Over the next few centuries, storm after storm would rage on the city of Constantinople, but it would always hold. Its powerful walls, its natural defenses, and the ingenious invention of Greek Fire would keep it safe from its enemies in Asia and in Europe. I'm going to fast-forward the story now until around the 10th century and pause there for a moment to take a look at what life was like in the Byzantine Empire during this time. For the Byzantine people, the city of Constantinople was a source of constant pride. They called it the Eye of the World and the Reigning City. Its banner, showing the Byzantine crescent moon, would have fluttered and snapped over its rooftops. Travelers and pilgrims to the Holy Land usually passed through Constantinople on their route and they have left us vivid accounts of the city's beauty and magnificence. One Russian visitor, Stephen of Novgorod, described the city in the following terms. Entering Constantinople is like entering a great forest. It is impossible to get around without a good guide, and if you try to get around on the cheap without offering tips, you will be unable to see or kiss a single saint. Another pilgrim named Fotii describes the enormous wealth of churches and icon houses around the city. It is impossible to go to all the holy monasteries or holy relics or to recount them. Still, there are thousands upon thousands of relics of saints and many wonders which it is impossible to describe. Fotii even witnessed an imperial procession, although he does fall foul of the hands-on approach of some of the Byzantine imperial guards. We set out the next day for the Blachernai Palace. I soon lost my companions in the crowd and stepped up onto the base of a pillar to try and see them. Instead, I caught a glimpse of the imperial family as they entered, resplendent in the most luxuriously embroidered golden robes imaginable and wearing golden crowns. As the ceremony started however, I was rudely knocked off the pillar by some of the imperial guards and sent sprawling onto the stone floor. Some of these may have been part of the famed unit called the Varangian Guards, made up of viking warriors from Scandinavia. Walking around the city at this time, visitors would have wandered down narrow streets, between buildings built from the orange- -brown bricks still manufactured with Roman methods. Church bells would have rung out, the singing of somber Byzantine chants from the churches, the calling of seabirds, and the clatter of the wooden shutters in the houses. Countless languages would have been heard on these streets since Constantinople at this time had welcomed people from all over the known world, as one 10th century knight named Bartolf of Nangis would write. In this city are Greeks, Bulgarians, Alans, Comans, Pigmaticians, Italians, Venetians, Romanians, Dacians, English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, and people of all nations come together here. The doors of the houses were often built of iron, studded with stout nails. Large houses had a courtyard with stables, cattle sheds, chicken coops, and storerooms looking out over it. Staircases were built of wood although stone was used in the more prosperous houses and in some, even marble. Many of these wealthy houses were also centrally heated using a hypocaust system inherited directly from the ancient Romans, although most people simply burned charcoal in iron braziers. Their kitchens had low hearths with square pipes forming a chimney to carry away their smoke. During the day, the skyline of Constantinople must have been fogged with the smoke from these chimneys, and the smells of wood smoke and baking food must have drifted out over its terracotta tiles. The tastes of the city would have been distinctive, too. According to the 11th century cook Simeon Seth, cinnamon arrived in the city around this time which he believed came from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. In fact, it had likely traveled all the way from Sri Lanka. Byzantines ate fish like the bass and grey mullet, and drank spiced wine called konditon, along with sausages and the ubiquitous fermented fish sauce known as garum, which would have filled the air with its earthy, sea salt aroma. Later, new crops like aubergines or eggplant, along with spinach, oranges, and lemons arrived in Constantinople and all of these would have added to the smells wafting through these streets. Street performers would have plied their trades; acrobats and jugglers and fire eaters. One bishop of Cremona, visiting in the year 949, describes seeing one of these performances. A man carried on his head without using his hands a wooden pole 24 feet or more long, then two boys appeared who went up on the pole, did various tricks on it, and then came down headfirst, keeping the pole all the time as steady as though it were rooted in the earth which filled me with great astonishment and admiration. But of course, being poor in Constantinople was a pretty miserable existence. Only the most fortunate among them lived in houses which were roofed over with rushes and floored with beaten earth. From the 5th century onwards, skyscraper blocks of flats containing anything from five to nine stories were built as tenement buildings, just like in a modern city. These were divided into flats which were let out to working people at exploitative prices and were usually little better than slums. One visitor to the city, named Odo of Deuil, passing through in the year 1147, summarizes the seedy underbelly of the city with this stinging observation. Constantinople is a city of extremes. She surpasses other cities in wealth and she surpasses them in vice. Constantinople itself is squalid and fetid and in many places afflicted by permanent darkness, for the wealthy overshadow the streets with buildings and leave these dirty, dark places to the poor and to travelers. There, murders and robberies and other crimes of the night are committed. People live untouched by the law in this city, for all its rich men are bullies and many of its poor men are thieves. But whatever the varying feelings about this city, no one could deny that it was a vibrant, energetic place. A later writer, Niketas Choniates, describes some of the smells of sizzling food that must have filled the streets of Constantinople on a daily basis, as the city's different cultures mixed and melded their culinary traditions. They reveled and drank strong wine all day long. Some favored luxury foods while others recreated their own native dishes such as ox rib apiece, or slices of salt pork cooked with beans, and sauces made with garlic or a combination of other bitter flavors. It wasn't just the smell of food that would have filled the air. In fact, Constantinople was famous for its spice markets and perfumeries, as this extract from the city guild's Book of Regulations shows. They are to sell pepper, spikenard, cinnamon, aloeswood, ambergris, musk, frankincense, myrrh, balsam, indigo, dyers’ herbs, lapis lazuli, fustic, storax, and in short, any article used for perfumery and dying. Their stalls shall be placed in a row between the milestone and the revered icon of Christ that stands above the bronze arcade so that the aroma may waft upwards to the icon and at the same time fill the vestibule of the royal palace. Sugar, ginger, and sandalwood came to Byzantium from India, while nutmeg and cloves came from as far away as Indonesia. On the days when imperial processions and religious ceremonies were being held, the unpleasant everyday smells of the medieval city were covered with wreaths of rosemary and pine chips, as well as rose petals which were hung in the streets along with bundles of marjoram. But above everything else, visitors to the city were struck time and again with awe by its size and magnificence. At half a million people, it was the largest city they would ever see and on witnessing its massive walls, its paved boulevards and tall spiraling columns, its vast palace and the golden dome of the Hagia Sophia glinting in the sun, visitors to the city were often left speechless. In the mid 10th century, the poet Konstantinos of Rhodes wrote about the effect this city had on arriving travelers. After a long and wearisome journey, the traveller sees from a distance towers rising high into the air and like strong giants in stride, columns that rise up to the highest point and tall houses and temples whose vast roofs reach to the heights. Who would not become instantly filled with joy? When he reaches the wall and draws near to the gates, who does not greet the city, lower his neck, kneel to the ground, and grasp the famous earth? But over the preceding centuries, the world around Constantinople had changed. In Western Europe, the post-Roman era had given way to the Middle Ages. The Latin-speaking Western Empire had fractured and made way for a patchwork of kingdoms speaking numerous different languages, but all tied together with their relationship to a church that spoke Latin in its services. These people of Western Europe seemed terribly crude to the sophisticated people of Byzantium. They referred to them sometimes simply as Latins but more commonly as Franks. The ancient capital of Rome had risen once again not as an imperial power but as the center of Roman Catholicism and the seat of the pope. The differences in translation between the Greek and Latin religious texts naturally led to disagreements between the branches of Christianity, some of them exceedingly bitter. In the year 1054, an event known as the East-West Schism would tear the Christian world down the middle. All Latin churches in Constantinople were shut down and excommunications were fired like volleys of arrows from one side of Europe to another. This rift between the Latins and the Greeks would only grow wider as time went on. In Western Europe, a feudal system now dictated that high-born people, the lords and ladies of the land, were born into their right to rule. In the west, it was impossible for peasants to rise above the lowly station they were born into, but in Byzantium there was no legal status given to nobles. There were the powerful and wealthy of course, and they used every means available to maintain and increase that power, but those great families could fall and others could rise out of nowhere. The founder of one great ruling dynasty, a 9th century king named Basileios the First, is one incredible example. He was another peasant who traveled to the city to escape the poverty of his life in the countryside, and he rose through Byzantine society to become the emperor. Over its history, four emperors of Byzantium were also women. The lack of feudal system also made the empire a remarkably modern kind of bureaucracy for its time. Western European kings now ruled over fractious, land-holding lords and feudal barons, all of whom had to be constantly placated in order to keep the peace and avoid a civil war. These lords would raise their own armies and taxed their own peasants, only coming together under the king's banner in times of war. But the Byzantine Empire collected taxes directly from its provinces just as the ancient Romans had, and they operated a centralized bureaucracy that paid magistrates and officials as well as its powerful and centralized military. But despite this, Byzantine emperors sat at the top of an incredibly precarious pyramid. They were often elected into their place and spent their time on the throne under constant threat from those around them; from other courtiers plotting palace coups, and from members of the military who might grow too powerful and attempt to topple them. Successful Byzantine emperors ruled through a delicate balancing act, keeping the peace with all the competing interests of the empire, and this posed a constant paradox. Emperors needed competent people to operate the various important positions in their government, but the most competent people tended to also be the most ambitious and could therefore pose the greatest danger. To deal with these challenges, Byzantine emperors used a number of different tactics. Firstly, in general, they didn't rule through their family. Any brothers or uncles that might pose a challenge were swiftly shipped off to the provinces the moment a new emperor was crowned and were usually given some inconsequential position where they could cause little trouble. It was also imperial policy that no general was allowed to command troops in his home province, a rule designed to prevent any general from building up too large a base of support and challenging the authority of the empire. As we saw in the last episode, this was a policy that the Han Dynasty of China would have done well to adopt. As a further insurance policy, many emperors gave positions of power to those who could not take the throne; often eunuchs or bishops. Later on, these figures would even be given command of the armies of the empire. But the final insurance policy of any emperor was ensuring that he had a solid base of support among the actual people of the empire and its political elites. If people supported their emperor, then it was less likely that a coup could succeed, and so emperors spent much of their time trying to increase this support, especially in the great city of Constantinople. Despite the reputation it has earned in the west, despotic emperors didn't last long in Byzantium. In the centuries following the rise of Islam, the Byzantine Empire became exceptional at projecting what we might call soft power. Having discovered how costly wars could be, it now preferred, where possible, not to fight. The kings of Byzantium were happy to let the majesty of their capital city speak for itself. They allowed foreign princes and kings to compete for the hands of Byzantine princesses and gave them titles of the empire as a form of honor. The Byzantines hosted young princes of foreign powers, educating them in the capital and raising them among the sophisticated aristocracy of the empire. They were also experts at creating vast ceremonies that impressed and overwhelmed the ambassadors of foreign powers. In the year 946, one delegation from Cilicia were greeted in the reception hall of the imperial palace, decked out with silk hangings, laurel wreaths and flowers, and slung with silver chains, the floors all decorated with Persian carpets, and the whole vast room sprinkled with rose water. The entire court stood there in ceremonial regalia of red, gold, and purple, thousands of people chanting along with the music of organs. Meanwhile, the emperor sat on a throne modeled after the biblical throne of Solomon, surrounded by mechanical moving animals powered by water and clockwork; birds and lions cast in silver that roared and warbled through intricately designed instruments in their throats. This throne could even be mechanically lifted into the air while the ambassadors knelt before it. All of this theater served to impress and terrify those who visited the empire. All of it projected one simple message; you have arrived in the Eye of Europe, the New Rome, the center of the world. And it worked. After one visit, the ambassadors of one Prince Vladimir of Kiev returned to their king with the following breathless report about their time in the city. We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty. We only knew that god dwells there among men and their service is fairer than ceremonies of other nations. But soft power didn't always suffice and when it failed, there was always the Byzantine army. The army of Byzantium was a large and powerful force. In the mid 10th century, it was made up of roughly 140,000 soldiers. This was around 1 percent of the empire's population and 5 percent of all adult males. The army was divided into local defense forces known as themata and the professional standing armies known as tagmata, who were mostly stationed in the capital. These different types of army allowed for some flexibility in warfare, but they were also used to keep checks on one another. They were often given joint command of a province, meaning that no one general could get any ideas about turning the strength of his men against the empire and making a bid for the throne, a lesson that seems clearly drawn from the constant civil wars that had once plagued the Western Empire. The Byzantines also employed foreign mercenaries, usually small units of specialized soldiers drawn from neighboring lands. But easily their most powerful military asset was the formidable might of their capital, the untakeable city of Constantinople. Over the centuries, they increased the city's siege defenses even further. The Byzantines constructed several hundred enormous underground cisterns to store water, meaning that they would never run out during even the longest sieges. The largest of these, known as the Basilica Cistern, has 366 columns supporting its immense underground vaults. But just as impressive are three great open-air cisterns built near the Theodosian walls. To give you a sense of their size, one of them today houses a football stadium. The Byzantines also cast an enormous iron chain, its lengths as thick as a man's arm that could be winched across the whole length of the Golden Horn, barring entry to the port of the city to any would-be attackers. Time and again, the Byzantines would fall back to the defenses of their city and there, no attacker was able to defeat them. But through the 11th century, a new threat was rising that would prove a challenge too great for the Byzantine Empire to face alone, a threat that would ultimately force them into a difficult and painful compromise, and lead in the coming centuries to the ruin and waste of their great capital. This was the rise of the Seljuk Turks. From their homeland near the Aral Sea, the Turks had built an empire that now stretched across mainland Persia and across the Middle East, capturing the cultural center of Baghdad and much of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean coast. In the year 1071, the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, considered them enough of a threat to march an army of 40,000 soldiers into Asia to meet them in battle around the area of modern Armenia at a place called Manzikert. Romanos’ army consisted of perhaps 10,000 professional Byzantine soldiers, with around 30,000 regional mercenaries coming from Georgia, Armenia, and Bulgaria, as well as a large contingent of Turkish mercenaries and even some Norman knights led by a Frankish general. The march across Anatolia was long and difficult, and the Emperor Romanos didn't endear himself to his troops on the journey. He brought along a luxurious baggage train while they suffered in hardship. Whispers soon began to spread around the soldiers, and the mood turned mutinous. On the eve of the battle, Romanos split his army in two, intending to send one half in a flanking maneuver against the Turks. But instead, these 20,000 soldiers seem to have disbanded, leaving him with only half his army left. Some of the Turkish mercenaries seem to have sensed that they were on the losing side and even defected to the Turkish sultan who welcomed them as brothers. In the ensuing battle of Manzikert, the Byzantines were utterly smashed and the Emperor Romanos was captured, the first Roman emperor to be taken prisoner in battle in over 900 years. When he was brought before the presence of the Turkish sultan, the victorious ruler refused to believe that the bloodied and tattered man before him was the mighty emperor of the Romans. But the Turkish sultan was magnanimous in victory. Romanos stayed in his captivity for a week and during that time, he ate at the sultan's table while the terms of the empire's surrender were negotiated. The loss at Manzikert was a devastating blow for the Byzantine Empire. While casualties in the battle itself were not enormous, the blow to its morale was devastating. When the Emperor Romanos returned to the empire, ransomed at the price of 1.5 million gold pieces, with several cities surrendered to the Turks and his daughter promised in marriage to one of their princes, the humiliation proved too much for his subjects. He was toppled from power and cruelly blinded, later dying from an infection related to his wounds. It's here that the empire's real troubles began. The Byzantine system of succession, cobbled together haphazardly and involving much bribery, deceit, and coup plotting, had worked mostly fine during times of plenty but under these times of stress, it fractured. The toppling of this emperor led to a 30-year period of unrest, civil war, and palace coups that did far more to damage the Byzantine state than a thousand battles of Manzikert ever could have. The Emperor Romanos had marched to Manzikert with an army of more than 40,000 but less than a decade later, the armies fighting in the civil wars barely topped 4,000. There were now virtually no Byzantine armies defending the east. The Turks advanced with ease and took more Byzantine cities so that right as the empire's armies were destroying each other, it was also losing the economic base it would have required to rebuild them. In only a few years, the Byzantines lost all of their vast heartlands in Asia and their enemies on all sides were emboldened. The catastrophe was so great that Byzantine historians rarely name the battle of Manzikert, simply referring to it as that dreadful day. The historian Anna Komnene, writing only a few decades later, wrote the following mournful appraisal of the situation. The fortunes of the Roman Empire had sunk to their lowest ebb, for the armies of the east were dispersed in all directions because the Turks had overspread and gained command of countries between the Black Sea and the Hellespont, and the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. Another Byzantine historian, Michael Atteleiates, was even more full of doom. We were pressed on all sides by the bonds of death. For centuries now, Western Europe had relied on the Byzantines to hold back the armies of the various Muslim empires that had risen and fallen in Asia. But it was becoming increasingly clear that they couldn't hold out on their own forever. If Byzantium was to continue what the west saw as guarding the gates of Europe, it would need a greater level of military support. In fact, it would need a radical solution that would reshape the balance of power in Europe. Into this situation strode a militant and ambitious pope named Urban II, and he would usher in a new age of violence and conflict that would seek to restore the power and standing of Byzantium but which would ultimately threaten to tear the entire empire apart. Before becoming pope, Urban II had been a French noble. He had a vision of a new kind of aggressive expansionist Christianity, and soon one Byzantine emperor would give him the chance to test it out. The Emperor Alexios I Komnenos feared for the future of his empire. His Asian lands had completely fallen into the hands of the Turks, and the Byzantines had neither the resources nor the manpower to do anything about it. By the year 1095, it seemed that even the great capital of Constantinople could be in danger. So, Alexios sent out a dramatic series of requests for help, as one anonymous Byzantine source recalls. Alexios everywhere sent letters heavy with lamentation and full of weeping, begging with tears for the aid of the entire Christian people and promising very generous rewards to those who would give help. Alexios even sent requests for help to some of the empire's bitterest rivals, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. In response to his letters, Alexios had probably expected the kind of help he'd gotten in the past; perhaps a few regiments of well-equipped western knights to strengthen his beleaguered armies. But he would get much, much more than he bargained for. On the 27th of November, 1095, Pope Urban II called together the Council of Clermont, and urged all those present to take up arms under the sign of the cross. For centuries now, European pilgrims had traveled to Jerusalem, to the site where that Jewish rebel had been executed by the occupying Roman forces and where the world's largest religion had been born. As we've seen, this pilgrimage route usually took them through Byzantium, crossing the Bosphorus at Constantinople and passing through the Cilician Gates into Syria and down the coast of the Mediterranean. But with Jerusalem in the hands of the Turks, Pope Urban had a vision of what he called an armed pilgrimage that would spread fire and death in its wake. He declared that with the army they raised, they would recover Jerusalem and the east, and he promised that all those who went to war on his behalf, from the generals to the lowliest foot soldier, would be forgiven of all their sins. To the sin-obsessed people of medieval Europe, this was an incredible promise and the response they got was enormous. The Byzantine historian Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Emperor Alexios, writing in the 12th century, gives one incredible description of the arrival of this great army. Then came an innumerable heterogeneous crowd collected from nearly all the Frankish countries, together with their leaders, kings, dukes, counts, and even bishops. One might have likened them to the stars of heaven or the sand poured out along the edge of the sea, for these men that hurried on to approach Constantinople were as many as there are leaves and flowers in the springtime. This unruly horde is thought to have contained more than 100,000 people, a vast migration of westerners into the east. It was made up largely of mobs of poor peasants gathered from all the towns and villages of Western Europe, and had marched across the continent, looting and stealing everywhere they passed through. They had only got as far as the Rhineland in Germany when they ran out of provisions and in response, they lashed out in anger at the sizable Jewish population who lived there, massacring their villages and stealing their food and livestock. The Jewish poet and legal scholar Eliezer Ben Nathan, writing around the year 1096, described these crusaders in the following terms. Cruel foreigners, fierce and swift Frenchmen and Germans who put crosses on their clothing and were more plentiful than locusts on the face of the earth. When the Emperor Alexios saw this vast horde gathered outside the walls of Constantinople, his blood must have run cold. One particularly unruly group of crusaders led by a man named Peter the Hermit even began looting the countryside and burning Byzantine villages near the capital. The emperor had to dispatch troops to return order. He must have wondered whether unleashing this fearsome force was worth the risk. But perhaps against his better judgment, he decided to make his deal with the devil. After all, these were Christians, even if they were the rough and unsophisticated sort of Latin Christian commonly found in the west, and if this unruly army was what it would take to protect his empire, then he would have to accept it. So, he allowed this vast crusader army to cross the Bosphorus and helped them with organization and supplies while they passed into Anatolia through the Gates of Cilicia and into the Holy Land. The crusaders, despite their general lack of experience and equipment, did very well. Their vast army took the city of Nicea in 1097, and Antioch a year after that. Jerusalem was reached in June of 1099 and taken by an assault one month later, with the crusaders massacring the defenders. For the next 200 years, there would be some form of crusader presence in the eastern Mediterranean. They set up small city-states and crusader kingdoms, a kind of early prototype of the settler states that would later characterize European colonialism. For a period of about two centuries, the gamble that the Emperor Alexios had made paid off. The five emperors of his Komnenos dynasty presided over a sustained restoration of the military, economic, and political position of the Byzantine Empire, while their Muslim rivals were busy fighting the constant influx of Latin armies over the cities of the Mediterranean coast. Under this military cover, the Byzantine Empire was able to flourish again. But the empire was living on borrowed time. The power of the crusades demonstrated to the Byzantines that Western Europe was no longer a distant backwater, the scattered remnants of the Western Empire. It had become a world of its own, with its own tensions, its own conflicts, and its own interests. The deal that Alexios had made had unleashed dark forces that would ultimately spiral out of control and bring the whole empire of Byzantium to the brink of destruction. This would all finally come to a head during perhaps the most disgraceful campaign conducted by a crusading army in the east, and it would be known to history as the Fourth Crusade. The goal of the Fourth Crusade was much like those that had come before it; to recapture the city of Jerusalem which was then held by the powerful Ayyubid Sultanate. Crusades had always been chaotic, poorly organized affairs, run as a kind of directed anarchy, but the Fourth Crusade set a new standard for chaos. Almost immediately, they ran into problems. The crusaders had planned to march to Venice and there buy passage on Venetian ships to the Holy Land. But when they arrived in Venice, they found that they didn't have enough money to pay their transport. The Venetians saw an opportunity. They asked the crusaders to march to the town of Zara, one of their rival cities in modern Croatia that was then held by the Christian kingdom of Hungary, and burn it to the ground. The crusaders debated for a long time but ultimately decided that any action was justified if it ultimately ended up in the recapture of Jerusalem. They marched to Zara, besieged the city, sacked it, and burned it to the ground. This act of violence against their fellow Christians shocked all of Europe. Pope Innocent III issued an order of excommunication for the whole crusader army, writing the following burning condemnation of their actions. Behold; your gold has turned into base metal and your silver has almost completely rusted. Since departing from the purity of your plan and turning aside from the path onto the impassable road, you have withdrawn your hand from the plow, for when you should have hastened to the land flowing with milk and honey, you turned away, going astray in the direction of the desert. The leaders of the crusader army, perhaps wisely, chose not to pass news of their excommunication down to their men. But while many viewed the presence of this vast unruly army as a danger, others saw in it an opportunity. One of these men was named Alexios IV Angelos. Alexios had been the son of a Byzantine emperor, but his father had been deposed in a coup and now he lived in exile with his brother-in-law, the king of Germany. Angelos lived much of his early life in a state of great bitterness about his family's loss, and he must have spent long hours fantasizing about returning himself to the throne of Byzantium. All his life he had been told that the people of Constantinople waited in anxious anticipation of his return and perhaps he even believed it. When he heard news of the failing Fourth Crusade, still heavily in debt to the Venetians, running out of money and wintering in the ruined city of Zara, he saw his chance. Angelos approached the leaders of the crusade and offered them a simple deal; you take the city of Constantinople and put me on its throne, and I will open the vast treasuries of Byzantium, pay off your debts, and fund the rest of your crusade to Jerusalem. The leaders of the crusade jumped at the opportunity. When Pope Innocent heard of their plans, he wrote them again, pleading with them to stop the violence against their fellow Christians, but it was too late. The crusaders set sail in April 1203 aboard a Venetian fleet, including a hundred ships designed for horse transport. But even on their journey to the city, they began to detect warning signs that the Emperor Angelos may not have the army of loyal subjects inside Constantinople that he had boasted about, as one crusader leader Count Hugh of Saint-Paul recalls. We passed by the arm of Saint George and made port on solid ground in the direction of Iconium. This port lies one league from Constantinople. There we were stunned, very much astonished that none of the friends or family of the young man who was with us or any messenger of theirs came to him who might tell him about the situation in the city. When the Fourth Crusade arrived at Constantinople on the 23rd of June, 1203, the city had a population of approximately 500,000 people. One French historian and knight among them, named Geoffrey of Villehardouin, wrote one account that records how the crusaders felt when they finally set their eyes on the great city of Constantine. All those who had never seen Constantinople before gazed very intently upon the city, having never imagined there could be so fine a place in the entire world. They noted the high walls and lofty towers encircling it, its rich palaces and tall churches of which there were so many that no one would have believed it to be true had he not seen it with his own eyes and viewed the length and breadth of that city which reigned supreme over all others. There was indeed no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight. The Byzantine civil wars had weakened the state's army and the city was now defended by a garrison of only 15,000 men, including 5,000 of the famed Varangian Guard, those viking warriors who defended the kings of Byzantium. The crusaders crossed the Bosphorus in their fleet of more than 200 ships and saw that the great defensive chain had been drawn across the Golden Horn as Sir Hugh recalls. Then we made our way towards a certain heavily fortified tower known as Galata. A very great, excessively thick iron chain was fastened to it. It ran across the sea, stretching from the tower all the way to the city walls. After a number of unsuccessful assaults with the crusaders taking heavy losses, on the 12th of April they were finally successful. They landed their ships below the sea walls of Constantinople, much lower than the land walls in the west. They anchored their ships below the walls and swarmed up their masts, scrambling across catwalks to reach the ramparts. Other ships landed on the shoreline and used picks and shovels to hack away at a gateway that the defenders had hurriedly bricked up. The city's defenders were beaten back and the crusaders managed to break the chain that hung over the Golden Horn. They sailed into the Port of Constantinople and raised up their exile prince, Alexios Angelos. He had told them that the people of Constantinople would welcome him with open arms, cheering him as a liberator, but the sounds they heard in that moment were not cheers. In fact, half the population of Constantinople had come out to jeer at the emperor in exile from the walls. But the numbers of the crusader army won out, and the emperor of the time soon fled the city. The exile Alexios Angelos was crowned emperor of the Romans on the 1st of August. But now Angelos realized that his grand promises about paying off the crusaders’ debts would have to be kept. The crusader Sir Hugh, writing to the pope and trying his best to make the conquest of Constantinople look like it had been a good idea, reassured him of Angelos' promises. Our new emperor, with everything that he had promised us fully and completely rendered, bound himself to us by oath to cross the sea with us in next March's voyage, accompanied by 10,000 soldiers and to provide food for one year to the entire army of the lord. But the actual situation was much different. Angelos soon found that he had vastly overestimated the wealth he would find in the imperial treasury. A century of civil wars had all but emptied it and when the previous emperor fled the city, he had taken with him more than a thousand pounds of gold, along with priceless jewels. With the large and unruly crusader army still camped restless and impatient in the city, awaiting their payment, the new Emperor Angelos ordered that the funds should be raised by any means necessary. He ordered soldiers to march through the streets, bursting into churches and taking any priceless works of Byzantine art that they could find. These were to be destroyed and melted down to strip them of their gold. The sight of this new emperor sending troops into the churches to destroy their treasures must have sent shivers down the spines of the average citizen of Constantinople but even then, Angelos had barely made a dent in the sum he had promised to the Latin warriors. Frustrated at their inability to fight with Muslims in the Holy Land, the crusaders began destroying Constantinople's mosques and persecuting its small Muslim community. But Constantinople lived up to its reputation as the refuge of strangers. The city's residents came out in force to protect their Muslim community from the foreign soldiers, and in retaliation the crusaders set the city ablaze. Riots soon broke out in the city. These riots turned into a full-blown revolution and the new Emperor Angelos was swiftly overthrown by a rebel leader named Doukas. He was strangled in February of the year 1204. The crusaders demanded that the new Emperor Doukas honor the debt that had been promised to them. When he refused, they embarked on a campaign of revenge and destruction that saw the city ravaged over three days of blood and fire. The historian Niketas Choniates, who lived in Constantinople at the time, records what happened next. Constantine's fair city, the common delight and boast of all nations, was laid waste with fire and blackened by soot, taken and emptied of all wealth. The crusaders began an unconstrained campaign of looting and destruction aimed at stripping every ounce of value from this great city. Niketas Choniates mourns the events of those days. Bloody raindrops did not pour down from the heaven, nor did the harvest turn blood red, nor did fiery stones fall out of the sky, nor was anything new observed but many- -legged and many-handed justice appeared without the sound of footfall or hand clap, as a zealous avenger fell silently and inaudibly upon the city and made us the most ill-starred of men. During those three days, many works of priceless Roman and Greek art were either stolen or destroyed. The famous bronze horses that decorated the Hippodrome were sent back to adorn the facade of Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice, where they remain to this day. Other statues were melted down to make bronze coins, as Niketas Choniates recalls. These barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not allow the statues standing in the Hippodrome and other marvelous works of art to escape destruction, but all were made into coins. Thus, great things were exchanged for small ones. The crusaders systematically violated the city's holy sanctuaries, destroying or stealing all they could lay hands on. Not even the tombs of the emperors inside the St. Apostles church were spared. Thousands of Constantinople's civilian population were massacred and most of the Byzantine aristocracy fled the city. Niketas Choniates describes a column of aristocratic refugees fleeing the city and being mocked for their ill fortunes by Byzantine commoners. The peasants and common riff-raff jeered at those of us from Byzantium and were thick-headed enough to call our miserable poverty and nakedness equality. Many were only too happy to accept this outrage, saying blessed be the lord that we have grown rich, and buying up for next to nothing the property that their fellow countrymen were forced to offer for sale, for they had not yet much to do with the beef-eating Latins and they did not know that they served up bile-like wine, nor that they would treat the Byzantines with utter contempt. Declaring a great victory for Christendom, the crusaders selected an emperor from among their ranks and divided the territory of the empire into various new crusader states. The Byzantine Empire fractured. Constantinople was ruled by a western emperor for the next 60 years and its citizens referred to this regime as Frankokratia, or the Rule of the Franks. But the Latins soon found that governing this large and fractious empire was no easy matter. Over the course of their rule, they lost one territory after another until their empire was reduced to no more than the city of Constantinople while a number of competing states at Nicea and Trebizond claimed the true mantle of Byzantium. The last Latin emperor of Constantinople was a man nicknamed Baldwin the Broke due to his incessant money problems. He was forced to sell some of the city's priceless Christian relics to keep the state running. He sent the supposed crown of Jesus to the west in exchange for much needed cash, and even sent one of his sons to Venice as collateral for a loan. Baldwin's mismanagement proved too much for the people of the empire and he was eventually ousted from the throne by a Byzantine lord. The throne of Constantinople returned to the hands of the Byzantines. Much of modern Greece and the Asian territories returned to the empire, but it was still a much diminished throne. A monk named Fotii traveled through the Byzantine countryside to Constantinople only a few years later, in the year 1277, and commented on the diminished state of the once great empire. Although the cathedrals are magnificent, we were greatly saddened to see the rest of the city had fallen on hard times. Its trade has been severely curtailed and oh, the outrage! The new trading colonies of the wicked Latins; they have insinuated themselves to secure advantages at the expense of the Greeks. The spacious markets were mostly abandoned. Many of its fine stone churches were in a poor state of repair. Over the decades since the sack of the city and the mismanagement of the Latin emperors, the population of Constantinople had barely recovered. It was no more than 35,000 by the end of the reign of Baldwin the Broke, and the city during this time must have been an eerie place. The streets of the capital no longer bubbled with the sounds of a dozen languages and merchant ships no longer stopped at its harbour. Constantinople was now little more than a cluster of villages inside the ancient walls, separated by overgrown wasteland, fields, and crumbling ruins, as the Burgundian noble Bertrandon de la Broquiere recalled in 1432 with something of a sneer. The city of Constantinople is made up of villages. There is much more open space than buildings. Another visitor during this time, an archbishop of Smyrna named Brocardus, wrote with barely concealed disappointment about the city he found within the great Theodosian walls. Although the city is large, only a modest number of people live there in relation to its size. Barely a third of the city is inhabited. The rest is made up of gardens or fields or vineyards or wasteland. The population consists of fishermen, merchants, artisans, and cultivators. The nobles are few in number. They are as weak as women. If we want to imagine what the city might have looked like during this time, we can look at the example of the war-torn city of Nicosia in Cyprus, where a depopulated buffer zone has existed since 1974, dividing it between north and south. No one lives in this abandoned district of the city and everywhere, nature has taken its course. The roof beams of the abandoned buildings have fallen in, their shattered terracotta tiles littering the ground. Aloes, prickly pears, and olive trees burst through the windows and walls, pushing their roots where the plaster is cracked and broken. Churches and schools, houses and shops are all crumbling, their rooms now open to the sky, turning into shaded gardens of wild, rambling overgrowth. Now, lapwings and larks flit between the crumbling walls while endangered species of flower like orchids and the rare Cyprus tulip grow here among the ruins. Even in the still-populated parts of the city, Constantinople must have been an eerie place. It was built to house more than 500,000 people but it now contained barely 10 percent of that number. Its wide avenues and vast spice markets, its fares and perfumeries, must have been virtually empty, silent, and cold as packs of dogs wandered through the lonely streets. The Byzantine Empire was now a shadow of its former self. The 14th century brought crop failures and the great famine of 1315, but this was followed quickly by the arrival of an even greater disaster, one that would spread death and destruction to every corner of Europe. That was the arrival of the Black Death. The first records of the plague begin in the city of Kaffa in Crimea. The city was under siege by forces of the Mongol Empire, but then what seemed like a miracle happened; a disease began to spread among the Mongol troops, one so devastating that it forced them to abandon their siege. But as a parting shot, the Mongol commander loaded the bodies of some of the plague victims onto his catapults and hurled them into the town. As soon as the Mongols left, a group of merchants left Kaffa for Constantinople and brought the plague with them. Constantinople was the epicenter for the Black Death in Europe. It spread from there along all of Europe's trade routes and caused tremendous mortality along the way. The Black Death would visit Constantinople eleven times over the next hundred years, and each wave of the disease had devastating consequences. The Greek writer Nikephoros Gregoras wrote about the horrifying effects of this disease on the city. During that time, a serious and pestilential disease invaded humanity. Starting from Scythia and Maeotis, it lasted for that whole year, passing through and destroying the continental coast, towns, as well as country areas up to Gadera and the columns of Hercules. The prominent signs of this disease were tumorous outgrowths at the roots of thighs and arms, and simultaneously bleeding ulcerations which carried the infected rapidly out of this life. One Byzantine emperor, Ioannes VI, even had his youngest son killed by the plague. Later in his life, he retired to a monastery after losing a disastrous six-year civil war and devoted his time to writing a recent history of the Byzantine Empire. In it, he described the destruction wrought on his people by the disease. The invading plauge attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of their people, for it swept not only through Pontus, Thrace, and Macedonia, but even Greece, Italy, and all the islands, Egypt, Libya, Judea, and Syria, and spread throughout almost the entire world. So incurable was the evil that neither any regularity of life nor any bodily strength could resist it. Strong and weak bodies were all carried away and those best cared for died in the same manner as the poor. In the 14th century, the Byzantine Empire had begun to look remarkably like the Western Roman Empire nearly a thousand years before. The plague exacerbated its economic problems and a number of destructive civil wars had fatally drained the empire's manpower and resources. In the year 1343, the Empress Dowager known as Anna of Savoy embroiled in a raging civil war over the Byzantine throne, even took the drastic measure of pawning the empire's crown jewels to the Venetians which included the imperial crown. While this was nominally a loan, Venice paid 30,000 ducats for these jewels. This was more than twice what the city of Constantinople produced in a year, and the Byzantines had no hope of ever repaying it. Although subsequent Byzantine rulers tried to get these jewels back, they met with no success and the empire's crown jewels would remain in Venice until the city's capture by Napoleon, when they were likely melted down for their gold. In place of the old Byzantine crown, the rulers of the empire now sat under a shoddy new crown made of gilded leather and cut glass. This was a sad symbol of the reduced state of Byzantium. But luckily, the empire's rivals were also suffering. While it mostly avoided the ravages of the plague, the empire of the Seljuk Turks was destroyed by the arrival of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan. Baghdad was burned in the year 1258 and the River Tigris famously ran red with blood and black with the ink of the books thrown into the waters from Baghdad's libraries. The Seljuk territories were divided into a number of small Mongol client states known as Beyliks. But once the Mongol armies left, one of these states would soon rise to conquer the others and reform the power that the Seljuks had once held. This was a state known as the Ottoman and its rise would spell the final end for Byzantium. The Ottoman rise to power in Anatolia is wreathed in legend and it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. But it's clear that they had great diplomatic skill and the ability to raise vast numbers of troops, especially powerful units of archers. Within 90 years of the first establishment of the Ottoman Beylik, they had grown into a powerful force and the Byzantine Empire had once again lost every one of its Asian territories to its expansion. In the year 1354, a great earthquake struck the region and the Byzantine fortress in Gallipoli in Europe was all but destroyed. The Greek citizens of the area fled the destruction and the Ottoman sultan seized his chance. He crossed the waters into Europe and occupied the area, quickly fortifying it and refusing to leave, despite the pleas of the Byzantine emperor. This was the first foothold in Europe for the new power of the Ottoman Empire, and their presence here would only grow as the 14th and 15th centuries wore on. By 1400, the Roman Empire had been reduced to nothing more than the city of Constantinople, some territories in Greece, and a few Aegean islands. The Ottoman Empire advanced in Europe, swallowing up territories, and slowly a pincer began to form around the city of Constantinople. The powers of the west, realizing too late the danger posed by the Ottomans, put together a number of crusades in an attempt to halt their conquests. But for Byzantium, their help came with a price. In the Council of Florence which opened in the year 1438, the Byzantines met with delegates from the Latin church in an attempt to bring the two sides of the Christian world together. But what took place was less a compromise than a complete surrender. The Greek orthodox priests caved in to Latin pressure on a number of key theological differences and essentially surrendered to the authority of the pope. The reaction in Byzantium was bitter. Many saw this surrender as a necessary evil, a temporary measure while the threat of the Ottoman advance loomed over the city's head. But others saw in it a kind of cultural suicide. One Byzantine priest Loukas Notaras is even said to have uttered this damning indictment. I would rather see a Turkish turban in the midst of the city than a Latin mitre. To many, it must have seemed that Byzantium had pawned away not just its princes, its holy relics, and its crown jewels, but also its very soul. To add insult to injury, this spiritual compromise achieved very little. The Crusade of Nicopolis that the Latin church put together in the year 1396 was utterly defeated by Ottoman forces. Half a century later, the Crusade of Varna met with an even more crushing defeat with the king of Poland, King Vladislav III, dying in battle. These efforts distracted the Ottomans for some time, but their abject failures discouraged the kings of the west from sending any more aid to the dying empire of Byzantium. The man who would finally topple the empire that had lasted for a thousand years was born in the year 1432. He was an Ottoman king by the name of Mehmed II, and he would be known to history as Mehmed the Conqueror. The Sultan Mehmed was an enigmatic character full of contradictions. He came to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in the year 1444, a boy of only 11 years old. His mother had been a slave and when he was crowned, he swore by the prophet and the Quran that he would devote himself to maintaining peace with the empire of Byzantium for as long as he lived. In Constantinople, church bells rang out in celebration at the news of his coronation. But Mehmed had many sides to his character. On one hand he was a poet and a scholar, fluent in several languages, but he also had a cold and ruthless side. Upon becoming sultan, still only a boy, it's said that he strangled his infant half-brother in his crib to remove the potential challenger to his throne. The young Mehmed inherited an empire that was already of considerable size. It held territory across much of what is today Turkey, as well as large holdings in Greece and Bulgaria. But there was still one territory in the midst of all this land that he still couldn't lay claim to. That was the city of Constantinople. At the age of 21, in the year 1453, the young Mehmed decided to take his chances. But the city was still a formidable target. It was guarded by only about 10,000 soldiers but its triple line of land walls, built nearly a thousand years before, had never been breached. Mehmed knew that to bring down those walls, his armies would need a weapon of a size and power that the world had never seen. To help him in this task, he hired the services of a radical Hungarian engineer named Orban. Orban had actually offered his services to the Byzantines first, but the cash-strapped empire had refused to give him any money, perhaps not believing his fantastical promises. So, he went instead to the capital of the Ottoman Empire and approached the Sultan Mehmed himself. Give me the bronze and the gold, he told the sultan, and I will build you a cannon such as the world has never seen. Mehmed asked Orban if he could build a cannon that would bring down the Theodosian walls of Constantinople, and Orban gave this reply. I can cast a cannon of bronze with the capacity of the stone you want. I have examined the walls of the city in great detail. I can shatter to dust not only these walls with the stones from my gun, but the very walls of Babylon itself. The young sultan was impressed and he gave Orban everything he asked for. Three months later, the monster cannon was completed and Orban gave it its name; Basilica. Basilica was one of the largest guns ever built. It was over 10 meters long and weighed so much that it had to be dragged to the walls of Constantinople by a team of 60 oxen and 400 men, leveling the land ahead of it and building bridges over ditches and rivers. The cannon edged towards the city at a rate of only four kilometers a day. Slowly but surely, inch by inch, the death of Constantinople was nearing. One of the most remarkable documents to survive from this time is the journal of a Venetian surgeon named Niccolo Barbaro who lived in Constantinople. It gives us an incredibly vivid account of the events of the days that followed. In this journal, Barbaro writes about the day that the full might of the Ottoman army appeared outside the walls of Constantinople. On the fifth month of April, one hour after daybreak, Mahomet Bay came before Constantinople with about 160,000 men and encamped about two and a half miles from the walls of the city. When the sultan arrived at the city with his army and his enormous cannons, he began the siege with a fearsome bombardment. The great cannon Basilica was horrifically inaccurate but when it landed a hit, the destruction it caused was immense. Iron cannonballs had yet to be developed and so this cannon hurled smooth balls of marble or granite, each weighing three quarters of a ton, and hurtling for over a mile towards the walls of Constantinople. Due to the immense amount of explosives used in each firing, the cannon had to be cooled with olive oil between shots. We can imagine the sweating workmen toiling around this bronze monster, the air wavering above its superheated sides, the smell of sizzling oil spattering from it, and the sharp smell of gunpowder in the air as each enormous plume of smoke burst from its gaping mouth and the sound of its firing echoed off the walls of the city like a thunderclap. Inside the city, the psychological toll of this gun must have been immense. It could only be fired three times a day since it had to be cooled between each shot to prevent the barrel from cracking, but when the thunder of its explosions sounded, the citizens of Constantinople must have ducked down and looked up to their ancient walls in fear to see if they would hold. The Venetian Niccolo Barbaro remembers the frantic attempts to repair the walls as the bombardment rained down on the city. The Venetians set about making good and strong repairs where they were needed at the broken walls. These repairs were made with barrels filled with stones and earth and behind them there was made a very wide ditch with a dam at the end of it which was covered with strips of vine and other layers of branches drenched with water to make them solid so that it was as strong as the wall had been. The bombardment of the city went on for 48 days, with repeated attempts by the Turks to storm the walls. But even under the fearsome cannon fire and vastly outnumbered, the walls of Constantinople held. Barbaro's diary recounts the fierce fighting that took place. They found the Turks coming right up under the walls and seeking battle, particularly the Janissaries, and when one or two of them were killed, at once more Turks came and took away the dead ones without caring how near they came to the city walls. Our men shot at them with guns and crossbows, aiming at the Turk who was carrying away his dead countrymen, and both of them would fall to the ground dead. Then, there came other Turks and took them away, none fearing death but being willing to let ten of themselves be killed rather than suffer the shame of leaving a single Turkish corpse by the walls. In their moment of darkness, the Byzantines looked to their ancient heritage. The Emperor Constantine XI is said to have addressed his soldiers defending the walls with the following cry. Hurl your javelins and arrows against them so that they know that they are fighting with the descendants of the Greeks and the Romans. I want to focus here on what it must have felt like to be a normal person living in the city of Constantinople during this siege, how it must have felt to watch this city finally come apart from the inside. During the siege, prayers were held daily in the Hagia Sophia, the austere, somber chanting of the Byzantine monks soaring out over the imprisoned people of the city. The rolling thunder of cannon fire would have sounded outside the walls like a storm; the firecracker sounds of the smaller guns popping in the distance and the booming thunder of the larger bombards. When the wind blew towards the city, there must have been a constant smell of gunpowder in the streets from the Turkish cannons camped far outside the walls. Barbaro notes the growing shortages in the city. The city was in great distress because of a growing lack of provisions, particularly of bread, wine, and other things necessary to sustain life. As the mood inside the city darkened and panic began to set in, Barbaro remembers the appearance of ominous signs in the sky overhead. On this same day, the 22nd of May, there appeared a sign in the sky which was to tell Constantine, the worthy emperor of Constantinople, that his proud empire was about to come to an end. At the first hour after sunset, the moon rose. It rose as if it were no more than a three-day moon, with only a little of it showing, although the air was clear and unclouded, pure as crystal. The moon stayed in this form for about four hours and gradually increased to a full circle so that at the sixth hour of the night, it was fully formed. When we Christians and the pagans had seen this marvelous sign, the emperor of Constantinople was greatly afraid and so were all his nobles because the Greeks had a prophecy which said that Constantinople would never fall until the full moon should give a sign. Panic wasn't confined to the common people of the city. Barbaro notes the increasing despair of the Byzantine emperor and his grief at being left to fight alone by his western allies. At this point, the most serene emperor began to weep bitterly for grief because the Venetians had not sent help, and when the emperor saw this, he decided to put himself in the hands of our most merciful lord, Jesus Christ, and of his mother Madonna Saint Mary, and of Saint Constantine, defender of his city, for them to guard it. As the walls were pounded into rubble by the enormous Turkish guns, panic began to spread among the commanders of the army, too, a panic that became contagious and spread through all the city's people. Zuan Zustignan, that Genoese of Genoa, decided to abandon his post and fled to his ship which was lying at the boom. The emperor had made this Zuan Zustignan captain of his forces and as he fled, he went through the city crying; the Turks have got into the city. As despair set in in the streets of Constantinople, it was matched by signs of celebration that could be seen in the Turkish camp outside the walls, whose lights were visible at night to the sentries on the walls. The Turks set fires blazing brightly through the whole of their camp. Every tent in their camp lit two fires of great size and the light from them was so strong that it seemed as if it were day. These fires burned until midnight and the sultan had them lit in his camp to encourage his men because the time was coming for the destruction of the city. But finally, the time had come. The final assault on the city began and the Turkish soldiers burst over the walls. Barbaro recalls the sound and fury of the ensuing battle. At sunrise, the Turks entered the city near San Romano, where the walls had been razed to the ground by their cannon. After being driven back from the barbicans, the Turks again fired their great cannon and the pagans, like hounds, came on behind the smoke of the cannon, raging and pressing on each other like wild beasts so that in the space of a quarter of an hour there were more than 30,000 Turks inside the barbicans, with such cries that it seemed a very inferno, and the shouting was heard as far away as Anatolia. Just like the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries before, the Ottomans rampaged through the city and the bloodshed was tremendous. Around the city, the flags of Byzantium, those crescent moon and stars, were torn down and Ottoman flags were flown in their place. Hopelessness began to set in among the citizens. All through the day, the Turks made a great slaughter of Christians through the city. The blood flowed in the city like rain water in the gutters after a sudden storm, and the corpses of Turks and Christians were thrown into the Dardanelles where they floated out to sea like melons along a canal. No one could hear any news of the emperor, what he had been doing or whether he was dead or alive, but some said that his body had been seen among the corpses and it was said that he had hanged himself at the moment when the Turks broke in at the San Romano gate. Finally, the city was taken, and the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror strode into the ruined streets, victorious. It’s said that when he stepped into the haunting ruins of the ancient palace of Boukoleon, probably built by the Emperor Theodosius in the 5th century a thousand years before, Mehmed uttered two haunting lines by the famous Persian poet Firdusi, which encapsulate the melancholy ruin that must have spread before his eyes. The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars. The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab. The Byzantine Empire had lasted for 1,123 years and 18 days. But now the great liturgy that echoed from the dome of the Hagia Sophia fell silent. After the fall of Constantinople, a number of Byzantine lords held on to the fragments of the empire for a few more years, but by 1461 they had all surrendered. Mehmed the Conqueror moved the capital of his empire to Constantinople and gave himself the title of Caesar. He also set about an ambitious project to restore the capital of Constantine just as the ancient emperor had more than a millennia before. At the palace of Blacharnae, now crumbling and in ruins, he began a series of renovations, laying out magnificent gardens that the historian Critobulus of Imbros recalls with awe. Around the palace he laid out a circle of large and beautiful gardens burgeoning with various fine plants, bringing forth fruits in season, flowing with abundant streams, cold, clear, and good to drink, studded with beautiful groves and meadows, resounding and chattering with flocks of singing birds. For the city's beleaguered inhabitants, the conquest of the city would be a trauma that they could never successfully heal from. The painful truth of their history was converted into legend just as an oyster converts painful grains of sand into pearls. One such legend is of the priests who had been chanting in the Hagia Sophia when the city fell and who were killed by the rampaging soldiers. They had not been massacred, the legend says, and in fact had melted by some miracle into the south wall of the sanctuary. One day when the city was back in Christian hands, they would return and take up their service at the point they had been interrupted. Another legend says that the last emperor of Byzantium hadn't perished in the battle for the city. In fact, he had been rescued by an angel and turned to stone. Somewhere in a cave below the Golden Horn, the marble emperor awaits to one day return in triumph. Meanwhile, the Turkish people settled in Byzantium and a great cultural shift took place in the city's population. But the imprint of Byzantium would leave just as indelible a mark on its conquerors as its conquerors left on it. Mehmed II actually claimed that the Ottoman Empire was a continuation of the Roman Empire, not an end to it. In his court, he gathered Italian artists, humanists, and Greek scholars, and allowed the Byzantine church to continue functioning in the city. He collected in his palace a library which included works in Persian, Greek, and Latin, and even invited a Venetian painter to come and paint his portrait. Although his successors abandoned much of these efforts and any claim to the legacy of Rome, it’s clear that at least for this emperor of the Ottomans, Byzantium had left a deep impression on his soul. The legacy of Byzantium left its mark too on the religion of Islam. While Mecca and Medina were its spiritual heart, Constantinople became its cultural heart. The crescent moon had been the symbol of Byzantium since as early as 670 BC, in honor of the city's patron goddess Artemis. After the capture of Constantinople, Mehmed adopted it for his own banner. Over the centuries that followed, this crescent moon would become the official standard of the Ottoman Empire and by the mid-20th century had become recognized as the symbol of Islam. As Constantinople fell, the city that had once accepted refugees from all corners of the world now sent its own people streaming across Europe and wherever they went, Byzantine refugees brought with them the ancient learnings of the Greeks. While Aristotle had been known in Western Europe for centuries, now the Latins who welcomed the fleeing Byzantines were introduced to the writings of Demosthenes and Xenophon, Plato, Aeschylus, and the Iliad. The historian Edward Gibbon summarizes the seismic effect this had on the learning of Europeans. The restoration of the Greek letters in Italy was prosecuted by a series of immigrants who were destitute of fortune and endowed with learning. From the terror or oppression of the Turkish arms, the natives of Thessalonica and Constantinople escaped to a land of freedom, curiosity, and wealth, and taught their native language in the schools of Florence and Rome. Those fleeing Byzantium would tutor scholars like the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the Italian poet Poliziano in Florence. The wealthy Medici family of Italy became patrons of one Byzantine lecturer, opening up the Platonic Academy of Florence. In this way, the fall of Byzantium laid the seeds of what would become the European Renaissance and as one age of history ended, another would begin. The fall of Byzantium disrupted long- -established trade routes that joined Europe to Asia along the Silk Road. This seismic shift forced European traders to find new routes across the continent, to the markets of India and China. The developing technology of sailing ships like the caravel became increasingly crucial. Only 35 years after the fall of Constantinople, in the year 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southernmost cape of Africa and opened up the sea route to India. Only four years after that, the explorer Christopher Columbus would land in the Bahamas and open up the exploration of the New World. Columbus was inspired to undertake his voyage in part because of the ancient texts known as the Geographia, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Claudius Ptolemy. This text was one of those that was preserved in the libraries of Byzantium and which was brought to Western Europe after its fall. Although governed by different rulers under a different religion, Byzantium would continue to welcome the tired and huddled masses of the world to shelter behind its great walls. In the year 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered Hispaniola, the European antisemitism that had been unleashed by the First Crusade reached a fever pitch. All the Jews of Spain were expelled by the royal Alhambra Decree and the Sultan Bayezid II, the oldest son of Mehmed the Conqueror, himself now a man of 45 years old, dispatched the Ottoman navy to escort the Jews of Spain safely back to settle in his lands. For another generation at least, the city of Constantinople would once again earn the title that once emblazoned its name in the European imagination; refuge for strangers, the queen of the queens of cities. Today, as the French writer Gautier found at the beginning of this episode, the memory of Byzantium has been buried and not only beneath the streets of modern Istanbul. European enlightenment thinkers overwhelmingly shared this view that the Byzantine Empire was a fossilized society, unchanging and static, a relic of the past. They believed that the Byzantine Empire had played little part in the history of Europe except as an embarrassing fossil, a relic of a bygone age. The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, in his book Istanbul, writes about how the memory of Byzantium has been lost. Like most Istanbul Turks, I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded black-robe Greek orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with Hagia Sophia, and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant that there was little need to know about it. As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air, or so I'd been led to believe. No one had told me that it was their grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren who now ran the shoe stores, patisseries, and haberdashery shops of Beyoglu. Like Gautier, Pamuk writes movingly about the city of his childhood, a place where the crumbling ruins of the past rose out of the modern streets and the faded districts of Ottoman wood-paneled houses, all of it full of a strange and melancholy beauty. In Istanbul's poor neighborhoods, beauty resides entirely in the crumbling walls, in the grass, icy, weeds, and trees I remember growing from the towers and walls of the castles. The beauty of a broken fountain, an old ramshackle mansion, the crumbling wall of an old mosque, the vines and plane trees intertwining to shade the old blackened walls of a wooden house. These sad, now-vanished ruins gave Istanbul its soul but to discover the city's soul in its ruins, to see these ruins as expressive of the city's essence, you must travel down a long labyrinthine path strewn with historical accidents. Pamuk talks about the city's power to be seen through European and Turkish eyes, about how the city of strangers had now become a stranger to its own citizens. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke, condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect; a fountain from whose spouts no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for 80 years, a collapsing building, a row of houses with crooked window casings. None of these things look beautiful to the people who live amongst them. To savor Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must first and foremost be a stranger to them. Today, the lonely ruins of the Theodosian walls of Constantinople still line the modern city of Istanbul, tracing their battered and crumbling route from the Sea of Marmara to the waters of the Golden Horn. They stand as a testament to the spirit of a city that once promised to protect all the people of the world and shelter them in its embrace. These walls serve as a testament to the power of the people who held the remnants of Rome together into a flourishing and stable empire, a wellspring of art and culture, and a repository of the knowledge of the past that would pass its wealth onto the generations that came after. They stand as a symbol of the empire that never truly died but lives on today, ingrained in the fabric of the cultures of both east and west, Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, reaching back down the ages to the time of the ancients. I want to end the episode with the lament written by the great Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, upon seeing the destruction of his city after its sacking by the crusader army of 1204. Today, this lament stands as one of the most moving pieces of writing ever written about a lost and destroyed city, a wail of sorrow that speaks down to us through the ages. As you listen, try to imagine what it would have been like to be a citizen of Constantinople in the final days of its empire. Imagine what it would feel like to walk the abandoned streets of Constantine city, with its roof beams fallen in and olive trees growing among the patches of wasteland that now spread out between its sparse inhabited zones. Imagine what it must have felt like to walk its empty market places and hollowed out palaces, to run your hand along its ancient stones and see the sunlight fall on its faded murals, its glittering golden icons, and the earth-red tiles of its rooftops. Imagine seeing the sun set on the final days of Rome as the light fades over the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, over the rippling waters of the Bosphorus and for the final time, on the dying empire of Byzantium. City fortified, City of the Great King, tabernacle of the most high, praise and song of his servants and beloved refuge for strangers, queen of the queens of cities, song of songs and splendor of splendors, and the rarest vision of the rare wonders of the world, who is it that has torn us away from you like darling children from their adoring mother? What shall become of us? Where shall we go? What consolation shall we find in our nakedness, torn from your bosom as from a mother's womb? When shall we look on you not as you now are; a plane of desolation and a valley of weeping, trampled by armies and despised and rejected, but exalted and restored, revered by those who humbled you and provoked you? As we left the city behind, I threw myself just as I was on the ground and reproached the walls. If what you were built to protect is no more, for what purpose do you still stand? We went forth, weeping and casting our lamentations like seeds. Thank you once again for listening to The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Reading the diary of Niccolo Barbaro was David Kelly from the YouTube channel Voices of the Past. He'll be releasing a full reading of that source in the near future and you can find it on Voices of the Past soon. Special thanks also go to the author and historian Peter Sandham for agreeing to act as a special consultant on this episode. We were joined on this episode by the choir from the St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London, bringing us the incredible sound of Byzantine chanting. If you enjoyed these traditional performances, they will be available to download for all Patreon subscribers. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at PaulMMCooper. If you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_of_Civ_Pod, with underscores separating the words. This podcast can only keep going with with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help to keep the podcast ad-free. You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading onto patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast or just Google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N to contribute something and help keep this podcast running. For now, all the best, and thanks for listening.
Amazing video, loved watching it. Although I'm going to have to request that Paul takes action for clearing some of the hate speech in the comments. As someone of Turkish background I felt especially uncomfortable reading comments encouraging my own city to be invaded and for me to die.
I just finished watching the two parts of this series and I loved them. I continue to be amazed by the outstanding quality of the writing and the visuals. Thank you so much!
I just wanted to thank you u/paulmmcooper for this. You are a great storyteller and listening to you talk about the tragedy of fallen civilizations has become one of my most treasured passtimes.
I listen to your podcast every evening before bed. It’s strangely soothing. “Also this will pass” kinda mood so to say. But I’m wondering... will there be new episodes?