian built it up again from the foundations,
as great, and more beautiful and wonderful, and
this most beautiful design was adorned with much
precious metal. He built it in a round form, with
burnt brick and lime. It was bound together here and
there with iron; but they avoided the use of wood,
so that it should no more be easily burnt. Now
Anthemius was the man who devised and worked at
every part. And when by the earthquake the middle
part of the roof and the higher parts had been destroyed,
the Emperor made it stronger, and raised it to
a great height. Anthemius was then dead, but the
young man Isidorus and the other craftsmen, turning
over in their minds the earlier design, and comparing
what had fallen with what remained, estimated where
the error lay, and of what kind it was. They determined
to leave the eastern and western arches as they
were. But of the northern and southern they brought
towards the inside that portion of the building which
was upon the curve. And they made these arches
wider, so as to be more in harmony with the others,
thus making the equilateral symmetry more perfect.
In this way they were able to cover the measurelessness
of the empty space, and to take off some of its extent
to form an oblong design. And again, they wrought
that which rose up above it in the middle, whether
cycle or hemisphere or whatever other name it may be
37
called. And this also became more straightforward
and of a better curve, in every part agreeing with the
line; and at the same time not so wide but higher, so
that it did not affright the spectators as before, but was
set much more strong and safe.”

S. SOPHIA AND THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE FROM THE SEA

A more minute account of the work must be reserved
till we pass from history to description. Here we have
only to summarise and characterise the work of the great
architects whom Justinian employed to rebuild his city.
The opportunity was a great one. Constantinople was
now the centre of the civilised world. Thither came
in the sixth century a crowd as motley as those
38
gathered together on the day of Pentecost, or as
may be seen now on the bridge of Galata. Men of
Mesopotamia and Syria, Persians, Greeks from the
islands and the Peloponnese, men of Sicily and Africa,
Alexandrines and Palestinian Jews, met with the
Roman and with the barbarian subjects of the now
again undivided empire.

Of this vast gathering of the nations Byzantine art
was the result and the reflexion. But adaptive as it
was of every influence that came before the eyes of its
great masters, it was, above all, like the city where it
reached its highest glory, pre-eminently religious and
Christian. The new style has been called “historical-dogmatic,”
and indeed it combined in a marvellous
manner the traditions of different races under the uniting
power of the Catholic faith.

The genius which gave to the Byzantine architecture
its completed glory was that of Anthemius of Tralles,
of whose skill contemporary writers write in enthusiastic
applause. His works, says Agathias, “even if nothing
were said about them, would suffice of themselves to
win for him an everlasting glory in the memory of man
as long as they stand and endure.”

The characteristics of the art of Anthemius at its
highest development may be seen to-day in Constantinople.
There are few churches earlier than his time
still standing. Among these may be the semi-basilican
S. Thekla and S. Theodore of Tyrone, and certainly
are S. John of the Studium and S. Irene. The last
was rebuilt by Justinian immediately after the Nika
insurrection in 532, but it belongs to the earlier style.
Similar to it was the church of S. Peter and S. Paul,
now destroyed, but of which some beautiful marble
capitals lie in the sea close to the palace of Hormisdas.
Later came the still standing church of S. Sergius and
S. Bacchus, called by the people “little S. Sophia,” built
39
about 527 by Justinian himself. This prepares the
way for almost every feature which appears developed
and completed in the great S. Sophia itself. The two
most striking characteristics of the new style are the
impost capital and the merging of subsidiary spaces in
one central building.

The impost capital is probably first seen in the great
cistern, also of Justinian’s day. I may here repeat
what I have said elsewhere.[7]

“Strygowski[8] regards this impost-capital as the work
of the builder of the great cistern, who he thinks may
have been Anthemius, here proving his fitness for the
great work of S. Sophia. It was, he shows, an
architectural revolution. The capital, with undercut
volutes, was suitable for a straight architrave, but
not for the arch. Hence a piece was inserted to
transfer the weight from the angles to the centre.
The Theodosian age used an inserted impost. The
constructive activity of the age of Justinian produced
the impost-capital.

As to design, the capitals lying neglected about
the city, together with those in situ in the churches
and cisterns, furnish a perfect museum of the types
with which others, dispersed over the whole area
of the empire, agree in the minutest particulars of
design and workmanship. The acanthus leaves, so
familiar through all the work of the centuries—from
the Golden Gate (388) onward, and the portico
to S. John of the Studium a century later—assume
the beautiful “windblown” design in the ruins near
the “Rose Mosque.”[9]

The second feature is the arrangement which unites
the longitudinal with the central building and makes
40
the whole effect of the interior of one piece by relating
every piece of work, pillar, arch, semi-dome,
to the one vast central dome which crowns the whole.
From without, but more clearly from within, the
architecture of S. Sophia is seen to form one entire
and perfect whole. It is impossible to conceive it
deprived of a single feature without the sacrifice of
the whole. To mutilate would be to destroy.

Seen then in its grandeur at S. Sophia the work
of Justinian changed the appearance of the whole
city. Procopius in his Aedifices records what was
when he wrote in 558, a complete list of what had
been built in the reign. Everywhere there were
arising, as though by an enchanter’s wand, palaces,
churches, baths, aqueducts, great cisterns supported
on exquisitely carved columns, new markets, houses for
the great nobles, barracks, hospitals, convents. The
splendour and beauty of the new city, its richness
of decoration, marbles, statuary, mosaics, struck all
beholders with amaze. The chroniclers, who in other
times would have been satisfied to tell of military
successes and court intrigues, now tell of measurements
and designs, and collect lists of gems and
splendours of decoration. The reign of Justinian,
in spite of many foreign dangers, and oppression
at home, is the most magnificent period of early
Byzantine history; and the magnificence seemed to
be expressed in the buildings of Constantinople.

When Procopius in his Ædifices has told of the
glories of S. Sophia, he goes on to speak of the
Augusteum and its statues. Chiefest among them, one
of Justinian himself as Achilles. Then S. Irene, then
the churches of the Blessed Virgin at the Blachernae
and at Balukli beyond the triumphal way. Church
after church follows in his tale, and chief among them
those which the mariner sees as he sails up the Golden
41
Horn. “As to the other buildings, it would be
hard to name them all.” The Hospice of Samson
rose again from its ruins, probably close by where
the gate of the old Seraglio now stands. The baths
of Xeuxippus, which lasted down to the time of
Mohammed the Conqueror, with the other buildings
near the Augusteum and the forum of Constantine,
were restored. “In addition to this he rebuilt and
added great magnificence to the house named after
Hormisdas, which stands close to the palace, to which
he joined it,”—that pathetic ruin whose broken wall
hangs over the Marmora to-day. When the eulogist
comes to the palace itself, words fail him to repeat
its glories, the pictures, mosaics, marbles, that combine
to make the walls glitter as with life. After works of
beauty come those of use, and the cisterns receive
as much praise as works more brilliant yet hardly
more beautiful.

It is buildings such as these that enable us to see
what Justinian was to the capital of his Empire.
Every year it seemed that new victories and new
conversions were increasing the power of the Empire
and the Church. While Belisarius reconquered Italy
and made the name of the Cæsar again honoured
at Rome and Ravenna, ended the cruel rule of the
Vandals in Africa and Sicily, crushed the Goths of
Spain, and kept the strong Persian prince at bay on
the eastern frontier of the empire, Christian missions
spread the faith of the orthodox Church to the
Caucasus and the Sudan. Again and again did processions
of returning warriors pass along the triumphal way,
but the Emperor alone entered by the Golden Gate.
It was in the Hippodrome that Belisarius celebrated his
triumph over the Vandals. It was nigh six hundred
years, Procopius thought, since any had had the
same. But Belisarius walked with a proud humility
42
from his own house to the Hippodrome, and thence
from his own tent to the imperial throne. The rich
spoils that were spread out were the treasures of all the
years of Vandal conquest, and among them some of the
vessels that Titus had brought from the temple at Jerusalem
and Generic the Vandal conqueror had taken
from Rome. These Justinian gave to churches in the
Holy City. As the captives were led up to the imperial
throne all eyes were fixed on the Vandal chief,
Gelimer, wearing the purple, as in mockery, with
his kindred about him, “himself the tallest and most
beautiful of the Vandals.” As he walked up to the
throne he looked up, and uttering no lament for his
fallen state, said with the poet’s simple feeling, “Vanity
of vanities.” They stripped him of his robe and made
him fall on his face before the Emperor. Beside him
knelt his conqueror, and supplicated for his pardon,
and the day was crowned by generosity such as the
Emperor loved to show and the people to applaud.

THE GOLDEN GATE

Such scenes became familiar to the people as the
43
years of victory rolled on. They saw, too, Belisarius,
drawn through the streets in his chariot by the captives
of his wars, when he received the dignity of Patrician.
The empire of Justinian, based upon the old laws which
he collected and enlarged, cherishing the traditions of
old Rome, was eager to revive every glory of former
days. “And then,” says Procopius, who himself the
bitterest of satirists of the present, looked not unkindly
on the past, “men saw things long forgotten thus
renewed by time.” But the picture, brilliant though
it was, was not unclouded. The city of the Cæsars
was again and again threatened by barbarians and struck
by the visitation of God. In 542 Constantinople was
devastated by a terrible pestilence, the bubonic plague,
that has lost none of its terrors in fifteen hundred years.
For four months it raged, and at its height Procopius
declares that as many as ten thousand perished in a day.
It spared no constitution and no age, and God alone
could be the cause of it. Justinian, who was one of
the few who recovered, was assiduous in charitable aid;
but the loss to the city could hardly be conceived—no
trades, no shops, says the recorder of many horrors,
remained, and “many for fear leaving their bad courses,
consecrated themselves to God, and many when the
danger was passed fell to their old despising of God
again.”

After plagues came famines and earthquakes, and
in the last year of the reign, the dread army of the
Huns, under Zabergan, drew nigh even to the walls
of Constantinople, murdering and ravaging as they
came. Hastily the treasures of the church northwards
of the city were brought for safety within the walls,
and Belisarius in old age again came forward to save
the empire. It was his last victory, and seven years
later he passed away, honoured and beloved. The
Emperor himself died but a few weeks later in November
44
565. The glories of the reign had passed
away before the aged ruler laid down his power; but
he left a reconquered Empire and a capital that was
the wonder of the world.

He left too a memory as a theologian, which the
church for some centuries continued specially to honour
in her most solemn service. Justinian, the legislator,
the builder and the organizer of victory, seemed to
the vision of Dante to dwell like the sun in perpetual
light.

To this aspect of his life we can give here but little
attention; but it is not to be doubted that it was as a
theologian that the men of his Constantinople heard
most of their ruler’s doings. Far into the dark hours,
says the chronicler of his reign, he sat writing the
theological treatises which expressed the teaching of
the Church; night after night he would study in his
library the writings of the Fathers, and the Sacred
Scriptures, with some learned prelates or monks at
hand, that he might discuss with them the questions
as they rose before his mind. From the time of his
predecessor he had been engaged in corresponding with
Popes on theological points, and when he became sole
ruler he determined once for all to settle the side issues
which depended on the great Monophysite contest.
Edict after edict, letter after letter, treatises closely
argued and tightly packed with patristic and scriptural
learning, and even hymns, showed the restless activity of
the imperial theologian. When in 535 Anthemius of
Trebizond was made Patriarch of Constantinople, and
when Pope Agapetus came on a mission from the
45
Gothic King Theodahad, the discussion of articles of
the faith brought the deposition of the patriarch as a
monophysite, and the succession of Mennas, head of
the hospice of Samson. Then came the conflict with
the Origenists, which led indirectly to the controversy
of “the Three Chapters” and the session of the Fifth
General Council. Of this it were here a weariness to
tell. Let it suffice to say that on May 5, 553, the
Council met in the southern gallery of the great Church
of the Divine Wisdom. The Pope himself was at
Constantinople but he would not attend the sessions.
He was lodged at first in the royal palace of Placidia
at the eastern end of the promontory, beyond S. Irene,
looking over the sea to Asia and the churches of
Chalcedon. Then he fled by night to cross the Bosphorus
and took refuge in the Church of S. Euphemia
at Chalcedon where a hundred years before the council
had sat. Embassies crossed and recrossed the sea;
even the great general Belisarius was an envoy, but
Vigilius, when the Council met, refused to join it, to
speak, or to vote: and the Council made short work
of the foolish, bombastic, hesitating pontiff. It condemned
those who refused to receive its decisions and
struck Vigilius out of the diptychs on which were inscribed
the names of those prayed for at the Eucharist.

But if there was no Roman patriarch present, there
was the new patriarch of Constantinople, Eutychius,
and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, while
he of Jerusalem sent proxies. To the decisions of the
council a hundred and sixty-four signatures were
affixed. Theologians still contest as to whether it was
a free and open council; but it was accepted beyond
question, though after some years, by the whole Church.
It did its work: it safeguarded the Catholic faith by
stripping bare the meaning of statements which indirectly
attacked the Divine and Human Natures of the
46
Incarnate Son. It condemned these subtle suggestions,
and it preserved to the Church the real Christ of
Whom she had learned.

These theological questions stand out, it may seem
to some to-day, too boldly in the history of the New
Rome: but they know little of the capital of the East
who do not know how close to its life lie these matters
of dogma and definition. The very tradesmen at their
work talked of them, as they talked in the time of
Gregory; and there was nothing which the crowds
who thronged the markets and the basilicas in the days
of Justinian more readily or more constantly discussed.
Constantinople in these first centuries of her life had
the theological interest closest to her heart; as the
years went on the needs of defence brought the
military interest to the top.

The city in Justinian’s days was rich and full of
bread. All the glory of the world seemed there to be
gathered together, and with it the vice, which stern
laws and the charitable institutions, founded by the
imperial sovereigns, endeavoured as best they could to
conquer or to heal. The thronged markets sold every
kind of goods, for commerce or luxury. The monks
who brought the silkworm from China to the Emperor’s
court enabled him to found an industry which added
greatly to resources of his empire and the prosperity of
his people. The mosaics, which glittered on the walls
of the churches, were made by skilled artists in the
city itself—carved work, images (the icons which the
Greek Church has never ceased to love), jewellery,
beautifully wrought, were among the manufactures of
the great trading centre of the East; and the military
engines for which the Eastern army was renowned were
made within the walls of the capital itself. The pages
of Procopius and Agathias, of Lydus and John of
Ephesus, show a busy hurrying life, elaborate administrative
47
arrangements, official classes greedy and exclusive,
popular agitations hasty and fickle, an accumulating
luxury with all its accompaniments of oppression,
avarice, and vulgar show. The millionaires of the
sixth century, with their gout, their costly equipages,
and their summer palaces on the Bosphorus or at
Chalcedon, were a prominent feature in the life of the
great city. Beside them were the dusky traders from
the far East, the hordes of bearded monks ever ready to
join in the logical squabbles or take part in popular riots,
and the silent barbarian soldiers, opening wondering
eyes on the disputes and the splendours of the imperial
city, and prompt at the word of command to dethrone
emperors or massacre their foes. In such a city it
would have been strange if there were order or peace;
and indeed the constant complaint of the chroniclers is
of nobles, clerics and artizans, whom it was impossible
to restrain. Yet amid this scene of confusion at any
moment the imperial power might show itself with
arbitrary and brutal abruptness. When a servant maid
by mischance spat on the robe of the dead Empress
Eudocia as it was carried to the tomb she was executed
immediately and without protest.

3. From Justin II. to the Latin Conquest.

In 565 Justinian died, and the glory of his reign set
in a dull glow that heralded storms. Justin II., his
nephew, was a tyrant and a madman, but it was power
which brought out his tyranny and his madness. When
he came to the throne he spoke mildly and well. He
made profession of orthodoxy in S. Sophia; he was
raised on the imperial shield in the palace; he promised
in the Hippodrome to pay the debts of the
dead Emperor. They were strange scenes, such as
the people of Byzantium often saw, and strangest of
all to our minds is that which shows the citizens in
48
the place of public games clamouring before the imperial
throne for the payment of debts of Justinian.

Constantinople is still the same. Even when it
looks cowed, it has still its impudence and its determination
to criticise. Justin’s doings were watched
and mocked at, as if he had been the humblest tradesman,
by the city jesters. He built a golden chamber in
the palace by the sea: he set up a pillar to record his
virtues, and then some one affixed a tablet on it:

Meanwhile the barbarians were coming nearer to
the Empire. The Avars demanded tribute, and the
Turks, a name that was so soon to be a familiar terror,
sent envoys to the Cæsar’s court. The enemies, it
might seem, were already closing in when Justin became
a lunatic, bursting into mad fits of rage, and drawn about
the palace in a toy cart, while the “whole senate and
city” knew of the sad fate of their Emperor. Sophia,
his wife, had all the masterful genius of her aunt
Theodora. It was she who gave the rule to
Tiberius II., under whom the empire steadily decayed.
Maurice, his successor, was a severe ruler,
whom the people learned to hate. When at last his
reign ended in a revolution and a flight, it was the
people of Constantinople, the demes and the factions
of the Circus, who gave him to death, and placed the
imperial crown on the head of Phocas, his successor.

While Constantinople thus dethroned and set up
the civil rulers of the Empire, it was claiming for its
49
patriarch the highest position in the Church. When
at the beginning of the sixth century the patriarch
John had signed the formula drawn up by Pope
Hormisdas, he repudiated any claim to superiority
on the part of the old Rome: the two cities and the
two Sees he declared were one. As early as 518 the
patriarch of Constantinople called himself “universal
bishop”: in 595 the great Pope Gregory, who had
himself, as a papal envoy, seen the greatness of the
Eastern See, vigorously protested, to the Emperor
Maurice, against the assumption to the title. But
while the patriarchs used the title in no exclusive
sense, they were determined, as they are determined
to-day, to assert the independence of their See and
its equality with that of Rome.

Ecclesiastical independence did not preserve the
Empire from political weakness. Phocas was soon
seen to be worse than Maurice, and one conspiracy
after another was begun in the Hippodrome and ended
by a massacre in the streets. The Green faction in the
Circus called the Emperor a drunkard and a madman
to his face. Famine and pestilence ravaged the
crowded city, and when Heraclius, already a renowned
general, brought his fleet up the Hellespont
and anchored at the Golden Horn the collapse of the
power of Phocas was immediate, and a new Emperor
was crowned in the great church of the “Capital of
the World.” The reign of Heraclius, gallant man
though he was, began in almost unbroken disaster, and
when in 615 Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians
it seemed that the end was at hand. In the next year,
as had already happened under Phocas, a Persian
army encamped at Chalcedon. When negotiations
were in vain, when Heraclius had even formed the
idea of transferring the seat of Empire from Constantinople
to Carthage, and had only abandoned it after
50
his preparations were far advanced, when the terror
and indignation of the people forced him to take oath
before the patriarch in S. Sophia that he would never
leave “the Queen of Cities,” at length the courage of
the empire awoke, the nobles sacrificed their wealth
and the churches their treasures, the fleet utterly destroyed
that of the Persians, and Heraclius delivered
the city and the empire by a march as brilliant as it was
daring. Leading five thousand veterans across Asia
Minor and through the mountains he “penetrated into the
heart of Persia and recalled the armies of the great king
to the defence of their bleeding country.” After three
campaigns he returned in triumph and entered, as no
Emperor since Theodosius the Great had done, by the
Golden Gate.

In his absence thirty thousand Avars, who had
swept over the Balkan provinces like a devouring
flame, broke through the great wall and encamped
under the very walls of the city itself. Churches in
the suburbs were burnt to the ground and the famous
Church of the Theotokos in Blachernae was on the
point of being destroyed, when some panic caused
the Avar horsemen to retire. The danger was too
obvious for the warning to be neglected, and the
Senate, which had refused with contumely the offers
of the barbarian leaders, allies of the Persian King,
drove back the enemy and immediately increased the
fortifications by a new wall. This splendid barrier,
magnificent to-day in its ruins, stretched from the
enclosure outside the palace of Blachernae, at the foot
of the sixth hill, to the Golden Horn. It is flanked
by three hexagonal towers.

A year later, in 627, the Emperor, who dreaded
even the sight of the sea, crossed the Bosphorus by a
bridge of boats, decked with branches of trees to
imitate a forest. Landing north of the city he marched
51
inland and crossed the valley at the head of the Golden
Horn—below the “Sweet Waters of Europe”—by a
bridge made by Justinian nearly opposite the end of
the walls. So along the triumphal way he went, past
the new walls that have ever since borne his name, and
entered by the Golden Gate, the Emperor who had
vanquished the Persians, saved his empire, and brought
back the greatest of all relics, the sacred wood of the
true Cross, which S. Helena, the mother of Constantine,
had found on Calvary.

But Heraclius was not to triumph unchecked. The
fatal temptation of theological strife conquered even
the conqueror of the Persians, and the beginning of the
Monothelite controversy dates from the Ekthesis of
Sergius the patriarch, a document which, if it were
intended to make peace, certainly provoked, war that
was not ended, though its area was defined, by the
decision of the Fourth General Council, which met
at Constantinople in 680, and condemned those who
denied that Christ had two wills, human and divine.

The dreary years of the latter half of the seventh
century may be rapidly summarised. Constantinople
saw the settlement of barbarians, Slaves and Balgars,
almost at its gates. Emperor succeeded emperor without
anyone appearing who was worthy to be the heir
of Heraclius. At length in 672 the Saracens, who
had long devastated Asia, brought a fleet up the Hellespont
and besieged the city. Their total defeat by
Constantine IV., whom his people nicknamed Pogonatus
(the bearded), was the greatest triumph of the
Christian powers against the infidel; it was won, it is
said, by the newly-discovered “Greek fire,” so long
to be the terror of the foes of the Empire. Constantinople
proved herself the bulwark of Europe against
the infidel. The nations of the West sent their envoys
to applaud. Six hundred years later another Constantine
52
was to fall, when his city was at length captured by
the followers of Mohammed.

Justinian II., the son of Constantine Pogonatus, was
a great builder like his namesake, whom probably he
sought to imitate; but in character he was far from
resembling the builder of S. Sophia. In the inimitable
phrases of Gibbon, “The name of a triumphant law-giver
was dishonoured by the vices of a boy….
His passions were strong; his understanding was
feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride
that his birth had given him the command of millions,
of whom the smallest community would not have chosen
him for their local magistrate. His favourite ministers
were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy,
an eunuch and a monk; to the one he abandoned
a palace, to the other the finances; the former corrected
the Emperor’s mother with a scourge, the latter
suspended the insolvent tributaries, with their heads
downwards, over a slow and smoky fire. Since the
days of Commodus and Caracalla, the cruelty of the
Roman princes had most commonly been the effect of
their fear; but Justinian, who possessed some vigour of
character, enjoyed the sufferings and braved the revenge
of his subjects about ten years, till the measure was full
of his crimes and of their patience.”

The attempt to banish a popular general whom he
had long imprisoned was the occasion of a revolt which
cast the Emperor from the throne; and the hippodrome
saw again an act of tragic vengeance, when the
tongue and nose of the fallen Cæsar were slit in the
presence of the people who had borne with him too
long.

THE GOLDEN HORN FROM EYÛB

Let Professor Bury’s summary continue the tale:—”The
twenty years which intervened between the banishment
of Justinian in 695 and the accession of Leo the
Isaurian in 717 witnessed a rapid succession of monarchs,


55
all of whom were violently deposed. Isaurian Leontius
was succeeded by Apsimar, who adopted the name
Tiberius, and these two reigns occupied the first ten
years. Then Justinian returned from exile, recovered
the throne, and ‘furiously raged’ for six years (705-711).
He was overthrown by Bardanes, who called
himself Philippicus; then came Artemius, whose imperial
name was Anastasius; and finally the years 716
and 717 saw the fall of Anastasius, the reign and fall of
Theodosius, and the accession of Isaurian Leo, whose
strong arm guided the Empire from ways of anarchy
into a new path.”[10]

In the tragedies of these years Constantinople bore its
full share, and no more strange contrast to the scene
of his barbarous mutilation could be imagined than that
when Justinian II. sat again, ten years later (705) in
the hippodrome, with his feet on the necks of the
two monarchs who had filled his throne in the meantime.
As the fickle people saw the “slit-nose,” as
they called him, triumphant over Leontius and Apsimar
they called out in the words of the psalms,
which came so readily to their lips, “Thou hast
trodden upon the lion and the asp: the young lion and
the dragon hast thou trodden under thy feet.”

Six years later (711) there was a more terrible
tragedy. Justinian was justly dethroned and slain,
and his little boy Tiberius, the child of his exile, was
torn from the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae
and cruelly butchered outside the palace wall. The
next years were stained by crimes and follies hardly
less revolting than those that had gone before; there
could be no more bitter irony than the single word
which the humble tax-gatherer, who was elevated
against his will to the imperial throne under the name
of Theodosius II., inscribed upon his tomb—ὑγίεια—health
56
was to be found nowhere for the empire in his
day.

His successor, Leo the Isaurian, whom the Senate
and the patriarch of Constantinople chose in 718 to
be their lord, had seen an adventurous life, and was
already the general and imperator of the great eastern
army.

His first task was to defend the city against the
Saracens. The great siege of 718, lasting twelve
months, failed chiefly through his skill and patience.
The invaders encamped before the city in August 717;
the name of their Suleiman was one which was later
to be very familiar to the Byzantines. When winter
came it was one of those bitter seasons to which Constantinople
is often subject. For many weeks snow
lay on the ground, and the besiegers suffered far more
than the garrison. Leo defended the city with extraordinary
skill, and at length, at the right moment, by
a well planned sortie he scattered the infidels, and of the
great host of a hundred and eighty thousand men the
Mohammedan historians say that only thirty thousand
escaped back to the East. No greater feat was ever
performed by the great empire, the bulwark of
Christendom, than this heroic defence and splendid
repulse.

It was not wholly the work of Leo, for the Bulgarians
came from the north to his aid, and a pestilence,
even before the storms of the Dardanelles destroyed
their fleet, caused the withdrawal of the Saracen host.
Then as an administrator he reformed the government,
as a legist he reissued and revised the laws. The great
earthquake of 739 caused the institution of a new tax,
if not a new financial system.

“Some of the oldest monuments in the city were
thrown down by the shock, the statue of Constantine
the Great, at the gate of Attalus; the statue and
57
sculptured column of Arcadius; the statue of Theodosius
I., over the Golden Gate, and the church of
Irene, close to S. Sophia. The land walls of the
city were also subverted; and in order to repair the
fortifications Leo increased the taxes by one-twelfth,
or a miliarision in a nomisma.”

Thus Professor Bury.[11] But to such acts, important
though they were, Leo the Isaurian does not owe the
fact that his name will never be forgotten in the history
of the Empire which he ruled. It was he who began
the attack upon the ancient custom of the Eastern
churches which gave rise to the long and bitter iconoclastic
controversy. It were idle for a Western
accustomed to the severity and restraint of English
worship to pretend to judge without partiality the
conflict which arose in the eighth century among the
Easterns. To Englishmen it comes with a shock of
surprise to learn that they are regarded as Romanists,
as has recently happened, because they do not use
incense in every public service of the Church, according
to the immemorial usage of the East. Similarly it is
with diffidence that we learn to recognise the reverence
paid to icons, pictures of sacred things, as a true and
helpful part of Oriental devotion. It tends, we think,
to superstition; as much perhaps as our grandfathers’
pride in the black gown of the preacher, or the curious
customs which led in England to the “plethoric
Sunday afternoon.” Leo the Isaurian, and after him
his son, Constantine V. (nicknamed Copronymus by his
people, probably “from his devotion to the stables”),
of whom the latter certainly had no sense of the
reality of religion, embarked on an ill-omened attempt
to purge from the Church, and to destroy in the sacred
buildings themselves, all the brilliant pictures and
mosaics which commemorated the saints and received
58
the homage, bordering no doubt on superstition, of the
faithful. They objected that it was a sin to represent
Christ in art at all; and that the representation of
His Mother tended to the exaltation of her name into
that of a Divinity. “Apostles of rationalism” these
Emperors have strangely been called, who fought
against an ineradicable passion of their people. As
dear to the hearts of the Greek Christians as their
subtle questionings into the deep meanings of divine
things, their determination to be satisfied with nothing
less than a precise and logical definition of the faith
once for all given to the saints, was their craving for
outward and visible signs to represent the gifts of God
at once in the Divine Life and in the lives of the
saintly followers of the Lord, and their own reverence
and consecration of all that was beautiful in the work
of man. The force of Mohammedanism had lain in
its austere rejection of any outward image of Divine
things; heretics, Judaising or Monophysite, had from
time to time taken up the cry against these innocent
representations of the saints. If the “worship” of
images tended to obscure the spiritual truth of religion,
the destruction of all visible memorials of the saints,
emblems of the divine attributes, or representations of
the passion of Christ, was even more certain to tell
against the real belief of a race at once ignorant and
dramatic, to whom the eye was the constant teacher of
the mind. However strange and unedifying the reverence
paid to icons may seem to the modern Western
mind, it is but the shallowest ignorance which would
call it idolatry, and it is plain that any hasty attempt to
interfere with the popular expression of religious ideas
must tend, if hastily and unskilfully conducted, to
impair the faith of the people itself. Led by men
who were believed by the enthusiastic and conservative
Byzantines to be influenced by Monophysites, Jews
59
and Mohammedans, it was certain to provoke a desperate
resistance, and that the more widespread because
the issue was not an intricate matter of scholastic
teaching, but a plain issue of practice in which every
day passions were deeply concerned.

In 726, almost, it would seem, without warning, the
Emperor Leo issued an edict that all images in churches
should be utterly abolished. The patriarch, rather than
consent to the action, resigned his office. The story
of what followed may be given in the words of Mr
Tozer.[12]

“The work of destruction now commenced in earnest;
the statues were everywhere removed, and the pictures
on the walls were whitewashed over, and though
numerous outbreaks occurred, and some executions
took place before it was accomplished, yet on the
whole the opposition was not formidable. The act
which caused the greatest indignation was the removal
of the magnificent image of Christ which surmounted
the bronze gateway of the imperial palace, and was
the object of great reverence. In order to take down
this statue and burn it, a soldier of the guard had
mounted a ladder, when a number of women assembled
at the spot to beg that it might be spared; but,
instead of listening to them, the soldier struck his axe
into the face of the image. Infuriated by this, which
appeared to them to be an insult offered to the Saviour
Himself, they dragged the ladder from under his feet
and killed him. The Emperor avenged his agent by
executing some, and exiling others, of the offenders,
and set up in the place of the statue a plain cross, with
an inscription explaining the significance of the change.

“In the defence of images there stood forth two
champions, the one in the West, the other in the
East; and the points of view from which they
60
respectively regarded them illustrate the different
feelings of the two churches on the subject. The
former of these was Pope Gregory II., who at first
strongly remonstrated with the Emperor on his edict,
and afterwards, when he endeavoured to enforce its
observance in Italy, encouraged his people to disregard
the order, and defied his nominal sovereign in violent
and even insulting language. At last he excommunicated
his nominee, the patriarch Anastasius. But he
advocated the retention of images on the practical
ground of their utility in instructing the young and
ignorant, and as being an incentive to devotion. Far
more exalted and more subtly defined was the position
attributed to them by the other advocate, who spoke
from the distant East. This was John of Damascus,
otherwise known as S. John Damascene, the last of
the Fathers of the Greek Church. This learned and
acute theologian, who in many ways was superior to
the age in which he lived, at one time filled a civil
post of some importance under the Caliphs, who now
ruled in Syria, but afterwards retired to the monastery
of S. Saba, in the wilderness of Engedi, the strange
position of which, overhanging a deep gorge that leads
down to the Dead Sea, is still the wonder of the
traveller. As he lived in the dominion of the Saracens
he was beyond the reach of the Emperor’s arm,
and now undertook the cause of his suffering co-religionists.
In three powerful addresses he set forth
his arguments for image worship. Some of them
follow the familiar lines of defence, that these objects
were memorials of the mysteries of the faith; and that
in the adoration of them the spiritual was reached
through the medium of the material. But beyond this
he made it plain that, to his mind, and the minds of
those who thought with him, the worship of images
was closely connected with the doctrine of the Incarnation,
61
the earthly material having been once for all
sanctified when the Son of God took human flesh,
and being thenceforth worthy of all honour. From
this we may learn both how it came to pass that the
most religious men of the age became enthusiasts for
what was in itself superstitious, and also what was the
cardinal point of difference between them and their
opponents. For, while the one side regarded figures
of Christ as a degradation of a heavenly being, to the
other they were a practical confession of His true
humanity, and any disregard of them appeared in the
light of a denial of the Incarnation. At last, when it
was found that the Emperor persevered in his attack,
the iconoclasts were anathematised by the orthodox
congregations in all the Mahometan countries outside
the Empire. Both John and Gregory protested
throughout against the interference of the State with
the Church in this matter as being beyond its province;
and, owing to the close connection which
existed between the clergy and the people, they were
generally regarded as the assertors of liberty and
of the right of private judgment in opposition to
despotism.”

The indirect effects of Leo’s action were even more
important than the obvious ones. The division which
ensued between Italy, resisting iconoclasm under the
Pope’s authority, and the imperial power made the
Emperor decide to transfer to the patriarch of Constantinople
the jurisdiction over Sicily and Calabria,
leaving to the Pope that over the exarchate of
Ravenna which still nominally obeyed the Cæsar.
The meaning of this is thus expressed by Professor
Bury.

“The effect of this act of Leo, which went far
to decide the mediæval history of Southern Italy,
was to bring the boundary between the ecclesiastical
62
dominions of New Rome and Old Rome into coincidence
with the boundary between the Greek and
the Latin nationalities. In other words, it laid the
basis of the distinction between the Greek and the
Latin Churches. The only part of the Empire in
which the Pope now possessed authority was the
exarchate, including Rome, Ravenna and Venice.
The geographical position of Naples, intermediate
between Rome and the extremities of Italy, determined
that its sympathies should be drawn in two
directions; in religious matters it inclined towards
Old Rome, in political matters it was tenacious of
its loyalty to New Rome.”[13]

But this was not all. An immense immigration
of persecuted monks and priests as well as lay folk
practically recolonised much of Southern Italy.

Constantine Copronymus was far more eager than
his father to push the iconoclastic campaign. In
761 he began a deliberate and bitter persecution of
those who opposed him. Already, under Leo the
Isaurian, the virgin Theodosia had been martyred.
Her festival is still kept on May 29, and the church
raised to her memory still stands transformed into a
mosque just within the Aya Kapou, on the Golden
Horn. Many whom the Greek Church still commemorates
were now slain and others tortured. Constantine
was equally hostile to monks, and he was as
bitter against his creatures whom he suspected as
against those who openly disputed his will. The
patriarch whom he had set up fell into disgrace in
spite of his support of iconoclasm. He was degraded
in S. Sophia, carried round the Hippodrome sitting
backwards on an ass, and at last beheaded as a traitor.

The successor of Constantine, Leo IV., was significant
only in that he followed his policy of persecution.
63
He left the crown in 780 to his son Constantine and
his widow Irene. Conspiracies, real or alleged, of
his brothers were bitterly punished. The Empress
Irene was satisfied so long as her son was still a boy to
allow him a nominal share in the government; but
when he grew up and showed an independent spirit,
she used the growing unpopularity which came upon him
after his repudiation of his wife to raise a party against
him, and hired troops to take his life. He escaped
death only to lose his eyes, and his wicked mother,
surrounded by degraded favourites, reigned alone. It
was she whom the great Teutonic King Charles was
ready to wed, and the failure of the negotiations led,
with other more notable causes, to the creation of the
new empire of the West, so long held by German
Cæsars, but professing still to be—as that of Constantinople
historically was—the heir of the ancient
empire of the Roman world.

Wicked as Irene was, it was given to her to restore
peace to the Church, and to reunite though only for a
time the Catholic Church throughout the world. So
completely was the popular feeling against the iconoclasts
that it needed little of the intrigue or violence
which Irene was so ready to use to secure the result
she desired. In 786, when her worst passions had not
been revealed and she still lived in union with her son,
the seventh General Council met at Nicaea. It was
attended by representatives from Italy as well as from
the East, and as its decisions represent the use and
teaching of the Eastern Church to-day, they may here
be summarised in Professor Bury’s words.

“At the seventh sitting (5th or 6th October), the
definition (ὅρος) of doctrine was drawn up; after a
summary repetition of the chief points of theology
established by previous Universal Councils, it is laid
down that the figure of the holy cross and holy images,
64
whether coloured or plain, whether consisting of stone
or of any other material, may be represented on vessels,
garment, walls or tables, in houses or on public roads;
especially figures of Christ, the Virgin, angels, or holy
men: such representations, it is observed, stimulate
spectators to think of the originals, and, while they
must not be adored with that worship which is only for
God (λατρεία) deserve adoration (προσκύνησις).”[14]

But Irene’s services to the Church were not allowed
then, any more than we should allow them now, to preserve
her in power. The stars in their courses seemed
to the superstitious to fight against her, and, though she
held the crown she had so ill-won for five years, the
end came at last by the treachery of those she had
raised to highest place. “For five years,” says
Gibbon, “the Roman world bowed to the government
of a female; and, as she moved through the streets of
Constantinople, the reins of four milk-white steeds
were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot
before the golden chariot of their queen.” But among
the patricians whom she had chosen was the treasurer
Nicephorus, who on October 31, 802, having captured
his benefactress, and with some spark of generosity,
undestroyed by his ambition and his avarice, sent her
to banishment rather than to death, ascended the throne
of the Cæsars.

With him began a new dynasty, a new century, and
in some ways a new era for the imperial city.

During the eighth century Constantinople, as a city,
underwent a great change. This was not merely due
to the incessant ebb and flow of population, the coming
and going of different detachments of the imperial army,
the founding of new monasteries by men from all parts
of the Christian world, the opening of new commercial
establishments, the coming of new trading embassies,
65
but to one great and irremediable disaster. From
745 to 747 the city was devastated by the plague, that
bubonic distemper, so familiar already but now more
terribly destructive than ever before. The words of
Theophanes, who lived when the remembrance of it
was still fresh, though they have been often quoted,
may be quoted again. They stand side by side with
the modern records of the still powerful pestilence.

“And in the spring of the first indiction (747) the
pestilence spread to a greater extent, and in summer its
flame culminated to such a height that whole houses
were entirely shut up, and those on whom the office
devolved could not bury their dead. In the embarrassment
of the circumstances, the plan was conceived of
carrying out the dead on saddled animals, on whose
backs were placed frameworks of planks. In the same
way they placed the corpses above one another in
waggons. And when all the burying-grounds in the
city and suburbs had been filled, and also the dry
cisterns and tanks, and very many vineyards had been
dug up, the gardens too within the old walls were used
for the purpose of burying human bodies, and even thus
the need was hardly met.”

THE AQUEDUCT OF VALENS

The effect of the great loss of life which ensued was
felt at once. At the very time when multitudes were
seeking refuge in Italy from the iconoclastic persecution,
came this new depopulation, and Constantine found
himself obliged to encourage, and even enforce, immigration
from every part of his dominions. Chiefly he
brought Greeks from the mainland, and their places
were filled by Slaves from the North. Greece and the
Balkan States as they appear to-day, and even to some
degree Constantinople itself took a new and marked
departure in the middle of the eighth century.
Constantinople received a new Greek population and,
while its official classes still preserved the pomp and
66
dignity of Roman traditions, began to feel itself more
than ever Greek. None the less it was still actively
and obviously cosmopolitan. Scholars from all parts
of the world came to the university where ancient
classics were still read and where Greek was still a living
tongue. Constantine actually made Nicetas, a man of
Slavonic race, patriarch, and it is said that his clergy
mocked at his pronunciation of the Greek of the
Gospel. Armenians had already become almost as
prominent in the city as they are to-day; at the
beginning of the ninth century one of them actually
became Emperor. As early as the reign of Justin II. a
large colony of traders from Central Asia was established
in the city. When communication became easier
and the power of the Roman State, reviving under
Heraclius, more wide spread, the riches of the city
increased. It is noted that the influence of the Church
was steadily directed against luxury, and that nothing
at all like the scenes described by Juvenal or Petronius
marked the Byzantium of the days of the iconoclasts.
Constantine himself was a man who lived freely, and
the monks whom he attacked commented severely on
his life. But the rich men of Constantinople, as a rule,
though they delighted in the outward adorning of gold
and precious stones, and loved entertainments, the
circus and excursions on the Bosphorus, lived on the
whole simply. Though the churches, as well as the
houses, glittered with mosaics and gems, the asceticism
which the many monasteries kept always visibly before
the eyes of the people, had its influence among the rich
as well as the poor. Rich though the imperial city
was it was rich most of all in its churches and its relics.
And indeed the constant danger from without, and the
pressing needs of a large population, both gave employment
to great numbers and gave to the government
always some practical work which kept up the taxes.
67
The laws, it has been observed, recognised the duty of
the State to provide work for the people, and to see
that they did it. Idleness was regarded as a crime as
well as a sin: the State declared that for this reason it
must actively discourage it, and no less because “it is
unfair that strong men should live by the consumption
of the superfluity of the labour of others, because that
superfluity is owed to the
weak.” It is noted also
that “besides the inevitable
staff of public workmen,
who, in a city like
Byzantium, where fires
were frequent and earthquakes
not uncommon,
had much to do beyond
the repairs necessitated
by the wear and tear of
time, the State also
supported multitudes of
bakers”—for the State
still followed the Roman
rule and provided the
poor with bread as well
as public games—”and
we are taught that the
gardens, to which we sometimes meet casual references
in the historians, were not the property of
private citizens, but were parks for the people,
kept up at the State’s expense.” Already we see
that some of the features most prominent in the
city to-day belonged to it in the early Middle
Age. The great Dome of S. Sophia glittered upon
the wayfarer as he sailed up towards the mouth of the
Golden Horn, and the city as the soldier looked at it
from the tower of Heraclius was a city set in bowers
68
of perpetual green. Another feature as prominent,
which the foreigner sees from the heights of Pera,
owes its preservation to Constantine Copronymus.
The aqueduct of Valens had been destroyed by the
Avars in the reign of Heraclius, Constantine brought
thousands of workmen together and repaired it, and the
water flowed as of old into the capacious cisterns which
were the work of the greatest of eastern architects.

The ninth century began with the new and short-lived
dynasty of Nicephorus. “His character,” says
Gibbon, “was stained with the three odious vices of
hypocrisy, ingratitude and avarice; his want of virtue
was not redeemed by any superior talents nor his want
of talents by any pleasing qualifications.” The historians,
being ecclesiastics, resented his attempt to
assert the most extreme claims of the iconoclastic
emperors to rule the Church, and the people despised
him for his treachery and his failures in war. He fell
in 811 in battle against the Bulgarians. In six months
his son, Stauricius, followed him to the tomb. Michael
Rhangabe, who had married Procopia, the daughter of
Nicephorus, then reigned for two years, but his weakness
caused his deposition, and the people of Constantinople
found a new sovereign, Leo the Armenian,
forced upon them by the army. During his reign the
imperial city was again besieged. Hadrianople was
lost, and but for the death of the Bulgarian king it
seems unlikely that Leo would have been able to drive
back the forces which overran the peninsula. Yet
Leo, conqueror though he was, was able to hold the
crown but little longer than his predecessors. In 820
a conspiracy of his generals, which his own generosity
had made possible, attacked him as he sang matins on
Christmas Day, and slew him at the foot of the altar in
the chapel. He did not reign without leaving a memorial
of his rule which lasts to this day. The wall of
69
Heraclius was not thought fully to defend the quarter
of Blachernae. Leo determined to build another wall
and dig a broad moat in front of the Heraclian wall.
“The wall of Leo,” says Professor Van Millingen,
“stands 77 feet to the west of the wall of Heraclius,
running parallel to it for some 260 feet, after which it
turns to join the walls along the Golden Horn.” It is
a strong fortification, and the number of attacks afterwards
delivered on that quarter show how necessary it
was that it should be strong. “Its parapet-walk was
supported upon arches, which served at the same time
to buttress the wall itself, a comparatively slight structure
about 8 feet thick. With a view of increasing the
wall’s capacity for defence, it was flanked by four
small towers, while its lower portion was pierced by
numerous loopholes. Two of the towers were on the
side facing the Golden Horn, and the other two
guarded the extremities of the side looking towards the
country on the west. The latter towers projected
inwards from the rear of the wall, and between them
was a gateway corresponding to the Heraclian gate of
Blachernae.”[15]

Michael II., called the Stammerer, who was then
brought from the dungeon to the throne, and on whose
legs,—such was the haste of the revolution,—the fetters
actually remained for some hours after he was Emperor,
was twice besieged in Constantinople by a rival general,
but was relieved by the Bulgarians, and showed to the
captured leader, Thomas the Slavonian, none of the
mercy that had been shown to himself. He died in
829, and his son Theophilus reigned in his stead. Of
his character and reign the most contradictory reports
are given; but it is interesting to recall the scene of his
choice of a wife, as Theophanes tells it. He determined
to choose a bride from among the beauties of
70
Constantinople, and when they were assembled he
walked between two lines of lovely damsels. When
he came to the poetess Kasia, he addressed her in
verse:

She replied, more happily,

It was in the style of the old Greek poets: the
leaders of each semichorus championing the cause of
their sex in the immortal question: “Through woman
evil things entered”; “but also through woman better
things well forth.” The lady was too witty to be
empress, and Theodora, who was chosen instead, became
not only a happy wife but a wise regent after the
death of Theophilus. He died in 842, and Theodora
was regent for her son Michael till 856. Her husband
had been Iconoclast, and he scourged those who
would not receive his edict. His widow declared that
he had repented on his death-bed, and procured his
absolution after death. Before the year of his death
was out Theodora had replaced the images and a
synod had reiterated the right and benefit of image-“worship.”
But the independence of the Eastern
Church was none the less fully secured; and the
indignant protests of Popes showed that they were becoming,
as their own pretensions grew, more and more
estranged from Constantinople.

The wisdom of the mother was not rewarded in
the life of her son. Michael III. was perhaps the
most contemptible sovereign who ever sat on the
imperial throne of the East. He gave himself up to
pleasure and in particular to the Circus. He was a
drunkard and buffoon, and he delighted to mock in
public processions the most sacred ordinances of the
71
Christian religion. In 867 he was murdered by one
whom he had raised almost to the purple. The years
of his reign were diversified by sieges—notably the
first attack of some hitherto unknown barbarians from
the North-East.

Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries Constantinople
was attacked four times by the Russians.
The traders told of the riches of the city, and the
barbarians were eager to carry them away. In June
860 they actually anchored in the Bosphorus and
attacked the walls, but the return of Michael III.
drove them off, and they were afterwards completely
defeated. A second attempt is said to have taken
place in 907, when the rough barks of the pirates
were drawn over the isthmus; a third in 941 was as
completely defeated; and again in 1048 the Greek fire
proved effective.

But these later sieges were still in the far future
when Michael, with the aid, men said, of the Blessed
Virgin of the Blachernae, scattered the invaders, and
passed again into the seclusion of his corrupt court,
from whose recesses no news but that of murders and
debaucheries seems ever to have penetrated without.
“The state of society at the Court of Constantinople,”
says Finlay, “was not amenable to public opinion, for
few knew much of what passed within the walls of the
great palace; but yet the immense machinery of the
imperial administration gave the Emperor’s power a
solid basis, always opposed to the temporary vices of
the courtiers. The order which rendered property
secure, and enabled the industrious classes to prosper,
through the equitable administration of the Roman law,
nourished the vitality of the Empire, when the madness
of a Nero and the drunkenness of a Michael appeared
to threaten political order with ruin. The people,
carefully secluded from public business, and almost
72
without any knowledge of the proceedings of their
government, were in all probability little better acquainted
with the intrigues and crimes of their day than
we are at present. They acted, therefore, only when
some real suffering or imaginary grievance brought
oppression directly home to their interests or their
feelings. Court murders were to them no more than
a tragedy or a scene in the amphitheatre, at which
they were not present.”[16]

Thus, when Cæsar followed Cæsar, with no change
for the city over which they were supposed to rule,
the intrigues and scandals which disgraced the reign of
Michael III. raised scarce a stir among the people;
and when he died by the hands of one who had taken—it
was said—a base part in some of the most degraded
of his acts, men hardly wondered and certainly
did not condemn.

Basil the Macedonian, had had a romantic life. As a
boy he had wandered penniless to Constantinople, and
slept on the steps of the church of S. Diomed. The kindness
shown to the wayfarer by the abbat of the monastery
attached to the church was rewarded, when Basil
became Emperor, by the erection of a new church and
monastery, some pillars of which still lie neglected upon
the beach of the Sea of Marmora, not far from Yedi
Koulé station. His immense strength, personal beauty,
and acute intelligence, soon made their way, and he
completed his ascent to power it is said by marrying a
mistress of Michael III.

As sovereign and the founder of a dynasty, Basil the
Macedonian was amongst the greatest of the Emperors.
He was a successful warrior, an able administrator of
finance, a great builder of churches, and a repairer of the
walls. But his greatest glory is that of restorer of the
ancient Roman law. He returned, as has been shown
73
by Professor Bury,[17] to the principles of Justinian, in the
Basilica, which were the most important reconstruction of
Roman law in the Middle Ages, and the last it received.

We must hurry over these years, in which Constantinople
itself underwent but few changes. Leo VI.,
the “philosopher,” who has been more happily called
a pedant, left no trace on the history of the city, save
his name as a repairer on one of the towers of the sea-walls
by Koum Kapou. His son, Constantine VII.,
called Porphyrogenitus, because he was “born in the
purple,” (i.e. not when his father was Emperor, but
because of the porphyry lined chamber reserved for his
mother at his birth), was at first under the charge of his
uncle Alexander and then of his mother Zoe, and lastly
of a successful general Romanus, who surrounded himself
with a galaxy of imperial sons, allowing Constantine
VII. also still to retain the title of Emperor.

“The studious temper and retirement of Constantine,”
says Gibbon, “disarmed the jealousy of power; his
books and music, his pen and his pencil, were a constant
source of amusement; and, if he could improve a scanty
allowance by the sale of his pictures, if their price was
not enhanced by the name of the artist, he was endowed
with a personal talent which few princes could employ
in the hour of adversity.” Constantine was much more
than a student. A plot against Romanus and the other
Cæsars enabled him to resume power, which he held
with credit for seventeen years. As a writer he is one
of the most important of all the Byzantine historians.

The chief feature indeed of this age is its literary
interest. Two Emperors ruled whose pride it was to
be men of letters. Leo the wise, and Constantine born
in the purple, were both men who wrote of war and
74
government as they knew them, and left to their successors
remarkable pictures of their times. Leo describes
the military forces which had still a magnificent
organisation and a record of victory and valour but little
tarnished. The nobles of Constantinople could fight
as well as intrigue. Rich, brave and popular, the
ancient families which lingered so long after the Mohammedan
conquest in the ancient houses of the Phanar
could always be relied upon to furnish gallant officers
for the troops. Constantine wrote of the Themes, of
the Imperial administration, and of the court ceremonial—the
last an extraordinary work describing the dignity
and state of the emperors, and regulating the minutest
detail of the pomp with which their daily life was
surrounded.

The Court of the Eastern Empire indeed was by far
the most brilliant of the Middle Ages, and the Empire
itself, weak and corrupt though it may seem, was much
the strongest government of the time, and the one
under which life and property were most secure. The
commerce of Constantinople was still greater probably
than that of any other city of the world. East and West
poured their treasures into the city.

The reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was
diversified, like those of so many of his predecessors,
as has already been said, by revolutions, which placed
many Cæsars on at least the steps of the throne.
Romanus and his sons Constantine (called the Eighth)
and Stephen, came to an end in 945, and from that
time till his death in 958 Constantine VII. reigned
alone. His son, Romanus II., succeeded him, and to
him came a time of war, in which his arms were
victorious over the Mohammedans through the genius
of his general, Nicephorus Phocas. In 963 Romanus
died, and Nicephorus, marrying his widow Theophano,
became joint Emperor with the young Basil.
75

Nicephorus was above all things a warrior. He
recovered for the Empire the lands of Cilicia, North
Syria, and Cyprus. His triumph in 966, celebrated in
the Hippodrome and in the great street of the city,
was the prelude to many another great military display;
yet not being sole Emperor, he never entered in triumph
through the Golden gate, though it was at that gate that
he was received in 963 when he began his joint reign.[18]
But his life as Emperor was an unhappy one. So unpopular
was he in the city, owing to his opposition to
the lavish generosity of his predecessors and to his
debasement of the coinage, that he was often stoned in
the streets and had to fortify the great Palace; and his
portrait has been limned for posterity by his enemies.
Chief among the pictures of mediæval Constantinople is
that drawn by Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, who
came on behalf of the Emperor Otto I. to treat of a
marriage between Theophano, the daughter of the
Emperor Romanus, and the future Otto II.

Liudprand had visited Constantinople in 948. Then
he spoke of the great palace to which he was admitted
to audience with Constantine Porphyrogenitus, of its
golden tree in which golden birds of divers kinds sang
sweetly, of the golden lions that guarded the throne,
shaking the earth with the beat of their tails, and roaring
at the approach of the envoys—marvellous features
of the Eastern Court which the Emperor had not forgotten
to record in his account of the ceremonial.
Then he saw, too, the Emperor recline at dinner after
the ancient fashion, he saw the games of the Hippodrome,
and he marvelled at the size of the fruit and at
the extraordinary acrobatic strength of the boys of the
circus. Then he was treated with great distinction.
Now, in 968, his reception was very different. In his
76
letter to the two Ottos he declared that he even lodged
in a roofless house, exposed to heat and cold, and
constantly under guard, and that he suffered agonies
from the resinous Greek wine. First he saw Basil,
the Emperor’s brother, and then he was admitted to
the presence of Nicephorus himself, whom he describes
as more a monster than a man, black as an Ethiop, and
small as a pigmy. A pretty argument took place
between envoy and Emperor; the Greek refusing the
imperial title to the German Cæsars of the West, while
the Western bishop would not allow any rights of the
East to the Italian lands of old Rome. Their converse
was interrupted by the hour of prayer, and
Liudprand joined the procession to S. Sophia. Tradesmen
and low-born folk, says the contemptuous bishop,
lined the streets, many of them barefoot, because of the
holiness of the procession. Nicephorus alone wore gold
and jewels.

When they entered the great church the choir sang
“Lo there cometh the morning star. The dawn
riseth. He reflects the rays of the sun. Nicephorus
our ruler, the pale death of the Saracens.”[19] The
famous phrase, “pallida mors Saracenorum,” which
Liudprand uses, was to be terribly avenged; but then
it was a triumphant expression of the safety which the
city owed to the wise Emperor. As he went, says
Liudprand, “his lords the Emperors” (Basil and
Constantine, the sons of Romanus) bowed before
him. After the Eucharist the bishop dined with the
Emperor, and was again, he says, subject to his taunts.
“You are not Romans but Lombards,” was the
Eastern mockery of the German imperialism; and
77
the reply was that to the Westerns there was no name
more contemptible than that of Roman. Such abrupt
witticisms naturally consigned Liudprand again to his
“hated dwelling, or more truly, prison.” He wrote
to Basil the curopalates (a post of honour second only
to that of Cæsar) and John Tzimisces the Logothete,
beseeching that if his mission was not favourably received,
he might return at once; and then in an interview
with Nicephorus, in the presence of Basil the
chamberlain (parakinomenos) he pressed the proposal
of Otto for a marriage. The Emperor replied that it
was unheard of that a princess born in the purple, the
child of an Emperor born in the purple, should be
given in marriage to a “gentile” or “barbarian.”
So day by day the meetings were renewed and the
proud Italian thought that he was treated each time
with new indignity, being even set below a Bulgarian
envoy—to whose master the Greeks would even allow
the title of “Vasileus” (βασιλεύς) which they would
not give to Otto, and towards whose people alone it
seemed that the Eastern Empire at this time had any
kindly feeling. Theology as well as politics were
often in question, and the Italian bishop was mocked
at for the modernism of his doctrines, as the Greeks
mock the Latins to-day. He was kept, he says, in
company with five lions; and the women, as he passed
through the streets, called out in pity at his woe-worn
appearance. Sometimes he visited the Emperor in
the camp at Balukli (εἰς πήγας, he says, in one of
his snatches of Greek) and quoted Plato to him;
sometimes he had to listen to homilies of S. John
Chrysostom read aloud; more often he had to hear
what seemed to him the grossest insults of the Germans
and the Latins, insults which he gladly returned in his
report to the Ottos upon “the wild ass Nicephorus,”
and which he even ventured, he says, to write on the
78
wall of his prison in verses none too easily to be understood.
At length he was allowed to leave the city,
“once most opulent and flourishing, now half-starved,
perjured, lying, cunning, greedy, rapacious, avaricious,
boastful.” His report, as we have it, breaks off in a
torrent of denunciations of the Greeks and their ways.
His mission was a failure, but Theophano, refused by
Nicephorus, was afterwards given by John Tzimisces,
to be bride to Otto II.

This curious survival of tenth century opinion illustrates
the almost total severance which had now come
about between the East and the West, and shows how
natural was the destruction which was soon to come
upon the city of the Cæsars. The West had ceased
to feel for the Eastern survival of empire anything
of brotherhood or Christian fellowship. First it would
seek to conquer the bulwark of Christendom for itself;
then it would let it fall before the conquering infidels.

Nicephorus did not long retain the throne he had so
well defended. John Tzimisces (or Tchemchkik), an
Armenian, who won the favour of the Empress Theophano,
joined in a plot to overthrow his benefactor,
and Nicephorus was murdered in the palace. John
Tzimisces reigned in his stead. He made treaty with
the patriarch Polyeuctus, by which he gave up the claim
that Nicephorus had asserted, that all episcopal nominations
should only be valid by the Emperor’s consent.
He gave high promotion to the dignified and imposing
Basil, the chamberlain whom Psellus the historian
describes as so impressive a person. He banished the
wicked Empress Theophano to the Princes’ islands.
Then he reigned as joint Emperor with the young
Emperors Basil and Constantine, whose rights he was
scrupulous to preserve.

John Tzimisces was famous as a gallant defender of
the empire. The people of Constantinople knew him
79
chiefly for the imposing ceremonies of his accession,
of his second marriage with Theodora, daughter of
Constantine VII., and of his departure for war against
the barbarian invaders, when the clergy led him in
pomp to his embarkation on the Golden Horn, and
blessed his ships, and the citizens watched a naval
sham fight from the walls. Domestic rebellions—those
of Bardas, Sclerus, and of the family of Phocas—as
well as the dangerous Russian invasions—distracted
his reign: but Tzimisces was a successful
general, and by his conquest over the Russians under
Swiatoslaf he preserved the Empire, and began that
association of teaching and Christian influence which
is returned to-day by the orthodox Russians to the
Church of Constantinople, which is their mother, and
which now, in her time-honoured conservatism, weak
though she is, she is inclined rather to resent than to
welcome. From his conquest John Tzimisces returned
in triumph to Constantinople through the Golden gate,
followed by his soldiers and his captives, greeted by
the Church and by the officers of his court, and
watched by the vast population of the imperial city.
It was one of the greatest of the triumphs, as it was
one of the last. The ancient usages were retained in
all their pomp. The senate met the Emperor at the
gate with the conqueror’s chaplet and with the golden
chariot drawn by four white horses, in which they
besought him to drive through the streets. Dramatically
he showed his sympathy with the religious feeling
of his people; the chariot should carry the Ikon of the
Blessed Virgin which he had taken in Bulgaria and
to which he attributed his victories: he would ride
behind, clothed as an emperor and a general, and
would offer in S. Sophia the crown of the conquered
Bulgarian kings. Then in the palace the young
Bulgarian chieftain Boris, who had followed his
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triumph on foot, was despoiled of the insignia of
sovereignty, yet ranked among the officers of the
imperial court.

It was not the last of the victories of John
Tzimisces. He returned more than once a conqueror
from Armenia and Mesopotamia. He died in
976, in the midst of his victories; and since the young
Emperors whom he had guarded were now grown to
man’s estate, men spoke of his death as mysterious and
as probably due to poison.

In Basil II. the Empire again had a warrior Emperor,
but one who added to the delights of war the
devotion of an almost monastic religion. While his
brother, Constantine IX., confined himself to the
court and its pleasures, Basil in many hard-won fights
achieved the title of Bulgaroktonos, the slayer of the
Bulgarians. For thirty-four years he fought the great
King Samuel, who had built up a power in the
Balkans, till at last he utterly broke up the Slavs,
captured all their fortresses, and extended the frontier
of the Empire to Belgrade, and so down the Danube
to the Black Sea. It was, as Gibbon says, “since
the time of Belisarius, the most important triumph of
the Roman arms.” Victories also he won in the East,
but they served only to break down the kingdom of
Armenia, and thus to destroy what might have been a
bulwark against the infidel. Basil, who reigned from
963 to 1025, when he died at the age of sixty-eight,
and who for more than fifty years was practically the
sole ruler of the Empire, was a stern, vigorous man,
sharp in speech, often cruel in victory, serious and restrained
in life, but fond of mirth in his moments of
ease. He was a complete contrast to his idle brother,
who lived it seemed only for the Hippodrome and the
society of the ladies of his court. Basil was never
married. Constantine, who survived him three years,
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left three daughters.[20] During his long reign Basil
had swept away all rivals from his path: the great
chamberlain Basil had early been banished, and there
was no dynasty to compete with the Macedonians in
the last days of their power.

Basil taught the people that the Emperor could rule
without the intervention of courtiers, and thus when
he died the imperial city looked for a man to be at its
head. If they had feared rather than loved the great
conqueror of the Bulgarians, they respected him because
he had kept up the power of the Church and had patronised
the learning which still had its home in the
East. He left to his successors the alliance of the
patriarchal See and a school of literature founded on
classic models, which, with all its affectations, gave to
the eleventh century an important group of historical
writers. In no age, too, was Byzantine art, the art of
working in ivory, of miniature, of mosaic, more vigorous.
With the death of Basil, however long it might
be disguised, the decay began.

When Constantine died his three daughters survived
him, Eudocia who preferred a convent to a throne, and
Zoe and Theodora, ladies of more ambitious temper.
Zoe before her father died was wedded—she was forty-eight—to
Romanus Argyrus, an elderly noble already
married, whose wife was banished to a convent. Romanus
III. was for six years (1028-1034) the nominal
ruler of the Empire. He thought himself a philosopher
and a warrior; but, says Psellus, “he thought he knew
far more than he did.” Some of his acts were useful—as
his repair of the walls after the earthquakes of
1032 and 1033, commemorated by an inscription on
82
the fourth tower from the Sea of Marmora, shows.
But the historian mocks at his long drawn-out building
of the monastery of S. Mary Peribleptos and says that
a “whole mountain was excavated” to supply the
stones. It was his most enduring memorial, and,
several times rebuilt, it still survives in the possession
of the Armenians as the monastery of S. George, not
far from the Psamatia station.

But the Emperor’s dreams of war, philosophy and
building, were rudely disturbed by the intrigue of his
wife with a young Paphlagonian soldier, Michael. He
professed to disbelieve it, though it was notorious to
the court. His complaisance perhaps allowed him to
die in peace, though some said he was killed by a slow
poison. On the very day of his death Zoe elevated
Michael to the throne, and before the burial of Romanus
the senate kissed the right hand of his successor.

Michael appears before us in the pages of the rhetorical
Psellus as almost a hero and a saint. He reclaimed
sinners after the manner of Justinian, he reformed the
administration, he daily worshipped God in the services
of the Church, and nightly walked the streets to watch
and to prevent crime. One of the strangest pictures
of mediæval Constantinople is that which Psellus gives
us of the unwearied Emperor, disguised in monkish
dress, passing swiftly “like lightning” through the
streets at night, watching that his people might be preserved
from crime. Yet with all his virtues he was a
drunkard, and the epileptic fits to which he became
more and more subject were probably due to his vices.
So terribly did his affliction increase upon him that
when he gave audience it was necessary to surround
him with curtains which could in a moment be drawn
to hide his paroxysms, and when he rode his guards
formed a circle about him. His greedy relations surrounded
him and urged him to provide for them, and
83
when he had signalised his reign by a heroic defence
of the Empire against a rising of the Bulgarians he returned
in triumph only to retire to a monastery and to
die.

Zoe emerged from the seclusion in which she had
passed the last years of her young husband’s life, and
was induced by her family to make his nephew, Michael
Kalaphates Emperor. Raised to the throne by his family
he set himself at once to reduce it to the lowest depths.
“The names of kinship, the common tie of kindred
blood, appeared to him mere childishness, and it would
have been nothing to him if one wave had engulfed all
his kin.” The same measure he meted to the nobles
and the officials; but he courted popularity with the
traders and the populace more than any of his predecessors
had done, and when he showed himself in the
streets silk carpets were strewn before him and he was
greeted as the noblest of the Cæsars. Yet he relied too
much upon the fickle mob. When the senate consented
to his banishment of Zoe, shorn as a nun, to
Prince’s Island, he proclaimed his act in the forum of
Constantine for the acceptance of the people.

But Constantinople again showed that, favoured as it
had been like a petted child, it could show its power.
The people assembled in knots at street corners and
protested against the banishment of the heiress of the
Macedonian warrior. The conclaves became a riot
and the riot a revolution. Women ran through the
streets tearing their hair and beating their breasts.
Officers of State joined the mob, and they rushed to
destroy the houses of the Emperor’s family. Zoe
was hastily recalled from Prinkipo, and shown in
purple robes to the people in the Hippodrome. But
it was too late. The mob broke open the monastery
of the Petrion (by the Phanar) where her sister
Theodora had long lived in retirement, and forced her
84
to go with them to S. Sophia and there the patriarch
Alexius and the vast crowd hailed her as Empress.
The Emperor and his uncle took refuge in the church
of the Studium. They were dragged from the altar
and their eyes were put out; and Zoe and Theodora,
who hated each other, became joint Empresses.

Their rule was extravagant and reckless; and while
the State was advancing rapidly towards bankruptcy,
the aged Zoe took a third husband, after two attempts
at choice, wedding Constantine Monomachus, who
reigned from 1042 to 1054 as Constantine X. The
old Empress and her young husband gave themselves
entirely to pleasure, to luxury and buffoonery. The
Emperor, generous in giving and knowing how to
confer benefits after the manner of an Emperor, beautified
the city by the building of the magnificent
monastery of S. George at the Mangana (near
Deirmen Kapou on the Mamora), and amused the
citizens by showing them an elephant and a camelopard.
The court which Constantine and Zoe gathered
round them was a strange assembly; its chief personage
was the Emperor’s mistress Skleraina, whom the
Empress treated as a friend. The people resented the
conjunction and cried “we will not have Skleraina to
reign over us, nor on her account shall our purple-born
mothers, Zoe and Theodora, die.” The aged Zoe
herself appeased them. It was an extraordinary
state of society, reminding us of the eighteenth century
in France: the intrigues that Psellus tells are indeed
hardly credible. But the social corruption coexisted
with a real revival of learning. Constantinople became
the centre of a new study of literature, which had
decayed since the iconoclastic emperors set themselves
to destroy culture and Leo III. abolished the University.
Constantine refounded the University, endowing two
chairs—philosophy and law—which were held by
85
Psellus and his friend, John Xiphilinos. A revival
of the study of the classics followed this institution:
Psellus considered himself a Platonist, and he thought
himself worthy to represent as well as to revive the
best traditions of Greek literature. In the hands of
Anna Comnena and her contemporaries, the purism
which the writers affected became little more than
an Attic euphuism.

While the Emperor and his friends were thus busy
with trifles, and the government was in the hands
sometimes of wise ministers such as Leichudes, sometimes
of mere thieves, the throne was constantly
threatened by revolts (of which the most famous was
that of George Maniakes) and by direct attacks on
the city, such as that of the Russians, and in 1047
of Leo Tornikos. This latter was nearly successful.
Many of the citizens were ready to join him, and but
for the military skill shown by Constantine (if we
rightly read the rhetorical description of Psellus)
Leo would probably have entered and found himself
welcomed as Emperor.

In 1054 Constantine X. died, and the aged Theodora,
the last survivor of the Macedonian house, came forth
again from her convent and reigned with the aid of
ministers who were at least capable and honest. On
her death, after two years as sole ruler, the throne
passed, by her wish, to an able but aged soldier,
Michael Stratioticus.

Psellus shows that the accession of this sovereign
marked a crisis in the history of the Empire. Constantine
X. had reformed the Senate, opening it to all
men of merit apart from their birth. Michael VI.
thought he could rely entirely on the civil functionaries,
but the army was still strong enough to dictate to the
Emperor, and his unwise acts led to an alliance between
the generals and the energetic patriarch Michael Cerularius.
86
Michael attempted to negotiate with Isaac
Comnenus, whom the army had chosen as their leader,
and who was encamped at Nicæa (Isnik); but before
the envoys, among whom was Psellus, had completed
their mission, a rising in the city, led by some discontented
senators, had dethroned and slain Michael,
and the whole city was waiting to welcome Isaac as
Emperor.

Constantinople in this revolution decisively chose her
own Emperor. The Senate and the chiefs of certain
“clubs” (the successors of the factions of the Circus
so prominent four centuries before) guided, as seems
probable, by the patriarch, carried the city with them.
Isaac they summoned from Skutari: Michael departed
to a monastery with the patriarch’s kiss of peace.

The scene when Isaac was about to cross the Bosphorus
to receive his crown was a dramatic one. He
called Psellus, the envoy of his deposed rival, to him,
and said, when the philosopher spoke of the enthusiasm
of the people, “I liked thy tongue better when it
reviled me than now when it speaks smooth words.”
But he began his reign by an amnesty, for he made
Psellus president of the Senate, and Michael the
patriarch—however much he may have distrusted
him—he treated with the fullest confidence and
honour.

While these political and dynastic changes had supplied
the Empire with a new ruler almost every year,
the growing alienation between East and West had
been marked decisively by the separation of the
Churches. Two great names embody in the East
the final protest against Roman assumption. The
Church of Constantinople had never abandoned its
claim to equality with that of Rome, though it
allowed to the ancient city the primacy of honour.
Photius, who became patriarch in 858, and died in
87
891, owed his throne to an election which was not
canonical, and though a council in 861 at Constantinople,
at which papal legates were present, confirmed
him in his office, Pope Nicholas I. declared that its
decisions were illegal, and that Photius was deposed and
excommunicated, while the Emperor himself was attacked
in language of peculiar vehemence. The papal
claim to decide between two claimants to the patriarchate
was fiercely resented. Photius declared the
equality of his see with that of Rome. To the Roman
claim of jurisdiction, complicated also by assertions of
supremacy over the Bulgarian Church, were added
points of theological contention which the churches
debated with as much eagerness, and it would seem, as
little desire, to arrive at a reasonable solution. The
addition of the words Filioque to the Nicene Creed,
asserting the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the
Father and the Son, was, and is, resented by the
Greeks as an addition to “the faith once for all
delivered to the Saints.” The use of unleavened
bread in the Holy Eucharist was regarded in the East
as an heretical innovation. There were, and are, other
points of dispute; but none, it is probable, but for the
strong national feeling of Italy and of Greece, would
have caused a final breach.

The position which Photius defended with skill and
vigour in the ninth century was reasserted by Michael
Cerularius in the eleventh. He regarded the teaching
of the West on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, says
Psellus, as an intolerable heresy; and he was prompt
to reassert jurisdiction over the churches of Apulia, now
conquered by the Normans and made subject to Rome.
The final breach came from Rome itself. On July 16,
1054, two legates of the Pope laid on the altar of S.
Sophia the act of excommunication which severed the
patriarch from the communion of the West, and condemned
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what were asserted to be seven deadly heresies
of the Eastern Church.

But to return to the imperial revolution.

Isaac Comnenus, who was called to the throne in
1057, had been brought up in the palace, but he was
none the less a warrior and a man of determination,
who had served the Empire well. He reigned only
for two years, and then retired to end his days in
religion, in the famous and beautiful monastery of the
Studium, which looks from a slight elevation over the
Sea of Marmora, some half mile away, and whose
half ruined walls are to-day among the most striking
of the memorials of the past that Constantinople can
show.

With the beginning of the dynasty of the Comneni
the causes which brought about the fall of the Empire
can clearly be traced. The imperial power, concentrated
more and more in the imperial household, and
finally in the Emperor himself, had come to be devoted
chiefly, in the hands of feeble or self-indulgent emperors,
to the maintenance of imperial dignity and pride
in the city itself. The magnificent administration
which had presented a coherent and effective government
while the rest of Europe was in “the dark ages,”
was beginning to sink into a mere machine for the
support of a luxurious Court. The Empire was
neglected. The aristocracy of Byzantium was treated
with severity or contempt. The officials of the State
were the mere nominees of the Emperor. For their
interest and for the pursuit of popularity among the
people it was that government seemed to exist. Every
year, as the defences of the Empire grew weaker, the
shows of the Hippodrome, the festivals of the Church,
the entertainments of the palace, grew more splendid.
When the other States of Europe were yet in their
cradle, when England as a Power had hardly begun to
89
exist, the long history of the Empire was verging
irresistibly towards decay.

“The domestics of the Basilian dynasty carried on
the work of political change,” says Finlay,[21] “by filling
the public offices with their own creatures, and thereby
destroying the power of that body of State officials,
whose admirable organisation had repeatedly saved the
Empire from falling into anarchy under tyrants or from
being ruined by peculation under aristocratic influence.
In this manner the scientific fabric of the imperial power,
founded by Augustus, was at last ruined in the East
as it had been destroyed in the West. The Emperors
broke the government to pieces before strangers destroyed
the Empire.

“The revolution which undermined the systematic
administration was already consummated before the
rebellion of the aristocracy placed the imperial crown
on the head of Isaac Comnenus. No organised body
of trained officials any longer existed to resist the
egoistical pretensions of the new intruders into ministerial
authority. The Emperor could now make his
household steward prime minister, and the governor
of a province could appoint his butler prefect of the
police. The Church and the law alone preserved
some degree of systematic organisation and independent
character. It was not in the power of an
emperor to make a man a lawyer or a priest with
the same ease with which he could appoint him a
chamberlain or a minister of State.”

The decay of which the general causes are thus
sketched can clearly be traced in the series of historians
who give us the records of the years from the
accession of John Comnenus to the conquest of Constantinople
by the Crusaders, from the year 1057, that
is, to the year 1204. Psellus, monk, secretary of
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State, philosopher, statesman, gives, as we have already
seen, a close account of the intrigues of the court.
Michael Altaleiates records the years 1034-1079.
Nicephorus Bryennius and his wife, Anna Comnena,
wrote from within the story of the politics of Alexius
Comnenus, the former to some extent, the latter very
greatly, influenced by the classic revival, and endeavouring
to form their work on classic models.
John Cinnamus, Nicetas Acominatos, John Scylitzes,
John Zonaras, are all chroniclers who have special
sources of information; and the result is that for the
century of decay which culminated in the collapse of
the Empire before the Latins, we have information
almost complete.

The Emperor Isaac was assisted at the first by
the able patriarch Michael Cerularius, who put into
exercise all the claims of his predecessors to power
and independence, to equality with Rome, and to
superiority over the churches related to the patriarchate.
Strife soon broke out between Emperor
and patriarch. Michael appeared in the red boots
which marked the imperial dignity, declaring that he
was the equal of the Emperor; and of the Emperor
himself he said, in what seems to have been a popular
proverb, “Oven, I built you, and I can knock you
down.” He was seized and banished to Proconnesus.

After the retirement of Isaac, Constantine Ducas,
like the Comneni a Cappadocian, and a friend of
their own, reigned for eight years, 1059-1067,
and left the reputation of a man anxious only to
save money, and thus unable to protect the frontiers
of the Empire. Under him we learn the importance
of the Emperor’s personal guard of Varangians—a
body of barbarian warriors founded early in the
eleventh century, and consisting at first of Russians,
whom the wars of Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimisces
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and Basil Bulgaroktonos had taught the Empire to
respect; and of Scandinavians, and later of Danes,
and after the Norman Conquest of fugitive Englishmen,
who, rather than serve the foreign conquerors
of their own land, gladly came to win fame and
wealth as the guardians of the Cæsar’s throne. Constantine
XI. paid the Varangians while he neglected
the rest of his army. The Empire paid the penalty
in the ravaging of Armenia by the Seljuk Turks, and
of Bulgaria by the Tartars. When he died in 1067,
already the name of Alp-Arslan, the Sultan of the
Seljuks, struck terror into the Asiatic provinces of
the Empire, and the sceptre of the Cæsars fell to
Michael VII., a child who could not protect what
his father had not cared to defend. The mother
of the young Emperor, Eudocia, married a gallant
general, Romanus Diogenes, who, with the title of
joint Emperor, won but little power in the palace,
but was readily allowed to lead the armies in the
field. Of his campaigns it is only needful to say
that, while for a time he held back the Seljuks, in
1071, at Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier, his
troops were scattered by the overwhelming hordes
of the barbarians, and when night fell Alp-Arslan
placed his foot upon the neck of the prostrate Cæsar,
his captive.

In Constantinople a new revolution followed the
news of the Emperor’s defeat. John Ducas, brother
of Constantine XI., for a time held the post of Regent
for his nephew. When Romanus was released from
captivity he was seized and his eyes were put out, a
crime which resulted in his death. The scenes of
blood and treachery which marked these years, when
the Court still kept up its splendours in the presence of
pestilence, famine, and decay, are almost incredible;
but the vengeance that was surely coming shows the
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weakness that resulted from the reign of corruption and
crime. Michael VII. was called Parapinakes, “the
peck-stealer,” a name “given him because in a year of
famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a
fourth short of its proper contents.” He was overthrown
by an adventurer named Nicephorus Botoniates,
whose reign of three years was a period of vice and
waste which brought the Empire rapidly nearer to its
fall. Michael VII. retired, like Romanus, to the
Monastery of the Studium, where as titular bishop of
Ephesus, he passed the last years of his life in peace.
Three years exhausted the patience of the nobles with
the aged and debauched Nicephorus. Maria, once wife
of Michael VII. and now wife of his successor, formed
a plot against him, and from a number of conspirators,
Alexius Comnenus, son of the Emperor Isaac,
was chosen to lead the troops who determined to
give a new Cæsar to the exhausted Empire. In
1081 the friends of the conspirators escaped through
the gate of Blachernae with horses they had stolen
from the Imperial stables. They returned with an
army: the German guards who held the gate of
Charisius (Edirnè Kapou) were bribed, and the adherents
of Comnenus poured into the heart of the
city. A battle at first seemed certain, for the Varangians
stood boldly across the forum of Constantine
to defend the approaches to the great palace. But
when George Palaeologus, a gallant officer connected
by marriage with the Comneni, secured the fleet, the
heart of the aged Nicephorus failed him, and he fled to
S. Sophia, whence he was removed like so many of
his predecessors to a monastery.

Alexius Comnenus was not strong enough to restrain
the motley rabble who had entered in his train. The
city was given over to pillage. The very palaces and
monasteries were spoiled by the barbarians from the
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Balkans. It was from this date that the ruin of the
city began. If the churches still maintained their relics
and their jewels, the commercial prosperity, which all
through these years of imperial corruption and weakness
it had struggled to maintain, now began to slip from its
grasp. It was clear that property was no more safe
than life; and as the Italian cities began to secure the
commerce of the Levant, the merchants of Constantinople
fell behind in the race for wealth, and saw the
trade that had been theirs taken by the Venetians, the
Pisans and the Genoese, who now settled at their very
gates.

Alexius Comnenus was at first not sole Emperor.
Constantine Ducas, the son of Michael VII., was also
called Emperor, but he soon died. Alexius then
reigned alone, but not without many plots against him.
Within, the city managed to suppress the conspirators;
without, he suffered defeat from the Normans at
Durazzo, and preserved with difficulty the Thessalian
province. He won fame among his people as a persecutor
of Paulicians and Bogomils; and Basil, a monk,
was entrapped by Alexius into a confession of his
heretical opinions and then burnt as a heretic in the
Hippodrome, to the delight of the people of Constantinople.
He kept off the Turks, though they were
now (1092) settled so near as to have Smyrna for their
capital. But his chief danger came from the Crusades.

In spite of the breach between the Churches it was
impossible for the Eastern Emperor openly to do otherwise
than welcome the hosts who in response to the
preaching of Peter the Hermit and the call of Urban
II. marched through Hungary and Bulgaria and arrived
outside the land walls in a ragged and disordered condition.
Hugh of Vermandois had landed near Durazzo,
but had been treated almost as a foreigner, and
having been made to do homage to Alexius, awaited in
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the imperial city the arrival of the rest of the hosts.
His treatment was resented by Godfrey of Bouillon;
but the skill and tact of Alexius triumphed. In the
palace of the Blachernae, while the hosts were encamped
outside the walls, the Emperor received the leaders,
among them Godfrey, Bohemond, and Peter the Hermit
himself, and by cajoling some, bribing others,
threatening those who seemed weakest, he procured
that they all should do him homage and promise to
convey to him all of his Empire that they should recover
from the Turks.

To the people of Constantinople the warriors of the
West seemed like ignorant and half-brutal children, ever
gabbling, boasting, and changeable. The warlike garb
of the Latin priests and bishops disgusted the Greeks
and widened the breach between the Churches. The
climax seemed to come on the day when the chiefs did
homage to the Emperor. Thus the story is told by
Anna Comnena, who was herself then fourteen years
old, and may not improbably have witnessed the scene.

“As soon as they approached the great city, they
occupied the place appointed for them by the Emperor,
near to the monastery of the Cosmidion.[22] But this
multitude was not, like the Hellenic one of old, to be restrained
and governed by the loud voices of nine heralds.
They required the constant superintendence of chosen
and valiant soldiers to keep them from violating the
commands of the Emperor. He, meantime, laboured
to obtain from the other leaders that acknowledgment
of his supreme authority which had already been drawn
from Godfrey himself. But notwithstanding the willingness
of some to accede to this proposal, and their assistance
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in working on the minds of their associates, the
Emperor’s endeavours had little success, as the majority
were looking for the arrival of Bohemond, in whom they
placed their chief confidence, and resorted to every art
with the view of gaining time. The Emperor, whom
it was not easy to deceive, penetrated their motives;
and by granting to one powerful person demands which
had been supposed out of all bounds of expectation, and
by resorting to a variety of other devices, he at length
prevailed, and won general assent to the following of
the example of Godfrey, who also was sent for in
person to assist in this business.

“All, therefore, being assembled, and Godfrey
among them, the oath was taken; but when all was
finished, a certain noble among these counts had the
audacity to seat himself on the throne of the Emperor.
The Emperor restrained himself and said nothing, for
he was well acquainted of old with the nature of the
Latins.

“But the Count Baldwin stepping forth, and seizing
him by the hand, dragged him thence, and with many
reproaches said, ‘It becomes thee not to do such things
here, especially after having taken the oath of fealty.
It is not the custom of the Roman Emperors to permit
any of their inferiors to sit beside them, not even
of such as are born subjects of their empire; and it is
necessary to respect the customs of the country.’ But
he, answering nothing to Baldwin, stared yet more
fixedly upon the Emperor, and muttered to himself
something in his own dialect, which, being interpreted,
was to this effect—’Behold, what rustic fellow is this,
to be seated alone while such leaders stand around
him!’ The movement of his lips did not escape the
Emperor, who called to him one that understood the
Latin dialect, and inquired what words the man had
spoken. When he heard them the Emperor said
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nothing to the other Latins, but kept the thing to
himself. When, however, the business was all over,
he called near to him by himself that swelling and
shameless Latin, and asked of him, who he was, of
what lineage, and from what region he had come.
‘I am a Frank,’ said he, ‘of pure blood, of the nobles.
One thing I know, that where three roads meet
in the place from which I came, there is an ancient
church, in which whosoever has the desire to measure
himself against another in single combat, prays God to
help him therein, and afterwards abides the coming of
one willing to encounter him. At that spot a long
time did I remain, but the man bold enough to stand
against me I found not.’ Hearing these words the
Emperor said, ‘If hitherto thou hast sought battles in
vain the time is at hand which will furnish thee with
abundance of them. And I advise thee to place thyself
neither before the phalanx, nor in its rear, but to
stand fast in the midst of thy fellow-soldiers; for of
old time I am well acquainted with the warfare of the
Turks.’ With such advice he dismissed not only this
man, but the rest of those who were about to depart on
that expedition.”

A scene such as this made the Greeks regard the
Westerns simply as barbarians, and they rejoiced when
the host at last passed over the Bosphorus to fight the
Turks. For the first year Alexius remained with the
army; but as they became divided among themselves,
and refused to give up to him the territory they conquered
in the East, he returned to Constantinople,
satisfied with the conquest which had driven back the
Turks in Asia for more than 200 miles.

While the Empire gained by its most dangerous
enemy being thus driven back, it lost seriously in other
ways. “Between 1098 and 1099 a continual stream
of armed pilgrims traversed the Byzantine Empire,”
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everywhere bringing ruin and devastation with them.
One detachment of Lombards actually attempted to
storm the Blachernae quarter and were only with great
difficulty taken over to Asia, where they slaughtered
Christians as readily as Turks. Open war broke out
between Bohemond and Alexius, and it was the last
success of Alexius that he was able to beat off the
attacks of the Christians of the West. He died in
1118, his last hours disturbed by a plot in which his
wife Irene and his daughter Anna were engaged to
compel his son John to yield the Empire to Anna’s
husband, Nicephorus Bryennius.

Alexius may have seemed to leave the Empire
stronger than he found it; but in truth, though its
military power was greater, its commercial greatness
was passing away. The development of trade in the
Levant through the establishment of Christian kingdoms
in the East by the Crusaders reduced the trade of
Constantinople, it has been estimated, by “a third or
even a half in the fifty years that followed the first
crusade.” A system of financial extortion and a
debased coinage brought the merchants of the city
still nearer to ruin, and that ruin seemed consummated
when they found the Genoese and Pisans settled with
special privileges in their midst. But the new
Emperor at least kept up appearances. He was a
conqueror, and he was popular among his subjects,
called at first Maurojoannes (Black John), from
his dark complexion, he soon became called Kalojoannes,
for his goodness rather than his beauty. At
the first he was met by conspiracy. His sister Anna
was ready to have him murdered that she and her
husband might ascend the throne. He discovered
the plot, and after a few weeks restored her to all
her possessions. His brother Isaac fled from Constantinople
to the Turks, and though he returned, his
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son afterwards became a Mohammedan. For chief
minister the Emperor had a Turkish slave who had
been captured by his father at Nicaea and brought up
with him. These instances show how closely the
Empire, in spite of its Christianity, was drawing nigh
to the Turks, a state of affairs paralleled by the
relations between Christians and Moors in Spain in
the days of El Cid Campeador, and which made the
conquest, when it came, less abrupt and terrible than
it seems to-day.

The reign of John Comnenus (1118-1143) was
perhaps the brightest in the later years of the Empire.
“Feared by his nobles, beloved by his people,” says
Gibbon, “he was never reduced to the painful necessity
of punishing, or even of pardoning, his enemies.
During his government of twenty-five years[23] the
penalty of death was abolished in the Roman Empire,
a law of mercy most delightful to the human theorist,
but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community,
is seldom consistent with the public safety.
Severe to himself, indulgent to others, the philosophic
Marcus would not have disdained the artless virtues of
his successor, derived from his heart and not borrowed
from the schools. He despised and moderated the
stately magnificence of the Byzantine Court, so oppressive
to the people, so contemptible to the eye of reason.
Under such a prince innocence had nothing to fear and
merit had everything to hope; and without assuming
the tyrannic office of a censor he introduced a gradual
though visible reformation in the public and private
manners of Constantinople.”

Manuel I., his youngest son, whom he chose for his
military daring in preference to his brother Isaac, was
“a mere knight errant, who loved fighting for fighting’s
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sake, and allowed his passion for excitement and
adventure to be his only guide.” It is said that he
made a special payment to secure the good will of the
clergy on his accession; but he was vicious as well as
passionate, and the crimes of his court received a
licence from his own acts. Buffoonery as well as vice
seems to have marked the life of Constantinople, for
the popular minister, John Kameratos, was renowned
as the greatest drinker of his time, as being able to
swallow a vast quantity of raw beans and drink “the
water contained in an immense porphyry vase at two
draughts,” and he was favoured by the Emperor chiefly
for his powers as a singer and dancer. Manuel himself
was skilled in surgery and was a theologian as
well as a warrior, but his abilities were of no service
to the Empire. The citizens saw the Italians encroaching
upon them at every point. Heavy taxation
was continued, but the army and navy alike decayed in
his time. Only the public games were kept up, and
outwardly Constantinople was as gay and wealthy as
ever. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew who visited the
city in 1161, wrote of the magnificence that he saw
everywhere, and the riches of the traders and nobles,
and in the Hippodrome he said that “lions, bears and
leopards were shown, and all nations of the world were
represented, together with surprising feats of jugglery.”
With all this, and especially after the war with Venice,
which was ended in 1174, the city was really becoming
poor, and it might almost seem defenceless. Manuel
did much for the defences; a large part of the land
walls, defending the palace of Blachernae, was added
by him; an inscription on the tower close to Narli
Kapoussi records his repair of part of the sea wall;
and he built many other gates and additional fortifications.
It was indeed time.

The eleventh century saw the position of the
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Empire and the safety of the imperial city continually
threatened not only by active attacks but by internal
dissensions; dissensions which, it has been well said,
would have settled themselves a century before, but
which now both weakened the city and made its
weakness apparent to the world.

How weak the city was, was seen in 1146, when a
Norman fleet sailed up the Hellespont, and the admiral
robbed the imperial gardens of fruit. Bulgars,
Serbians, Turks, had all at different times threatened
the city, and without success, but its internal weakness
was made the more evident as the century went on by
the division which was arising between the Emperor
and his people. Manuel I. was believed to be at heart
a Latin; his campaigns of the West, his marriages to
Western wives, his neglect of the fleet, his encouragement
of foreign settlers in the capital, all increased his
unpopularity. Matters were not improved under the
boy, Alexius II., when the struggle between his
mother and the minister she favoured, and his sister,
took place in the streets of the city, and in S. Sophia
itself. The dynastic dispute was complicated, like all
the disputes in Constantinople, by ecclesiastical interests,
and the return of a patriarch who had been driven out
was one of those picturesque scenes in which the people
delighted, which showed their independence of the
government, but revealed also, only too plainly, that
there was now no union in Church or State.

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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.

And the merchants who made their living in Constantinople
had, like those of the Hansa in London,
their own permanent settlements. You may see to-day
the great khans or caravanserais where the merchants
and pilgrims congregate, the walls strong to resist
attacks, the gates closed at nightfall, the arrangements
for common meals and common ablutions; and as you
pass by you see the dark figures clustering in the doorways,
or sitting on the marble steps, in their picturesque
colours, and with that strange far-away look on their
faces that you learn to know so well in the land where
there is never any more pressing need than repose, or
any delight more sweet. The custom of these great
common lodgings, and very often the buildings themselves,
go back far into the Middle Ages. In the
thirteenth century they held great colonies of merchants
strong for mutual combination and defence.
Many of them were near to the wharves, as close
within the walls as might be, and some without. No
visitor to-day can fail to be struck by the great khan
hard by the Mosque of Validè Sultan, which he
passes when he has crossed the Galata Bridge on his
way to S. Sophia.

The traders of the thirteenth century were by no
means all Christians. Jews and even Mohammedans
were allowed to settle in the imperial city, and Geoffrey
of Vinsauf bitterly says “it would have been right even
to have rased the city to the ground, for, if we believe
report, it was polluted by new mosques, which its
perfidious Emperor allowed to be built that he
might strengthen the league with the Turks.” It
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seemed strange to the Western that such toleration
should be allowed. The Jews and the Albigenses
were the only “dissenters” he had met; but in the
East there were not only the Romanists, but the
Monophysite Armenians and the Nestorian Chaldeans;
Jews and Mohammedans made no such very great
addition to the parliament of religions. And they all,
infidels and heretics alike, brought their riches to the
great mart. As the Turks advanced over Asia,
scattering ruin and blight before their path, the riches
of the devastated cities fled to shelter behind the
Byzantine walls. No city it seemed to a Jewish
observer of the time was so rich or so full of business
save Baghdad. Gold was nothing accounted of; it
covered the walls and pillars of the palace, it made the
throne of the Emperor, the lamps of S. Sophia, the
vessels of many an almost forgotten church. “The
whole Empire had been put under contribution for the
adornment of the capital. The temples and public
buildings of Greece, of Asia Minor, and of the islands
of the Archipelago, had been ransacked to embellish
what its inhabitants spoke of as the Queen City, and
even Egypt had contributed an obelisk and many other
monuments.” All who saw the city were amazed
at its riches, at the magnificence of its buildings, of
its churches, palaces, houses of nobles and merchants.
Marble and stone houses filled the chief streets; the
splendid marble from the quarries of the Proconnesus,
the stone which still stands firm in the massive dwellings
of the Phanar. There were of course then as
now many houses of wood, and fires were constant, but
those who noted the fine houses destroyed as more than
in the three largest cities of France, noted also that of
those that remained as of the treasures of the churches
there was “neither end nor measure.” And with all
this there was a profound sense of security, so often
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and so unwarrantably contemporaneous with a marked
development of luxurious life. Constantinople had
never been captured, men easily believed that it never
would be. Its walls, so magnificent in their decay,
had proved and were thought still to be impregnable.
The subtle influence of Oriental habits had eaten, it
seemed, into the life that had been so strong and fierce
under Justinian or Heraclius. Men, as they had
ceased to contend earnestly for faith or morals, had
sunk down into a luxurious pleasure-loving life, almost
like that of old Rome or modern London. Some of
the worst features of Asiatic life had already been
introduced; the entourage of the Sultan that is now so
conspicuous at the Selamlik had its counterpart in the
court of the Comneni. The Emperor’s favourites were
coming to be the administrators of the Empire: so
bitterly complains the chronicler Nicetas—”these
creatures who guard the mountains and the forests
for the Emperors’ hunting with as great care as the
old pagans guarded the groves sacred to the gods, or
with a fidelity like that with which the destroying
angel guards the gates of Paradise, threatened to kill
any one who attempted to cut timber for the fleet”: it
was at the crisis of the Empire. And while the
Empire was ruled by eunuchs and the court by
mistresses the Emperors of the twelfth century lived in
luxury, effeminacy, and indolence. It had come to be
thought—what a contrast from the days of the sleepless
Justinian!—that work was impossible for a Cæsar of the
East. And the example spread, as such examples
always do, downwards. It was easy for there to be a
general who could not lead, soldiers who could not
fight, sailors who could not navigate beyond the
Bosphorus. And there was no hope of regeneration
from a strong Church preaching righteousness. The
Emperors in the time of their power had reduced
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the patriarchs to impotence: and now there was no
one in the Church to resist, as there was no one in the
State to lead. Yet still the immemorial protest of the
Church was not altogether silenced. Historians show
that there were many priests and monks who preached
and lived according to a high standard of morality and
religion. Learning still survived, and piety, without
ostentation but never wholly without influence.

It is not necessary to detail the causes which led to
the diversion of the fourth Crusade upon Constantinople.
Venice, it is enough to say, betrayed the Christian cause
by a secret treaty with the infidel, and then formed a
plot for the capture of the city. Alexius III. had
deposed Isaac Angelus in 1195; his son Alexius was
allowed to escape and secretly took ship for Italy
and eventually threw himself upon the charity of his
brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia, the claimant of the
imperial crown of the West. He was assisted; and by
a series of complicated intrigues the Crusaders were induced
to undertake the capture of Constantinople and
the restoration of the Empire to the supposed rightful
heir, as a step towards the accomplishment of the duty
to which they were pledged, the recovery of the Holy
Land. The Pope’s wishes were set aside, the honest
leaders were hoodwinked, and Dandolo won the day.

On the 23rd of June 1204 the crusading fleet
anchored at San Stefano. Thence they saw the
magnificent city that lay before them. “Be sure,”
says Villehardouin, “there was not a man who did
not tremble, because never was so great an enterprise
undertaken by so small a number of men.” Next day
they sailed up to the Bosphorus, past the walls, crowded
with spectators, to the anchorage of Chalcedon. The
Emperor sent to know their intentions: they ordered
him to surrender the crown to the young Alexius.
Then came another of those picturesque scenes of
109
which the mediæval history of the New Rome is so
full. It was determined to show the young prince
to the people whom he came to recover to their
allegiance. The splendid Venetian galleys sailed up
to the walls of the Sea of Marmora, and stopped
where the crowds that thronged them could see.
Then loud voices proclaimed the presence of the
young Alexius, and demanded the loyal assent of
the people to the restoration of his father. Only
mocking laughter came back from the walls.

Then the Crusaders prepared for the attack. First
it was necessary to break the chain which crossed the
Golden Horn from Galata, near what is now Tophané,
to near the point of the peninsula of Byzantium. A
fierce attack was made on the watch-tower at Galata,
from which the chain began. It was captured, the
chain was loosed, and the fleet sailed up the Golden
Horn. The army was then landed beyond the walls,
where is now Eyoub, and took up a position opposite
the Blachernae quarter, which had so long been felt
to be the weakest point. They were opposed then by
the wall of Manuel Comnenus which extended southward
of the wall of Heraclius, and considerably in
advance of the old Theodosian fortification. Moats,
walls, towers, stood before them, a defence hitherto
unbroken, and which even before the last fortification
was erected it had been found impossible to overthrow.

And so it proved again. When the attack on July
17, 1203, was directed against the northern point of
the wall of the Blachernae quarter, near the Xylo-porta,
it was utterly defeated. And so again when Dandolo,
the old blind Doge, dauntless in bravery as adept in
cunning, led the attack from his galleys, their success
was but temporary. The old sea-dog had his galley
drawn up close to the walls, threw himself on shore,
110
on the narrow strip of land that stood between the
water and the walls, and planted the gonfalon of S.
Mark on one of the towers. The ends of the flying
bridges were thrust from the vessels on to the towers
and thus twenty-five were captured. But the Venetians
could not maintain their position, and when the
Greeks were reported to have made a sortie from the
gate of S. Romanus, south of the Blachernae quarter,
they withdrew to help these other Crusaders who
were attacked.

Meanwhile within the walls disaffection with the
government of Alexius III. was growing into readiness
to accept the new sovereign to be set up by the
Crusaders rather than to risk the chances of capture.
Alexius himself would do nothing to protect the
city: and when he brought out his troops to the
sortie, he retired with them before any fighting took
place. Before the next day he himself fled across
the sea, deserting his wife and children and the city.
The imprisoned Isaac was at once released and placed
upon the throne.

This was far from satisfying the greed of the
Crusaders. It took away from them every honest
cause for attack. So they demanded through Villehardouin,
who has himself written us the account
of it, that Isaac should consent to the hard terms
which Alexius his son had agreed to—that the
Empire should be placed under the Roman Pope;
that 200,000 marks of silver should be given to
the army, and that they should be supported for a
year; that 10,000 of them should be taken to Egypt
in Greek vessels at the Emperor’s expense, and
supported there for a year; and that Isaac should
agree, during the whole of his life, to keep five
hundred knights for the defence of the Holy Land.
The Emperor, though from the first he said that he
111
thought it would be impossible to carry it out, felt
bound to give his consent to the convention. Alexius
was crowned in S. Sophia as joint occupant of his
father’s throne, and it seemed as if the danger was
at an end.

But it was only just begun. Some of the Crusaders
wanted to push on at once to the Holy Land or to
Egypt; but they had not enough money, and no ships.
And the Venetians who held the ships delayed: they
cared for nothing but that the army should be divided.
Within the city the fiercest opposition was aroused
when it was known that Alexius had promised to
subordinate the Church to Rome. He was making
large exactions too, to pay the men who had brought
him back to his country. Feeling against him rose
rapidly in the capital. He left with Boniface of Montferrat
to pursue the fugitive Emperor to Adrianople.

During his absence the populace, eager to vent their
rage upon the foreigners, attacked the Pisan quarter:
a sort of retaliatory measure was the attack of the
Crusaders on a Saracen mosque between S. Irene
and the sea. The Saracens had legal rights of toleration,
and the Christians of Constantinople defended
them. The riot ended, as riots so often do in the
East, in a fire—and before it was over a great strip
of the most thickly populated part of the city, running
right across from the Golden Horn to the Mamora,
was utterly destroyed. Confusion soon reigned within
the city. The old Emperor, so long imprisoned, was
weak and foolish; but young Alexius was equally
weak and enjoyed his new sovereignty without the
slightest dignity. He drank and gambled in the
Crusaders’ tents, took off his imperial circlet, and
wore the woollen caps of his boon companions. And
he could not find money to pay the incessant demands
of the greedy host. As new taxes were levied the
112
citizens resisted, and eventually the Western troops
became really in need. They had not enough provisions:
why were they waiting: why were the ships
not ready to carry them on their quest?

At length all the allies agreed to demand formally of
the Emperor the payment of the money that was promised;
if he refused they would defy him to his face.
The scene was another of those dramatic audacities
which so often flash across the history of the city.
Villehardouin and five others stood before the Emperors
on their thrones in the palace of Blachernae,
and their spokesman, Conan de Bethune, spoke thus:

“We come to summon you in the presence of your
barons to fulfil the agreement made between you and us.
If you fulfil it, well; if not, take note that the barons
will hold you neither for lord nor friend, but they will
deem themselves free to take what belongs to them as
they can get it. They give you warning that till they
have defied you they will do you no harm. They
will not betray you; that is not the custom of their
land. Now you have heard what we have said, and
you will take counsel on the matter how you will.”

No such speech, men said, had ever been made to a
Roman Emperor; and Villehardouin wonders that the
envoys were allowed to depart in peace. But for a
week or two nothing happened. Yet the city was
slowly rising to fever point. Attacks were made on
the Venetian fleet; the people assembled in the great
Church of S. Sophia and debated how they could
drive out the foreigner, and replace the dastard
Emperors. Then it seemed to Alexius that he must
protect himself. He called on Boniface of Montferrat
to protect the palace with Frenchmen and Italians.
That sealed his fate.

Alexius Ducas, a kinsman of the Emperors and
protovestiarios of the household, whom the people called
113
“Mourtozouphlos” on account of his thick overhanging
eyebrows, determined to dethrone the Cæsars
and replace them. He prevailed on Alexius to leave
the palace for safety, and at once placed him in chains.
In a few days both he and his father were dead, and
Alexius V. was crowned in S. Sophia.

The new Emperor set himself at once to defend the
city, and at once he drew down on him the vengeance
of the Crusaders. They were, of course, the defenders
of Isaac Angelus and his son. “Never was so
horrible a treason committed by any people as deposing
and imprisoning young Alexius,” says Villehardouin,
who had a few days before taken part in
insulting him to his face. When a little later they
heard that he was dead, they paused for a while as
though in dismay: their difficulties grew on them:
the storms of a January at Constantinople made them
reluctant to embark: and yet what could they do?

Henry Dandolo met the new Emperor in conference
within the walls, and demanded the submission
of the Church to Rome and an immediate payment
of money. It is said that there was a treacherous
attempt to capture the Emperor. At any rate no
compromise was arrived at, and the divergent parties
among the Crusaders agreed to besiege the city.
Long was the debate before the final step was taken.
They talked, says Villehardouin in his quaint way,
before and behind. At last it was agreed how to
divide the spoil, how a new Emperor and a new
patriarch should be chosen.

On April 9, 1204, the first attack was delivered,
on the Petrion or Phanar, and the gate now called
Petri Kapoussi at the east of the church of the
Patriarchate was first attacked. The invaders were
repulsed. A second attack, on the 12th, was more
successful. “The flying bridge of the Pélerine
114
lodged itself on a tower and allowed a bold French
knight, André d’Urboise, to rush across, seize the
tower, and clear a way for their comrades to follow.
Here ladders were then landed, the walls scaled, three
gates forced, and the city thrown open to the whole
host of the invaders.” In vain did Mourtozouphlos
try to rally his troops; he was forced to take refuge
in the palace of the Bucoleon. In the night he fled
through the Golden Gate, through which before Emperors
had entered only in triumphal procession. Next
day the Crusaders entered; the palaces were occupied;
the troops marched through the streets; and then the
horrible work of plunder and ravage began.

Nicetas, the Grand Logothete, whose own house
was burnt earlier in the siege, and who now had to
escape with his family as best he might, tells piteous
tales of the horrors that ensued. Of the destruction
of precious things it seems impossible to draw an adequate
picture. S. Sophia, then the richest as well as
the finest church in the world, was utterly despoiled;
and what had been “an earthly heaven, a throne of
divine magnificence, an image of the firmament created
by the Almighty,” became like a bare barn, and was
defiled by the most disgraceful scenes of profanity and
horror.

When the church had been stripped of everything
it contained, the altars of precious metals broken up to
be melted down, the vestments and carpets and hangings
carried off, the sacred vessels packed up with the
other plunder as if they were common things, the
sacred icons torn down from the splendid iconostasis;
when the tombs of the emperors had been rifled, and
the body of Justinian cast out like that of a criminal
in the search for treasure, it might be thought that the
worst was over. It was not so. Then began the
hunt for relics which made not the least degrading
115
part of the work of these soldiers of Christ. Well
was it said by a contemporary that if these soldiers
had when they besieged the city the shield of the
Lord, now when they had taken the city they threw
away His shield and took the shield of the devil.
Bitter, and well deserved, were the words of Nicetas.
“You have taken up the Cross, and have sworn on it
and on the Holy Gospels to us that you would pass
over the territory of Christians without shedding blood
and without turning to the right hand or to the left.
You told us that you had taken up arms against the
Saracens only, and that you would steep them in their
blood alone. You promised to keep yourselves chaste
while you bore the Cross, as became soldiers enrolled
under the banner of Christ. Instead of defending His
tomb, you have outraged the faithful who are members
of Him. You have used Christians worse than the Arabs
used the Latins, for they at least respected women.”

Of the extraordinary quantity of ecclesiastical plunder
taken by the Crusaders we have the records collected
by Comte Riant in his monumental (and delightful)
volumes of Exuviæ Sacræ Constantinopolitanæ. It
may be observed, to begin with, that he collects no
less than a hundred and forty-four letters relating to
the reception in the West of these stolen relics. To
these are added endless references in the chroniclers of
the time, who were enchanted with the riches that
poured upon their religious houses, and displayed all
the passion of a collector of antiquities combined with
the business instincts of a dealer in curiosities and the
piety of a hagiologist. In spite of all this evidence—and
there is more of it, in inscription, later lives of the
saints, and the like—it is impossible to discover exactly
all that was stolen, because the lists of the relics preserved
in the churches of Constantinople at the actual
time of the siege have disappeared. But it is possible
116
of course, from earlier lists, as well as from the sources
already named, to discover what were the greater part
of the relics taken.

The riches of Constantinople were well known to
the Crusaders when they turned to besiege it. The
stories of the earlier crusades were well known, when
the Greeks had loved to show the treasures of the
imperial city, the riches of S. Sophia, and even of the
imperial palace. In the East were almost all the most
sacred survivals, nearly all that remained in fact, or was
believed to remain, of the relics of the Saviour, His
Mother, and most of His Apostles. In the West, till the
thirteenth century, there was practically nothing but the
relics of Western, and, therefore, comparatively modern,
saints, and the few more sacred treasures that had been
given by Eastern sovereigns to those of the West.

For three days the pillage went on. Churches
escaped no more than palaces or private houses.
Indeed they were more greedily ransacked: and after
the days of direct pillage there came weeks, months,
of deliberate search for relics which had been concealed.
The result was, as M. Riant says, to rob
Constantinople of two distinct sorts of sacred objects;
of relics, with or without their reliquaries, and of
ecclesiastical furniture. It seems that the treasures
taken were supposed to be placed in a common fund
and divided proportionately among the nations concerned;
but there was a great deal of chicanery and
jobbery as well as of direct spoliation; ecclesiastical
furniture certainly was supposed to be divided like the
other booty, but the relics were regarded as too sacred
for anything but direct robbery. It should be added,
also, that much that was not taken at first was acquired
during the period of the Latin Empire in ways more or
less legitimate. The robbery went on for forty years.

Time would fail to tell of the wonderful things that
117
were discovered and stolen. Almost every country in
Europe received some fragments of the True Cross,
found by S. Helena. Besides this there were drops
of the Saviour’s Blood, one of His teeth, some of His
hair, the purple robe, some of the bread blessed at the
Last Supper, and countless relics of the Blessed Virgin
and the Apostles. The heads of S. John Baptist
and of many of the Apostles found their way to the
West. Venice was incomparably the largest gainer,
but even the little church of Bromholm in Norfolk, by
a gift which was the result of a double robbery, became
the possessor of a fragment of the true Cross. The
Crusaders were not content with taking relics of the
primitive Church, but must needs take also the mortal
remains of the Greek Fathers; you may see the head
of S. Chrysostom to-day in the cathedral of Pisa.

The reliquaries, the exquisite examples of Byzantine
art, that were scattered about the West, remain very
often even now to witness to the completeness of the
spoliation. But artistically the things that were
destroyed, broken up or melted down, were far more
precious than those that survived. If S. Mark’s still
possesses the horses that once stood in the Hippodrome
of Constantinople, we know that magnificent statues of
Juno, of Paris, of Bellerophon, an exquisite figure of
Helen, of which Nicetas pathetically deplores that
“she who had formerly led all spectators captive
could not soften the heart of the barbarians,” and
many ancient works, statues, medallions, vases, were
destroyed in the furnace. There are remains of
ancient art in Constantinople to-day; but when we
think of the pillage of 1204 and the Mohammedan
Conquest we marvel that there is anything more
ancient than the sixteenth century, or more valuable
than a kettle or a candlestick of old time, to be
found in the whole city.
118

The capture of the city was followed by the election,
by twelve electors representing the Crusaders, of an
Emperor for the throne of the Cæsars. Baldwin Count
of Flanders, by what process of intrigue we do not
know, was chosen. He was “heaved” upon the
shield, as the ancient custom was; he received the
reverence of those who had been his equals in the
campaign; he was led in triumph to S. Sophia, and in
a strange mixture of Latin and Greek rites was consecrated,
crowned and enthroned a week after his
election, as Cæsar and Augustus.

But this was not all. It is possible that in time the
citizens, weary of their decadent rulers, might have
come to accept without active discontent the rule of a
gallant and chivalrous Christian knight such as Baldwin.
But the Crusaders, and most of all the Pope,
would not be content with this. If they were justified
at all in the havoc they had made it was only because
the Easterns were heretics and idolaters and schismatics.
The Church of Constantinople was “rebellious
and odious” to that of Rome. It must be
brought to submission. So a century later the case is
summed up, “God delivered the city into the hands of
the Latins because the Greeks declared that the Holy
Ghost proceeded only from the Father, and celebrated
the mass with leavened bread.” Such was the feeling,—though
the expression of it is somewhat of an
anachronism,—that animated now the leaders of the
hosts, which, sated with their debauchery, began to feel
something of an inevitable remorse.

But Innocent III. was of too pure a soul to countenance
the iniquity that had been committed. Among
all the shameless hypocrisies of the time his words of
denunciation ring out true. Even the union of the
Churches on which he had set his heart seemed to him
now to be impossible. “Disappointment, shame, and
119
anxiety weaken us when we ask whether the Greek
Church can enter into union with the Apostolic see
when that Church had seen among the Latins only
the works of darkness.”

Meanwhile the Venetians set canons in the Church
of S. Sophia, and elected Morosini to be patriarch. It
was an empty honour. In fifty-seven years a Greek
again was seated on the throne of Justinian, and the
Liturgy of S. Chrysostom was again sung in S.
Sophia; but long before that revolts had made the
Latin hold on the East more and more precarious,
and the city more and more able to reassert its
ancient independence.

4. From the Latin Conquest to the Conquest
by the Turks.

It is unnecessary to tell of the division of the Empire
among the conquerors, or of how a daughter of Alexius
III. wedded the heroic Greek who still fought on,
Theodore Lascaris, and was the ancestress of one
who eventually brought back the old Empire; of how
Mourtozouphlos was caught by the Latins and cast
down from the top of the column of Arcadius, or
of how Greek states sprang into existence on every
side; how Baldwin the Emperor was captured by
the Bulgarians and died a horrible death. These
events all happened within two years. Henry, the
brother of Baldwin, reigned in his stead. Henry
Dandolo the old doge died “in the fulness of years
and glory” and was buried, it would seem, in S.
Sophia, where the great slab that covered his grave is
still to be seen. Ten years later Henry the Emperor
passed away, and Peter of Courtenay, husband of his
sister Yolande reigned in his stead. He reigned
though crowned in Rome, only to be captured on
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his way to Constantinople, and to pass away from
history to an unknown fate. Robert, his son, was
crowned in S. Sophia in 1221. His fate was hardly
less ignominious. His successors, the child Baldwin II.
(Courtenay) and John of Brienne, were besieged in
Constantinople by the Greek so-called Emperor of
Nicæa and John Asēn, the Bulgarian king, but the
aged joint-Emperor successfully defended the city.
The young Baldwin went as a beggar to the chief
courts of Europe, was the pensioner of S. Louis,
seated himself with difficulty on the throne, descended
to an ignoble marriage treaty with a Mohammedan
Sultan and sold the Crown of Thorns to the king of
the Franks.

In the weakness into which they had fallen, it is
not to be wondered that the survivors of the Latin
conquerors were easily vanquished by the advancing
power of the Greeks, and on July 25th, 1261, John
Ducas and Michael Palæologus were welcomed back
by the exultant Greeks to the throne of the Cæsars.

It was Alexius Strategopoulos, General and Cæsar,
who captured the city. By night he led his men to
the gate of the Pegè (πύλη τῆς πηγῆς)—the
gate which led out to the spring of Balukli, now
called the gate of Selivria. The Latins had built up
the entrance, but some of the soldiers scaled the walls,
and aided by friends within, killed the guards, broke
down the barricade, and opened the gate. A few
days later the Emperor, Michael Palæologus, entered
in triumph. He walked as far as the church of S.
John of the Studium. Then he mounted his horse
and rode on to S. Sophia. So the Greeks had won
back their city. But the results of the Latin conquest
and the years of strife that followed it were
not undone. The historian of that conquest has thus
summed them up.
121

“The results of the Fourth Crusade upon European
civilisation were altogether disastrous. The light of
Greek civilisation, which Byzantium had kept burning
for nearly nine centuries after Constantine had chosen
it as his capital, was suddenly extinguished. The
hardness, the narrowness and the Hebraicism of western
civilisation were left to develop themselves with little
admixture from the joyousness and the beauty of Greek
life. Every one knows that the Turkish conquest of
Constantinople dispersed throughout the West a knowledge
of Greek literature, and that such knowledge
contributed largely to the bringing about of the
Reformation and of modern ways of thought. One
cannot but regret that the knowledge of Greek literature
was so dearly bought. If the dispersion of a few
Greeks, members of a conquered and therefore despised
race, but yet carrying their precious manuscripts and
knowledge among hostile peoples, could produce so
important a result, what effect might not reasonably
have been hoped for if the great crime against which
Innocent protested had not been committed? Western
Europe saw the sparks of learning dispersed among
its people. The light which had been continuously
burning in a never forgotten and, among the literary
class, a scarcely changed language, had been put out.
The crime of the Fourth Crusade handed over
Constantinople and the Balkan peninsula to six
centuries of barbarism, and rendered futile the attempts
of Innocent and subsequent statesmen to recover
Syria and Asia Minor to Christendom and civilisation.
If we would understand the full significance of the
Latin conquest of Constantinople, we must try to
realise what might now be the civilisation of Western
Europe if the Romania of six centuries ago had not
been destroyed. One may picture not only the Black
Sea, the Bosphorus, and the Marmora surrounded by
122
progressive and civilised nations, but even the eastern
and southern shores of the Mediterranean given back
again to good government and a religion which is not
a barrier to civilisation.”[25]

The restored Empire of the Greeks was ruled for
some years with wisdom and enthusiasm. Michael
Palæologus was of an ancient family already allied
with the imperial house, and “in his person the
splendour of birth was dignified by the merit of the
soldier and statesman.” He was admitted as the
guardian, and then as the colleague, of the child-Emperor
John. The gallant Varangians, the northern
soldiers whose force had been replenished by fresh
blood from year to year, and had never deserted the
imperial house, had raised him to the throne, and he
ruled with a severity and determination that bore
down all opposition.

It was his first task to cleanse and restore the
palace of Blachernae, left filthy and dilapidated by
Baldwin II. Then he set about the restoration of the
walls. His chief attention was paid to the sea walls,
which he raised seven feet by means of wooden
erections covered with hide; and later he began to
make a double line of walls to protect the sea side of
the city as the land side was protected. He took
the harbour of the Kontoscalion (in front of what
is now Koum Kapoussi) for a dockyard, had it
dredged and deepened, protected by an iron mole
and “surrounded with immense blocks, closed with
iron gates.” But he was determined to rule alone,
and before the end of the year he had blinded his
young colleague and banished him. He was excommunicated
by the patriarch Arsenius, and a schism
was caused by his banishment of the prelate, which
was not healed for nearly fifty years.
123

Fearing a renewed invasion by the Latins he did his
utmost to make alliances to protect himself. He established
the Genoese in a settled concession at Galata,
hoping to make them a firm support against their rivals
of Venice. But this act only made the commercial
rivalries stronger, and planted a power which soon became
hostile on the very shores of the capital and in
command of the Golden Horn. “The Roman Empire,”
says Gibbon, “might soon have sunk into a
province of Genoa, if the Republic had not been
checked by the ruin of her freedom and naval power.”
No less disastrous was the attempt of Michael to unite
with the Roman Church. Urban IV. had taken up
the cause of the young Baldwin and called on the
powers to make Crusade. Michael endeavoured to
meet him by diplomacy if not by submission. His
envoys attended the council held at Lyons in 1274
by the Pope Gregory X. Veccus, who had long opposed
the union of the churches, underwent a sharp imprisonment
in the prison of Anemas, but being convinced
of the error of his opinions was released to mount the
patriarchal throne. But all these measures were in
vain. On questions of faith it should not have been
impossible for candid men, as the history of Veccus
shows, to bring the churches into essential union, but the
claim of the Popes to supremacy, which they emphasised
by the mission of legates, was one which the Church of
Constantinople has never admitted. Michael died in
1282. Already his attempt had failed, and he died
excommunicated by pope and patriarch. The restorer
of the Empire was unworthy to rank among its heroes,
and the historian of the Greek people has described
him in language of severity that is well deserved.
“He was selfish, hypocritical, able and accomplished,
an inborn liar, vain, meddling, ambitious, cruel and
rapacious. He has gained renown as the restorer of
124
the Eastern Empire; he ought to be execrated as the
corrupter of the Greek race, for his reign affords a
signal example of the extent to which a nation may be
degraded by the misconduct of its sovereign when
he is entrusted with despotic power.”

Of his intrigues, the most important of which was his
encouragement of the revolt of John of Procida against
the French in Sicily, ever memorable as the Sicilian
Vespers, it can only be said that they may have saved
him from attack. Catalan mercenaries, who after the
expulsion of the French from Sicily came into the service
of the Empire, overwhelmed its fairest provinces
with rapine and disaster. It is a history which makes
Gibbon for once ascend the pulpit of the preacher of
righteousness. “I shall not, I trust, be accused of
superstition; but I must remark that, even in this world,
the natural order of events will sometimes assume the
strong appearances of moral retribution. The first
Palæologus had saved his Empire by involving the
kingdoms of the West in rebellion and blood; and
from these seeds of discord uprose a generation of iron
men, who assaulted and endangered the Empire of his
son.”

Andronicus II., indeed, had a long but disastrous
reign. He continued his father’s works at the harbour
of the Kontoscalion. He repaired the sea walls, and
in 1317, when his wife, Irene, died and left him some
money, the impoverished Cæsar was able to undertake
a general repair of the whole of the fortifications.
Otherwise he is known in the history of the city only
for his disputes with the patriarch, his abject submissions,
and his misfortunes. His son, Michael IX.,
was from 1295 to 1320 the associate of his throne,
and won universal praise. His grandson, Andronicus
III., sank to the pleasures which had disgraced so
many of his predecessors, but when his iniquities were
125
too flagrant to be concealed, when his brother Manuel
was murdered, it was believed, through his orders, and
his father, Michael IX., died of grief, he took up
arms against his grandfather, secured his own coronation,
and then the absolute submission of the aged
Emperor. Andronicus lived in 1332 in the great
palace, but in absolute penury. He took monastic
vows and died, no longer as Emperor, but as the poor
monk Antony.

Andronicus the younger (III.), though he married
princesses of Western houses, did not add to the
dignity of the Eastern Empire. He died in 1341,
and left behind him a child of eight, the son of his
second wife, Agnes of Savoy. He was protected by
John Cantacuzene, who had protected his father, and
finally won him the crown, and who himself bore
a character that was high among the best of the
Byzantine statesmen and generals. But palace intrigues
and attacks of interested politicians against
him, at last obliged him, as he declares—for he is his
own historian—to assume the Imperial title. In the
war that ensued it seems that while the people supported
the Palæologi, the officials supported the new
claimant. It gave the opportunity to the Servian king,
Stephen Dashan, to extend his territories and threaten
to replace the Emperors as leaders of the Greek
peoples. Strip by strip the territory of the Empire
was shorn away, and Serbians, Turks, and Albanians
left little to be conquered by Cantacuzene. At last,
after previous failures, he advanced to the walls again
in 1347 and was admitted secretly by his friends
through the Golden Gate. For once, what was
practically a change of dynasty was accomplished
without bloodshed. John Cantacuzene became Emperor
and gave his daughter in marriage to John
Palæologus. It is said by a contemporary that so poor
126
were even the imperial houses that at the wedding
feast the illustrious personages had to be served in
earthenware and pewter: strange change from the time
when the very walls of the palace glittered with gold.
In seven years the balance of power changed completely.
War, first joint against the Serbians, then
hostile against each other, was ended, it seemed, in
favour of Cantacuzene by the assistance—a woeful
precedent—of the Turks, now settled in Europe and
the masters of Adrianople. But when the successful
Emperor tried to associate his son Matthew on the
throne, the feeling of Constantinople turned strongly
against him. In 1358, John Palæologus whose seat of
government had been fixed at Thessalonica, arrived,
with but two galleys and two thousand men, on a dark
night at the gate of the Hodegetria on the Sea of
Marmora. Bringing their vessels quite close to the
gate, they made every sign of distress, throwing out
oil-jars and uttering cries for help. The stratagem
succeeded; the guards opened the gate and came to
their assistance. They were overpowered, and the
troops rushed in and captured the adjoining tower.
The city rose in favour of the young Palæologus, and
John Cantacuzene with great willingness, if he is to be
believed in his own case, retired from the throne and
entered a monastery, where he died in 1383.

Each change of Emperor marked the more clearly
the coming end of the Empire. John VI. Palæologus
“carelessly watched the decline of the Empire for
thirty-six years,” from the day when he became sole
ruler. He saw the growth of the Turkish power, and
he sought the aid of Urban V. for the final contest
that he saw must come. In 1361 he was decisively
defeated before Adrianople, and in later years he was
little better than the vassal of the Sultan. He himself
went to Rome in 1369, and submitted to the Latin
127
Church, on the points of the Procession of the Holy
Spirit, the use of unleavened bread and the supremacy
of the Roman See. So poor was he that he was
arrested at Venice, on his return, for debt. The
Cæsar of the East had indeed sunk low.

He was compelled to aid Sultan Murad with troops,
and during his absence in Asia, apparently in 1374, his
eldest son, Andronicus, secured Constantinople, in alliance
with the Turkish Sultan’s son, also a rebel against
his father. By the aid of Murad, Andronicus was
seized. He was imprisoned in the tower of Anemas
with his wife and his son John, then only five years
old. He was to have been blinded, but perhaps in
mercy the sight of one eye was not harmed. After
two years he was released, and he at once made
alliance with the Genoese and with the Sultan Bayezid,
and marched to the capital. He caught his father and
his brother Manuel, who were at the palace of the
Pegé, now the village of Balukli, and sent them with
his younger brother Theodore to the prison in which
he himself had been confined, “as Zeus,” says the
historian Ducas, with a classic touch such as the
Greeks always delighted to use, “cast his father
Kronos and his brothers Pluto and Poseidon into
Tartarus.” Andronicus entered the city by the Selivri
Kapoussi (gate of the Pege), and held the throne for
two years and a half. Bayezid urged him to kill his
father and brothers, but he would not; and within two
years, in some way, as to which the historians—none
of whom are strictly contemporary—differ, they
escaped, and with the aid of Murad, or Bayezid
(for again the dates are doubtful), attacked the city,
entered by the gate of S. Romanus, and defeated
Andronicus, who was allowed to retire to Selivria as
ruler of the adjacent lands. In 1384 Manuel was
recognised as heir to his father. These changes were
128
all effected by the aid of the Turks, and of the cities
of Genoa and Venice, who, it might seem, gave the
city to whom they would; and when John VI. began
to repair the walls which thirty-six years before he
had himself despoiled, he was stopped by order of
Bayezid and compelled to destroy what he had done.

In his time decay visibly laid its hand on the still
splendid city. Many of the streets, it is said, were
almost in ruins, the palaces empty, and the costliest and
most beautiful treasures of the ancient Byzantine art had
been sold to the Genoese and the Venetians. But
for the defeat of Bayezid by Timur, the prize would
have fallen into the hands of the Turks half a century
before it was theirs at last.

Manuel II. had an unquiet reign. Forced to yield
on every side to the demands of the Sultan, blockaded
in Constantinople, he was at last forced to admit his
cousin John, the son of Andronicus, as joint Emperor,
in 1399, a title which he seems to have borne but a
short time.

For a while it seemed that the distractions and
defeats of the Turks might give opportunity for a
revival of the Empire. In 1411 a Turkish attack on
Constantinople was driven off; but the Greeks were
incapable of using their own victories or the weakness
of their enemies; and though Manuel made some
reforms in the administration the members of his household
thwarted him on every side. The years of peace
were wasted, and in 1422 Murad II. appeared before
the walls of the imperial city.

The defeat of the Turks—their last—was soon
followed by the death of Manuel (1425). John VII.
set himself to repair the walls, but he could not rebuild
or repopulate the city. The decay, in spite of
the outward splendour, the disgraceful subjection of the
Emperor to the Turks, and the hatred of the Greeks
129
for the Westerns, all struck the keen observer Bertrandon
de la Brocquière, a Burgundian knight, who
visited the city in 1433. The despairing effort of the
Emperor was to win the help of a new crusade by
union with the Latin Church.

Those who have stood in admiration before the
frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace at
Florence will remember the solemn impressive figure
of John Palæologus, in his gorgeous robes, as he rides in
the procession of the Magi, a stately personage contrasting
markedly with the bourgeois Medici who
follow him. Italians knew the Eastern Emperor, for
in 1438 he stood with the patriarch before the Council
of Ferrara, and in the next year, in Florence itself
accepted, with his bishops (save the bishop of
Ephesus), the doctrines of the Latins, and joined on
July 6, 1439, in the proclamation beneath the dome of
Brunelleschi, then only three years completed, of the
unity of the Catholic Church of East and West.

When he returned to Constantinople the people
refused to accept the union, and even the bishops who
had signed the decrees of Florence now repudiated their
act as a sin. No help came from the West; and John
died in 1448, having preserved his throne even by
temporising with the Turks.

Constantine Palæologus was the eldest surviving son
of the Emperor Manuel. He could only ascend the
throne by the consent of the Sultan, and when that was
obtained he was crowned in Sparta, where he had
ruled. On the 12th of March 1449 he entered Constantinople.
The city was receiving its new lord
with exultation and joy, says his friend and chronicler
Phrantzes. So long as Murad still reigned they were
indeed safe, but when Mohammed II. became Sultan
it was clear that there would be war.

Constantine turned—it was his only hope—to the
130
West for aid. He sent an embassy to Rome begging
for help, and showing willingness to renew the union of
the Churches. The Pope, Nicholas V., sent back
Cardinal Isidore, who had once been a Russian bishop,
but, having accepted the decrees of Florence, had
remained loyal to them, and was an exile from his
country in consequence. He arrived at Constantinople
in November 1452, bringing some money and a few
troops. On December 12, 1452, the union was
ratified in S. Sophia, and Cardinal Isidore said mass
according to the Latin rite. From that day the
people regarded the church as desecrated. In the
church and monastery of the Pantokrator the monk
Gennadios preached against the crime and folly of the
union. Many of the great nobles cried out against it;
one even declared that the Sultan would be a far better
lord than the Pope. As Constantine rode through the
streets daily the mob mocked and reviled him; and
some cried out “rather than that we should be Latins
would we be Turks.” The holy sacrifice of the Body
and Blood of Christ they rejected, declaring that it
was polluted. Even if an angel from heaven had
descended and declared that he would save the city if
only the people would unite with the Roman Church
the people would have refused. So the chroniclers
describe the disunion within. Without, the preparations
were complete.

The conquerors of Constantinople had had a romantic
history. A horde of barbarians, coming from the far
East, and a branch of the race known to Chinese historians
as the Hiung-no, they emerge into history
in the sixth century, then assuming the name of Turk,
which they were to make famous. In the latter half of
that century they became known to the rulers of Constantinople.
In 568 embassies came to the Emperor
from the Northern Turks. Eight years later an
131
embassy was sent to the Southern Turks. At the very
end of the century an embassy came to the Emperor
Maurice in 598 from the Khan of the Turks, now
claiming to be a great sovereign. But it was more
than six centuries before the Empire came face to face
with the actual tribe which should found the power
that was to take its place. Pressed hard by the
Seljuks, with territories limited to the Bithynian province,
it was not till the beginning of the fourteenth
century that Osman, the founder of the Osmanlis,
came forward as a leader who should begin a line of
mighty sovereigns.

Legends surround the life of Osman; his dream of
a great tree which should overshadow the world, of
Constantinople won by clashing swords, of the ring
of universal Empire, his romantic love suit, belong
perhaps to history, but only as it appears magnified
by an imagination fired by the wonderful successes
of later years. More certain are the capture of
Nicaea and of Brusa, accomplished by his son,—the
latter still the picture of a Turkish city, with its
innumerable mosques, its trees and gardens, its population
half-military, but now wholly languid and
quiescent. The sword of Osman is still the sign of
power among his descendants. It rests in the türbeh
of Eyûb, the companion of Mohammed himself, who
fell not by the sword but by disease during the first
Moslem attack on Constantinople in 672, and over
whose grave Mohammed the Conqueror built a tomb,
to the Moslems the most sacred of all in the city they
had made their own. Osman was brought to Brusa
only to be buried. His son Orchan carried fire and sword
nearer and nearer to the goal. It was he who founded the
terrible corps of the Janissaries, Christian child captives
trained by the sternest methods to be the fiercest champions
of Islam. In 1326 Orchan captured Nicomedia;
132
in 1330 he defeated the imperial host led against him
by the Emperor himself, and Nicaea fell into his hands.
He showed the wisdom and restraint which, combined
with the daring and ferocity of his men, served to
strengthen the Turkish power step by step in the
districts it won. Nicaea was not pillaged. Its citizens
were allowed to live on in peace under Moslem laws,
and Orchan himself by every act of charity and of
devotion to his religion sought, and won, the respect
of the people whom he had conquered. Then for
twenty years he rested and prepared. Brusa was
enriched with mosques and hospitals, tombs of soldiers
and prophets, fountains, baths, colleges of students of the
Koran. There rest to-day the first six Sultans, among
“some five hundred tombs of famous men, pashas, scheiks,
professors, orators, physicians, poets, musicians.”

The years of waiting ended when in 1346 the power
of Orchan was so great, and was recognised to be so
dangerous, that John Cantacuzene, the Christian Cæsar,
did not hesitate to purchase his friendship by the gift
of his daughter Theodora, in a marriage performed
with all the pomp of a State ceremonial, but without
even the form of a Christian blessing. The friendship
thus bought was never yielded. The Osmanlis crossed
to Europe in freebooting bands, and ravaged up to the
very walls of Constantinople; and when the Genoese
whom Cantacuzene had settled at Galata fought with
him and destroyed his fleet, it was with the aid of
Orchan that they fought against their benefactor. In
1356 Orchan’s son, Suleiman, inspired like his grandfather
by a dream or a vision which he took as a supernatural
summons, crossed to Europe with but thirty-nine
companions, and took the fort of Tzympe near
Gallipoli. In three days there were three thousand
Turks settled in Europe. It was the beginning of
an Empire which lasts to this day. The occupation
133
of Gallipoli followed, and when Orchan died in 1359,
the Turks had settled down to wait, for a hundred years,
till the Queen city herself should fall into their hands.

Before him his son Suleiman had passed away; and
his tomb at the northern entrance to the Hellespont
seemed to mark the country for the possession of the
Turks. “For a hundred years he was the only
Ottoman prince who lay buried in European earth;
and his tomb continually incited the races of Asia to
perform their pilgrimage to it with the sword of conquest.
Of all the hero-tombs,” says Von Hammer,
“which have hitherto been mentioned in connection
with Ottoman history, there is none more renowned,
or more visited, than that of the second Vizier of the
Empire, the fortunate crosser of the Hellespont, who
laid the foundation of the Ottoman power in Europe.”

Already the military organisation was founded, and
the system which had made in the brother of Orchan
as Vizier the civil ruler of the people. Now the
settlement in Europe was begun. Murad (or Amurath,
as our forefathers called the name), the younger
brother of Suleiman, succeeded his father. In less
than thirty years he had transformed the face of
Southern Europe, and made the Emperor of Rome
but a dependent of his power. He landed and established
his armies in Thrace. He defeated the Hungarians
and Serbians and captured Nisch; he pressed
southwards and Adrianople fell into his hands; and
then when the circle of Turkish territory was drawn
closely round Constantinople, he turned northwards and
became the conqueror of the northern lands ruled by
princes Christian yet still barbarian, who had long
before this conquered them from the Empire. In
1389 Murad was slain, after a great victory, by
Milosch Kobilovitsch, the hero of Serbian legend.
Bayezid, his son, reigned in his stead; and he began
134
the fatal custom which still further consolidated the
monarchy. On the very day of his accession he had
his brother murdered, and so wise was the precedent
considered that by the time of Mohammed the Conqueror
it became a law that every brother of the Sultan should
be slain. He began, too, it is asserted, the hideous vices
which have stained the Empire of his successors, and
which degraded the courts of the Sultan with the guilt
of the rulers and the shame of their captives.

The battle of Kossova, the last fight of Murad, was
followed before long by that of Nicopolis, in which
the choicest chivalry of Europe went down before
the fierce onslaught of the Turkish squadrons. The
captives, all but twenty-four knights, who were spared,
were butchered in cold blood in the presence of their
comrades, before the tent of Bayezid.

Then Bayezid led his hosts to the conquest of
Greece; and in 1397 Athens fell before his arms.
The Cæsars bowed before him, suffered a mosque to
be built within the walls of Constantinople, and actually
joined their arms to his for the capture of the one
Greek city which remained free in the midst of the
European conquests of the Turks. When at last the
insolent Sultan demanded that the crown of the
Emperors should be yielded to him, and threatened to
exterminate the inhabitants of the capital if he were
not obeyed, it is said that the nobles replied: “We
know our weakness, but we trust in the God of justice,
who protects the weak and lowly, and puts down
the mighty from on high.” It was an answer that
befitted the ancient city.

Before the attack was made that seemed certain to
prove fatal to the last stronghold, the capital of the
Christian Empire, Bayezid was called away to meet
the onslaught of the greatest of conquerors, Timur
the Tartar. The great battle of Angora shattered
135
the Turkish power, destroyed the Janissaries and left
Bayezid himself a prisoner in the hands of Timur.
Before a year was over, the proud Sultan died, and
the power which he had made so great was utterly
crushed beneath the feet of the Tartars.

Brusa itself was left in ruins, and not only the son
of Bayezid, who was safe in Adrianople, made submission,
but even the Emperor paid tribute to Timur.
Then the conquering horde swept back again to the
Far East, and the Turks set to work to rebuild
again the power that had been shattered.

Domestic warfare succeeded the destruction at the
hands of foreign foes, and Mohammed I., the youngest
son of Bayezid, established his authority over his
brothers as ruler of the Osmanlis by the aid of the
Emperor Manuel Palæologus. His brother Musa
laid siege to Constantinople, and the troops of Mohammed
actually joined with those of Manuel in the
successful defence of the city. Mohammed was the
ally, almost the subject, of the Emperor, and when he
died he sought to commend his children to Manuel’s care.

Mohammed died in 1421 at Adrianople. His son
Murad II. had to fight for his throne against a
pretender whom the Emperor had set free, and whom
he overcame only by the help of the Genoese galleys
which carried him from Asia to Europe. In 1422
he was ready to revenge himself on the Greeks.
His army encamped before the walls of Constantinople,
and his own tent was set up in the garden of the
Church of the Blessed Virgin of the Fountain
(Balukli). He brought his cannon to bear upon the
walls that cross the valley of the Lycus, but without
success. The walls of Theodosius were still too
strong, and the fierce attack on the gate of S.
Romanus was a failure now, as it would not be
thirty years later.
136

The city was stoutly defended. John Palæologus,
the Emperor’s son, commanded a garrison inspired
by the fullest religious enthusiasm: and when a vision
of the Blessed Virgin, the Panhagia, was seen on
the walls, both by assailants and defenders, the siege
was given up; and the Sultan did not attempt to
renew it. Still, a tribute was paid by the Emperor,
and it must have been clear to the Osmanlis that
the capture was but for a short time deferred. But
Murad had to undergo defeats at the hands of the
Hungarians, which he amply avenged: and his two
abdications showed that he was weary of power, if
not incapable of wielding it. The end of his reign
saw him repeatedly over-matched by the Albanian
hero, Scanderbeg, whom he himself had trained among
the Janissaries. In 1451 he died; and then the
greatest triumph of the Osmanlis was at hand.

The early history of Mohammed II. has been thus
summed up, in the clear-cut eloquence of Dean Church.

“Three times did Mohammed the Conqueror ascend
the Ottoman throne. Twice he had resigned it, a
sullen and reluctant boy of fourteen, whom it was
necessary to inveigle out of the way, lest he should
resist his father to the face, when, to save the State,
he appeared to resume his abdicated power. The
third time, seven years older, he sprang on the great
prize with the eagerness and ferocity of a beast of
prey. He never drew bridle from Magnesia, when
he heard of his father’s death, till on the second day
he reached Gallipoli, on his way to Adrianople. To
smother his infant brother in the bath was his first
act of power; and then he turned, with all the force
of his relentless and insatiate nature to where the
inheritor of what remained of the greatness of the
Cæsars—leisurely arranging marriages and embassies—still
detained from the Moslems the first city of the East;—little
137
knowing the savage eye that was fixed upon
him, little suspecting the nearness of a doom which had
so often threatened and had been so often averted.”

It did not need the half-defiant attitudes of Constantine
XII. to arouse the young Sultan: as soon as he
had concluded a truce with his northern foes he began
to make those elaborate preparations which should
ensure success in the great conquest. His first act
was to secure the isolation of the capital. Already he
held the passage of the Dardanelles; now he would
secure that of the Bosphorus. In 1393 Bayezid had
built on the Asiatic shore, some five miles above
Constantinople, the fortress which was the first distinct
menace to the imperial city. Anadoli Hissar, the
“Asiatic Castle,” still stands overhanging the water’s
edge, a splendid mediæval building of four square
towers with one great central keep. In 1452 a corresponding
tower was begun on the other side of the
sea, at the point where the passage is narrowest. The
first stone was laid by Mohammed himself on March
26, 1452, and by the middle of August the castle
was completed. The design of this Roumeli Hissar
represented the name of the Prophet and the Sultan,
the consonants standing out as towers. Protests were
unheeded and the two envoys sent by the Emperor to
remonstrate were butchered at once. A Venetian
galley was sunk as it passed, to prove the range of the
guns. Its crew were slain when they swam ashore.
A Hungarian engineer was employed to direct a cannon
foundry, and a vast store of materials of war was
accumulated for the siege. After another winter’s
preparation all was ready, and early in the spring of
1453 a vast Turkish host[26] was ranged from the
138
Golden Horn to the Marmora. The sea was covered
by three hundred vessels and it seemed as if succour
was cut off on every side.

On April 6, 1453, the siege began.

The last message of the Roman Emperor to the
Turkish Sultan had been somewhat in these words:
“As it is plain thou desirest war more than peace, as
I cannot satisfy thee by my vows of sincerity or by
my readiness to swear allegiance, so let it be according
to thy will. I turn now and look above to God. If it
be His will that the city should become thine, where is
he who can oppose His will? If He should inspire
thee with a wish for peace, I shall indeed be happy.
Nevertheless I release thee from all thy oaths and
treaties to me, I close the gates of my city, I will
defend my people to the last drop of my blood. And so,
reign in happiness till the Righteous and Supreme Judge
shall call us both before the seat of His judgment.”

It was in this spirit that Constantinople stood to
meet the foe. Mohammed when he came in sight of
the walls, spread his carpet on the ground and turning
towards Mecca prayed for the success of his enterprise.
Everywhere throughout the camp the Ulemas promised
victory and the delights of Paradise.

On April 7, the Turkish lines were drawn opposite
the walls. The tent of the Sultan himself was placed
opposite the gate of S. Romanus (Top Kapoussi).
Thence to his right the Asiatic troops stretched down
to the sea, to his left past the gate of Charisius (Edirnè
Kapoussi), the European levies extended northwards
to the Golden Horn. Within four days sixty-nine
cannon were set in position against the walls, and with
them ancient engines, such as catapults and balistae,
discharging stones. On the heights about Galata also
a strong body of troops was placed.

ROUMELI HISSAR

Within, measures had been taken to repair the walls,


141
but it is said that the money had been embezzled by
the two monks, skilled in engineering, to whom it had
been given, and in some places the fortifications were
not strong enough to support cannon. Constantine
sought help from every side. On April 20, four ships
laden with grain forced their way through the Turkish
fleet, but they added few if any to the defenders. The
Venetian aid that had been promised did not arrive even
at Euboea till two days after the Turks had captured
the city. Of troops within, Phrantzes, who himself had
charge of the search, states that there were hardly seven
thousand in all, of whom two thousand were foreigners.
Others give higher numbers, but there is no reason to
doubt the accuracy of the Emperor’s most trusted
friend. Strange it seems that outside, in the Sultan’s
army, some thirty thousand Christians were fighting for
the infidels. Phrantzes says that when he heard that
some of the Byzantine nobles had left the city, the
Emperor only heaved a deep sigh.

Of the arrangements for defence, the fullest accounts
can be found in the writings of Phrantzes and Ducas, the
letters of Archbishop Leonardo of Mitylene and of
Cardinal Isidore, the report of the Florentine Tedardi,
two poems, and a Slavonic MS. quoted by M.
Mijatovich.[27]

Here it is needless to tell how each wall was manned.
It may suffice to say that during the few weeks that
passed, while the Christians still kept their foes at bay,
there was no rest for the besieged. Sometimes when
the Emperor went on his rounds to inspect the defences
he found the weary soldiers asleep at their posts. He
seemed himself to be sleepless; every hour that he did
not devote to the defences he seemed to spend at prayer.
142

He visited every post himself; he even crossed the
Golden Horn in a small boat to be sure of the security
of the great chain which stretched from the tower of
Galata to what is now called Seraglio Point. Every
hour he had to contend with new difficulties, with
monks declaring that defence was hopeless because of
the union with the Latins, with Italian mercenaries
clamouring for pay. He was compelled to take the
furniture of the churches when the treasures of the
palace were quite exhausted, but he promised if God
should free the city to restore to Him fourfold.

After nearly a week in which the heavy Turkish
cannon thundered against the walls, the gunners learned
at last from the Hungarian envoys to their camp how
to direct their fire. At length, on April 18, at the
hour of vespers, a great attack was made. The people
rushed out from the churches, and the air was filled
with the cries of the combatants, the ringing of the
bells, the clash of arms. The attack was strongest
against the weak walls by the Blachernae quarter, and by
the gate of S. Romanus. After hours of hard fighting
it was repulsed, and Te Deum was sung in all the
churches for the victory.

The victory of the 18th, followed by that of the
20th, when the ships broke up the whole Turkish fleet
and rode triumphantly into the Golden Horn, inspirited
the besieged. But on the 21st the cannonade
brought down one of the towers that defended the gate
of S. Romanus. The Sultan was not on the spot, and
the Turks were not ready to make assault, so the opportunity
passed. After these victories the Emperor hoped
that it was possible to induce the Sultan to retire. He
offered to surrender everything but the city, and there
were some in the infidel camp who would have been
ready to make terms, but Mohammed would offer only
that the whole Peloponnesus should be Constantine’s
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in undisturbed possession, if he would yield the city.
The terms were rejected, and the Emperor prepared
for the worst.

But still the Turks were far from the end of their
task. Long though the extent of land walls was that
had to be manned, it was not difficult to protect it with
a comparatively small force. A low counter-scarp
enclosed a moat, over which rose the scarp surmounted by
breastworks. Above this was the line of the outworks,
with towers advanced here and there from their surface.
Behind, and also protected by high towers, was the
inner or great wall, with breast work and rampart. It
was “the most perfect of Eastern fortresses,”[28] and
might indeed seem impregnable. Every wall had its
“military engines capable of playing on the siege-works
of the beleaguering army.” And as the walls
“were loopholed at a stage below the battlements,”
the “garrison could fire not merely from the parapets
but from a well protected second line of openings.”
While therefore it was quite possible to defend the
land walls, the besieged relied for ultimate safety on
being able to leave without risk the walls of the Golden
Horn and the sea practically undefended. The Turkish
fleet would not venture to draw near to the Marmora
walls. The Golden Horn was safe with Galata on
the other side—though the Genoese held aloof, through
treaty probably with Mohammed—and the chain
across. The Sultan had already tried to force the chain
but failed. So it seemed safe:—

But the genius of the Sultan, or as one authority says, a
Christian in his army, devised a scheme which at once
144
made him the master of the city. He determined to
transport his fleet overland into the Golden Horn from
the Bosphorus. An extraordinary feat it was, but it
was splendidly performed. A narrow canal was dug,
paved, and set with rollers. The point of starting was
between Top Haneh and Beshiktash, out of the range
of the fort at Galata. Thence between two and three
miles up the valley of Dolma Bagtché the seventy or
eighty ships were drawn by night up the hill of Pera
to the point where now the gardens stand just below
the Hotel Bristol, and thence down the hill to the bay
of Kassim Pasha where now stands the great Arsenal.[29]
When the watchers on the towers of Galata and the
Kentatarion by the Gate of Eugenius could see
through the fogs of dawn on the morning of April
22, the great fleet was no longer before them in the
Bosphorus, but behind in the Golden Horn there
rode the gallant vessels with their flags flying in the
breeze. The north-east wall must be reinforced.
How could it be done?

The Venetian ships in the harbour determined to
attack the Turks before they could complete the great
pontoon which they were preparing to bring up. For
some days, however, nothing was done. The attacks
on the land walls continued and were beaten back,
often with heavy loss. But each day provisions were
growing less and the defenders were growing weaker.
On the morning of April 28th two Venetian galleys,
three smaller ships, and two stored with fire, advanced
upon the Turks. They were received with
the fire of four cannon. The great galley of Gabrielo
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Trevisani sank, and one of the smaller ships. Only
one of the Turkish ships caught fire. The Venetians
who swam to shore when their ships sank were beheaded
next day in sight of the defenders of the walls.
A bitter revenge was taken. Over two hundred
and fifty Turks had at some time or other been
captured and lay in the prisons of Constantinople.
They were now all beheaded on the walls in sight
of their kindred. The horrible act made certain
what would be the fate of the city if it fell.

And internal dissensions made the fall seem imminent.
The Venetians accused the Genoese and the
Genoese the Venetians for the failure of their attack on
the Turkish fleet, till Constantine himself called their
leaders before him and besought them to be at peace.
“The war without,” he said, “is enough; by the
mercy of God seek not war among ourselves.” “So,”
says Phrantzes, “with much speech at length he
pacified them.”

Next day and on the first of May the Turkish
cannon did some damage; but in some parts the fire
was utterly unable to penetrate or dislodge the splendid
masonry, and one tower near the Lycus, it is said,
was struck by over seventy balls without suffering in
the slightest; and the great gun built by the Hungarian
mercenary Ourban was dismounted by the fire of the
cannon directed by the gallant Genoese engineer
Giustiniani, who, with four hundred of his countrymen,
manned the walls near the gate of S. Romanus.
Mohammed himself was standing by the gun at the
moment, and in rage called his troops at once to the
assault. They crossed the counter-scarp and began to
pull down the scarp where it had been repaired; but
again the defenders drove them back.

It was said when the attack began the walls were
but half manned, as some of the soldiers had actually
146
left their posts to go home to dine. This laxity, as
soon as it was discovered, was of course stopped; but
it shows how utterly the people, safe for centuries
behind their defences, had forgotten the meaning of
war.

The Emperor on the 3rd of May sent out a
ship which penetrated through the Turkish fleet,
being disguised with Turkish colours, to beg aid.
It was plain that if it were much delayed it
would be too late. A council of war, indeed,
advised the Emperor to escape while it was still
possible. The Patriarch and the Senators urged him
to go, assuring him that he could then easily gather an
army to relieve the city. “The emperor,” we are
told, “listened to all this quietly and patiently. At
last, after having been for some time in deep thought, he
began to speak: ‘I thank you all for the advice which
you have given me. I know that my going out of the
city might be of some benefit to me, inasmuch as all
that you foresee might really happen. But it is impossible
for me to go away: how could I leave the
churches of our Lord, and His servants the clergy,
and the throne, and my people in such a plight?
What would the world say of me? I pray you,
my friends, in future do not say to me anything else
but, ‘Nay, sire, do not leave us.’ Never, never, will
I leave you. I am resolved to die here with you.’
And saying this, the Emperor turned his head aside,
because tears filled his eyes; and with him wept the
Patriarch and all who were there.”[30]

In the next two days a ship was sunk, and the other
Christian vessels were compelled to withdraw outside
the chain. A Genoese merchant ship was also sunk,
and when the merchants of Galata protested, declaring
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that they were entirely neutral, the Grand Vizier promised
to compensate them, when the city was taken.

During the next week the breach by the gate
of S. Romanus was daily widened, and on the 7th
of May a desperate attack was made upon the walls.
But again with splendid courage the Turks were beaten
back, though some of the bravest of the defenders fell.

On the 12th of May a breach was made in the
walls north of the palace of the Porphyrogenitus,
and thousands of Turks poured in. It was only
the arrival of Constantine himself, summoned hastily
from a council of war, that drove forth the hosts
after hot fighting. The Emperor would have pushed
through and fought hand to hand in the ditch, we are
told, if he had not been held back by his nobles.

From this date every effort was concentrated upon
the gate of S. Romanus. There more cannon were
directed; and in return men were brought from the
fleet, now felt to be useless, to man the walls. One
of the towers fell; and new engines were constantly
being brought, with clever shelters for the
archers. A great erection covered with bulls’ hide
was destroyed by a gallant attack from the walls, to
the surprise of the Turks, who thought the feat impossible.
Mines and countermines every day were discovered;
every day the defenders were becoming weaker.

On the 23rd an envoy from the Sultan was
admitted to the city. Again, and for the last time,
Constantine was offered a sovereignty in the Peloponnese,
freedom for all who chose to depart, and
security for the persons and possessions of all who
should choose to remain after the surrender. Again
he rejected the offer. No doubt he thought that
it was impossible to trust it; nor could the Roman
Emperor endure to yield the city that had been
but once captured in its age-long history. “We
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are prepared to die.” The last hope failed just after the
last bold defiance was returned: the ship sent out returned,
to say that nowhere had it found the vessels
of the relieving force.

The people began to see portents in the sky, when
the great bonfires in the Turkish camp were reflected
on the great dome of S. Sophia. The Emperor stood
on the walls watching the enemy keeping festival, it
seemed, with sounds of music, and shrill cries and the
beating of drums. As he watched, says one who saw
him, the tears coursed down his cheeks. He knew
what must come, but he was ready to fight to the last.
Again he was urged to fly, the Patriarch declaring
that the city now must fall. Again, and for the last
time he refused. “How many Emperors, great and
glorious, before me have suffered and died for their
country? Shall I be the one to fly? No, I will
die with you!”

The ladies of the imperial household, the sister-in-law
of the Emperor and her attendants, were
sent away in a ship of Giustiniani’s; and everything
was prepared for the worst. By gigantic efforts the
walls were repaired, and so well was the work done
that even the Sultan was for a moment half dismayed.

Already there were many in the Turkish camp who
thought the enterprise too hazardous to continue. It
was known that a Venetian fleet was on the way, and
that a league was being formed by the Pope. After
long debate it was decided to make one last assault,
and, if that failed, to raise the siege. On the night
of the 28th, Mohammed visited all the posts, and
promised to his soldiers all the pillage of the city,
encouraging them by every hope for this world and
the next. In the city priests bearing the sacred
icons went through the streets. It was for the last
time. For the last time Constantine called his officers
149
together and spoke to them in brave words which
burnt themselves into the memory of the faithful
Phrantzes.

“Brothers and fellow-soldiers, be ready for the
morn. If God gives us grace and valour, and the Holy
Trinity help us, in Whom alone we trust, we will do
such deeds that the foe shall fall back with shame before
our arms.” Then, says the chronicler, the wretched
Romans strengthened their hearts like lions, sought
and gave pardon, and with tears embraced each other
as though mindful no more of wife or children or
earthly goods, but only of death, which, for the
safety of their country, they were glad to undergo.
Constantine for the last time went to the great
church, and there, before all the bishops, asked the
pardon of all whom he had wronged. Then he received
his last communion. For the last time the
Holy Sacrifice was offered in S. Sophia, and then
the last of the Cæsars and his nobles went forth to
die.

Before cock-crow he was again at his post; and
with the first streak of dawn the Turkish troops
poured forth to the attack. Again and again they were
forced back, and again forced forward by the troops
behind them. The moat had been filled with earth
and stones; but a great palisade of stones covered with
hides had been set up below the inner wall. The
Janissaries at length rushed up to the breach, but even
they were driven back. The critical moment came
when a wound compelled Giustiniani to retire, and a
few minutes after the Turks discovered a gate in the
outer wall that had been newly opened, near to the
gate of Charisius, and below the palace of the
Porphyrogenitus, found it unprotected, and entering
through it turned upon the defenders from within.
Already the Genoese had left their posts when their
150
leader withdrew. The Janissaries again advanced;
they stormed the barricade, and at the moment when
some discovered the Kerko-porta,[31] others forced their
way through the gate of Charisius, and others through
the great breach near where the great Cæsar had stood.
When the city was entered he was in the street calling
his men around him. He rode forward, cutting his
way through the foe, with some of the bravest of his
nobles round him. At length he fell, near the gate of
S. Romanus, by an unknown hand, and the conquering
Turks swept over his body.

The age-long fight which the Imperial East had
waged against barbarism was over. The city of the
Cæsars and the Church was in the hands of the infidel.
The land where the scholarship of the ancient world
and the law of the pioneers of equal justice had been
preserved unbroken, was now trodden under foot of
those whose life was formed on quite other models.
Europe had stood by for centuries and watched the
gallant battle waged by the Christians who manned the
bulwarks of her civilisation. She had now to learn
what was meant by the substitution of the Koran for
the Bible, of Mohammed for Christ.

Within a few hours of the capture of the gate of
S. Romanus the whole city was overrun by the
victorious troops. At first they slew all whom they
saw, but when it was plain that all opposition was over
they began to make captives, tying them together with
ropes and dragging them on as they advanced further
into the city. In the last hours of the siege thousands
had gathered in the great church of S. Sophia. There
many still thought that they must find safety. God,
they fancied, could not allow the infidel to desecrate
the fairest church in all the world. An angel,
it had been prophesied, would descend at the last
151
moment and strike the enemies of Christ to the
dust.

The great doors were shut, and the hushed thousands
stood in prayer. The cries of the victors came nearer
and nearer, and at last the doors of the narthex were
beaten in and the savage soldiery rushed in, slaying at
first, then seizing captives, tearing down every Christian
symbol, and shattering with their axes the magnificent
iconostasis, before which, twelve hours before, Constantine
and his gallant men had bent in reverent
devotion.[32]

At noon Mohammed himself entered the city by the
gate of S. Romanus. He rode straight down the wide
street which leads to S. Sophia, followed by the
greatest of his officers and the holy men of the Mussulman
faith. At the great door he dismounted, and
taking earth from the ground he poured it on his head,
as mindful of the end of all earthly conquests. Then
he entered, and when he saw that wonderful sight
which still strikes dumb with awe the greatest and the
meanest of mankind, he stayed. Then, after some
minutes’ silence, he passed up to the altar. As he
went he saw a soldier wantonly breaking up the beautiful
pavement with his axe, and sternly forbade him,
with a blow. As the priests stood before him he
assured them of his protection, and he bade those
Christians who still stood unfettered in the church to
go to their homes in peace.

Then the Sultan ordered one of the Ulemas to mount
the pulpit and read forth to the conquerors from the
Koran, and he himself mounted upon the marble altar
152
and prayed. Two legends have grown up round these
first moments of the Mussulman triumph in the great
church. It is said that as the first infidel entered a
priest was celebrating the Eucharist, and that he passed
into the wall, which mysteriously opened for him and
closed when he had passed, bearing the Body and
Blood of the Lord. He will return, they say, when
the Christians again have S. Sophia for their own.
The other legend points to a pillar at the south-east
where a mark like a blood-stained hand stands out on
the white marble. There it declared, Mohammed riding
his horse over heaps of dead, made an impress of blood
and victory, and ordered the slaughter to be stayed.

As the day went on it became known that some of
the most notable of the defenders had escaped. Tedardi
the Florentine, whose record of the siege is one of the
most valuable we possess, when at last he saw that the
fight was hopeless, fled to the harbour and with many
others swam out to the Venetian ships some of which
put out to sea and escaped. Giustiniani’s wound had
proved mortal. Cardinal Isidore, in disguise, was taken
captive, but a Genoese of Galata bought his freedom.
Many escaped to Galata. Some paid large ransoms:
some were slaughtered, whether Latins or Greeks, in
spite of the money they gave. Most of the Greeks
were made captive. The duke Notaras and his family
were at first spared, but when Mohammed demanded
that the duke’s son, a boy of fourteen, should be sent
to him in the palace, he refused, and he and all his sons
were put to death.

The usual fate of the Greek nobles however was that
the fathers were slain, the boys taken to the barracks
of the Janissaries, and the women and girls to the harems
of the sultan and his chief favourites. Some forty
thousand Greeks perished during the siege, fifty thousand
it is supposed became captives, ten thousand, it is possible,
153
some few rich, most the very poor, retained their freedom
if not their homes.[33]

The body of Constantine, recognised by the purple
buskins, was found in a heap of dead. His head was
cut off and borne to the Sultan. It was exposed on a
column in front of the palace. The body was buried
with respect, and over its grave, not far from where the
mosque of Suleiman now stands, a lamp has always been
kept burning, but the Ottoman government has sternly
repressed the attempt of the faithful Greeks to turn it
into a place of pilgrimage and prayer.

So ended the Roman empire of the East. Its fall
was an undying disgrace to Christendom, which stood
by and would not help. But it fell chiefly through its
own weakness. Military power and religion had been
the strength of the Empire; corruption had eaten away
the first, and the luxury and vice of the imperial court
had shown that the Christian faith had failed to hold
its own. In the hour of their despair the Emperors
turned again to Christ, but it was too late to save the
Empire which their defiance of His laws had brought
to desolation. The Church of Constantinople must
pass through the fires of persecution, and recover in its
isolation, if it might be, the strength of the first days.

When Mohammed passed from the great church, he
rode along the Hippodrome, and when he came to the
serpent column from Delphi he struck off one of the
three heads. He had done, he might have said, with
the old world. It was the day of the new peoples: a
day which began with the destruction of the old. As
he walked through the deserted halls of the great palace
he repeated the words of Firdusi:

CHAPTER II
Constantinople under the Turks

154

Constantinople soon became Stambûl in
the mouth of the Turks, a corruption it may be
of the εἰς τὴν πόλιν which
they had often heard in
the mouth of the Greeks.
The crescent of Byzantium
became the symbol
of the Ottoman power.
A new city began to be
raised on the ruins of
the old.

IN THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI

Some privileges were
left to the Christians.
Galata and Pera were
from the first confirmed
in their independence
and freedom of trade;
yet step by step the
Turkish sway was established
over them, and
though the foreign liberties
still exist, and are
reinforced by the privileges,
from time to time
increased, of the ambassadors
and their households and the colonies
they protect, the Sultan’s rule is complete on both
155
sides of the Golden Horn. After three days of
plunder, Mohammed set himself to make order.
He declared that he would protect the Greek
Church. A new patriarch, George Scholarios or
Gennadios, was installed: his ecclesiastical jurisdiction
was recognized. He was allowed to hallow new
churches, and one little humble oratory remained
undefiled by the infidel. On the hill above the
Phanar, hidden away in a side street, by a high
wall, stands the little white-washed sanctuary round
which on the fatal day the fight had surged. The
Turks still call it Kan Klissé, the church of blood.
The Greeks know it as S. Mary Mouchliotissa (the
Mongolian), in memory, not only of the B. V. M.,
but of Mary the daughter of Manuel Palæologus,
who had married the Khan of the Mongols, and
after his death returned to Constantinople and built
or restored the little church. Mohammed gave it
to the architect Christodoulos, and by special firman,
preserved it to the Christians.

The patriarchal throne was moved first to the Church
of the Apostles, soon destroyed to make the mosque
of the conqueror; thence to the Pammakaristos
(Fetîyeh Djami); thence to the Church of the Wallachian
palace in the Phanar, now the monastery of
the Jerusalem patriarchate. At last, in 1601, it was
moved to the ancient Petrion, where it remains. The
palace of the patriarch is close by: the walls still
show remains of the ancient fortifications, and of
the stones of the monastery where the Empress
Theodora lived so long in retirement. The church
has a beautiful iconostasis of dark olive wood, and
a patriarchal throne and pulpit, all probably of the
seventeenth century, but which the faithful delight to
ascribe to much earlier days. The throne is called
the throne of S. John Chrysostom, the pulpit his
156
pulpit; but their only claim to the title is that they
belong to his successors, in an unbroken line. In
this sheltered spot, and in the district of Phanar,
stretching between the inner bridge over the Golden
Horn and the ultra-Moslem suburb of Eyûb, remain
the last links of Constantinople with the ancient
Christian city. Round the patriarchal church, with
the Christian schools and colleges, in the houses that
are still half fortresses, cluster ancient memories that
survive to-day. Gautier wrote fancifully, “Hither
ancient Byzantium has fled. Here in obscurity
dwell the descendants of the Comneni, the Dukai,
the Palaiologoi, princes with no lands, but whose
ancestors wore the purple and in whose veins flows
imperial blood.” Still in these dark houses, dusty
and begrimed without, there survives some of the
ancient Greek society, that has passed through so
many changes, and hopes at least to witness one
more.

The conquest of Constantinople had less effect than
might have been expected upon the position of the
Greek Church. Gennadios whom Mohammed made
Patriarch, had been the bitter opponent of the reunion
of the churches, and he had even declared that the
destruction of the Empire would be the certain result
of the concessions to the Latins. Mohammed desired
that the Church should retain its power. If he protected
it there might grow up some general feeling of
acceptance of the Moslem rule. Thus synods were
still allowed to meet, the patriarch was allowed to
hold courts Christian, and to enforce his sentences
with excommunication. But none the less the Church
had no means of resisting the absolute power of the
Sultan. At any moment patriarch, bishop or priest
could be deposed, banished, executed, by his
sole will. The Church has never ceased to
157
live in a position of danger, at the mercy of an alien
lord, and amid an infidel people; and at any moment
she is liable to an active persecution, and her members
to martyrdom.

The earlier patriarchs after the conquest seem to
have been disturbed in their office by scandals, intrigues,
difficulties of every kind. Before long the Sultan
demanded payment on each new election, and it is
represented that it was only by bribes that the election
proceeded at all. Simony appears to have been rife.
It was but slowly and under persecution that the
Church was purged from these sins and became again
fully worthy of the reverence of the whole Greek
people. The encouragement of learning in the present
century, the high character of the patriarchs, the
times of danger through which they have passed, have
left the Church the true centre of the national life
which still remains. Nor has the widespread influence
of the patriarchate failed to preserve some relics of the
power of the ancient Empire. During the seventeenth
century, while the Morea was in the hands of the
Venetians, the Patriarch of Constantinople still nominated
the bishops, revenues still reached him from the
monasteries; and his excommunications were still
valid in the lands which did not own the Sultan as
lord. The Patriarch still claims ecclesiastical jurisdiction
over the Balkan lands, though the Porte has
appointed a Bulgarian exarch, in accord with the
wishes of the government, to act as head of the
Orthodox in that principality, and Roumania has also
freed herself; Serbia still struggles to be free: but
it can hardly be doubted that should the lands ever be
reunited, they would all gladly return to the obedience
of the Patriarchate.

But this by anticipation: Mohammed set himself to
found a new city. Land was freely granted to rich
158
families from other cities: it is said that five thousand
families, Greeks and Turks, were soon induced to
settle in what had been the richest city in the world.
Four thousand Servians were planted outside the walls
to recolonize the villages that the war had destroyed.
As the conquest spread Greeks and Albanians were
forcibly deported to the capital. The Christians of
Constantinople alone were freed from the tribute of
their children. Before he died Mohammed saw the
city again populous and in prosperity. He founded a
new city on the ruins of the old: the new population,
half Christians, but predominantly Turks, gave new
life; and the new life was made to centre round the
new buildings which Christian art inspired the Moslems
to build. Gradually the city became not only Oriental,
but Mohammedan. It is thus we see it to-day. Of the
buildings let us speak later. Now let us see the
work that was done by Mohammed the Conqueror
and his successors.

The Turkish power depended upon the characteristic
institution of the Janissaries. From the time
of Orchan it was the law of the Turks to require
from all the Christian subjects of their power a
tribute of their children. These were at once made
Mussulmans, brought up very strictly in their faith,
skilfully taught, and trained to hardness. As time
showed their capacity, they were divided into two
classes; those who had no special physical strength
were set to work in the offices of State; the
others underwent the strict discipline which produced
the finest military corps in Europe, the Janissaries.
Unmarried, without family ties, connected neither
among themselves nor with the people, these soldiers,
it was said by their founder, Khalil-Djendereli, would
belong solely to their sovereign, from whom they
would have their sole reward. It was an original
159
and daring thought, to make each conquest the basis
of future victories. “Let the Christians support the
war; let themselves furnish the soldiers by whose
means we shall fight.”

The first batch of Christian captives thus set apart
in 1328 were brought before a renowned dervish,
Hadji Bektash. Thus he blessed them. “Let them
be called Yeni-Tscheri (new soldiers): they shall be
conquerors in every fight; let their countenance be
ever white and shining, their arm strong, their sword
sharp, their arrow swift.”

No troops ever more powerfully affected the
imagination of friends and foes. Among the Turks
they were always the leaders, the forlorn hope.
Among Christians the terror of their name spread
over Europe. In every war they gained new laurels,
and from the moment when they stormed the walls
of Constantinople they began to be, slowly but certainly,
the sole strength of the Ottoman power. At
first the absolute servants of the Sultan, before two
centuries were over they became his masters. Their
numbers increased rapidly. Within a few years their
numbers reached twelve thousand, and in the seventeenth
century they were more than three times as
numerous. The description of the English traveller
Sandys shows perhaps better than any other record
what impression they made upon Christians at the
height of their power.

“The Janissaries,” he says,[34] “are those that bear
great sway in Constantinople: in so much that the
Sultans themselves have been sometimes subject to
their insolencies. They are divided into severall
companies under severall Captaines; but all commanded
by their Aga: a place of high trust, and
the third in repute through the Empire: howbeit,
160
their too much love is to him an assured destruction.
These are the flower of the Turkish infantery,
by whom such wonderfull victories have been
atchieved. They call the Emperour father (for none
other is there for them to depend on), to whose
valour and faith in the time of warre he committeth
his person: they having their stations about the royal
pavillion. They serve with harquebushes, armed besides
with cymiters and hatchets. They weare on
their heads a bonnet of white felt, with a flap hanging
downe behind to their shoulders; adorned about the
browes with a wreathe of metall, gilt, and set with
stones of small value; having a kind of sheathe or
rocket of the same erected before, wherein such are
suffered to sticke plumes of feathers as have behaved
themselves extraordinarie bravely. They tucke up the
skirts of their coates when they fight, or march: and
carry certaine dayes provision of victuals about with
them. Nor is it a cumber: it being no more than a
small portion of rice, and a little sugar and hony.
When the Emperor is not in the field, the most of
them reside with him in the Citie: ever at hand upon
any occasion to secure his person, and are as were the
Pretorian cohorts with the Romanes. They are in
number about forty thousand: whereof the greater
part (I meane of those that attend on the Court)
have their being in three large Serraglios; where the
juniors do reverence their seniors, and all obey their
severall commanders (as they their Aga) with much
silence and humility. Many of them that are married
(a breach of their first institution) have their private
dwellings: and those that are busied in forreine employments,
are for the most part placed in such garrison
townes as do greatly concerne the safetie of the
Empire. Some are appointed to attend on Embassadors;
others to guard such particular Christians as will
161
be at the charge, both about the City, and in their travels,
from incivilities and violences, to whom they are in
themselves most faithfull: wary and cruell, in preventing
and revenging their dangers and injuries; and
so patient in bearing abuses, that one of them of late
being strucken by an Englishman (whose humorous
swaggering would permit him never to review his
countrey) as they travelled along through Morea, did
not onely not revenge it, nor abandon him to the pillage
and outrages of others, in so unknowne and savage a
country; but conducted him unto Zant in safety, saying,
God forbid that the villany of another should
make him betray the charge that was committed to
his trust. They are al of one trade or other. The
pay that they have from the Grand Signior is but
five aspers a day: yet their eldest sons as soone as
borne are inrolled, and received into pension; but his
bounty extendeth no further unto his progeny (the rest
reputed as natural Turks), nor is a Janizary capable of
other preferments than the command of ten, of twenty,
or of an hundred. They have yeerly given them two
gowns apiece, the one of violet cloth, and the other of
stanmell, which they weare in the City: carrying in
their hands a great tough reede, some seven feet long,
and tipped with silver; the weight whereof is not
seldome felt by such as displease them. Who are
indeed so awefull, that Justice dare not proceed
publikely against them (they being only to be judged
by their Aga), but being privately attached, are as
privately throwne into the sea in the night time. But
then are they most tumultuous (whereto they do give
the name of affection) upon the dangerous sicknesses of
their Emperours; and upon their deaths commit many
outrages. Which is the cause that the great Bassas as
well as they can, do conceale it from them, untill all
things be provided for the presentment of the next for
162
them to salute. Whereupon (besides the present
larges) they have an Asper a day increase of pension:
so that the longer they live, and the more Emperours
they outlive, the greater is their allowance. But it is
to be considered, that all these beforenamed, are not
onely of that tribute of children. For not a few of
them are captives taken in their child-hood; with
divers Renegados, that have most wickedly quitted
their religion and countrey, to fight against both: who
are to the Christians the most terrible adversaries.
And withall they have of late infringed their ancient
customes, by the admitting of those into these orders,
that are neither the sons nor grandsons of Christians;
a naturall Turke borne in Constantinople, before never
knowne, being now a Barsa of the Port.”

To the English traveller’s record may be added
information of the Venetian ambassador’s relazioni,
which speak of the severe military training which the
lads underwent, the strict asceticism in food, drill,
garb, and tell that at night they all lay in a long room,
lighted, and patrolled all night by a watchman, who
walked up and down that they might learn thus to
sleep in the midst of alarms.

Children of every nation, Poles, Bohemians,
Russians, Italians, Germans, as well as tribute slaves
from Greece and the Balkan lands, they knew no
home but that narrow court in the Seraglio, no master
but the Sultan, no hope but the hope of plunder and
the paradise of Islam. So great was the power of the
training, the comradeship, the fanaticism, that but one
of all the Christians forcibly made Moslem and
brought up among the Janissaries is known to have
taken the opportunity to escape and return to Christendom.
The single hero was Scanderbeg, who alone
arrested the triumphant progress of Mohammed II.

One of the most curious memorials of the old
163
Turkish State is that which is preserved to-day in the
museum at the end of the At-meidan. There a
hundred and thirty-six figures, huge painted dolls,
represent the terrible troops in their habits as they
lived. On the stairs are figures in chain armour, in
the hall above the representations of the different ranks,
and the officers named after the kitchen duties they
were supposed to perform. It was one great family,
in idea, with the Sultan as father. He gave the food,
and their great kettles in which it was cooked were
also their drums, with spoons for drumsticks. A
strange grotesque sight are these bright figures in
their long robes, with here and there, for contrast, an
example of the new uniform introduced by Mohammed
II. The museum is almost deserted; but there is no
more characteristic memorial of the great days of the
Turks. Let the visitor not imagine that he may
sketch or take notes or look at the book of drawings
which he may find in the room. He will hear the
familiar Turkish word Yasak! and the book will be
snatched from his hands.

But this by the way. When Mohammed II. took
Constantinople and settled the Janissaries in the outer
court of the Seraglio, once the Acropolis, they were
only beginning to be the centre of power. Yet even
then they were the most characteristic institution of
the Osmanlis. While Constantinople was assuming
the aspect which it was to bear for centuries, of an
entirely eastern town, with minarets everywhere, khans,
shrouded women, the strange solemn social life of the
East, Mohammed the Conqueror was adding everywhere
to his empire. Servia and Bosnia were annexed,
Albania and Cyprus subdued; the whole of Asia
Minor was under his rule. He died on May 2, 1481,
and left the name of the greatest of the Turkish rulers.
His laws, his organisation of the judicial and religious
164
class of the Ulemas, the teachers of the people, were
more permanent than his victories. But when he died
the power that he had founded rested securely on the
great maxim which his successors were, from his
practice, to develop till it became a fixed theory of
government—that the children of Christians were alone
those who should enjoy the highest dignities of the
empire.

The visitor to Constantinople remembers Mohammed
most of all by the magnificent mosque which towers
over the city and is seen in such striking effects of light
from the heights of Pera. With the name of his
successor is associated a mosque as beautiful and as
famous. Bayezid succeeded his father in spite of a
plot of the Grand Vizier to give the throne to his
younger brother Djem, whose romantic adventures fill
so large a space in the French and papal diplomacy of
the end of the fifteenth century. His reign (1481-1512)
was marked like his father’s by great victories,
and the once famous Turkish fleet owes its origin to
him. In him first appears the contemplative lethargic
character which was to become marked in some of the
later Sultans. Eastern writers called him a philosopher;
and when he had ceased even to pretend to be a
warrior his troops insisted on his giving up the throne
to his son Selim.

Three weeks after his resignation he died. Rarely
has he who has once been Sultan lived long in retirement.
Selim, with ferocious zest, carried out, though
he did not inaugurate, another custom of the Ottoman
monarchy. He swept away all possible claimants to
his throne, strangling his two brothers and five of
his nephews. He followed the victorious course of
his predecessors; he fought in Persia, he seized Egypt
and occupied Jerusalem, and Mecca, the centre of
Mohammedan reverence, passed under his power.
165
Savage and relentless as he was—it became a proverb
of hatred, “Would that thou wast the Vizier of
Sultan Selim”—he was yet, like so many of his race,
a poet, and the friend and patron of learned men. He
died near Adrianople on the 22nd of September 1520,
and left the throne to his son Suleiman, one of the
greatest of the Sultans.

Suleiman began with mercy. Justice and benevolence,
he declared that he took for the principles of
his government. He freed prisoners, he declared that
he would rule in accordance with the precepts of the
Koran. From the first his reign was a succession of
victories. In 1521 Belgrade surrendered; in 1522
he conquered the isle of Rhodes, so long the gallantly
defended outpost of Christendom in the Mediterranean.
For a time after these great successes he turned to
pleasure, but threatened insubordination among the
Janissaries awoke the barbarity which was never far
below the surface in the great Turkish Sovereigns, and
Mustafa the aga with several of the officers paid for
their independence with their lives.

It was necessary, Suleiman saw, to continue war, to
find employment for his turbulent force; and in 1526
he marched against Hungary with a force of a hundred
thousand men. At Mohacz the Christian army was
utterly defeated after a gallant fight, in which Suleiman
himself was for a time in great danger, and in which
at the end the flower of Hungarian chivalry with their
King at their head perished by the sword or in the
river through which they tried to escape. Buda Pesth
fell into the hands of the conqueror. All the
prisoners taken at Mohacz were massacred, and
over a hundred thousand slaves were led back to
Turkey. The spoils were enormous. The library
of the old Seraglio and the treasury still hold some
of the choicest manuscripts of the famous library of
166
Mathias Corvinus. Suleiman returned in triumph to
Constantinople.

To the passage of armies on their way to victory
the people of the great city had now become familiar
as in the greatest days of the Empire. Thirteen
times, it is said, did Suleiman pass through the gates
on warlike expeditions and thirteen times did he return
a conqueror. He led his forces to the walls of
Vienna, and though he was at length compelled to
withdraw, he inflicted a blow on the Empire which it
took long to recover, and he showed to Europe that a
new and terrible power had come to take part in the affairs
of the West. In Persia, if he was not entirely successful,
yet he added new territories to the Empire.
A pirate fleet under his sanction swept the seas. He
defeated the combined fleets of Spain, Italy, and
Venice. During a reign of forty-six years he kept
Europe and Asia at war. But his greatest triumphs
were not those of the battlefield. He made the great
Sovereigns of Christendom count him as their equal.
Every prince of the time was anxious to enter into
negotiation with him. Their envoys came to Constantinople,
and were treated as suppliants. To every
indignity they submitted for the sake of winning the
alliance of “the grand Turk,” the Sultan whom
Europe came to call “the magnificent.”

France was the first to make alliance with the
infidel; and in spite of the papal curse the Mohammedan
power was introduced as a prominent actor in
the politics of Europe by the most Christian King,
Francis I. The Sultan of sultans, King of kings,
giver of crowns to the kings of the world, the shadow
of God upon the earth, Suleiman, the ever victorious,
assured the prostrate King of France that he need not
fear, for that every hour his horse was saddled, his
sword girt on, and he was ready to defend and to
167
overthrow. A solemn treaty in February 1535 united
France and Turkey in bonds of perpetual amity. It
was renewed in 1553; and the alliance remained an
important fact in the politics of Europe for more than
two hundred years.

Renowned for his victories in diplomacy and war,
Suleiman’s fame was even greater as a patron of art
and letters. It was through him first that the
Christendom of the sixteenth century heard of the
glories of Eastern literature, and that Europe began
to imitate Asia. It was the great age of Turkish
poets. The court of Suleiman was thronged by
poets who vied with each other in celebrating the
glories of their master. Every bazaar of the East
rang with his praises: in far distant lands the ingenious
verse-makers made his victories, his pleasures,
his magnificence, the theme of their elaborate compositions.
Trade poured into Stambûl. All the
riches of the East, the wonderful carpets and embroideries,
the exquisite metal-work, the dignified
designs of the pen and the brush, fixed their natural
home in the court of the magnificent Suleiman.
Under him the architecture of the Moslems reached
its culmination: the splendid mosque named after him,
with the türbehs around it, represent the great work of
his age, worthy of commemoration as lengthy as that
which Procopius gave to the edifices of his sovereign.
Great as conqueror, as builder, and as restorer of
ancient work, Suleiman may well be called, in yet
another aspect, the Turkish Justinian. He was great
also as a legislator, and his work completed that of
Mohammed II. He laid down the limits of the
privileges of the Ulemas, the powers of the Sheikh-ul-Islam
and the Grand Vizier. Financial organisation,
so essential to the security of his conquests, was
made under his rule into an elaborate system. The
168
penal code was revised, simplified, and, on the whole,
rendered less severe. Every change, every reform,
showed the guiding genius of the great Sultan; arbitrary
as the worst of his race, unrestrained always in the
exercise of his authority, he yet showed an Eastern
despotism at its best, animated by a zeal for justice,
for regularity, for the welfare of the people.

Suleiman, whose name exercised so great a fascination
over the imagination of the West, was the hero,
Christian romancers thought, of a grand passion. The
name of Roxelana became famous in the drama and
poetry of Europe. Her story was indeed a striking
one. Khurrem, “the joyous one,” was a Russian
captive, who, in the later years of the mighty Sultan,
obtained an absolute control over him. From a slave,
placed among hundreds of other captives in the harem,
she rose to be herself Sultan,[35] the wife of the Commander
of the Faithful.

It was contrary to all precedent that Suleiman deposed
the mother of his eldest son from her rank and
made Roxelana Sultan. The French Ambassador
accounts for the elevation in this way. “Roxelana
wished to found a mosque for the weal of her soul,
but the mufti told her that the pious works of a slave
turned only to the advantage of her lord: upon this
special ground Suleiman declared her free. This was
immediately followed by the second step. The free
woman would no longer comply with those desires of
Suleiman which the bondswoman had obeyed, for the
fetwa of the mufti declared that this could not be
without sin. Passion on the one side and obstinacy
on the other at last brought it about that Suleiman
made her his wife. A treaty of marriage was ratified,
169
and Roxelana was secured an income of 5000
sultanins.”[36]

The extraordinary influence which this remarkable
woman exercised over the great Sultan was new, it
seemed, to the Empire; it was not only new, but
destructive to the military system of the Turks that
any special attachment should be formed which should
attract the Sultan to the home rather than the camp.
The Sultans, with all their gross pleasures, had been
ever warriors ready to desert everything for their military
duties, and had ruled their Empire as well as
their army solely by their own will. Suleiman seemed
to open the way to influences which would be destructive
to the Turkish power; and one of the greatest
of the Viziers a century later said that all his successors
were fools or tyrants.

Be this so or not, Suleiman and Roxelana were
unique in Turkish history. Their devotion to each
other appeared to be complete: and the passionate
love which grew rather than diminished with years,
marked the history of the court with the stains of
sacrifice and crime. Mustafa, the Sultan’s eldest
son, stood in the way of the children of Khurrem.
The Vizier Rustem Pacha was her devoted slave,
owing to her his elevation to the dignity of the
Sultan’s vicegerent. He brought to Suleiman reports
that Mustafa was allying with the Shah of Persia to
dethrone him, and was winning the Janissaries to his
side, a charge to which his valour and ability, and his
great popularity with the soldiers, might seem to give
some colour. Suleiman himself, on his Syrian campaign,
ordered his son to appear before him. On
September 21, 1553—the day was long remembered—the
gallant Mustafa was brought with great pomp
170
and ceremony to the tent of the Sultan. When he
entered he found only the seven mutes armed with
the fatal bowstring. He was seized, and before he
could utter more than one cry, he was murdered.
The thick tapestry at the back of the tent was drawn
aside and Suleiman entered to gaze upon the body
of his son.

Even then the vengeance was not complete. The
child of the murdered Mustafa was stabbed at Brusa in
his mother’s arms. The horror that was felt at these
crimes became evident when the Janissaries demanded
the punishment of Rustem, and when Djihanghir,
the son of Suleiman and Roxelana, died of grief
for the brother to whom he was devoted. The new
grand Vizier was sacrificed also: and not long afterwards
the beautiful Roxelana, Khurrem, passed away.
The great Sultan gave her the most beautiful of tombs.
The art of the Mussulmans was centered in that
last home which the love of Suleiman could bestow.

If Roxelana was the evil genius of Suleiman, his
reign was not more happy after her death. Her two
elder sons, Selim and Bayezid broke into open war.
Bayezid attacked Selim, and, betrayed, it would seem
by the basest of intrigues, he was defeated, and
fled to Persia. Every letter that he wrote to his
father was suppressed, and the Persians sold him to
his brother by whom he and his four sons were put
to death. A few months later his fifth son, a child
of three, was strangled at Brusa by the Sultan’s
orders.
171

To the last, Suleiman led his troops to the field.
He died on August 30, 1566, while he was conducting
the siege of Szigeth, a small fortress in
Hungary. The grand Vizier concealed his death
from the army and sent messengers at once to Selim,
who hastened to Constantinople.

Suleiman left behind him a name more famous
than any of his predecessors save Mohammed the
Conqueror. His lofty and enterprising genius, his
heroic courage, his strict observance of the laws of
Islam tempered at times by a wise tolerance, the
order and economy which were combined with his
magnificence and grandeur, his love of knowledge
and the protection he extended to learned men, all
mark him out, says the historian of the Ottomans,
among the noblest of his race.

Selim II. began ill by not paying the largesse
which the Janissaries expected from a new sovereign.
They mutinied, and he was obliged to yield. His
father had altered the ancient rule which required
the Janissaries only to go to the war when the Sultan
himself took the field. The Janissaries now compelled
him to allow the enrolment of their children in their
ranks. Selim was no warrior, and he was glad to
send his troops without him. He preferred, the
ambassadors say, “the society of eunuchs and of
women, and the habits of the serai to the camp:”
he “wore away his days in sensual enjoyments, in
drunkenness and indolence.” “Whoever beheld him
and saw his face inflamed with Cyprus wine, and his
short figure rendered corpulent by slothful indulgence,
expected in him neither the warrior nor the leader of
warriors. In fact, nature and habit unfitted him to be
the supreme head, that is the life and soul, of that
warlike State.”[37]
172

He was the first of the Turkish Sovereigns who
was unworthy of the throne that had been won by
hard and incessant work. “I think not of the future,”
he himself said, “I live only to enjoy the pleasure of
each day as it passes.” A drunkard ruling over the
Mussulmans, sworn to total abstinence from all intoxicating
drinks, was a grotesque and disgusting
anomaly. The people mocked while they followed
the example. “Where shall we get our wine to-day,”
they said, “from the Mufti (priest) or from the
Kadi (judge)?”

But whatever might be the character of the Sultan,
it had become a fixed policy with the Turks that the
Empire could only be carried on by aggressive war.
Under Selim, though without his personal intervention,
war was made with Russia, but without success: the
conquests of Suleiman in Arabia were made complete,
and Yemen fell into the hands of the Turks. Then
it was determined to complete the conquest of the
Mediterranean: war was declared against Venice, and
Cyprus was captured in August 1571. But this
capture, which Selim described to Barbaro as “cutting
off one of the arms of the Republic” was avenged by
the famous naval league against the Turks. On
October 7, 1571, Don John of Austria utterly
destroyed the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, capturing
130 galleys, 30,000 prisoners, and 15,000 Christian
slaves. It was the first sign of the long decline of
the Ottoman power. Europe awoke to the belief that
the Turks were not invincible.

THE GOLDEN HORN FROM PERA, AFTER SUNSET

The news was received with consternation in Constantinople.
An outbreak of Mohammedan fanaticism,
as so often since, found its expression in the ferocity
of the Sultan. Selim issued orders for the massacre
of all the Christians in the city: happily his Vizier
deferred the execution of the command, and it was


175
revoked. The incident is characteristic. From 1453
the Christian inhabitants of the capital have held their
lives simply at the pleasure of the Commander of the
Faithful. At any moment the word may be spoken
which the loyal Turk must obey

The butchery was countermanded in 1571, but little
more than twenty years later it was again seriously
proposed. When the Spaniards in 1595 sacked Patras,
the extermination of the Christians in Constantinople
“was discussed in the divan, but the result was confined
to the publication of an order for the expulsion
of all unmarried Greeks from Constantinople within
three days.”[38] This was in the reign of Murad III.,
and when he died, in the same year, “the Janissaries,
in their wonted manner, fell to spoiling Christians and
Jews, and were proceeding to further outrages, when
their aga, to restrain their insolence, hung up a
Janissary taken in the act of murdering a rayah.”

The alarm of Mussulman Constantinople was ended
by the speedy reconstruction of a fleet, and by the
capture of Tunis. But with none of these triumphs
was it possible to associate the name of Selim. He
died on December 12, 1574, “the victim,” in
the phrase of the Vicomte A. de la Jonquière, “de sa
passion pour le vin.”

Murad III. his son and successor was not without
good instincts. He was a striking contrast to his
father. He loved study, he was temperate, he was a
soldier. But the terrible custom, now become almost a
law of state, laid its frightful burden of crime upon him
at the moment of his succession. For eighteen hours
he refused to be proclaimed, he argued with the Muftis
176
and the Ministers, to save the lives of his brothers.
But he yielded, willingly or unwillingly, and the chief
of the mutes was summoned to his presence, shown
the body of the dead Sultan, and given nine handkerchiefs
for the nine princes in the Seraglio. Weeping,
Murad gave the order, says the Venetian ambassador:
and men thought when he began his reign that he would
be sober, wise, and just. He did not long retain
the reputation. He began a war with Persia and his
troops were engaged on the Hungarian frontier. But
he followed the example of his father. He did not
himself lead his armies in the field. He rarely left
the seraglio, where he gave himself up entirely to the
pleasures which appealed so powerfully to the Moslem.
The harem and the treasury became his sole delights.
The ambassadors tell stories that sound fabulous of his
insane desire for gold. He stripped ornaments from
ancient works of art and coined them into money; he
collected from every quarter; he pinched and starved
everything but his private pleasures, and year after year
he cast into the great marble well which he had made
beneath his bed “two and a half millions of gold, all
in sequins and sultanins.” Under him the sale of
offices, which was begun by Rustem, the vizier to whom
Roxelana induced Suleiman to give his favour, became
a settled and almost fundamental rule of the state.
Even judicial and military offices were given for bribes,
and the money was caressed by the insane Murad and
cast into the pit over which he slept. The ambassadors
describe in ludicrous language the impression which
Murad made upon them. He sat in state to receive
them, he received their presents, he listened to them
with a stupid stare; then he “went back to his garden,
where in deep sequestered spots his women played
before him, danced and sang, or his dwarfs made
sport for him, or his mutes, awkward and mounted on
177
as awkward horses, engaged with him in ludicrous
combats, in which he struck now at the rider now at
the horse, or where certain Jews performed lascivious
comedies before him.” In fact the Sultans were becoming
ridiculous, without ceasing to be terrible. As
for government, Murad left it to his vizier, a Bosnian,
Mohammed, who held his office in three reigns and far
surpassed any European minister in riches and power.
It was he who peacefully arranged the succession of both
Selim and Murad, and so long as he lived there was
order and firmness in the government. But after his
death the chief office was passed from hand to hand,
according to the Sultan’s fancy, and always a large sum
found its way, at each change of viziers, into the pit of
gold. The elevation of Ferhat reads like a tale in the
Arabian Nights. Murad would wander like Haroun
al-Raschid through the bazaars. One day he heard a
cook bewailing the misgovernment of the city. He
questioned him, approved his replies, and next day
summoned him to the palace and appointed him to the
office whose holder he had criticised, from which he
rose to be vizier. It was a perilous rise. Ferhat did
not long retain his position, but at least he escaped
with his life. It was different with others, and the
precedent of handing over officers to the vengeance of
the Janissaries was set in 1590, when the soldiers
attacked the Seraglio and demanded the execution of
the Beyler bey of Roumelia and another. The plane
tree of the Janissaries began its deadly history.

Murad died on January 6, 1596. His eldest son
and successor, whose mother was a Venetian, marked
his accession by the most bloody of all the murders
which inaugurated the reign of the Sultans. He had
his nineteen brothers strangled in his presence, and
then proceeded to govern as though he had no objects
but those of the most exalted virtue. After a few
178
weeks he left all the work to his ministers, and was
himself ruled entirely by his mother. In 1596, however,
the disasters of his army induced him to go himself
to the war in Wallachia. The sacred standard of the
Prophet, preserved at Eyûb, was unfurled, and on the
field of Kereskte, Mohammed won a great victory over
the Austrians. He returned in triumph to Constantinople,
where the rest of his reign was marked by rebellions
and misfortunes on all sides. The plague
made fearful ravages in the crowded streets of Stambûl.
It penetrated into the Seraglio, and it is said that seventeen
princesses, sisters of Mohammed, died. The
sipahis rose and demanded the heads of the eunuchs
who ruled under favour of the Valideh Sultan. They
were given up and strangled. But then the Sultan determined
to take vengeance, he entrusted its execution to
the Janissaries. The sipahis were ordered to lay down
their arms; if they failed to do so they were threatened
with the penalties of treason. The soldiers thereupon
delivered up their officers, who were put to death.
The Sultan himself died in 1603. His son Ahmed
succeeded him, an elder son having been put to
death on pretence of having shown independence of
character which threatened the throne.

Ahmed I. was but fourteen when he came to the
throne. Well served by a wise Grand Vizier, his
reign was marked by some signs of activity, and,
strange to say, by two years of peace. But the treaty
of Sitvakorok (1606) with Austria was another step
in the decline of the Ottomans.

Ahmed did something to redress the corruption that
had infected the government. He administered justice
like the chieftains of old; he received petitions, and
saw that grievances were redressed. He began, as he
grew up, to read of the exploits of Suleiman, and to
promise himself that he would surpass them; but he
179
had no stability of purpose, and his reign passed away
in disasters, with the murder of the one eminent
man, Nousouh Pacha, who might have saved the State,
and with the introduction of usages which seemed to
the Ulemas to strike at the very heart of Moslem law.
Constantinople was almost abandoned to mob-rule
because the muftis forbade the use of tobacco, which
was introduced by the Dutch. It is impossible now
to conceive a Turk without this solace; and it is
strange that it needed the most ingenious arguments
and the most stubborn defiance to procure the withdrawal
of the edict which forbade it to the Moslem.
The poets, we are told, called tobacco, coffee, opium,
and wine the four elements in the world of happiness;
the Ulemas replied that they were the four chief
servants of the devil. The people settled the
question for themselves.

With Ahmed the custom of butchering the brothers
of the new Sultan had ceased. He not only spared
the life of his brother Mustafa, but left directions that
he should succeed him on the throne. But the
custom which he began was even more fatal to the
power of the Turks than that which he ended. The
succession of the oldest male of the royal house might
not itself have been a misfortune. But from the time
when the princes ceased to be strangled they were
kept in the Seraglio, with no knowledge of the work
of government, trained only to a voluptuous and
effeminate life. Mustafa had almost lost his wits when
he became Sultan; he had been a prisoner for nearly
forty years. Within three months his violence, his
promotion of two pages to be Pashas of Cairo and of
Damascus, his dislike of the female sex, convinced the
ministers that he was incapable of governing; he was
again removed to the Seraglio, and Osman II., the
son of his brother Ahmed, was elevated to the throne.
180

Of the troubles which beset the ambassadors and
how they were redressed more shall be said hereafter.
Osman’s six years of rule were disturbed by sterner
men. The Janissaries again showed that their power
was greater than that of the Sultan. Osman decimated
them in war, and executed many who drank wine; but
they were too strong for him, dragged the unhappy
Mustafa again from prison, and again declared him to be
the ruling Sultan. The Kafess (cage), the splendid
building in the grounds of the old Seraglio, which even
now may not be approached, which had so long held
him prisoner, has memories of no stranger history than
his. When he was dragged forth he trembled before
his nephew, and threw himself at his feet. Osman
taunted the Janissaries with the weakness of the ruler
they preferred to himself; but it was not weakness
that the Janissaries feared. Osman was dragged to
the Seven Towers, and there, after a desperate
struggle, he was strangled in a dungeon. Within a
few months the idiot Mustafa was again deposed and
sent back to the Kafess, where soon afterwards the
bowstring ended his miserable life. For the few
months of his nominal reign he was entirely in the
hands of the soldiery; minister after minister was
given up to them, and ended his life by the bowstring
or on the fatal tree. The Janissaries held Constantinople
in terror, and raised and deposed a Sultan as
easily as a minister.

Murad IV., still a child, the surviving son of
Ahmed, was made Sultan in 1623. In him the
Turks had again a masterful and determined ruler.
His mother the Valideh, and his Vizier Hafiz, made
the first years of his reign distinguished if not glorious.
Till 1632 he trained himself in all military exercises;
he rode, he drew the bow with the best of the
Janissaries. Then came the revolt of the Sipahis and
181
Janissaries, which gave him his opportunity. Constantinople
was for many days in the hands of the
military mob, reinforced by disaffected troops who
had returned from Persia. They assembled in the
Atmeidan (the old Hippodrome); thence they went
to the Seraglio and demanded the “seventeen heads”
of the Sultan’s chief advisers and friends. For some
days Murad held out. He summoned the Vizier,
Hafiz, who rode through the crowd, past the barracks
of the Janissaries, in at the Orta Kapou, after dismounting,
the stones of the mob falling round him as
he disappeared. Murad ordered him to escape to
Juntan. Within a few hours the Sultan was compelled
to come forth to the people and hold Divan.
They demanded the seventeen—the “vizier, the aga
of the Janissaries, the deftarder, and even a boy,
because he was liked by the Sultan.” “Give us the
heads,” they cried. “Give the men up to us, or it
shall be the worse for thee.”

Murad summoned Hafiz to return to die. The
Vizier came back, made the ablution of the Moslem
law before death, went forth calmly to the mob, and
was hewn in pieces outside the gate of the Seraglio.
“Infamous assassins,” cried Murad, “who fear neither
Allah nor his prophet, some day if God wills you
shall find your victims terribly avenged.” “The sole
remedy against abuses is the sword,” one said to the
Sultan; and the rest of his life showed how well he
understood the lesson. One by one the leaders of the
revolt were secretly assassinated; their bodies were
found floating on the Bosporus. The Janissaries and
the sipahis were ostensibly received into favour again,
justice was promised, and the strict rule of law.
But it was a reign of terror that Murad inaugurated.
His first execution had given him a passion for blood.
Sometimes he gratified it in the chase, when he
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slaughtered thousands of head, driven together by an
army of beaters. More often it was displayed in the
slaughter of men. In the year 1637 it was declared
that he had executed 25,000 men, many of them with
his own hand. “He was now terrific to behold.
His savage black eyes glared threateningly in a
countenance half hidden by his dark brown hair and
long beard; but never was its aspect more peculiar
than when it showed the wrinkles between the eyebrows.
His skill with the javelin and the bow was
then sure to deal death to some one. He was served
with trembling awe. His mutes were no longer to be
distinguished from the other slaves of the Serai, for all
conversed by signs. While the plague was daily
carrying off fifteen hundred victims in Constantinople,
he had the largest cups brought from Pera, and drank
half the night through, while the artillery was discharged
by his orders.”[39]

Drunken and brutal as he was he had still much of
the terrible force of the early Ottomans. He led his
own troops to battle, and when they flinched—for the
old spirit seemed to have deserted even the Janissaries—he
drove them forward with his own sword. He
appears in history as the Conqueror of Bagdad (1638)
a conquest marked, it is said, by a massacre of 25,000
people. He was the last Sultan whom the people of
Constantinople saw return in triumph from a war of
which he himself had been the leader.

He died on February 9, 1640, leaving behind him
no child. Only his mother’s craft had prevented the
murder of his only brother, the last of the race of
Osman. He left behind him an empire which seemed
entirely subdued to the Sultan’s will. But the terror
which he had inspired could not endure; and while it
lasted it could only paralyse the forces which should
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have given strength and permanence to the empire.
Greedy, avaricious to an extent as enormous but not
so ridiculous as Murad III., the supreme passion of his
life was the lust of blood. It became an insanity; at
night he would rush through the streets, cutting down
all whom he met. Yet he died in his bed; the time
had not come when Sultans were murdered as easily as
Viziers. Ibrahim, his successor, had been imprisoned
in the Kafess since he was a child of two. He had
lived through the reigns of Mustafa, Osman and
Murad. He had been allowed no offspring. He
was utterly ignorant of politics and war. He cared
for nothing but the pleasures of the harem. When
the soldiers went in to announce his accession he
would not believe that they desired anything but his
death. He would not be convinced till the corpse
of his brother was brought before him. Then he
screamed with insane delight, “The empire is at last
delivered from its butcher.”

His reign of nine years was a horrible mixture of
tragedy and farce. In licentiousness he outdid the
worst of his predecessors, in folly the silliest of them.
The capture of the child of a favourite slave led to the
war of Candia: the marriage by his orders of his baby
daughter to a rich Pacha was used as an occasion to
strangle the bridegroom and seize his treasures. At
length the shameful crimes of the sovereign, of which
murder seemed the least, caused an organised insurrection
in the city. The chief Mufti, whose daughter
had been shamefully used by the Sultan, assembled all
the mollahs, and the officers of the Janissaries and
the sipahis in the Orta djami (a mosque on the
Etmeidan, the old quarter of the Janissaries, now
destroyed). They first demanded the execution of
the Vizier. When that was refused, the Janissaries
secured the gates, surrounded the Seraglio, caught
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and slew the Vizier. In S. Sophia, the Mufti, the
Sheik-ul-Islam, proclaimed to a vast multitude the
iniquities of the Sultan, and demanded his deposition.
Solemnly the Osmanlis declared Ibrahim,
the padishah, the king of kings, the commander of
the faithful, unworthy to reign. His little child,
Mohammed, only seven years old, was fetched from
the charge of his mother, the famous Valideh Sultan,
and invested with the ensigns of sovereignty. Ibrahim
was again carried to the Kafess. Ten days later appeared
the mutes, with the Vizier and the Sheik-ul-Islam;
and the bowstring ended the life of Ibrahim.

Mohammed IV. reigned for nearly forty years,
1649-1687, and he filled a great space in the history
of his time. Foreign observers—notably that most
entertaining writer Paul Ricaut, Esquire, “late secretary
to his Excellency the Earl of Winchelsea, Embassador
Extraordinary for His Majesty Charles II.,
to Sultan Mahomet Han the Fourth Emperor of the
Turks, now Consul of Smyrna, and Fellow of the
Royal Society,” in his “History of the present state
of the Ottoman Empire,” and a certain escaped slave
(unless indeed it be an ingenious gentleman of Grub
Street) who wrote in 1663 “A new survey of the
Turkish Empire and Government”—made Europe
well acquainted with the customs of the Turks, and the
manners, especially the least pleasing manners, of their
rulers. The Turk become better known, yet hardly
less terrible; and our knowledge of the revolutions of
Constantinople now comes to us, for the first time,
largely from English observers. The story must be
briefly sketched. In the first year of the child-Sultan’s
reign tragedies of the palace succeeded each
other with fearful rapidity.

There was a contest between the Valideh, the
mother, and Kiosem (as Ricaut calls her), the
185
grandmother of Mohammed. The aga of the
Janissaries took part against Sinan the Vizier, who,
with the old queen, determined to put a young child,
Suleiman, on the throne. Sinan took prompt measures.
He entered the Seraglio, had the Valideh aroused and
sent to the bedside of her son. The household
was armed. Suspected traitors were slain before
Mohammed’s eyes, and their blood bespattered his
dress as he sat on his throne. While within the
Seraglio there was this confusion, without the whole
city was in disturbance, and the people were all
aroused to defend their Sultan.

Ricaut’s description is worth quoting. He derived
his knowledge from some persons intimately concerned,
and the way he tells the tale, from which a short
passage is here given, shows how Eastern doings struck
the Westerns of his day.

“These preparations,” he says,[40] “were not only in
the Seraglio, but likewise without; for the Visier had
given order to all the Pashaws and Beglerbegs, and
other his Friends, that without delay they should
repair to the Seraglio with all the force they could
make, bringing with them three days Provision, obliging
them under pain of Death to this Duty. In a
short space so great was this concourse, that all the
Gardens of the Seraglio, the outward Courts and all
the adjoining Streets were filled with armed Men:
from Galata and Tophana came boats and barges
loaden with Powder and Ammunition and other
necessaries; so that in the morning by break of day
appeared such an Army of Horse and Foot in the
Streets, and Ships and Gallies on the Sea, as administered
no small terrour to the Janizaries; of
which being advised, and seeing the concourse of
the people run to the assistance of the King, they
186
thought it high time to bestir themselves; and therefore
armed a great company of Albaneses, Greeks and
other Christians to whom they offered Money, and
the Title and Priviledges of Janizaries, promising to
free them from Harach, or Impositions paid by the
Christians; which Arguments were so prevalent, that
most taking Arms, you might see the Court and City
divided, and ready to enter into a most dread confusion
of a Civil War.”

FOUNTAIN IN THE COURT OF THE MOSQUE OF VALIDEH

The end of the matter was that “the old queen”
was dragged naked from the Seraglio, a horror unknown
in Turkish history, and bowstrung outside the
Orta Kapou. The banner of the Prophet was unfurled.
The Janissaries rallied to it. Their aga was
deserted and slain, with his accomplices, and (by retributive
justice) the Vizier was stabbed in the streets.
Tranquillity was re-established, and the government
was carried on from the harem. From 1649 to 1656
six Viziers were deposed or strangled, Pacha after
Pacha broke into open revolt, the Janissaries and
sipahis fought against each other as if there had been
no Christians to conquer, and in turn demanded from
the Sultan the heads of those whom they chose to
proscribe. The Valideh Sultan was wisely and carefully
educating her son. In 1656 she gave him the
best of teachers and viziers in Kuprili Mohammed.
With him began the age of the great Viziers who
for a time revived the glory of the Turks. He
showed with severity that he intended to rule; and
the Turks have always submitted to one who knows
how to command. The sipahis were sent away from
Constantinople and settled in the provinces. A
rising was sternly checked, and four thousand corpses
were thrown into the sea. Thus began the rule of the
Kuprilian Viziers, which lasted from 1659 to 1702, a
half century of varying fortunes, but never wholly
187
unfavourable to the Turks. The interminable war
with Candia went on, and the Austrian and Hungarian
campaigns succeeded each other with undeviating regularity.
The Turks met Montecuculi, and Sobieski, in
the field; and when they were defeated they were at
least not disgraced. In 1683 Kara Mustafa, the
Vizier, was defeated before Vienna and the Turks
were driven back to Belgrade. Though he was the
Sultan’s son-in-law an order was sent to the camp for
him to die; he placed the cord with his own hands
round his neck. In the year of continuous warfare,
when the forces of the empire bore the Turkish
banners against Venice, as well as the Empire, the
vices and neglect of the Sultan passed for a time
almost unheeded. But in 1687 the defeat of the
army led to a demand for the punishment of the
general, Suleiman Pacha. Mohammed saw that this
was but a step towards his own deposition. He
sacrificed his minister, and ordered the execution of
his own brother Suleiman, that there might be no one
to replace him. But it was too late. The army, in
rebellion, marched on Constantinople, released Suleiman
and invested him as Sultan. Mohammed was
imprisoned till his death in 1693.

Suleiman II. reigned but four years, but he showed
an unexpected ability. His accession was marked by
what had now become a custom, an insurrection of the
Janissaries. The house of the Grand Vizier was
sacked, his harem was violated, and the most shameful
atrocities were committed in the streets. Constantinople
seemed to be given over to pillage; the
bazaars were attacked, and some private houses were
pillaged. The Sheik-ul-Islam was obliged to arouse
the Ulemas and display the standard of the Prophet
over the gate of the Seraglio, and when the Janissaries,
like spoilt children, returned to their allegiance, their
188
leaders were executed and peace was restored. In
Suleiman the people had again a sovereign who lived
according to the precepts of the Koran. His wisdom
and impartiality, extended even to allowing the
Christians of Constantinople to rebuild some of their
ancient churches, were recognised even by fanatics and
he was counted a saint. His wars were carried on by
Kuprili Mustafa, to whom also his brother Ahmed II.
(1691-1695) abandoned all the power of government,
at the death of that wise statesman at the head of the
defeated army of the Turks at Salankanem. Mustafa
II. (1695-1703) was the son of Mohammed IV.
His first proclamation to his people was a strange
document to issue from the arbitrary sovereign of the
Osmanlis. He attributed all the defeats and misfortunes
of the last reigns to the vices of the Sultans.
“While the Padishahs who have ruled since our
sublime father Mohammed have heeded nought but
their fondness for pleasure and for ease, the unbelievers,
the unclean beings, have invaded with their armies the
four quarters of Islam.” In any other monarchy it
would have been dangerous indeed to criticise after
this fashion. At Constantinople neither the pen nor
the voice was of much importance. It was the sword
that ruled.

And the sword of the Sultan had ceased to be
victorious. In 1697 Mustafa was utterly defeated by
Prince Eugene at Zenta. Again a Kuprili was
called to command, but by the treaty of Carlowitz,
1699, by which Hungary and Transylvania were
given up, the dismemberment of the Empire had
begun.

For the last two years of his reign Mustafa abandoned
his capital and lived in a palace at Adrianople.
An intrigue deposed him in 1703, and his brother
Ahmed reigned in his stead. He began his reign by
189
executing all those who had taken part in his elevation,
an act which he followed by appointing another Kuprili
Vizier. The next year was marked by the beginning
of serious wars with Russia, the bizarre sojourn of
Charles XII. at Bender, and the treaty of Passarowitz
(1718). The wars in which Turkey was now year
by year involved continued the slow process of the
dismemberment of Turkey; but Constantinople hardly
felt the blows which struck the Empire at its extremities.
The description which English travellers
give of the city shows that strangers passed freely
about in it, and that in many respects it was superior
to other European capitals as they were then, and
particularly in the condition of its streets, to what it
became a hundred years later, and remains to-day.
A passage from Pococke’s travels (published in 1745)
is worth quoting here. His description of the four
“royal” mosques he saw, those of Ahmed, Suleiman,
Selim, and Mohammed the Conqueror, shows that they
were much as they are to-day, but on the other hand
S. Sophia and the Church of the Studium are manifestly
worse now than then; the latter indeed, now a
mere ruin, was then “the finest mosque next after Saint
Sophia.” Of the city he writes thus[41]:—