by Jan Morris
Crusaders though they were, sailing to a Christian city, they made no attempt at a peaceful approach. When some of those fishing boats got in the way, they instantly attacked them; and when the fleet sailed, as we did, close under the walls of the city, the soldiers on deck were already cleaning their weapons for battle. It was the feast day of St John the Baptist, whose head was among the most precious of the relics enshrined in Byzantium: the ships flew all their flags in honour of the saint, and the noblemen hung out their decorated shields again all along the gunwales.
The people of Constantinople swarmed to the ramparts in their thousands to watch the fleet sail in. The soldiers looked back in awe at the walls towering above their ships. This was the most perfectly fortified city in the world. On its landward side, cutting off the peninsula from the mainland of Thrace, were the celebrated walls built by Theodosius II in the fifth century: four and a half miles long, and elaborately constructed in four lines of defence – moat and three walls. Then all along the shoreline, enclosing the entire peninsula, a sea-wall protected the city against amphibious attack. Some four hundred towers commanded these encircling defences, and behind them underground reservoirs, granaries and innumerable windmills made the city self-sufficient for months of siege. A huge chain, controlled by a winch on a hill above, blocked the entrance to the Golden Horn. The imperial army was concentrated within the capital, and at the core of it was a formidable praetorian guard of Danish and English mercenaries, the Varangian guard.
Nobody had ever cracked these defences. For a thousand years they had kept the barbarians at bay. Six times Muslim armies had been beaten back from them; Goths, Huns, Hungarians, Bulgars, Serbs had all been repulsed. No wonder the Crusaders eyed the walls of Constantinople thoughtfully as they sailed by. ‘There was indeed no man so brave and daring,’ says Villehardouin convincingly, ‘that the flesh did not shudder at the sight…’
The fleet anchored on the other side of the Bosphorus, on the Asian shore. The army encamped itself at Scutari, now Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had her hospital six centuries later and where now, from the big turreted railway station on the waterfront, the trains run away to Anatolia, Aleppo, Baghdad and Teheran. The soldiers looted the surrounding countryside for victuals and souvenirs: the leaders of the Crusade took over one of the Byzantine Emperor’s several country palaces. It was an ominous scene from the battlements of Constantinople, across the water. You can easily see from one shore to the other, and the huge encampment on the foreshore there, its smoke in the daytime, its lights at night, the forested riggings of its ships off-shore, must have cast a chill in the heart. What was that great host preparing? Was it merely passing by, or was it inexplicably, beneath the banner of the Cross, about to attack this ancient fortress of Christ?
The emperor did not wait to find out. His fleet, ramshackle in the Golden Horn, was in no condition to tackle the Crusade, but within a couple of days a squadron of his cavalry did ride down upon the Scutari encampment, being humiliatingly driven off. Two days later the Crusaders declared their purpose. They put Young Alexius on the deck of a warship, and displayed him below the walls of the city. They had come, they shouted, to place him upon the throne, since he was the true king and natural lord of Byzantium. ‘The man you now obey as your lord rules over you with no just or fair claim to be your emperor, in defiance of God and the right. Here is your rightful lord and master. If you rally to his side you will be doing as you ought, but if you hold back, we will do to you the very worst that we can.’
These were specious arguments (long-winded, too, to be yelled into the wind from the deck of a galley) and the people’s predominant response, as they looked down at the Young Alexius, was ‘Never heard of him!’ Succession by coup or revolution had always been a feature of the Byzantine monarchy, and it was the accepted form for the populace to transfer their loyalties to a new emperor, however bloodily he had come to power. There was no suggestion that the people of Constantinople thought of Alexius III as an unlawful usurper. Hardly a single citizen defected from the imperial cause to join the pretender, just as nobody tried to rescue his blinded father Isaac, now old and derelict, from the dungeons in which he had so long been immured.
So it had to be done by force. On 5 July 1203, the first assault ships crossed the Bosphorus, each galley towing a transport, and made for the mouth of the Golden Horn. Most previous assaults on Constantinople had been from the landward side, the attacking armies beating themselves vainly against Theodosius’s tremendous walls. Dandolo knew that the weakest part of the defences was the sea-wall along the Golden Horn. The Horn was unbridged in those days, and on its northern bank, opposite Constantinople proper, was the foreign quarter of Galata, where the trading colonies were settled, and the envoys of the powers were all obliged to live. Halfway up its hill stood the massive Galata Tower, and from it ran the chain across the entrance to the Golden Horn: it was 1,500 feet long, with links the length of a man’s forearm, and it was suspended a few feet above the surface of the water.
Once through this chain, and the Crusaders would be under the lee of the city on its weakest side. The walls along its northern shore were feeble compared to the others, without moats or enceintes, and made difficult to defend by the steep streets running directly down the hills behind them. Dandolo, the tactician of the assault, accordingly ordered the first landing to be made on the Galata shore. There was no resistance. At the first sight of the Norman knights on their armoured horses, led by grooms out of the sally-ports of the assault craft, the Greek forces fled from the waterfront, and in no time a bridgehead was established. Next day they captured the Galata Tower, after a stiff fight, and winched down the chain across the Horn. In sailed the warships, led by the mighty Aquila, into the crowded waterway, storming and burning whatever ships they found there: and so by 6 July the flank of the city was turned, and they were ready to storm it.
From the middle of the Ataturk Bridge, the higher of the two bridges that now span the Golden Horn, one may see almost exactly the view the soldiers saw, as they planned their assault from the decks of their warships. This is visibly the city’s soft side. It has none of the piled, phalanx look that characterizes Constantinople from the Sea of Marmara. Here all the muddled bazaars, speckled with small mosques and splashed here and there with green, give the place a rather helpless look, and the great buildings along the skyline, which look so forbidding from the sea, seem almost avuncular from the Golden Horn.
Along the shoreline you can make out the remains of fortifications. It is a sleazy shore there, a slum of small warehouses and factories, old houses crumbled into squalor, small boatyards where the caiques are caulked, tanneries and tyre depots. Big ships do not moor here, only grubby coasters from the Anatolian islands, their masts shipped, their crews wearing cloth caps and eating fried fish sandwiches out of carrier bags. But not quite obliterated by the confusion, still just distinguishable against the warren of streets on the hillside behind, turrets stand shadowy, and city gates reveal themselves. In 1203 this line of walls was complete, and joined the Theodosian walls at the head of the Golden Horn. Its turrets were manned all along the water’s edge, and there was no way of turning it. This was the one place, though, where the defences of Constantinople might be broken – by the skills not of soldiers, who had invariably failed to take this city, but of sailors, who had never tried before.
For it was the Venetians themselves who mounted the assault here, on 17 July 1203. The French decided to march to the head of the Horn, along its northern bank, and attack the Theodosian walls at the point where they joined the sea-wall on the waterfront. The Venetians resolved simply to hurl themselves across the Horn, a very Dandolan device. The point that they chose as the fulcrum of their attack can be identified. It is a rotted mass of masonry still called the Petrion Gate, immediately below the modest residence of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, the Pope of eastern Christendom, who still lives in somewhat prickly circumstances in this Muslim and less than philhell
ene city. If you run your eye along the line of the waterfront buildings, you may identify almost exactly the site of the first landing: a small grubby square, with a struggling tree or two, beside the remains of the gateway at the water’s edge.
In the small hours of every morning they open the Ataturk Bridge to let the ships go through, and then, with the flashing of the lights, the beat of the engines, the slow movement of the vessels down the waterway in the dark, you can best imagine the Venetians preparing for their assault before the dawn of the battle. The fleet’s room for manoeuvre was awkwardly small. The Horn is only half a mile wide there, the tide runs fast, and somehow several score ships had to be navigated across this narrow channel simultaneously. The waterway was jammed full with their threshing oars and creaking hulls, and the later Venetian artists, when they came to recall this epic moment in the idealized historical reconstructions they were fond of, rendered it confusedly. In an excitable version I have before me now, for instance, the Golden Horn seems to be one solid mass of warships, all ropes, masts, spars, oars and ladders, and one peers along the walls of Constantinople through a curtain of arrows and plunging missiles. Sailors clutch yard-arms, arrows plunge into knightly shields, axemen hack each other, men-at-arms fall upside-down into what little can be seen of the water.
But serenely dominating the picture, armoured on the foredeck of his flagship, is old blind Dandolo, holding a flag and pointing firmly towards Santa Sophia. This, it seems, is perfectly just, for he really did lead the assault. If he could not actually see the walls,
Constantinople, 1203
at least he had them in his mind’s eye, and at his inspiration the Venetians had devised a particular mechanism for attacking the high towers from the water. Using the lateen yard-arms of their ships, they contrived a series of gangplanks which protruded from the prows of their galleys at a steep angle, like ladders to the tops of the ramparts. Covered with awnings of leather, to protect the assaulters against fire and arrows, these were jammed hard against the battlements by the impetus of the ships’ grounding.
Supported by 250 shipboard catapults, up these precarious contraptions crawled the assault force, beneath a storm of stones and arrows, and presently the first of the towers was in Venetian hands. Instantly grappling ladders were thrown against the walls below, and the main body of the army swarmed up to the ramparts. The fight did not last long. Inspired by the frail but militant figure of their Doge, sword in hand on the strand below, the Venetians cleared the battlements tower by tower – twenty-five in all, in a single hour’s fighting – and by afternoon the city seemed to be won. The news went home to Venice, we are told, by carrier pigeon across the Balkans.
‘O city, city!’ To disembark in Constantinople thus must have been a traumatic experience for the more sensitive of the Venetians. This was a holy city, after all. Constantine, its founder, had set up his capital here after the vision which, on the hills outside Rome, had converted him to Christianity, and he conceived it from the start as a divine city: asked how far he proposed to go, as he first marked out its limits, he is supposed to have replied, ‘Until He stops who goes before me.’ His successor Justinian too, when he built the matchless shrine of Santa Sophia, felt he was fulfilling a sacred destiny. ‘Now at last,’ legend had him saying as he entered its gigantic nave for the first time, ‘I have outbuilt Solomon.’
Even the glitter of Venice paled somewhat beside this marvel. The shape of the place was strictly functional. Through the Theodosian walls two roads entered the city, one from the west through the Adrianople Gate, one from the south through the ceremonial entrance called the Golden Gate. They met on the spine of the ridge, then proceeded the triumphal way called the Mese through a succession of forums, each the pride of a different emperor, to the complex of state buildings, memorials and open spaces that was the heart of the city.
It was a city of marvellous statues. Lysippus was supposed to have created the great bronze Hercules, whose thumb was as big as a man’s waist, Phidias had made the image of Athene Promachos, Athene the Champion, that had been brought here from the Acropolis in Athens. The bronze group of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf had come from Rome at the foundation of the city; the wooden statue of Athene was supposed to have been removed by Aeneas from Troy; the lovely marble figure of Hera was from the isle of Samos. Bellerophon riding Pegasus was so big that ten herons had made their nests between the crupper and the horse’s head. A huge bronze ox-head from Pergamon gave its name to the Forum of the Ox, and here is how Nicetas described the statue of Helen of Troy: ‘Fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars… all harmony, grace and elegance.’
It was a city of columns, too. There was a column whose elaborate frieze, if you read it right, supposedly foretold the future. There was a column with hermits living on the top. There was a column one of whose trap-doors flew open every hour, to announce the time of day. There was a column into whose base had allegedly been inserted the crosses of the two thieves at the Crucifixion, St Mary Magdalene’s alabaster jar and the basket of the miraculous loaves. There was a column carrying an equestrian figure of Justinian, and another with the Empress Helena, and another with a bronze woman, Servant of the Winds, swinging with the prevailing breezes. There was Constantine’s Pillar sheathed all in copper. There was an Egyptian obelisk. There was a sinister and beautiful object, called the Column of the Three Serpents, which had come from the oracle at Delphi.
It was a city of churches, strewn across every quarter of it – more than one hundred dedicated to the Virgin alone, at one time or another, and thirty-five to the Baptist. At one extreme there was Santa Sophia, which seemed to have been lowered into place from heaven itself, which was served by 600 clergy and illuminated at night by lanterns, flickering from each arch of its dome, to be seen like a vision far out at sea. At the other extreme there were the myriad tiny shrines and hermitages which were hidden away in back-alleys, in the purlieus of palaces or the crannies of bazaars, or the scores of monasteries and nunneries which were embedded unobtrusively in the fabric of the place.
The churches of Constantinople were built in the sweet symmetry, at once innocent and commanding, which was the essence of Byzantine architecture, and was to find its way across the western world in successive adaptations of the Romanesque. They were decorated with the mosaics, frescoes and woodwork which only Byzantine artists could create. They were crammed with holy objects: fragments of the True Cross or the Virgin’s veil, heads of St Stephen or the Baptist, the lance that pierced the Saviour’s side, St Thomas’s doubting finger, arms and legs of holy martyrs, and, most revered of all, the wonder-working Nikopoeia Madonna, painted by St Luke himself, an icon of victory which was carried into action in the van of the imperial armies, and whose sheltering veil, every Friday morning, was miraculously parted as a pledge of the divine favour.
Then there were the kaleidoscopic bazaars of the city, which made even the markets of Rialto look ordinary. They were a labyrinth of lanes, ordered trade by trade, commodity by commodity, and in them cultures and continents met. If there were always buyers from Greece and Italy, there were always sellers from Persia, Afghanistan, India, Russia. Slavs, Armenians, Syrians, Negroes, Jews all frequented these stalls, and you could buy Siberian furs and skins there, honey from Turkestan, amber from the distant Baltic, cottons and sugar from the Levant, ivories, silks, spices, carpets and objets d’art from India, Tibet and China. There were no restrictions on imports to Constantinople: it was the whole world’s bazaar.
In the heart of all these wonders lay the Augusteum, the great open place outside Santa Sophia which was the focus of the capital. Here was the Hippodrome, the huge arena which was not only the empire’s sporting centre, but its great place of public assembly: criminals were executed there, triumphs were celebrated, and there the two national factions of old, the Blues and the Greens, had fought out their differences and proclaimed their emperors. Dynasties had risen and toppled in the Hippodrome. In the
centre of it stood the serpent column, the Egyptian obelisk, and a whole parade of curious blocks, pillars and pyramidal objects; all around were heroic bronze figures of famous charioteers, with their horses, commissioned by the heroes themselves in self-esteem, or sometimes by their supporters in tribute. And mounted magnificently on the emperor’s box at the head of the stadium, more lovely than nature itself, stood the four golden horses of Constantinople, the most famous animal figures ever made by man, nostrils elegantly flared, forelegs raised in postures of gentle but masterly power – cast from some alloy no man could analyse, brought from some source no man could remember, created long before by some genius whose name was forgotten.
Immediately beside the Hippodrome, immediately opposite Santa Sophia, stood the Bucoleon, the Great Palace, just as the Doge’s Palace stood beside the Piazza and the Basilica (the church for God, it used to be said, the palace for the emperor, the arena for the people). It was like an inner city of its own, spilling down the hillside in a complex of pavilions, courtyards, churches, barracks and gardens to its water-gate on the Marmara shore. It was the palace of palaces, full of astonishments. The Imperial Silk Factory occupied only a small corner of its space; in the imperial chapel even the nails and hinges were made of silver; the palace lighthouse was a signal station too, and its flashes kept the emperor in touch with his officials far away in Asia Minor. The very complexity of the place, corridor leading into gallery, hall opening only into anteroom, was designed to overawe the princes and ambassadors of lesser powers, while the core of it all, the audience chamber of the emperor himself, seemed to simple visitors actually magic. Mechanical birds twittered on enamelled branches as one entered it. Automatic lions roared, beating the ground with their tails. The towering blonde Varangians, like creatures from another planet, stood perpetually on guard with their battle-axes. When at last one reached the imperial presence, the emperor was discovered sitting on a sumptuous throne of gold and diamonds dressed in robes of many colours: but even as one made one’s obeisances, to a peal of organs he was whisked into the air and out of sight, descending a moment later still on his throne but in a yet more dazzling change of costume.