Then the dream would seem reality and the scoffers be silenced.

The city that rose in tier upon tier of houses, palaces, churches, shrines and markets on the banks of the Bosphorus was indeed a survivor from another world. The words which Walter Pater applied to the Mona Lisa might well have been used to describe Constantinople: “The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire… All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world…” Constantinople was indeed a combination unique in history. It had kept alive the traditions and culture of the Greco-Roman civilisation for nine centuries, and had preserved the ethics and humanities of the Christian Faith against the attacks of innumerable barbarian invasions.

The influence of the city was spread far beyond the confines of those who had ever seen it, or even of those who had ever heard of it. Its artistic achievements alone, as Charles Diehl wrote,[1] made it sovereign: “In the cold fogs of Scandinavia and beside icy Russian rivers, in Venetian counting-houses or Western castles, in Christian France and Italy as well as in the Mussulman East, all through the ages folk dreamed of Byzantium, the incomparable city, radiant in a blaze of gold. As early as the sixth century the range of its influence was already astonishing, and its art had exercised a potent influence in North Africa, in Italy, and even in Spain. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries this influence became yet greater; Byzantine art was at that time ‘the art which set the standard for Europe’… For any choice work, if it were difficult of execution or of rare quality, recourse was to be had to Constantinople. Russian princes of Kiev, Venetian doges, abbots of Monte Cassino, merchants of Amalfi, or Norman kings of Sicily—if a church had to be built, decorated with mosaics, or enriched with costly works in gold and silver, it was to the great city on the Bosphorus that they resorted for artists or works of art. Russia, Venice, southern Italy, and Sicily were at that time virtually provincial centres of East Christian art.”

But it was not only for its works of art and its preservation of an ancient tradition of craftsmanship that the city was held in reverence. Here, within the walls of its libraries—both monastic and secular—were contained nearly all the wealth of literature surviving from the ancient world. The manuscripts of forever-lost plays by the great Greek dramatists, perhaps even the lyrics of Sappho, and an uncountable wealth of Greek and Roman authors—some of whose names we shall never know—these were housed in its libraries and given the same almost devout attention that was paid to the relics of the saints. Both were considered holy. If the word of the gods spoke through the manuscripts, the Word of God was evident in the wonderworking relics that were housed in miracles of gold and enamel.

Yet such a city could never be the perfection admired by some of its devotees in later centuries. It was human and, moreover, it stood at the confluence of the East and the West, where not only the virtues but also the vices of both natures were equally mingled. The Byzantium imagined by W. B. Yeats possibly existed:

 

…such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.[2]

 

There was another Byzantium. It was recorded by travellers and ambassadors who visited it during these centuries, as well as by its own native historians. “The eunuchs who preserve the mountains and the forests for the emperor’s hunting with as much care as the ancient pagans guarded the groves sacred to their gods (or with a fidelity like that of the angel who guards the gates of Paradise) were ready to kill any one who even tried to cut timber for the fleet.”[3] That, in itself, helps to explain why the ships of Byzantium were not ready in their hundreds to oppose the invader.

Of the blinded Isaac, whose son was now preparing to besiege Constantinople, Nicetas Choniates, the contemporary Greek historian, wrote that: “Forests of game, seas of fishes, rivers of wine, and mountains of bread went to make his daily table.” Isaac, if one may trust this historian (who was a deeply religious conservative, in love with a lost golden age), was never happy to appear in the same robes on more than one day, and spent a great deal of time at the steam baths (that inheritance from Rome, now called ‘Turkish’). “He went about glorious as a peacock,” wrote Sir Edwin Pears, echoing in Victorian sentiment the moral strictness of his Byzantine predecessor. “(He) was fond of songs, and his gates were ever open to actors, buffoons, and jugglers.”

It is true that the later emperors had misspent their fabulous inheritance, but if Byzantium was decadent it was due more to the ceaseless blood-letting of centuries of warfare than to the profligate excesses of weak rulers. The city which had stood inviolate on the shores of the Bosphorus for hundreds of years had not achieved its pre-eminent position by accident.

Older by far than the religion it now proclaimed, the city of Byzantium had been founded in 657 b.c. by Greek colonists who had wisely appreciated its superb position and the easy dominance that this gave over the Euxine grain trade. Although the narrow channel of the Dardanelles to the south might have seemed an equally good place to found a city with the intention of controlling the all-important trade-route between Russia, the Black Sea and the civilisations of the Mediterranean, the particular advantage of the narrow Bosphorus was that it was the main crossing-point between Europe and Asia for the overland caravan routes. Byzantium stood not only at the gates to the Black Sea and to the important Russian grain-trade, it was also the meeting-point of the main trade-route between the continents of Europe and Asia. It commanded these two all-important sources of wealth in the ancient world.

Byzantium did not play a significant part in the history of the classical period, largely because it was so far to the north. Geographically it was outside the mainstreams both of culture and of conflict. As communications improved, and as the bias of the Roman world moved increasingly to the East, so it was inevitable that what had once been no more than an important trading centre should take on a more prominent role.

Quite apart from its attractive and defensible situation on a promontory of seven hills, the city was blessed by something unusual in the Mediterranean—a deep-water bay that stretched some seven miles into the land. It was, indeed, this geographical accident that, more than anything else, led to the development of the great city. This unique natural harbour was known from its shape, from the richness of the city that it fostered, from the innumerable fish that thronged its waters, and from the press of shipping that gathered there, as the Golden Horn.

If there was any disadvantage to the city of Byzantium, it was to be found in its climate. A modern traveller[4] has aptly observed that its main drawback is “the damp that rises from the three seas; on summer evenings, when the heat makes it intolerable to sit indoors, the damp makes it intolerable to sit out of doors, whether one suffers the miasma of the Golden Horn as one watches the waxing moon over Stamboul from the Rue des Petits Champs or thereabouts, or the miasma of the Bosphorus as one watches the waning moon over Asia from Taxim or one of the garden-restaurants below it.