The majority of the fleet passed into the Dardanelles, where they stopped at the ancient city of Abydos on the coast of Asia Minor. They were now striking deep into the heart of the Byzantine Empire. About 150 miles away, down at the end of the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosphorus, lay Constantinople itself, determined to fight and repulse the intruders.
The citizens of Abydos prudently surrendered to the crusader army. Mindful, as they neared Constantinople, that they needed to make as positive an impression as possible, the leaders set up a secure guard on the city and prevented any ill-disciplined looting by the army. This did not mean that the crusaders took nothing: the winter corn crop was due to be harvested and the westerners commandeered everything that was available because their own supplies were beginning to run low. Good weather allowed Baldwin and Boniface to join their colleagues at Abydos within a week. Reunited, the fleet prepared for the final approach to Constantinople.
Passage of the Bosphorus was far from easy, largely because of the prevailing north-easterly winds and adverse currents that headed down from the Black Sea, running at up to six or seven knots.
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The skill of the Venetian sailors saw them safely through, however, and as they sailed up towards Constantinople, ‘the full array of warships, galleys and transports seemed as if it were in flower. It was indeed, a marvellous experience to see so lovely a sight,’ as Villehardouin expressed it.
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For the Byzantines, of course, the crusaders’ ships, for all their colour, embodied a terrible threat. On 23 June, the eve of St John the Baptist’s Day, the fleet arrived at the abbey of St Stephen, about five miles south-west of its target. Soon the crusaders had their first real sight of the city they had come to attack, and as their ships cast anchor they began to absorb what lay before them.
Constantinople was indisputably the greatest metropolis in the Christian world. Its huge population - estimated at 375—400,000—dwarfed every city in the West. In comparison, Paris and Venice probably had about 60,000 inhabitants each. Girded by its formidable walls, Constantinople excited awe, admiration and not a little trepidation amongst the crusaders.
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What had they taken on? Villehardouin provides a vivid insight into their feelings:
I can assure you that 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 all the world. They noted the high walls and lofty towers encircling it, and its rich palaces and tall churches, of which there were so many that no one would have believed it to be true if he had not seen it with his own eyes, and viewed the length and breadth of that city which reigns supreme over all others. There was indeed no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight. Nor was this to be wondered at, for never had so grand an enterprise been carried out by any people since the creation of the world.
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Robert of Clari echoed the sense of awe: ‘the fleet regarded the great size of the city, which was so long and so wide, and they marvelled at it exceedingly’.
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Constantinople lay at the heart of an empire that encompassed parts of the modern countries of Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria, up to the northern frontier along the River Danube. It also included the western half of Asia Minor and much of its northern and southern coastlines, as well as the Greek islands, Crete and Cyprus. It was a huge, heterogeneous and culturally complex entity. The inhabitants of Constantinople took great pride in their city - they called it ‘New Rome’, or ‘the Queen of Cities’ - descriptions based on its powerful history and sustained by its continued splendour. The Emperor Justinian wrote of ‘the imperial city guarded by God’.
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Rome, of course, could boast an imperial past and many great buildings, but the ravages of barbarian invasions and the instability of the early medieval papacy had done little to preserve its heritage. Of all cities known to Christians at this time, only Baghdad was greater in size, although by reason of faith and physical distance only the most intrepid merchants and travellers had seen it. The inhabitants of Constantinople had adopted the Virgin Mary as their special protector and the discovery of relics associated with her in the eleventh century further enhanced this sense of their city having been divinely blessed.
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Constantinople was founded in the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine established his control over both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire. To commemorate this victory (in the year 324) he ordered the Greek settlement of Byzantium to be renamed Constantinople in his honour and took measures to make the city the heart of his empire. Four years later, on foot and with spear in hand, he paced out the limits of his capital, although later emperors enlarged this first city. It was no coincidence that the new Rome was built on seven hills, the same number as its illustrious predecessor. Constantine had chosen the site carefully, poised between Asia and the West, at the gateway to the Black Sea and provided, for the most part, with strong natural defences. The Bosphorus and the Hellespont offered entrances to the Sea of Marmara, described by one historian as ‘a natural moat’.
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The city has a triangular shape, with the Sea of Marmara to the south and the inlet of the Golden Horn to the north, creating two of the sides. The Golden Horn is just over six miles long and forms a perfect harbour. The weakest side of the triangle is the landward: few natural obstacles stand between this and the great plains rolling north-west towards the Danube—the frontier with the barbarian world - and the need for a massive system of fortifications here was to concern many future emperors.
On 11 May 330 Constantinople was formally rededicated and became the effective capital of the Roman Empire. Eighteen years previously Constantine had been the first emperor to convert to Christianity and to publicly endorse the faith. Constantinople emerged, therefore, from a synthesis of Roman imperialism, the Hellenic tradition and the emerging power of Christianity.
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The impact of these three forces can be seen in the physical, intellectual and spiritual development of the Byzantine Empire as its fortunes ebbed and flowed over the next few centuries. The reign of Justinian (527—65) was a particular high point as he did much to recover parts of the empire lost to the Goths in previous decades, while in Constantinople itself he initiated a remarkable building programme, centred upon the church of Hagia Sophia.
Over the centuries Byzantium had to face threats from all points of the compass. The period 600—800 was particularly difficult, with the emergence of Islam as a dynamic and aggressive new force to the east and the rise of a powerful empire to the west under Charlemagne (d. 814). In the late ninth and early tenth centuries the Christianisation and takeover of the kingdom of Bulgaria represented an advance for the Byzantines, but their crushing defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 saw the loss of most of their lands in Asia Minor and the humiliating capture of their emperor. The advent of the crusades led to greater engagement with western Europe. At some levels this was positive: with the help of the First Crusade, Alexius I Comnenus recovered the western regions of Asia Minor, although the Greeks’ efforts to impose their overlordship on the principality of Antioch proved a struggle. Furthermore, the Normans of Sicily emerged as a violent and expansionist power in the central Mediterranean and the ambitions of both the papacy and the German Empire also needed to be kept in check. Under Manuel Comnenus (1143-80) the empire had established a position of genuine strength, although after his death the subsequent decades of political turmoil in Byzantium did much to create the conditions in which the Fourth Crusade found itself outside this magnificent city. A serious degeneration of political order had taken place in Constantinople prior to the crusade. The period from 1101 to 1180 witnessed very few problems, yet between 1180 and 1204 there were 58 rebellions and conspiracies. This demonstrates the build-up of tensions under Manuel and how the different elements within the imperial family were dissatisfied with their position. There is a further conjunction between this situation and the growing number of provincial uprisings, such as the establishment of the Bulgarian Empire and the losses of Cyprus and Thessalonica.
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Many of the buildings of late antiquity survived to dominate the skyline and topography of medieval Constantinople. Together they told the story of its history and formed the essence of its identity and appearance at the time of the Fourth Crusade. The crusaders saw before them a true marvel - a mixture of formidable defences, splendid churches and sumptuous palaces, as well as the essential everyday workings of any city, although in almost all cases on a scale unknown to most of them. The city itself, broken up by small hills, encloses an area of approximately 11½ square miles, although even in medieval times suburbs extended outside the walls to the north and on to the other side of the Golden Horn at Galata.
One of the most impressive and intimidating features of Constantinople were the land walls. As the city expanded back in the fifth century, the Emperor Theodosius II (408-50) took measures to accommodate the extra citizens and to provide adequate defence against the ravaging Huns.
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These fortifications, more than 3½ miles long, formed a mighty impediment to any potential aggressor. Even today they are, for the most part, complete. Some sections are restored and others still ruined, yet as the walls rise and fall along the contours of the land, the sheer length of this barrier seems endless, at times stretching from horizon to horizon in front and behind.
The walls consist of a multi-faceted series of obstacles (see plate section). The inner wall has 96 towers, 58 feet high and 175 feet apart, which punctuate a wall 30 feet high and 15 feet thick at its base. Then between the inner and outer walls runs a terrace 55 feet wide to allow movement of the troops manning the outer wall. This is 27 feet high from the outside and up to 6½ feet thick. Its towers are 32 feet high and they alternate between the bigger towers of the inner wall to provide the best protection. Next, to maximise the distance between the attackers and the defenders, there is another terrace, 60 feet wide; and then a moat of similar width, now much filled in, but which was 22 feet deep, although it is not certain whether this was ever full of water.
Ten gates pierced Theodosius’s walls. Important visitors who arrived by land entered through the Golden Gate at the southernmost end of the walls, in the south-west of the city. This was the way in which returning emperors processed into their capital: across the deep moat and thence through the powerful defensive complex. Two great marble towers flanked the Golden Gate. Originally this had been a triumphal arch constructed by Theodosius I in 391 and then incorporated into the main walls in the next century. Its name derived from the fact that the three gates across the entrance were inlaid with gold.
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Two huge copper elephants also stood guard over the gate at the time of the crusades.
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The entry towers still remain, absorbed into a later defensive complex, although their decoration is inevitably long gone. All around, decorating the gateway and towers, were statues of classical scenes, such as the labours of Hercules.
From the Golden Gate to the imperial centre of Constantinople was a distance of about three miles, a journey along avenues decorated with statues and punctuated by a series of
fora
(public squares) dating from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. In the Forum of the Bull stood a huge bronze equestrian statue, while the oval Forum of Constantine contained many wonders, such as a great bronze statue of the goddess Hera, whose head was so large it is said that four yokes of oxen were needed to transport it. At the forum’s centre was the column of Constantine. The original had fallen in a storm in 1106, but Manuel Comnenus had it rebuilt. Bereft of its statue today, six of the seven porphyry drums still stand—defiant but rather badly battered - on top of a rough stone casement.
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Alongside these fairly conventional monuments were some that were more idiosyncratic. For example, the Forum of Constantine also boasted a massive wind-vane, the
Aneznodoulion
or Wind-Servant: a towering, four-sided bronze mechanical device decorated with birds, shepherds and fish. At its apex it terminated in a point like a pyramid, above which was suspended a female figure who turned in the wind.
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Around 500 yards past the Forum of Constantine was the mighty complex of buildings that lay at the very heart of Constantinople: namely the Hippodrome, the Imperial Palace and the awesome church of the Hagia Sophia. Here the sacred and the secular met and overlapped in dazzling displays of imperial power and piety, grounded in the city’s classical past, yet utterly essential to the maintenance of the medieval emperors’ authority. The fundamentals of government - finance and justice - lay here: treasuries, barracks, prisons; religion and spectacle thrived too in the mighty spaces inside the Hagia Sophia and the Hippodrome.
The Great Palace, often known to westerners as the Bucoleon on account of its sculpture of a lion in a death struggle with a bull, was an enormous complex of buildings on the south-eastern corner of the city, bounded by the Hippodrome, the square of the Hagia Sophia and, on the other two sides, the Sea of Marmara. Based upon Constantine’s original palace, this had been developed and expanded many times over the centuries.
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William, archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem, described a visit to Emperor Manuel Comnenus by King Amalric in 1171. As a special honour the Franks were allowed to dock at the sea gate, from where they followed ‘a marvellous pavement of magnificent marble’. The palace possessed countless corridors and hallways and the emperor greeted Amalric in an audience chamber screened by curtains of precious fabrics with, at its centre, two golden thrones, one lower than the other to demonstrate to the king his lesser rank.
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Robert of Clari struggled to convey the true scale of the palace where, he claimed, ‘there were 500 halls, all connected with one another and all made with gold mosaic’. According to Robert, there were more than 30 chapels alone in the Great Palace, including the most dramatic of all, the church of the Blessed Virgin of the Pharos (lighthouse), which ‘was so rich and noble that there was not a hinge nor a band nor any other part such as is usually made of iron that was not all of silver, and there was no column that was not of jasper or porphyry or some other rich precious stone. And the pavement of this chapel was of a white marble so smooth and clear that it seemed to be of crystal, and this chapel was so rich and so noble that no one could ever tell you of its beauty or nobility.’ The list of relics it held was remarkable, including two large pieces of the True Cross, some of the nails driven through Christ’s hands and feet, a phial of His blood, the Crown of Thorns, a part of the robe of the Virgin Mary and the head of John the Baptist.
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