In the year 1852, the French writer and translator Théophile Gautier made a journey to the city then known as Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the new technology of the steamship that now crisscrossed the Mediterranean, he made the journey from Paris in just under 11 days. Gautier stayed in the city for nearly three months and during that time, he wrote a book full of his observations. As a young man, Gautier had dreamed of becoming a painter and he'd spent much of his life as an art critic. So, his descriptions of the city of Istanbul during this time are always infused with the language of art, as though the city were a painting he was appraising. The harbour, crowded with ships of all nations and rippled by caiques gliding about in every direction, and above all, the wonderful panorama of Constantinople itself displayed upon the opposite shore. This view is so strangely beautiful that it is hard to credit its reality or to believe that it is anything but one of those theatrical scenes prepared to illustrate some Eastern fairytale. Gautier walked the streets of Istanbul for weeks, visiting its markets and cemeteries, wandering down the narrow alleys and crumbling cobbled boulevards, and all the time writing about what he saw. Everywhere he went, he became increasingly aware of the vanished history of this ancient city. While the Ottoman Turks who lived there increasingly referred to their city by the name Istanbul, Gautier, along with much of the rest of Europe, knew it by a different, much older name. That name was Constantinople and it was a city that had been at the heart of another very different empire, one that had been the foremost power in Europe for centuries. This was a power known as the Byzantine Empire or more simply as Byzantium. Byzantium had its beginning as the eastern half of the Roman Empire. While the west of that empire fell, the east remained. It lasted for another thousand years after what people commonly think of as the fall of Rome. It stood and endured and in its great libraries it preserved and protected the knowledge of the ancients. But the ruins of that great city now littered the streets of Istanbul. Of all the ruins that Gautier visited, none affected him so deeply as the site of the great walls of Constantinople which had once been legendary around the world. We would have gone along the whole outer extent of these ancient walls of Byzantium had we not been too much fatigued. I do not suppose that there is in the world a ride more austerely melancholy than upon this road which extends for nearly a league between a cemetery and a mass of ruins. The ramparts, composed of two lines of wall flanked with square towers, have at their base a large moat at present cultivated throughout which is again surrounded by a stone parapet forming in fact three lines of fortification. These are the walls of Constantine, at least, such as have been left of them. After time, sieges and earthquakes have done their worst upon them. Gautier writes movingly about the masses of overgrown vegetation now growing on the ancient walls, fig trees sprouting from their towers, and vines and grasses bursting from the cracks in the masonry. Here and there, a gigantic crevice severed a tower from top to bottom. Farther on, a massive wall had fallen into the moat. But where the masonry was wanting, the elements had supplied earth and seed. A shrub had supplied the place of a missing battlement and grown into a tree. The thousand tendrils of parasitical plants had sustained the stone which would otherwise have fallen. The line of walls raised to the sky its battered profile, draped with ivy and gilded by time. The whole haunting scene seemed like something out of a dream or a magical tale as the weight of the city's history seemed to weigh down on him. It was difficult to believe that a living city lay behind the defunct ramparts which hid Constantinople from our view. It had been easier to believe oneself near some of those cities of the Arabian legends, all the inhabitants of which had been by some magical process turned into stone. As he walked the length of those walls under the soft Istanbul sun, Gautier must have asked himself how could the mighty walls of such a fortress city ever have fallen? How could a city that had once been at the center of the world now be home to such a scattering of rubble and ruin? What in all the world had happened to the great legacy of Byzantium? My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they have in common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at one of history's most remarkable stories of survival; that's the thousand-year epic of the Byzantine Empire. I want to explore how this civilization suffered the loss of its western half and continued the unbroken legacy of Rome right through the Middle Ages. I want to examine how it formed a bridge between two continents and two ages before ultimately being crushed between them both. I want to tell the story of how it was that the impregnable walls of Constantinople were finally brought crashing to the ground. Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was a very different place to the cool, dark waters we know today. In those days, our ape-like ancestors hadn't even begun to walk on two legs. But if you were able to go back and see that time, stand on the shores of Greece or Italy, Turkey or North Africa, all you would see before you would be a hellish, dead landscape. The land beneath would drop away for 1,500 meters into a rolling desert of bleak salt flats broken by lakes of water so salty that if you tried to swim in them, you would float on the surface. For more than 600,000 years, this deep depression in the land had been cut off from the Atlantic Ocean by the movement of the earth's plates. Over the millennia, the sea water that had once filled it had evaporated away, leaving only this harsh, salty land where nothing would grow. But this was all about to change in the most dramatic and apocalyptic way imaginable. This vast, deep basin was separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a thin strip of land only 60 kilometers wide, joining the land masses of what is today Spain and Morocco. Beyond that, the enormous weight of all the world's water heaved and rocked. As 600 millennia passed by, those Atlantic waves ate away at that narrow strip of rock. The ocean waters ground down those cliffs until this strip of land was only 30 kilometers thick, 15 kilometers, then 5 kilometers. Then at some point around 5.3 million years ago, this narrow gate of rock burst apart and the Atlantic Ocean was unleashed into Europe. What followed must have been one of the most impressive and terrifying sights that has ever occurred on earth. The world's ocean burst into the Mediterranean and thundered in a raging torrent down a series of waterfalls that dropped for more than a kilometer. This channel is thought to have carried more than 200 billion liters of sea water every second, or as much water as a thousand Amazon Rivers, reaching speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. The waters of the Mediterranean rose as much as 10 meters a day to create a sea 4,000 kilometers end to end, or enough to cover the whole of North America from California to Virginia. This process took perhaps as much as three years, but some researchers believe it could have taken only a few months. The force of these thundering waters caused earthquakes and landslides that can be seen in the geological record. These triggered mega tsunamis more than a hundred meters high, or enough to completely swallow a 30-storey building. This deluge is known today as the Zanclean flood, and it's in this violence that the peaceful sea we call the Mediterranean was formed. This was a body of water quite unlike anywhere else on earth; a vast inland sea now joined to the open ocean by a narrow channel only eight kilometers across at the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe and Africa were now two separate land masses, and the formation of this sea would have an immense impact on the shape and history of this region. Skull fragments found in the Apidima Cave in Greece show that modern humans arrived at the Mediterranean around 200,000 years ago, spreading out from Africa along its eastern coast. These early arrivals were initially out-competed by Neanderthals, a species of archaic humans well adapted to life in the cold climate of Europe. But over the next hundred millennia, modern humans spread out of Africa in ever greater numbers. They gradually pushed the Neanderthals out into the fringes of Europe and ultimately to extinction. When the last Ice Age ended, the climate of Europe warmed. The glaciers that had covered much of its northern regions disappeared, and humans spread all the way around this vast inland sea. Societies rose and fell here through the Bronze Age, but from about the year 530 BC, one city on the shore of this sea had been steadily growing in size and influence. It sat on a temperate peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean, and its people referred to its waters as Mare Magnum, or the Great Sea. This city was called Rome and it would build an empire that would last in some form for more than 2,000 years. Rome succeeded because it excelled at organization, mass production, and military expansion. By the year 220 BC, its armies, armed with iron weapons and covering their bodies with iron chainmail or scales, had conquered all of the peninsula of Italy and the islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. By 140 BC, they had spilled out into the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Spain, and crossed the sea to conquer the ancient cities of Greece. The Romans found a way of expanding their territory that was financially self-sustaining. As more peoples were conquered, they provided the economic base for even further expansion. In 167 BC, the Romans captured the Macedonian treasury and as a result, they were able to virtually abolish taxes in Rome. When they conquered Pergamon in the year 130 AD, their state budget doubled and it nearly doubled again after the conquest of Syria. Rome's expansion during this time seemed as inevitable as the rushing torrents of water that had once poured through the Straits of Gibraltar, and by the year 70 AD, the entire Mediterranean had been completely surrounded by its vast empire. Rome now stretched from the snowy hills of Scotland in the north to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara in the south, from the stony shore of the Atlantic in the west to the deserts of Arabia in the east. The Romans and their subject peoples built roads and postal stations, scattering their empire with public baths and theaters, and ushering in a new age of technological development. But they also ruthlessly exploited the lands they conquered and exterminated any who resisted them with extreme cruelty. In the second century, five great emperors ruled; among them the emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. While wars went on at Rome's borders, a period of peace and prosperity reigned within its lands. But this age of relative peace wasn't to last, and the first signs of this empire crumbling came in the form of a devastating plague. In the winter of the year 165, Rome was at war with the Parthian Empire, a power centered in ancient Iran. Roman troops were besieging the Parthian city of Seleucia, close to the modern city of Baghdad, when they first began to experience strange symptoms. The Greek physician Galen describes these frightening occurrences. On the ninth day, a young man had a slight cough. On the tenth day the cough became stronger and with it he brought up scabs. After having catarrh for many days, first with a cough, he brought up a little bright fresh blood, and afterwards even part of the membrane which lines the artery and rises through the larynx to the mouth. This terrifying new illness spread rapidly through the troops. We don't know exactly what this plague was, but by its description it may have been smallpox, possibly combined with a simultaneous outbreak of measles. Whatever it was, the plague quickly spread up the rivers of Mesopotamia. In the city of Amida, where the Romans were trying to fight off a Parthian siege, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the horrific scenes. In the city, where the number of the corpses scattered over the streets was too great for anyone to perform the funeral rites over them, a pestilence was soon added to the other calamities of the citizens; the carcasses becoming full of worms and corruption from the evaporation caused by the heat and the various diseases of the people. Unable to fight both the Parthians and the disease, these Roman soldiers soon returned home. But they would unwittingly lead that invisible enemy right into the heart of the empire. The plague soon spread among the Roman soldiers stationed among the foggy pine forests on the Rhine River and then spread south along trade routes, finally reaching the densely-packed metropolis of Rome. The Assyrian writer Lucian of Samosata writes about the houses of Rome standing empty, with magical symbols and spells painted on their doors to ward off the evil that stalked the city's streets. The records of the Han Dynasty in China also record a period of plague breaking out around the same time, suggesting a worldwide pandemic of deadly proportions. This outbreak, known to history as the Antonine plague, is thought to have killed somewhere in the region of two percent of the empire's population, or around 2 million people. But in the worst affected areas, mortality seems to have reached 30 or 40 percent. This weakened the empire at a crucial time in its history. Industries like trade by sea were utterly devastated and the Roman military was critically weakened. As the plague reached its height, Rome's political world fell apart, too. As the dead littered its streets, the violent and selfish Emperor Commodus was crowned, and the long history of Rome's decline began. Soon, rival generals fought viciously over who would rule, burning cities to the ground and expending the empire's energy in pointless self-destructive wars. By the end of the third century, the vast Mediterranean Empire could no longer be ruled from the declining city that had given birth to it. Rome was crippled by corruption and its people increasingly suffered from a disease that the Romans believed was caused by bad air, or mal aria in Latin, which we know today as malaria. In a desperate bid to get the empire back on course and end the civil wars, in the year 285 the Emperor Diocletian ordered that Rome's territory be split almost exactly in two; Western Europe and Western North Africa would form the western half of the empire with its capital at Mediolanum, or modern Milan. Meanwhile, the eastern regions including the modern territories of Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Egypt would pass to a new entity which today we call the Eastern Roman Empire. Both halves of the empire would be governed by two rulers each, creating a system known as the tetrarchy, or the Rule of Four. It was thought that this division of power would finally end the brutal civil wars that had hollowed out the empire from within, but this would not turn out to be the case. The tetrarchy soon fell apart and civil war once more rocked the empire, a devastating 20-year conflict that saw the Emperor Constantine fight with his rivals over who would rule. During these wars, Constantine made the remarkable decision to convert to Christianity. This was a young religion based around the worship of a Jewish rebel protesting against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, and this young faith had long faced brutal repression by Roman authorities. Constantine beat back his rivals and once more united the divided empire, ruling over it as the sole emperor, and Constantine was also to embark on what to some must have seemed like an even more remarkable decision; Constantine decided to construct a new capital in the east. He considered various options but ultimately settled on a city that sat at the point right where Europe and Asia met, a small Greek trading city in the far east of the Mediterranean. This was a city known to the Greeks as Byzantion, but the Latin Constantine would have called it by the name we recognize today, Byzantium. The vast Zanclean flood that filled the Mediterranean wasn't the only great inundation to rock this region in pre-history. In fact, on the eastern shore of that sea around what is now Turkey, another very similar event would take place on a smaller scale but still no less dramatic. Around seven and a half thousand years ago, it's believed that the waters of the Mediterranean were themselves pushing up against another range of cliffs that walled off a narrow valley known as the Bosphorus. Beyond this barrier was another depression in the land, filled with a large freshwater lake. As the Ice Age ended and the glaciers melted, global sea levels rose. Perhaps aided by the frequent earthquakes in this region, the dam holding back the seas once again broke and the waters of the Mediterranean spilled through the valley of the Bosphorus in vast and unstoppable quantities. If this hypothesis is correct, it's thought that up to 50 cubic kilometers of water poured over this ledge each day, or 200 times the flow of the Niagara Falls. The lands beyond filled with salty seawater, flooding an area of 100,000 square kilometers, or about the size of Cuba. It's thought that Stone Age people would have witnessed this flood and it must have been a terrifying sight, one that they would tell their children about, and their children's children. In fact, along with the flooding of the Persian Gulf around the same time, this event has been proposed as one source for the biblical story of Noah's flood. This body of water would become known as the Black Sea. Today, its shores belong to the nations of Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. That narrow valley through which this vast flood of water poured is now a narrow sea channel which we call the Bosphorus. Here, the continents of Asia and Europe are separated by only about 750 metres of sea at their narrowest point. A second narrow channel known as the Dardanelles sits nearly 300 kilometers to the west where once the ancient city of Troy stood as a rival to the Bronze Age city-states of Greece. Between these two thin entryways is the world's smallest sea, known as the Sea of Marmara. It's right here that the city of Byzantium was founded. Byzantium was an ancient Greek colony founded by settlers from the powerful port city of Megara around the year 667 BC. Folklore attributes the founding of the city to a prince of Megara named Byzas. The inspiration for Byzas’ journey came from the oracle at Delphi. Modern analysis has shown that this oracle was built at a place where volcanic gases were vented from the earth through cracks in the planet's crust. The priestesses of this oracle would descend into chambers flooded with these gases which would send them into a trance-like hallucinatory state, ready to give prophecies to those who asked for them. According to this piece of folklore, the oracle at Delphi gave Prince Byzas a haunting piece of advice. You must set sail and search for the land opposite the City of the Blind. So, Byzas sailed across the sea, through the narrow Dardanelles Strait and into the Sea of Marmara. There, he saw what he was looking for. On the Asian side of the sea, a Greek colony named Chalcedon had been established. But Byzas saw immediately that the European side of the sea was a much better place for a colony; a defensible position with a large, natural harbour. The settlers of Chalcedon had been blind to miss this perfect spot, and so Byzas had found the land opposite the City of the Blind. He landed on the shore and named the city he founded there Byzantion, after himself. The advantages that Byzas saw in the city were indeed formidable. It sat right at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus Strait, the point where Asia was less than a kilometer away over the water. This was a natural crossing point, controlling all the land-based trade that ferried between the continents. But it also controlled all shipping traffic that passed between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. On top of this, the swift currents that flowed through the narrow channel would make it very difficult for any army to attack by sea. The city's harbour was a long sliver of a river estuary sheltered from the swift ocean currents and large enough to hold a thousand ships. This body of water would come to be known as the Golden Horn, either because of the enormous wealth that would flow through it in the ages to come, or for the rich yellow light that would often blaze on its surface as the sun set over the sea. Pinched between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, Byzantion was a perfect wedge shape. Any attackers who wanted to take the city were able to approach from only a single direction, and it was a perfect spot to build a fortress that would be virtually unassailable. For much of its early history, Byzantium was not a major city, although it was a wealthy one. No more than 40,000 people are thought to have lived here during those times, compared to the more than a million that may have lived in Rome during its height. But it was an abundant place. The Roman geographer Strabo writes about the rich stocks of fish that could every year be brought out of the narrow channel of the Bosphorus. The Horn, which is close to the Byzantian city wall, resembles a stag's horn. Into these, young fish stray and are then easily caught because of their number and the force of the current and the narrowness of the inlets. They are so tightly confined that they are even caught by hand, providing the Byzantians and the Roman people with a considerable income. But despite its natural defensibility, Byzantium was conquered a number of times by the Persian Empire and the Spartan and Athenian Greeks. It was even besieged and burned to the ground by the ruthless Roman Emperor Septimius Severus during one of the empire's more destructive civil wars. When the Emperor Diocletian split the empire in two, Byzantium was chosen to be the capital of the eastern half. Finally, in the year 330 AD, it was chosen to be the new imperial capital of the entire Roman Empire under the Emperor Constantine, as he writes in this 4th century decree. We have resolved that it is fitting that my rule and the power of my kingdom be transferred and transmuted to the regions of the east, and that in the province of Byzantia, on an excellent site, a city be built in my name and my rule be established there. Like the ancient explorer Byzas, Constantine saw his own reflection in this golden city. He renamed Byzantium after himself, calling it Kōnstantinoupolis, or the City of Constantine. Today, we know it as Constantinople. During this time, the city was also known by the informal title Nova Roma, or the New Rome. In his new capital, Constantine immediately began an enormous building project, with the goal of turning Constantinople into a city worthy of its empire. Constantine laid out a new square at the center of old Byzantium, naming it the Augustaeum, with a new Senate House in a grand basilica on the east side while on the south side, the great Palace of the Emperor rose. The Byzantine poet Marianus wrote about the beauty of the city in these early days. Where the land is cut in two by the winding channel, whose shores open the way to the sea, our divine emperor erected this palace. Oh far ruling Rome, you look from Europe at a prospect in Asia, the beauty of which is worthy of you. Near to the imperial palace was the vast Hippodrome, used for chariot races. Its track was 450 meters long, with stands capable of holding up to 100,000 spectators. Up to eight chariots could race on its track at one time, each powered by four horses each. These events must have been an electric spectacle. Nearby was the famed Baths of Zeuxippus, adorned with opulent mosaics. The fifth century writer Leontius writes one invitation to a friend that gives a glimpse of the leisurely life of this city. On one side I have close by me the Zeuxippus, a pleasant bath, and on the other, the racecourse. After seeing the races at the latter and taking a bath in the former, come and rest at my hospitable table. Then in the afternoon, you will be in plenty of time for the other races, reaching the course from your room quite near at hand. Constantinople would even create its own obelisk to adorn its Hippodrome, built of square stone blocks to a height of 32 meters tall. That's exactly the same height as the obelisk that decorates the Circus Maximus in Rome. This was a statement of clear intent; that Constantinople was every bit the equal of the eternal city. Around the year 330, Constantine also built an imposing city wall running between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, closing off the wedge-shaped city and taking full advantage of its defensible shape. The first Christian emperor claimed that an angel had guided him about where to place the walls, and he built them a great distance from where the old city walls had been, an impressive statement about how large he expected his new capital to grow. He was right. In the next century, Byzantium would grow at an immense rate and by the beginning of the 5th century, the city had spilled out even beyond Constantine's ambitions. Today, we can trace the expansion of the city in the advancing rings of its city walls, growing outwards like the rings of a tree. By the year 404, the emperor in the east, a man named Theodosius II embarked on an even more ambitious building project to protect the expanding city and build a new set of walls two kilometers to the west. These would stretch for 6.5 kilometers and massively increase the enclosed area of the city. But while these walls demonstrate the ambition of this expanding city, they also testify to the increasingly dangerous world that the young capital found itself at the heart of. When you look at the situation that the Emperor Theodosius faced at the time he embarked on the building of these walls, it's not hard to see why he considered them necessary. Around this time, vast migrations of people had been pushed out of the Eurasian steppes by some unknown force and were now crossing en masse into Roman lands. The Roman state, crippled by civil war, was struggling to cope. One writer Synesius summed up the mood of impending doom in a speech he gave to the Emperor Arcadius around the year 399. Everything balances on a razor's edge and the state needs the assistance of god and the emperor to crush that danger which has been troubling the Roman Empire for so long. Two years into his reign, in the year 410 AD, the emperor Theodosius received news of an unthinkable tragedy. An army of Goths led by the General Alaric had laid siege to the great city of Rome three times and on the third time, they had burst over its walls and sacked the city. While the sack of Rome was relatively constrained by the standards of the time, it was still an act that shocked the world. The writer Saint Melanius the Younger writing about ten years later, describes this horrifying event. A barbarian storm of which prophecies long ago spoke fell upon Rome, and it did not even spare the bronze statues in the forum. Plundering with barbarian madness, it destroyed everything. Thus, Rome, beautified for 1,200 years, became a ruin. The writer Saint Jerome, a native of the Western Empire, then living in Bethlehem, wrote a passionate outburst of sorrow at the news. Oh, horrid; the universe tumbles and yet our sins do not fall. A renowned city and head of the Roman Empire is consumed in one blaze. The disaster sent refugees from Rome fleeing across the Mediterranean, piled into boats. They landed on the shores of Africa, Egypt, and the East. Saint Jerome describes the desperate plight of these citizens. Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed, that the mother of nations had become also their tomb? The shores of the whole east of Egypt, of Africa which once belonged to the imperial city, were filled with the hosts of her menservants and maidservants. Wherever the Roman refugees landed, piled into boats, starving and thirsty, the people saw their fine clothes and thought they must be carrying some hidden wealth on them, as Saint Jerome remembers. Who would have believed that mighty Rome, with its careless security of wealth, would be reduced to such extremities as to need shelter, food, and clothing? Some are so hard-hearted and cruel that instead of showing compassion, they break up the rags and bundles of the captives and expect to find gold on those who are nothing more than prisoners. The Emperor Theodosius was determined that his city of Constantinople would not follow the fate of Rome. So, the walls he built in the following years would be one of the most imposing defensive structures ever to be built in either the ancient or the medieval worlds. This was a ring of three walls arranged one after the other, each taller than the last, with a wide moat in front of them. This moat could be immediately flooded on demand using an ingenious system of pipes that ran along the length of the walls, providing instant defense should the city be threatened. The final, tallest wall was almost 5 meters thick and 12 meters high, including 96 towers, each at a height of 20 meters. These walls were built with precisely cut blocks of white limestone and decorated with lines of red brick so that they must have shone a gleaming white when the sun hit them. These walls were so formidable that they would not be breached for a thousand years, and it would take a complete revolution in military technology to do so. These walls were not completed a moment too soon; in fact, as the final stones were being put into place, they would face one of the most fearsome tests that could be imagined. That's because in the decades since the first barbarian migrations had begun, it had become apparent what was driving so many nomadic people out of Asia. That force was a people known as the Huns and they would soon be ruled by a man whose shadow would loom over all of Europe. His predecessors had united the nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes into a terrifying force, and he would lead them west in a campaign of destruction that would have few equals. That man's name was Attila. The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. They were a society of pastoral warriors, living mostly from the meat and milk provided by the animals they herded. At first, they had mostly held back from Roman territory. The Romans even employed them as mercenaries, happily paying them to keep clear of its territory. But with the rise of Attila, all of that was about to change. The 5th century Byzantine historian Priscus of Panium, describes Attila in the following terms. He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands who terrified all mankind. He was haughty in his walk, rolling his eyes hither and thither so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body. He was indeed a lover of war. When Attila became king of the Huns, he was determined to set out on an aggressive policy of expansion into Roman lands. He broke treaties he'd formally kept with the Romans and began to raid their cities. The Roman army, weakened by all of the empire's troubles, could do little to repel him. Attila conquered territory throughout Gaul and into modern France, establishing a vast Hunnic empire across Eastern and Central Europe. In the year 447, he marched his armies across the Danube and into the Eastern Roman Empire. The eastern Romans were immediately overwhelmed. All along the border their forts burned, pillars of smoke black in the sky. Now, the armies of Attila bore down on the center of their world, their capital, the great city of Constantinople itself. The Byzantine monk Callinicus, in his work The Life of Saint Hypatius, wrote about the dire situation that now faced the new capital. The barbarian nation of the Huns which was in Thrace became so great that more than a hundred cities were captured. There were so many murders and bloodlettings that the dead could not be numbered, for they took captive the churches and monasteries and slew the monks and maidens in great numbers. To make matters worse, the formidable walls of Constantinople could no longer be relied on. In January of the year 447, the ground shook with a terrifying force. This earthquake was the strongest in living memory, perhaps in all of the city's history. Over a period of four months, earthquakes and the floods they caused ravaged the whole area with enormous loss of life. Buildings collapsed across Constantinople. The city's skyline must have been pocked and broken by fallen roofs and crumbling walls, and people were buried in the rubble. But most terrifying of all, the tremors brought down a whole section of the great Theodosian walls, the only thing standing between the people of the city and the approaching army of the Huns. For the citizens of Constantinople, this must have been utterly terrifying. These walls had taken more than nine years to build, and now one man was put in charge of the seemingly impossible task of repairing them in only a few months. He was a prefect and a native of the lands of Phrygia in modern Turkey, and his name was Constantinus. Constantinus was new in his post and he had an enormous task ahead of him. But he also knew that his city had one great untapped resource; that is, its immense spirit of competition. Constantinus went down to the city's vast Hippodrome, or racetrack. Over the century or so since its renovation by the Emperor Constantine, it had become the most important hub of the city's social life. Chariot racing in Byzantium held people's fanatic devotion in a similar way to football today. Just like football, chariot racing had become a big money business. Four great racing teams raced in the sands of the Hippodrome, each named after a color; the reds, blues, greens, and whites. Each of these were supported by and closely tied to a political party in the Byzantine Senate. Just like our modern sports teams today, bitter rivalries existed between these teams and their legions of supporters. Riots were common events of the racecourse and it was not uncommon for deaths to occur when rival gangs of these hooligans met. Constantinus arrived at the Hippodrome that morning, perhaps shaking a little at the magnitude of the task he faced. He raised his hands and made a simple announcement to the gangs of racing fans he found there. The city was in danger. These sports teams were to help with the reconstruction of the city walls. They would each be given a section to complete and they had to gather as many of their supporters to help as they could. The declaration of a competition was clear and irresistible. These gangs went about the city's drinking places and squares, its baths and spice markets, gathering as many people as they could from the streets, telling them that the pride of their team was at stake and also, perhaps as an afterthought to some of them, the fate of their city. In this way, more than 16,000 workers were gathered to repair the walls of Constantinople. We can imagine the frenzy of activity as these masses of sports fans climbed the scaffolding with stones, bricks, and mortar, singing their team songs and jeering at the other teams as together they rebuilt their fallen walls. This effort was so effective that in only two months, the walls of the city were rebuilt and even reinforced in some places. A brief inscription carved into the base of the walls is all the monument that was left to this remarkable achievement, comparing it to the mythological figure Pallas, the Titan of War. By command of Theodosius, in less than two months Constantinus erected triumphantly these strong walls. Scarcely could Pallas have built so quickly so strong a citadel. We can imagine the look on the face of Attila when he arrived at the gates of Constantinople and found not the earthquake-crumbled ruin that he had been promised, but a triple line of defensive walls, their limestone glistening white in the sun, the strongest fortification in the known world. The two sides reached a stalemate. Attila could not take the city but the Byzantines could not beat him in battle. Eventually, a treaty was signed. The Romans agreed to increase their payments to the Huns and Attila left the lands of Byzantium. Constantinople was saved and the Eastern Roman Empire would survive. But for its sister power, the Western Roman Empire, the pressures raining down on it would prove too much. As the 5th century progressed, one side of the empire would stand while the other would crumble into the earth. The landscapes of Byzantium ranged across two continents and over an enormous variation in temperatures and climates. These lands had always been the most populous of all the lands of Rome, the richest and the best developed. In fact, by the late empire, its eastern half had a budget three times the size of the west and an army twice as large. In Europe, the heart of the eastern empire was always the Balkans, including Greece, and in Asia it was the region known as Anatolia or Asia Minor, which is roughly the area of modern Turkey. The empire's European territories included parts of modern Greece, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Here, craggy mountains covered by dense forest divide this area into steep river valleys that drain into the Adriatic, Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas. The most fertile regions here are along the Danube, Europe's second-longest river. The temperate regions of the north have a very similar climate to Northern Europe and on the coast, grains and vegetables can be grown, along with fruit trees like apples, cherries, figs, pears, and pomegranates. Olive trees are grown here in great numbers, surviving well on the rocky soil. Inland, there are terraced vineyards and orchards while the higher mountain regions are used for herding goats and sheep. Across the narrow channel of the Bosphorus is Anatolia, again around the region of modern Turkey. In the west, the earth here rises gently out of the Aegean Sea and forms a fertile coastal plain where the Greeks once founded city-state colonies. But in the north and south, huge mountains loom. Among them, the range known as the Taurus. These form an almost unbroken wall along the length of southern Turkey, and they're broken only by the famed Cilician Gates, a path through the rocky hills along a narrow gorge that in ancient times took about five days to cross, leading travelers out of Anatolia and into Syria. In Byzantine times, much of this land wasn't suitable for crop production but the sloping plateaus of Anatolia were perfect for raising vast pastures, and medieval writers regularly mention the enormous herds of cattle, goats, and sheep that roamed here. Despite the administrative division of the empire, the Romans of the time didn't consider their empire to have been split. For much of their shared history, the Romans of both halves went on viewing it as a single entity, although governed by two different imperial courts. But there were significant differences between the two halves. The overwhelming culture of the east was Greek, and the Byzantines spoke the Greek language throughout the empire's history, in contrast to western Rome which spoke Latin. But the people of the Byzantine Empire never referred to themselves as Greek. Even the name Byzantine is a much later invention. In fact, until the end of their history right through the Middle Ages, they referred to themselves simply as Romans and their lands as Romania. Byzantine rulers were in fact greatly offended whenever westerners referred to them as the emperor of the Greeks. The people of Constantinople viewed their city and the city of Rome as what the Byzantine philosopher Themistius describes as the world's two mother cities, although of course, he argues that Constantinople deserves just a little more credit since it had to build itself up from nothing. Yet, of the two mother cities of the world; that have Romulus and that of Constantine, it is ours I would say that is in greater harmony, for she had no association with the race of rulers and yet she became a partner and empire with the great city through her virtue. In the year 381, the theologian and archbishop of Constantinople, Gregory Nazianzen, wrote about how these two cities seemed like a light to the world. Nature has not given us two sons but it has given us two Romes, beacons of the whole world. One an ancient power and one a new, differing from each other only to this extent; that the one outshines the sun, the other the evening star. But they hold a beauty to match beauty, a balanced pair. So, it's hard to imagine how it must have felt during this time, to be a citizen of Constantinople and to hear stories about what was happening in the west. While the administration of the emperor's court had moved elsewhere, in the 4th century the city of Rome was still the symbolic heart of a powerful empire and the home of an immensely rich aristocracy, with estates all over the Mediterranean. But as the 5th century dawned, its position began to falter. Only 45 years after the destruction of the city by Alaric, a second sacking of the city by the vandals once again halved its population and by this time, Rome's influence extended no further than the borders of the Italian Peninsula. Despite its claims, wealth no longer flowed to it from the rest of its empire and the complex economic web it sat at the heart of began to unravel. We can see the decline of Rome written in the stones of its buildings. One example is the massive Basilica Aemilia which stood next to the Senate House. It was destroyed by fire sometime in the 5th century, possibly during one of the sacks of the city, and while the Romans rebuilt its outside facade, making sure it looked suitably grand to onlookers, they never repaired its interior. This building presented a grand face to the world while inside, it was a burned-out shell. By this time, the same could be said for the whole city of Rome and the western part of its empire. Excavations have shown that by the mid 5th century, rubbish was being dumped within Rome's great monumental buildings, that the buildings themselves were beginning to crumble and that new, rough paths were being cut by people walking and dragging carts and horses through its fine gardens and monuments. By the 470s, the Roman emperor in the west, who now ruled from the city of Ravenna, was little more than an Italian warlord. Rome could no longer pay to maintain its legions and increasingly relied on the services of German mercenaries. Eventually, they could no longer pay these either, and when one group of mercenaries known as the Heruli demanded lands in Italy as payment, the Romans refused. The Heruli rebelled and the remnants of the Roman army was defeated in the battle of Ravenna in the year 476. The Roman emperor was forced to resign and the Western Empire vanished as a political entity entirely. For those in the east, watching this collapse over the 5th century must have sent chills down their spine. The writer Saint Jerome encapsulates what must have been the fear and uncertainty of that age. What is safe if Rome perishes? But for the most part, life in the east was virtually unaffected by the fall of the west. In fact, Constantinople continued its expansion and rise in importance, becoming now the undisputed capital and center of the Mediterranean world. Throughout the whole period of Rome's collapse, the east was seen as a safe haven and it must have received an influx of refugees fleeing the destruction in the west. One writer, Paulinus of Pella, writes in his work Eucharisticos that he considered leaving the west and heading back to his Byzantine estates in Greece and Albania. His wife ultimately convinced him that the journey would be too dangerous but we can assume that many did make this trip, swelling the population of the east and its capital of Constantinople. This was the beginning of the city's role as a sanctuary to the destitute, the city that later poets would refer to as the refuge of strangers. Beloved refuge for strangers, queen of the queens of cities, song of songs, and splendor of splendors. Before the Christians of the east, the fall of Rome posed a religious conundrum. The empire had converted to Christianity little more than a century earlier, and now destruction was raining down on it from all sides. Many back in Rome believed that this was a punishment for abandoning their ancient pagan gods, but Christian scholars in the east were busy arguing that it was just these remnants of paganism that had brought about the collapse, as the writer Nilus describes. You have said that hordes of barbarians have often invaded Romania because everyone was not willing or eager to worship the pagan gods with sacrifices. No, however; something more distinct and unveiled. Inroads of the barbarians, earthquakes and conflagrations, and all other grievous things are occurring for no other reason than the wickedness and foolishness of the superstitious and impious men among you who have not ceased your idolatry but continue to sacrifice to worthless deities every day in the suburbs. The eastern half of the empire endured the tremors of the 5th century well. It suffered some damage from the Hun and Ostrogoth invasions, but it ultimately managed to buy off these attackers. It was plagued by vandal pirates sailing from their bases in North Africa, and nomadic tribes like the Blemyes and Nobades in Upper Egypt. But these enemies inflicted no permanent damage and soon one man, an emperor of the east, would go on a crusade to recover the fragmented lands that had once belonged to the western empire. He was one of the most remarkable characters from history, and his name was Justinian. The story of Justinian begins with his uncle, a man named Justin. Justin was a prime example of one remarkable aspect of Byzantine society; that is, the ability of just about anyone to rise through its ranks and even reach the very pinnacle of imperial power. In fact, Justin began his life as a swineherd in the region of Dardania, a mountainous area in the Balkans, next door to Macedonia. As a teenager, he and two of his friends fled the chaos in the west. They crossed the mountain passes in what must have been columns of refugees, with the smoke of their homeland rising in the skies behind them. Everyone in that column had only one name on their lips, the only place in the world that at that moment seemed like a place of safety, the refuge of strangers, the city of Constantinople. The historian Procopius gives one account of this humble journey. Three young farmers of Illyrian origin came from Vederiana, determined to join the army. They covered the whole distance to Byzantium on foot, carrying on their own shoulders cloaks in which on their arrival they had nothing but twice-baked bread that they bagged at home. When they arrived at the great capital, life must have been hard. Justin spoke Latin but only very simple Greek, and he must have been at sea in the hubbub of different languages spoken in Constantinople. Like most peasants he was also illiterate, but he managed to secure a place in the palace guard and rose through the ranks of military life to become a tribune and then a senator. Finally, under the Emperor Anastasius, he was appointed commander of the palace guard. When the emperor died, as so often happened upon the death of Byzantine emperors, the palace exploded in intrigue. The grand chamberlain, a man named Amantius, is said to have given a large amount of money to Justin, intending to buy his support. But Justin took his money and gave it out to numerous other people, ensuring their loyalty to him. When the dust settled, Justin was elected as the new emperor. Justin soon reached out to his peasant family and he brought his young nephew, the boy named Justinian, to the capital to be educated. Justinian was also a peasant but in Constantinople he learned jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history. He learned about the greatness of the empire that had once ruled in the west and about the circumstances of its catastrophic fall. Perhaps it's here that he began to dream of an ambitious and seemingly impossible project; this he would later call the renovatio imperii, the restoration of the empire. Justinian became emperor after his uncle's death and he set about the job of ruling with enormous energy. He became known as the emperor who never sleeps, but his reign was not without controversy. He married a lower-class woman named Theodora, a courtesan with a lascivious reputation. This caused great scandal across the empire. The contradictory and contrasting ways that Justinian has been portrayed are nowhere better shown than in the writings of the scholar Procopius. Early in his life, Procopius writes about Justinian and Theodora as a pious and dedicated couple. But later, he also wrote another text entitled the Anecdota. This was a scandalous tell-all about the true Justinian and Theodora, a text that has come to be known as the Secret History. In his Anecdota, Procopius portrays the Emperor Justinian as a cruel, incompetent ruler. He committed numberless murders through his notion of piety. In his zeal to bring all men to agree in one form of Christian doctrine, he recklessly murdered all who descended there from under the pretext of piety, for he did not think that it was murder if those whom he slew were not of the same belief as himself. Procopius even goes so far as to claim that Justinian and his wife had been possessed by evil spirits, and recounts tales of them wandering the palace without their heads. Justinian’s reign was also marred with riots. In the year 532, the famous chariot racing factions of Constantinople, those rival gangs who had helped to rebuild the city's walls against the advance of Attila, joined forces once again to rise up in the streets against what they saw as the corruption of Justinian's rule. They marched through the streets of the capital, setting fire to the city and chanting the word nika, nika, the Greek word for victory. These riots became known as the Nika Riots and they were so severe that the emperor considered fleeing by sea. During the riots, the old church that had stood on the hill beside the imperial palace burned to the ground, and Justinian’s reaction was brutal. In the next few days, he ordered the crushing of the riots by the army. Procopius records that 30,000 citizens of Constantinople were killed during this repression and the sands of the Hippodrome were stained with their blood. Whatever the truth of Justinian's character, we can at least be certain that he was ambitious. In the wake of the riots, he resolved to rebuild the city and in the blackened ruin of the old church, he ordered plans to be drawn up for a new cathedral that would rival Saint Peter's tomb in Rome. What resulted was one of the world's most remarkable buildings. Columns and other marbles were brought from all over the empire and more than 10,000 people were employed in its construction. Its vast dome rises 55 metres above the ground, with a span of 30 meters. This is the church of Saint Sophia, more commonly known by its Greek name the Hagia Sophia, and today it's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Justinian was also determined to increase the economic potential of his empire, and one of the ways he did this was through perhaps history's first act of corporate espionage; that's the theft of the secret of silk from China. As we discovered in the last episode, for centuries silk had been the sole reserve of Chinese craftsmen. The product of their silkworms had spread throughout the world, long before any diplomatic contact with China was established. But in the year 551, two Byzantine monks who had been preaching in India made their way to China and observed the intricate methods used in the raising of silkworms and the production of silk. They hurried back to Constantinople and sought an urgent audience with the Emperor Justinian. They told him that they had found the source of the miracle material silk, and the emperor was impressed. He offered them a great fortune if they were able to smuggle some of these mysterious worms back to the capital. The monks set out once again, likely travelling along a northern route along the Black Sea. They would have passed through the Tarim Basin and the Taklamakan Desert, through the Gate of Jade, and down the Hexi Corridor into the heartlands of China. With them they carried bamboo canes, hollowed out on the inside with hidden compartments. In China, they convinced others to smuggle the silkworms out for them, likely in the form of eggs or very young larvae, since adult silkworms are very delicate and easily killed by temperature variations. The entire expedition may have taken up to two years but they eventually returned successful and established a breeding population of silkworms on the other end of the Silk Road. Their actions began a Byzantine trade in silk, with silk factories setting up in Constantinople as well as Beirut, Antioch, and Thebes. The Byzantine Empire quickly established a monopoly on silk in Europe, and this formed one of the bases for their economy throughout the Medieval Period, swelling the wealth of Byzantium to unprecedented size. By the early 6th century, the city of Constantinople was unmatched around Europe. It had constructed the longest aqueduct in the ancient world, winding for around 250 kilometers through the countryside. The early emperors had also supplemented the city's defenses with another series of defensive walls more than 60 kilometers from the capital known as the Long Walls. These stretched 56 kilometers from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. But the Emperor Justinian had even greater ambitions. He wanted to recover all the lands of the Western Roman Empire and restore Rome to its ancient size. He would be incredibly successful. Justinian never took part in the military campaigns he ordered. He left that to a talented general named Belisarius and from his throne in Constantinople, Justinian watched as the lands of old Rome fell once more under his banner. The General Belisarius marched across North Africa and conquered the vandals who still occupied it in only nine months. Then he set his sights on Italy where an Ostrogoth king still ruled. Belisarius swept into Italy and laid siege to Rome itself, encircling it for over a year and finally marching through its gates in the year 536. When Belisarius marched into the city of Rome, he would have seen a place much faded from the greatness of its past. Two large earthquakes in the 5th century had damaged many of its great buildings but its aqueducts were still running and its baths still functioned. Gladiators and animals still fought in its coliseum and a threadbare population had begun to reclaim some of their importance in the region, if nothing like the European empire they had once ruled. For the Emperor Justinian and Belisarius, Rome was the ultimate symbol of the revitalized empire and they would not give it up for anything. The Ostrogoth king who ruled over Italy, a man named Vitiges, quickly responded, marching on Rome with an army of his own. Now, it was the turn of Belisarius to be under siege. The Ostrogoth king offered him and his men safe passage if he left the city in peace, and Belisarius responded with this reply. It was you who trespassed upon this city in former times, though it did not belong to you at all. Now you have given it back, however unwillingly, to its ancient possessors and whoever of you has hopes of setting foot in Rome without a fight is mistaken, for as long as Belisarius lives, it is impossible for him to relinquish this city. Ultimately, the Romans succeeded in holding the city but this was only the beginning of a long and costly series of wars in Italy. In the years that followed, the city of Rome would be besieged and captured a further three times, each time more brutally and more costly than the last. But finally, the Ostrogoth hold on Italy collapsed and the Byzantine Empire reclaimed the eternal city for the Empire of Rome. But there was a tragic irony to this situation. In trying to return Rome to its empire, the Byzantines had done immense damage to the city. In the wars of Belisarius, perhaps as many as 90 percent of all Rome’s citizens had either been killed or fled the city, leaving a population of perhaps only 30,000 people. The inhabited area of the city was reduced to only a tenth of its previous size, and of the thirteen great aqueducts that had once carried water directly into the city, only two remained in operation. If there had ever been hope of Rome rebuilding the glory of its ancient past, then the Byzantines had ended that hope forever. The conquests of Justinian, though remarkable as achievements in themselves, were short-lived. The Byzantine Empire simply didn't have the resources to maintain such a large territory for any period of time. The Gothic wars drained its wealth and distracted its military, and in the 540s another plague spread throughout Europe, weakening it even further. The so-called Plague of Justinian may have killed anywhere between 25 to 100 million people over the next two centuries. Modern science has confirmed that it was caused by a strain of the bacterium yersinia pestis, the same organism that caused the Black Death in medieval Europe. The outbreak in Constantinople is thought to have been carried to the city by infected rats on grain ships arriving from Egypt, and the Emperor Justinian is even reported to have contracted the disease although he was one of the approximately 50 percent of people who would recover. Procopius records that at its peak the plague was killing 10,000 people in Constantinople every day and of course, he blamed Justinian for its arrival. The plague began to rage and swept away nearly half the survivors. Such were the disasters that afflicted mankind from the day when Justinian first commenced to manage the affairs of the kingdom and after he had ascended the imperial throne. Procopius also reserves harsh words for the way Justinian reacted in the face of this plague and his unwillingness to offer support to the stricken peasants of the empire. When pestilence swept through the whole known world and notably the Roman Empire, wiping out most of the farming community and of necessity, leaving a trail of desolation in its wake, Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined freeholders. Even then, he did not refrain from demanding the annual tax. The plague weakened the Byzantine Empire at a critical point, when Justinian's armies had nearly retaken all of Italy and the Western Mediterranean coast. Soon, the Germanic people known as the Lombards invaded northern Italy, defeated the small Byzantine army left there, and established their own kingdom. The dream of resurrecting the ancient empire was dead. In the 550s, two earthquakes shook the capital of Constantinople and in an event that seemed redolent with symbolism, the great dome of the Hagia Sophia cracked. In the year 558, a final earthquake caused the dome to collapse entirely. To the citizens of Constantinople, this devastating event must have seemed like the final judgment of god on an emperor who had such lofty ambitions but had in the end fallen so short. Justinian died in the year 565, having left no children. He was buried in a grand mausoleum in the church of the holy apostles, and the emperors who followed after him would reap the consequences of his over-ambitious conquests. Justinian had inherited an imperial treasury of 29 million gold coins but his wars had all but emptied it. In the east, Byzantium was now under pressure from the powerful Sassanid Empire, a Persian empire that ruled from the city of Ctesiphon near modern Baghdad. Wars with the Sassanids dragged on for decades, weakening both empires and usually resulting in a bitter and costly stalemate. By the year 630, the empire had lost most of Italy and North Africa once more, and held only a foothold in the island of Sicily. But in the early 7th century, one emperor named Heraclius seemed like he could return the empire to its previous glory. He ruled for 30 years, won an impressive series of battles, and beat the Sassanids back in Anatolia, even recapturing the holy city of Jerusalem. In the year 629, Heraclius brought the relic of the true cross back to the city of Jerusalem in a lavish and triumphant ceremony. For a time, it must have seemed that he was leading the empire to a new golden age, but little did the people of Byzantium know that a new rival was rising out of one of the most unlikely places, the seemingly empty desert sands of Arabia. The Arabian Peninsula is a wedge of land pinched between the Persian Gulf in the north and the Red Sea in the south. It's technically a subcontinent since it sits on its own tectonic plate, and over millions of years it has torn away from the rest of Africa in the south while slowly crashing into the Eurasian Plate in the north, forcing up Iran's Zagros Mountains. This is an arid land divided between rocky mountains and dry coastland lined with coral reefs, and separated by small strips of fertile pastures in its rocky valleys. But perhaps most famously, the region is home to a vast range of deserts. The largest of these, the great Arabian Desert, is the fifth-largest in the world and one of the deepest. Its sands are thought to extend up to 180 meters below its surface, or more than 50 stories. It's here that a warrior visionary had risen to topple the established powers of the region and gathered a powerful military force. The man known to history as Mohammed was a revolutionary, a guerrilla warrior, a poet, and an innovative military strategist. During the final ten years of his life, he led a successful campaign to capture the city of Mecca from the Qureysh tribe who had ruled it for centuries. After his death in the year 632, the successors of Mohammed took up his mantle. To their north, they spread out of the Arabian Peninsula and faced ahead of them the lands of both the Sassanids in Mesopotamia and Persia and the Byzantines in Egypt. But these two great ancient empires had been hollowed out from within, weakened and bankrupted by their incessant wars. The last great war between these two empires had ended only a few years before, after grinding on for nearly three decades and critically weakening them. The Arab advance came as a complete surprise. The Byzantines were distracted by their wars and paid little heed to news that was trickling across the desert to the south. They had also stopped paying tribute to the desert tribes who they usually relied on to pass them information. In the year 634, to the surprise of the entire world, the Arab armies defeated a Byzantine force sent into Syria and captured Damascus in a lightning strike. The Byzantines tried again in 636, but a sandstorm scattered their forces and when the Arab cavalry bore down on them, they were utterly annihilated. Arab armies fought using swords made of the finest Indian steel, riding on the backs of camels and horses, versatile and fast across the desert landscape. Their tactics were primarily defensive; luring their opponents into ill-advised attacks with large groups of archers placed on both flanks. The only hope for the Byzantines was now that their great rivals, the Sassanids, would halt the Arab advance. But this hope would be in vain. In fact, Arab attacks would bring about the complete disintegration and collapse of the Sassanid Empire. Four hundred years later, the Persian poet Firdusi would write the following lament about the end of this great power. Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate. Where are your valiant warriors and priests? Where are your hunting parties and your feasts? Where is that war-like spirit and where are those great armies that destroyed our country's foes? Count Iran as a ruin, as the lair of lions and leopards. Look now and despair. The Byzantines watched helplessly as their Asian territories were swallowed up. Jerusalem, recaptured less than a decade before at enormous cost, surrendered to Arab armies in the year 637. For the General Emperor Heraclius, on whom the Byzantines had pinned such hopes, this catastrophic defeat proved too much. He had once been the commander of his father's fleet, a bold and accomplished sailor, but in his old age he developed an overwhelming thalassophobia, or fear of the sea. On his way back to Constantinople from Asia, he found even the 700 meter crossing of the Bosphorus too terrifying. His men had to tie boats together across the whole length of the crossing, covering them with shrubs and matting so that the terrified old emperor couldn't see the water rocking dark and deep beneath him. When Egypt fell to Arab forces in the year 642, the Byzantine Empire lost its rich food supplies which had been a major source of grain for the capital. This arrangement had been in place since the time of the ancient Romans and now the entire economic structure of the Byzantine Empire would have to be rearranged overnight. Food shortages were now added to the list of the empire's problems. By 647, the last Byzantine territory in Africa, the ancient city of Carthage, had also fallen to the advancing Arab armies. In the year 644, to the Byzantine's horror, the Arab Empire began building a navy. Only a decade later, it was strong enough to raid the island of Cyprus and Rhodes. Neither island put up even a scrap of resistance and it soon became clear that Byzantium was no longer able to defend its empire. In the year 654, the Emperor Constans personally set sail with the Byzantine navy, the pride of the empire, and its last line of defense to meet the Arab fleet in battle. The writer Theophanes the Confessor recalls what happened next. In this year, Mu’awiyah commanded that a great naval armament should be made with a view to his fleet sailing against Constantinople. This man arrived at Phoenix in Lycia, where the Emperor Constans lay with the Roman fleet and engaged him in sea battle. Now the emperor, who had taken no measures to draw up his battle line, ordered the Roman fleet to fight. When the two sides engaged, the Romans were defeated and the sea was dyed with Roman blood. In the ensuing struggle, 500 Byzantine ships were destroyed. The Emperor Constans was forced to swap clothes with another man and flee in the garb of a common soldier, a stinging humiliation for this emperor of the Byzantines. The emperor then put his robes on another man. This courageous man then stationed himself bravely on the imperial ship and killed many of the enemy before giving up his life on behalf of the emperor. The enemy surrounded him and held him in their midst, thinking he was the emperor. After he had slain many of them, they killed him too, as the man was wearing the imperial robes. Thus routed, the emperor escaped and leaving everyone behind, sailed off to Constantinople. The city of Constantinople was now completely defenseless. Now firmly in control of Syria and the Mediterranean coast, Arab armies were able to send frequent raiding parties deep into Anatolia and in the year 674, they felt bold enough to make a strike at the great city, Constantinople itself. The Arab fleet began by capturing port towns along the coast and then setting up a blockade of Constantinople, attempting to choke the life from the city. Theophanes the Confessor recalls these events in his chronicle. In this year in March, a rainbow appeared in the sky and all mankind shuddered. Everyone said it was the end of the world. In this year, the deniers of Christ readied a great expedition. The emperor at the time was named Constantine IV and he must have wondered whether this was finally the end of the empire that had once ruled all of Europe. But the Byzantines had one more trick up their sleeve. In fact, in recent years they had developed a secret super weapon of terrifying power that would soon become famous around the world. This weapon is so mysterious that today there is still lively debate over what exactly it was, and the scholars of Byzantium guarded its secrets so jealously that today its name is synonymous with the Greek Byzantines who developed it. That weapon was Greek Fire. Incendiary weapons had been used in warfare for centuries before Greek Fire was invented. Flaming arrows and pots containing combustible substances were used by the Assyrians as early as the 9th century BC, but the substance known as Greek Fire was different. It was reportedly developed by a man named Kallinikos, who had fled the Arab conquests as a refugee and had been given refuge in the city of Constantinople. This city, which had seen refugees rise to become emperors, now saw the secret of its survival come to it from the midst of those huddled masses. The medieval writer Anna Komnene gives one account that is thought to describe this terrifying weapon. This fire is made by the following arts; from the pine and for certain such evergreen trees, inflammable resin is collected. This is rubbed with sulfur and put into tubes of reed and is blown by men using it with violent and continuous breath. Then in this manner, it meets the fire on the tip and catches light, and falls like a fiery whirlwind on the faces of the enemies. The refugee Kallinikos is said to have demonstrated his Greek Fire to the Byzantine emperor. It was a flaming substance possibly based on petroleum that seemed to set even the surface of the sea ablaze. Water couldn't douse its flames and by some accounts even made them more intense. Its use was accompanied with smoke and the sounds of thunder. One remarkable Norse saga relates the story of a viking warrior named Ingvar the Far-Traveled, a traveler who sailed down the Volga River and into the Caspian Sea to explore the lands of Asia. Ingvar apparently faced ships equipped with Greek Fire weaponry which is described in the saga. They began blowing with smith's bellows at a furnace in which there was fire, and there came from it a great din. There stood there also a brass or bronze tube and from it flew much fire against one ship. It burned up in a short time so that all of it had become white ashes. Whatever its exact composition, we know the effect that this weapon had. The writer Theophanes recalls these dramatic events in his chronicle as the ships of the Arab forces bore down on the great city. When Constantine learned of the movement of god's enemies against Constantinople, he prepared huge two-storied warships equipped with Greek Fire and siphon- -carrying warships, ordering them to anchor in the harbour of the Caesarium. All day long, from dawn to dusk, there was combat, from the outworks of the Golden Gate to Kyklobion. Both sides were thrusting and counter-thrusting, but with the aid of god and his mother they were disgraced, expending a host of war-like men. They retreated in great distress with severe wounds. As their expedition was going away after god had ruined it, it was overtaken by a tempestuous winter storm near Syllaion. It was shivered to atoms and completely destroyed. This defeat on sea was coupled with a Byzantine victory on land and the Arab forces withdrew, suffering enormous losses. Growing divisions in their own lands soon forced them to attend to their own affairs and a peace deal was struck. A second siege of Constantinople was attempted at the start of the 8th century but once again the use of Greek Fire drove the enemy armies back into their lands. The Byzantine Empire had survived yet another existential threat and the city of Constantinople remained the impregnable fortress that the Emperor Theodosius had hoped.
Thank you for everything you’re doing Paul!
What a gift for a Sunday.