Only the islands are free from this, and they are far away. Another physical trial is the wind that blows down from the Black Sea and, swirling round street-corners, puffs finely powdered dung in your face…”

Worse than the lethargic humidity of summer are the northerly winds which in spring and winter blow down from the Black Sea. With all of frozen Russia on their wings, they blast the city with snow and turn its marble columns into monuments of despair. The climate, then, was probably one reason why both Greeks and Romans tended to ignore Byzantium’s potentials. As a residential city they were prepared to leave it to the coarse fibres of merchants and trading captains.

As an important economic centre Byzantium played its part in the history of the ancient world, but it did not achieve any great cultural or political significance until the fourth century a.d. During the struggle for the Roman Empire between Constantine and his brother-in-law Licinius, the latter used Byzantium as his main base, for he had observed that it was upon this city that the whole eastern empire of Rome pivoted. Constantine did not fail to notice this either, and upon his defeating Licinius and becoming emperor of both the eastern and western hemispheres, he decided that a new capital was needed. This was not a decision based upon any folie de grandeur nor was it based upon religious prejudice against pagan Rome (Constantine was no Ikhnaton), for the need had long been felt for a new heart to the Roman Empire.

From a practical point of view, Rome was too far removed from the frontiers that were now of prime importance—the Danube and the Asian front stretching from Armenia to Syria. It was here in the North and the East that the main threat to the stability of the Mediterranean world now came. Byzantium was ideally suited to be garrison, naval base and administrative centre, for it was almost equidistant between the two sources of danger. Rome, in the eyes of the later emperors, also carried with it the dead weight of its old republican attachments. It was, in any case, uncongenial to rulers whose interest lay increasingly in the East. Constantine himself had been born at Naissus (Nish in modern Jugoslavia), and at one time had considered founding a new capital in his birthplace.

The Emperor had perhaps another reason for wishing to found a capital city that would be free of many of the attachments of ancient Rome—he had been converted to Christianity by a conspicuous miracle. This was the famous ‘Vision of the Flaming Cross’, which had appeared to him in the sky one day at high noon, accompanied by the words ‘By this, conquer’, Constantine, therefore, wished to found a Christian city, and it so happened that Byzantium fulfilled all his requirements. It possessed an almost unassailable position, commanded the most important trade-routes, and it appealed to his own desire for a capital in the East. All these things combined to suggest that God himself had elected Byzantium as the capital of a Christian Roman Empire.

Although the victorious Emperor renamed the city ‘New Rome’, it was always known in his memory as Constantinople, the City of Constantine. Its ancient name Byzantium—far from being totally dispossessed—lingered on to embrace an empire, a way of life and a culture, so that ‘Byzantine’ to this day may indicate the design of a church in Russia or Syria, a style of painting, or a hair-fine mode of definition in religious or political argument. A number of English writers, most notably the great historian Edward Gibbon, have contrived to give the adjective ‘Byzantine’ a pejorative sense. This must be largely ascribed to an Anglo-Saxon inability to comprehend the finer shades of aesthetic and political definition, let along the nuances of religious interpretation. The shades of Byzantium, whose empire lasted for a thousand years and whose influence upon the world is still far from exhausted, need not be disturbed.

The city founded by Constantine was completed in less than six years, and was inaugurated by the Emperor in May a.d. 330. In the centuries that followed, it became not only the capital of the Roman Empire but the only truly civilised city in Europe. When Rome fell to its northern invaders, and when the whole of the western empire gradually dissolved (to become a mass of petty and backward states), at the end of the Mediterranean there shone the New Rome. Enriched by the whole of the great classical past, it comprised the imperial functions that had once been those of Rome, the legacy of Athens and of Greek culture, and the patina of the Hellenistic civilisation which had graced cosmopolitan Alexandria (until extinguished by the Arabic conquest).

The Emperor Alexius III, who now watched the fleet of the Crusaders as it passed the mouth of the Golden Horn and turned East towards the Asiatic shore, was among the most contemptible in the history of this great city and empire. Less vicious than some of his predecessors, he suffered from the greatest disadvantage of those who inherit great wealth and power—he “was under the impression that work was inconsistent with the dignity of an emperor”.[5] Whatever might be held against Doge Dandolo, he at least had always been aware that great things are not achieved by little effort The Doge knew that the power and the glory belong to those who have the capacity to rule the world, and not be ruled by it.

 

 

 

3

THE FIRST SKIRMISH

 

The Crusaders’ first requirement was to get the troops fed, and the fleet victualled and watered. Since it was now harvest-time, the fertile land on the Asiatic shore opposite the city was the obvious place to disembark. There was, furthermore, a small harbour at Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople, where the fleet could safely anchor.

The night of June 24th saw the eastern coastline of the Bosphorus dense with sails and shipping. Their lights sparkled across the water, and on the shore the camp-fires of the Crusaders glowed against the dark land-mass of Asia. The city shone brighter than any that the Crusaders had seen before—torches passing along the battlemented walls, the glitter of the great houses and the diamond-brilliance of Blachernae, the imperial palace fronting on to the Golden Horn. Santa Sophia floated above Acropolis Point like a luminous bubble.