Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 11. Byzantium - Last of the Romans

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

On the outskirts of modern Istanbul, a line of ancient walls lies crumbling into the earth...In this episode, we look at one of history’s most incredible stories of survival - the thousand-year epic of the Byzantine Empire. Find out how this civilization suffered the loss of its Western half, and continued the unbroken legacy of Rome right through the middle ages. Hear about how it formed a bridge between two continents, and two ages, and learn how the impregnable walls of Constantinople were finally brought crashing to the ground. This episode we're joined by members of the St Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral Choir in London, and a number of musicians playing traditional Byzantine instruments.Support Fall of Civilizations on Patreon: http://patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcastCredits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Nicolas RixonJoey LAnnie KellyCleo MadeleineOriginal Compositions and music supervision:Pavlos Kapralos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzgAonk4-uVhXXjKSF-Nz1AChanters of The St Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral: Michael Georgiou Alexandros Gikas Matthew TomkoStephanos Thomaides Pavlos KapralosTraditional Musicians:Monooka (Monica Lucia Madas), vocals Alexandros Koustas, Lyra (other names: Byzantine Lyra/ Lyra of Istanbul/ Kemence)Konstantinos Glynos, Kanonaki (other names: qanun; in Byzantine Greek: psaleterion)Theofilos Lais, Cretan Lyra Dario Papavassiliou, Santouri (other name: Greek Santur)Pavlos Kapralos, OudOther music by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: incompetech.com/Title theme: Home At Last by John Bartmann. https://johnbartmann.com/

In the year 1852, the French writer and translator Teofi Gautier made a journey to the city then known as Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the new technology of the steamship that now crisscrossed the Mediterranean, he made the journey from Paris in just under 11 days. Gautier stayed in the city for nearly three months, and during that time, he wrote a book full of his observations. As a young man, Gautier had dreamed of becoming a painter, and he'd spent much of his life as an art critic, and so his descriptions of the city of Istanbul during this time are always infused with the language of art, as though the city were a painting

he was appraising. The harbour crowded with ships of all nations and rippled by Caiques gliding about in every direction, and above all, the wonderful panorama of Constantinople itself displayed upon the opposite shore. This view is so strangely beautiful that it is hard to credit its reality, or to believe that it is anything but one of those theatrical scenes prepared to illustrate some eastern fairy tale, and bathed by the fancy of the painter and the brilliancy of the gas lights in a radiance purely celestial. Gautier walked the streets of Istanbul for weeks, visiting its markets and cemeteries,

wandering down the narrow alleys and crumbling cobbled boulevards, and all the time writing about what he saw. And everywhere he went, he became increasingly aware of the vanished history of this ancient city. While the Ottoman Turks who lived there, increasingly referred to their city by the name Istanbul, Gautier, along with much of the rest of Europe, knew it by a different, much older name. That name was Constantinople, and it was a city that had been at the heart of another very different empire, one that had been the foremost power in Europe for

centuries. This was a power known as the Byzantine Empire, or more simply as Byzantium. Byzantium had its beginning as the eastern half of the Roman Empire. While the west of that empire fell, the east remained. It lasted for another thousand years after what people commonly think of as the fall of Rome. It stood and endured, and in its great libraries it preserved and protected the knowledge of the ancients. But the ruins of that great city now littered the streets of Istanbul. Of all the ruins that Gautier visited, none affected him so deeply as the sight of the great walls of Constantinople, which had once been legendary around the world. We would have gone along the whole outer extent of these ancient walls of Byzantium,

had we not been too much fatigued. I do not suppose that there is in the world a ride more austerely melancholy than upon this road, which extends for nearly a league between a cemetery and a mass of ruins. The ramparts, composed of two lines of wall flanked with square towers, have at their base a large moat, at present cultivated throughout, which is again surrounded by a stone parapet forming, in fact, three lines of fortification. These are the walls of Constantine, such as have been left of them, after time, sieges and earthquakes have done their worst upon them. Gautier writes movingly about the masses of overgrown vegetation, now growing on the ancient

walls, fig trees sprouting from their towers, and vines and grasses bursting from the cracks in the masonry. Here and there a gigantic crevice severed a tower from top to bottom. Other on a mass of wall had fallen into the moat, but where the masonry was wanting, the elements had supplied earth and seed. A shrub had supplied the place of a missing battlement, and grown into a tree. The thousand tendrils of parasitical plants had sustained the stone which otherwise would have fallen.

The roots of trees became chains to confine them. The line of walls raised to the sky its battered profile, draped with ivy, and gilded by time. The whole haunting scene seemed like something out of a dream or a magical tale, as the weight of the city's history seemed to weigh down on him. It was difficult to believe that a living city lay behind the defunct ramparts which hid Constantinople from our view. It had been easier to believe oneself near some of those cities of the Arabian legends, all the inhabitants of which had been, by some magical process, turned into stone. As he walked the length of those walls under the soft Istanbul sun, Gautier must have asked himself, how could the mighty walls of such a fortress

city ever have fallen? How could a city that had once been at the center of the world now be home to such a scattering of rubble and ruin? And what in all the world? had happened to the great legacy of Byzantium. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common, what led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time,

who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at one of history's most remarkable stories of survival. That's the thousand-year epic of the Byzantine Empire. I want to explore how this civilization suffered the loss of its western half and continued the unbroken legacy of Rome right through the Middle Ages. I want to examine how it formed a bridge between two continents and two ages, before ultimately being crushed between them both. And I want to tell the story of how it was

that the impregnable walls of Constantinople were finally brought crashing to the ground. Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was a very different place to the cool, dark waters we know today. In those days, our ape-like ancestors hadn't even begun to walk on two legs. But if you were able to go back and see that time, stand on the shores of Greece or Italy,

Turkey or North Africa, all you would see before you would be a hellish, dead landscape. The land beneath would drop away for 1,500 metres, into a rolling desert of bleak salt flats, broken by lakes of water so salty that if you tried to swim in them, you would float on the surface. For more than 600,000 years, this deep depression in the land had been cut off from the Atlantic ocean by the movement of the Earth's plates, and over the millennia, the seawater that had once filled it had evaporated away, leaving only this harsh, salty land where nothing would grow. But this was all about to change, in the most dramatic and apocalyptic way imaginable.

This vast, deep basin was separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a thin strip of land, only 60 kilometers wide, joining the landmasses of what is today Spain and Morocco. Beyond that, the enormous weight of all the world's water heaved and rocked. And as 600 millennia passed by, those Atlantic waves ate away at that narrow strip of rock. The ocean waters ground down those cliffs until this strip of land was only 30 kilometers thick, 15 kilometers, then 5 kilometers. And then at some point around 5.3 million years ago, this narrow gate of rock burst apart, and the Atlantic Ocean was unleashed into Europe.

What followed must have been one of the most impressive and terrifying sights that has ever occurred on Earth, the world's ocean burst into the Mediterranean and thundered in a raging torrent down a series of waterfalls that dropped for more than a kilometer. This channel is thought to have carried more than 200 billion liters of seawater every second, or as much water as a thousand Amazon rivers, reaching speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. The waters of the Mediterranean rose as much as 10 meters a day to create a sea 4,000 kilometers end to end, or enough to cover the whole of North America from California to North Virginia. This process took perhaps as much as three years, but some researchers believe it could have taken only a few months. The force of these

thundering waters caused earthquakes and landslides that can be seen in the geological record, and these triggered mega tsunamis more than 100 meters high were enough to completely swallow a 30-story building. This deluge is known today as the Zanclan flood, and it's in this violence that the peaceful sea we call the Mediterranean was formed. This was a body of water quite unlike anywhere else on earth, a vast inland sea now joined to the open ocean by a narrow channel only eight kilometers across at the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe and Africa were now two separate landmasses, and the formation of this sea would have an immense impact on the shape and history of this region.

Skull fragments found in the Apodima cave in Greece show that modern humans arrived at the Mediterranean around 200,000 years ago, spreading out from Africa along its eastern coast. These early arrivals were initially out-competed by Neanderthals, a species of archaic humans well adapted to life in the cold climate of Europe. But over the next hundred millennia, modern humans spread out of Africa in ever-greater numbers. They gradually pushed the Neanderthals out into the fringes of Europe, and ultimately to extinction. When the last Ice Age ended, the climate of Europe warmed. The glaciers that had covered much of its northern regions disappeared,

and humans spread all the way around this vast inland sea. Societies rose and fell here through the Bronze Age, but from about the year 530 BC, one city on the shore of this sea had been steadily growing in size and influence. It sat on a temperate peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean, and its people referred to its waters as Mare Magnum, or the Great Sea. This city was called Rome, and it would build an empire that would last in some form for more than 2,000 years.

Rome succeeded because it excelled at organization, mass production, and military expansion. By the year 220 BC, its armies, armed with iron weapons, and covering their bodies with iron chain mail or scales, had conquered all of the peninsula of Italy and the islands of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia. By 140 BC, they had spilled out into the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Spain, and crossed the sea to conquer the ancient cities of Greece. The Romans found a way of expanding their territory that was financially self-sustaining. As more peoples were conquered, they provided the economic base for even further expansion. In 167 BC, the Romans captured the Macedonian treasury and as a result they were able to

virtually abolish taxes in Rome. When they conquered Pergamon in the year 130 AD, their state budget doubled, and it nearly doubled again after the conquest of Syria. Rome's expansion during this time seemed as inevitable as the rushing torrents of water that had once poured through the Straits of Gibraltar, and by the year 70 AD, the entire Mediterranean had been completely surrounded by its vast empire. Rome now stretched from the snowy hills of Scotland in the north to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara in the south. from the stony shore of the Atlantic in the west to the deserts of Arabia in the east. The Romans and their subject peoples built roads and postal stations,

scattering their empire with public baths and theatres, and ushering in a new age of technological development, but they also ruthlessly exploited the lands they conquered and exterminated any who resisted them with extreme cruelty. In the second century, five great emperors ruled, among them the emperor's Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. And while wars went on at Rome's borders, a period of peace and prosperity reigned within its lands.

But this age of relative peace wasn't to last, and the first signs of this empire crumbling came in the form of a devastating plague. winter of the year 165, Rome was at war with the Parthian Empire, a power centered in ancient Iran. Roman troops were besieging the Parthian city of Siliusha, close to the modern city of Baghdad, when they first began to experience strange symptoms. The Greek physician Galen describes these frightening occurrences. On the ninth day, a young man had a slight cough. On the 10th day, the became stronger, and with it he brought up scabs. After having Qatar for many days, first with a cough, he brought up a little bright, fresh blood, and afterwards even part of

the membrane which lines the artery and rises through the larynx to the mouth. This terrifying new illness spread rapidly through the troops. We don't know exactly what this plague was, but by its description, it may have been smallpox, possibly combined with a simultaneous outbreak of measles. Whatever it was, the plague quickly spread up the rivers of Mesopotamia. In the city of Amida, where the Romans were trying to fight off Apathian siege, the Roman historian Amianus Marcellinus describes the horrific scenes. In the city, where the number of the corpses scattered over the streets was too great for anyone to perform the funeral rights over them, a pestilence was soon added to the other calamities of the citizens,

the carcasses becoming full of worms and corruption from the evaporation caused by the heat and the various diseases of the people. Unable to fight both the Parthians and the disease, these Roman soldiers soon returned home. But they would unwittingly lead that invisible enemy right into the heart of the empire. The plague soon sprued. spread among the Roman soldiers stationed among the foggy pine forests on the Rhine River, and then spread south along trade routes, finally reaching the densely packed metropolis of Rome. The Assyrian writer Lucian of Samusata writes about the houses of Rome standing empty, with magical symbols and spells painted on their doors to ward off the evil that stalked

the city's streets. The records of the Han Dynasty in China also record a period of plague breaking out around the same time, suggesting a worldwide pandemic of deadly proportions. This outbreak, known to history as the Antonine Plague, is thought to have killed somewhere in the region of 2% of the empire's population, or around 2 million people. But in the worst affected areas, mortality seems to have reached 30 or 40%. This weakened the empire at a crucial time in its history. Industries like trade by sea were utterly devastated, and the Roman military was critically weakened.

As the plague reached its height, Rome's political world fell apart too. As the dead littered its streets, the violent and selfish Emperor Commodus was crowned, and the long history of Rome's decline began. Soon rival generals, fought viciously over who would rule, burning cities to the ground and expending the empire's energy in pointless, self-destructive wars. By the end of the 3rd century, the vast Mediterranean empire could no longer be ruled from the declining city that had given birth to it. Rome was crippled by corruption, and its people increasingly suffered from a disease that the Romans believed was caused by bad air, or mal-arriarch.

in Latin, which we know today as malaria. In a desperate bid to get the empire back on course and end the Civil Wars, in the year 285, the Emperor Diocletian ordered that Rome's territory be split almost exactly in two. Western Europe and Western North Africa would form the western half of the empire, with its capital at Mediolanum or modern Milan. Meanwhile, the Eastern regions, including the modern territories of Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Egypt would pass to a new entity, which today we call the Eastern Roman Empire. Both halves of the Empire would be governed by two rulers each, creating a system known as the

Tetrarchy or the rule of four. It was thought that this division of power would finally end the brutal civil wars that had hollowed out the empire from within, but this would not turn out to be the case. The Tetraki soon fell apart, and civil war once more rocked the empire, a devastating 20-year conflict that saw the Emperor Constantine fight with his rivals over who would rule. During these wars, Constantine made the remarkable decision to convert to Christianity. This was a a young religion, based around the worship of a Jewish rebel protesting against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, and this young faith had long faced brutal repression by Roman authorities. Constantine

beat back his rivals and once more united the divided empire, ruling over it as the sole emperor and in stating Christianity as its official religion. And Constantine was also to to embark on what to some must have seemed like an even more remarkable decision. Constantine decided to construct a new capital in the east. He considered various options, but ultimately settled on a city that sat at the point, right where Europe and Asia met, a small Greek trading city in the far east of the Mediterranean. This was a city known to the Greeks as Byzantion, but the Latin Constantine would have called it by the name we recognize today. Byzantium.

The vast Zanclan flood that filled the Mediterranean wasn't the only great inundation to rock this region in prehistory. In fact, on the eastern shore of that sea, around what is now Turkey, another very similar event would take place, on a smaller scale but still no less dramatic. Around seven and a half thousand years ago, it's believed that the waters of the Mediterranean were themselves pushing up against another range of cliffs that walled off a narrow valley known as the Bosphorus. Beyond this barrier was another depression in the land, filled with a large freshwater lake. As the ice age ended and the glaciers melted, global sea levels

rose, and perhaps aided by the frequent earthquakes in this region, the dam holding back the seas once again broke, and the waters of the Mediterranean spilled through the valley of the Bosphorus in vast and unstoppable quantities. If this hypothesis is correct, it's thought that up to 50 cubic kilometers of water poured over this ledge each day, or 200 times the flow of the Niagara Falls. The lands beyond, filled with salty seawater, flooding an area of 100,000 square kilometers, or about the size of Cuba. It's thought that Stone Age people would have witnessed this flood, and it must have been a terrifying sight, one that they would tell their children about, and their children's children. In fact, along with the flooding of the Persian Gulf around the same

time, this event has been proposed as one source for the biblical story of Noah's flood. This body of water would become known as the Black Sea. Today, its shores belong to the nations of Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. And that narrow valley through which this vast flood of water poured is now a narrow sea channel, which we call the Bosphorus. Here, the continents of Asia and Europe are separated by only about 750 meters of sea at their narrowest point. A second narrow channel known as the Dardanelles sits nearly 300 kilometers to the west, where once the ancient city of Troy stood as a rival to the Bronze Age city-states of Greece. Between these two thin entryways is the world's smallest sea.

known as the Sea of Marmara. And it's right here that the city of Byzantium was founded. Byzantium was an ancient Greek colony, founded by settlers from the powerful port city of Magara around the year 667 BC. Folklore attributes the founding of the city to a prince of Megara named Baisas, and the inspiration for Baisus' journey came from the oracle at Delphi. Modern analysis has shown that this oracle was built at a place where volcanic gases were vented from the earth through cracks in the planet's crust.

The priestesses of this oracle would descend into chambers flooded with these gases, which would send them into a trance-like hallucinatory state, ready to give prophecies, to those who asked for them. According to this piece of folklore, the oracle at Delphi gave Prince Baezas a haunting piece of advice. You must set sail and search for the land opposite the city of the blind.

And so Baezas sailed across the sea, through the narrow Dardanelles Strait and into the sea of Marmara. And there he saw what he was looking for. On the Asian side of the sea, a Greek colony named Chalcedon had been established, but Bysus saw immediately that the European side of the sea was a much better place for a colony, a defensible position with a large natural harbour. The settlers of Chalcedon had been blind to miss this perfect spot,

and so Baisus had found the land opposite the city of the blind. He landed on the shore and named the city he founded there Byzantion after himself. And the advantages that Beezer saw in the city were indeed formidable. It sat right at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus Strait, the point where Asia was less than a kilometer away over the water. This was a natural crossing point, controlling all the land-based trade that ferried between the continents, but it also controlled all shipping traffic that passed between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. On top of this, the swift currents that flowed through the narrow channel would make it very

difficult for any army to attack by sea. The city's harbour was a long sliver of a river estuary, sheltered from the swift ocean currents and large enough to hold a thousand ships. This body of water would come to be known as the golden horn, either because of the enormous wealth that would flow through it in the ages to come, or for the rich yellow light that would often blaze on its surface as the sun set over the sea. Pinched between the golden horn and the sea of Marmora, Byzantion was a perfect wedge shape. Any attackers who wanted to take the city were able to approach from only a single direction, and it was a perfect spot to build a fortress that would be virtually unassailable. For much of its early history, Byzantium was not a major city, although it was a wealthy one. No more than 40,000 people are thought to have lived here during those times,

compared to the more than a million that may have lived in Rome during its height. But it was an abundant place. The Roman geographer Strabo writes about the rich stocks of fish that could every year be brought out of the narrow channel of the Bosphorus. The horn, which is close to the Byzantine city wall, resembles a stag's horn, into these young fish stray and then are easily caught because of their number, and the force of the current and the narrowness of the inlets. are so tightly confined that they are even caught by hand, providing the Byzantians and the Roman

people with a considerable income. But despite its natural defensibility, Byzantium was conquered a number of times, by the Persian Empire and the Spartan and Athenian Greeks. It was even besieged and burned to the ground by the ruthless Roman Emperor Septimius Severus during one of the empire's more destructive civil wars. When the Emperor Diocletian split the empire in two, Byzantium was chosen to be the capital of the eastern half. And finally, in the year 330 AD,

it was chosen to be the new imperial capital of the entire Roman Empire under the Emperor Constantine, as he writes in this fourth century decree. We have resolved that it is fitting that my rule and the power of my kingdom be transferred and transmuted to the regions of the east, and that in the province of Byzantia, on an excellent site, a city be built in my name, and my rule be established there. Like the ancient explorer Bysus, Constantine saw his own reflection in this golden city. He renamed Byzantium after himself, calling it Constantinopolis,

or the city of Constantine, and today we know it as Constantinople. During this time, the city was also known by the informal title Nova Roma, or the New Rome. In his new capital, Constantine immediately began an enormous building project, with the goal of turning Constantinople into a city worthy of its empire. Constantine laid out a new square at the centre of old Byzantium, naming it the Augusteum, with a new Senate house in a grand basilica on the east side. While on the south side, the great palace of the emperor rose, the Byzantine poet Marianas wrote about the beauty of the city in these early days.

Where the land is cut in two by the winding channel, whose shores open the way to the sea. Our divine emperor erected this palace. O far ruling Rome, you look from Europe at a prospect in Asia, the beauty of which is worthy of you. Near to the imperial palace was the vast hippodrome used for chariot races. Its track was 450 metres long,

with stands capable of holding up to 100,000 spectators, up to eight chariots could race on its track at one time, each powered by four horses each. And these events must have been an electric spectacle. Nearby was the famed baths of Zoixippus, adorned with opulent mosaics. The 5th century writer Leoncius writes one invitation to a friend that gives a glimpse of the leisurely life of this city. On one side I have close by me the Zoic Cypus, a pleasant bath, and on the other the race course. After seeing the races at the ladder and taking a bath in the former, come and rest at my hospitable table. Then, in the afternoon, you will be in plenty of time for the other races, reaching the course from your room quite near at hand.

Constantinople would even create its own obelisk to adorn its hippodrome, built of some. square stone blocks to a height of 32 meters tall. That's exactly the same height as the obelisk that decorates the Circus Maximus in Rome. And this was a statement of clear intent, that Constantinople was every bit the equal of the eternal city. Around the year 3.30, Constantine also built an imposing city wall, running between the golden horn and the sea of Marmora, closing off the wed-shaped city and taking full advantage of its defensible shape. The first Christian emperor claimed that an angel had guided him about where to place the walls, and he built them a great distance from where the old city walls had been, an impressive statement

about how large he expected his new capital to grow. And he was right. In the next century, Byzantium would grow at an immense race. and by the beginning of the 5th century, the city had spilled out even beyond Constantine's ambitions. Today, we can trace the expansion of the city in the advancing rings of its city walls, growing outwards like the rings of a tree. By the year 404, the emperor in the east, a man named Theodosius II, embarked on an even more ambitious building project to protect the expanding city. and build a new set of walls two kilometers to the west.

These would stretch for 6.5 kilometers and massively increase the enclosed area of the city. But while these walls demonstrate the ambition of this expanding city, they also testify to the increasingly dangerous world that the young capital found itself at the heart of. When you look at the situation that the Emperor Theodosius faced, at the time he embarked, embarked on the building of these walls, it's not hard to see why he considered them necessary. Around this time, vast migrations of people had been pushed out of the Eurasian steps by some unknown force, and were now crossing en masse into Roman lands, and the Roman state, crippled by civil war, was struggling to cope. One writer Synesius summed up the mood of impending doom,

in a speech he gave to the Emperor Arcadius around the year 399. Everything balances on a razor's edge, and the state needs the assistance of God and the Emperor to crush that danger which has been troubling the Roman Empire for so long. Two years into his reign, in the year 410 AD, the Emperor Theodosius received news of an unthinkable tragedy. An army of Goths, led by the General Alaric had laid siege to the great city of Rome three times, and on the third time they had burst over its walls and sacked the city. While the sack of Rome was relatively constrained by the standards of the time, it was still an act that shocked the world. The writer St. Melania's the

Younger, writing about 10 years later, describes this horrifying event. A barbarian story. of which prophecies long ago spoke fell upon Rome, and it did not even spare the bronze statues in the Forum, plundering with barbarian madness, it destroyed everything. Thus, Rome, beautified for one thousand, two hundred years became a ruin. The writer Saint Jerome, a native of the Western Empire, then living in Bethlehem, wrote a passionate outburst of sorrow at the news. Oh, horrid, the universe tumbles and yet our sins do not fall. A renowned city and head of the Roman Empire is consumed in one blaze. The disaster sent refugees from Rome fleeing across the Mediterranean, piled into boats. They landed on the shores of Africa, Egypt and the East. St. Jerome describes the desperate plight of these citizens.

Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed, that the mother of nations had become also their tomb, that the shores of the whole east, of Egypt, of Africa, which once belonged to the imperial city, were filled with the hosts of how men-servants and maid-servants. Wherever the Roman refugees landed, piled into boats, starving and thirsty, the people saw their fine, clothes and thought they must be carrying some hidden wealth on them, as St. Jerome remembers. Who would have believed that mighty Rome, with its careless security of wealth, would be reduced to such extremities as to need shelter, food and clothing? Some are so hard-hearted and cruel that instead of showing compassion, they break up the rags and bundles of the captives, and expect to find gold on those who are nothing more than prisoners. The Emperor Theodosius, was determined that his city of Constantinople would not follow the fate of Rome.

And so the walls he built in the following years would be one of the most imposing defensive structures ever to be built in either the ancient or the medieval worlds. This was a ring of three walls, arranged one after the other, each taller than the last, with a wide moat in front of them. This moat could be be immediately flooded on demand using an ingenious system of pipes that ran along the length of the walls, providing instant defense should the city be threatened. The final tallest wall was almost five meters thick and 12 meters high, including 96 towers each at a height of 20 meters. These walls were built with precisely cut blocks of white limestone and decorated with lines of red brick. so that they must have shone a gleaming white when the sun hit them. These walls were so formidable

that they would not be breached for a thousand years, and it would take a complete revolution in military technology to do so. And these walls were not completed a moment too soon. In fact, as the final stones were being put into place, they would face one of the most fearsome tests that could be imagined. That's because in the decades since the first barbarian migrations had begun, it had become apparent what was driving so many nomadic people out of Asia. That force was a people known as the Huns, and they would soon be ruled by a man whose shadow would loom over all of Europe. His predecessors had united the nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes into a terrifying force. and he would lead them west in a campaign of destruction that would have few equals.

And that man's name was Attila. The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. They were a society of pastoral warriors, living mostly from the meat and milk provided by the animals they herded. At first, they had mostly held back from Roman territory. The Romans even employed them as mercenaries, happily paying them to keep clear of its territory. But with the rise of Attila, all of that was about to change. The 5th century Byzantine historian Priscus of Parnium describes Attila in the following terms. He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands, who terrified all mankind.

He was haughty in his walk. rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body. He was indeed a lover of war. When Attila became king of the Huns, he was determined to set out on an aggressive policy of expansion into Roman lands. He broke treaties, he'd formally kept with the Romans, and began to raid their cities. And the Roman army, weakened by all of the empire's troubles, could do little to repel him. Attila conquered territory throughout Gaul and into modern France, establishing a vast Hunnic empire across eastern and central Europe.

And in the year 447, he marched his armies across the Danube and into the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Romans were immediately overwhelmed. All along the border, their forts burned, pillars of smoke black in the sky. And now the armies of Attila bore down on the centre of their world, their capital, the great city of Constantinople itself. The Byzantine monk Kalinicus, in his work the life of St. Hypatius, wrote about the dire situation that now faced the new capital.

The barbarian nation of the Huns, which was in Thrace, became so great that more than a hundred cities were captured. There were so many murders and bloodlettings that the dead could not be numbered, for they took captive the churches and monasteries and slew the monks and maidens in great numbers. And to make matters worse, the formidable walls of Constantinople could no longer be relied on. In January of the year 447,

the ground shook with a terrifying force. This earthquake was the strongest in living memory, perhaps in all of the city's history. Over a period of four months, earthquakes and the floods they caused ravaged the whole area, with enormous loss of life. Buildings collapsed across Constantinople. The city's skyline must have been pocked and broken by fallen roofs and crumbling walls, and people were buried in the trouble. But most terrifying of all, the tremors brought down a whole section of the great Theodosian walls, the only thing standing between the people of the city and the approaching army of the Huns. For the citizens of Constantinople, this must have been utterly terrifying. These walls had taken

more than nine years to build, and now one man was put in charge of the seemingly impossible task of repairing them in only a few months. He was a prefect and a native of the lands of Frija in modern Turkey, and his name was Constantinus. Constantineus was new in his post, and he had an enormous task ahead of him. But he also knew that his city had one great untapped resource, that is, its immense spirit of competition. Constantineus went down to the city's vast hippodrome or racetrack. Over the century or so since its renovation by the Emperor Constantine, it had become the most important hub of the city's social life. Chariot racing in Byzantium held people's fanatic devotion in a similar way to football today. And just like football, chariot racing had become a

big money business. Four great racing teams raced in the sands of the hippodrome, each named after a colour, the reds, blues, greens and whites. And each of these were supported by, and closely tied to, a political party in the Byzantine Senate. And just like our modern sports teams today, bitter rivalries existed between these teams and their legions of supporters. riots were common events at the racecourse, and it was not uncommon for deaths to occur when rival gangs of these hooligans met. Constantinus arrived at the hippodrome that morning, perhaps shaking a little at the magnitude of the task he faced.

He raised his hands and made a simple announcement to the gangs of racing fans he found there. The city was in danger. these sports teams were to help with the reconstruction of the city walls. They would each be given a section to complete, and they had to gather as many of their supporters to help as they could. The declaration of a competition was clear and irresistible. These gangs went about the city's drinking places and squares, its baths and spice markets, gathering as many people as they could from the streets.

telling them that the pride of their team was at stake, and also, perhaps as an afterthought to some of them, the fate of their city. In this way, more than 16,000 workers were gathered to repair the walls of Constantinople. We can imagine the frenzy of activity as these masses of sports fans climbed the scaffolding with stones, bricks and mortar, singing their team songs and jeering at the other teams, as together they rebuilt their fallen walls. This effort was so effective that in only two months the walls of the city were rebuilt, and even reinforced in some places. A brief inscription carved into the base of the walls is all the monument that was left to this remarkable achievement, comparing it to the mythological figure Palace, the Titan of War. By command of Theodosius, in less than two months Constantinus

erected triumphantly these strong walls. Scarcely could Palace have built so quickly so strong a citadel. We can imagine the look on the face of Artilla, when he arrived at the gates of Constantinople, and found not the earthquake crumbled ruin that he had been promised, but a triple line of defensive walls, their limestone, glistening white in the sun, the strongest fortification in the known world. The two sides reached a stalemate. Attila could not take the city, but the Byzantines could not beat him in battle. Eventually a treaty was signed. The Romans agreed to increase their payments to the Huns,

and Attila left the lands of Byzantium. Constantinople was saved and the Eastern Roman Empire would survive. But for its sister power, the Western Roman Empire, the pressures raining down on it would prove too much. As the 5th century progressed, one side of the empire would stand, while the other would crumble into the earth. The landscapes of Byzantium ranged across two continents and over an enormous, variation in temperatures and climates. These lands had always been the most populous of all the lands of Rome, the richest and the best developed. In fact, by the late empire, its eastern half had a budget three times the size of the West, and an army twice as large. In Europe, the heart of

the Eastern Empire was always the Balkans, including Greece, and in Asia, it was a lot of the Eastern Empire. In It was the region known as Anatolia or Asia Minor, which is roughly the area of modern Turkey. The empire's European territories included parts of modern Greece, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Here, craggy mountains covered by dense forest, divide this area into steep river valleys that drain into the Adriatic, Aegean and Mediterranean seas. The most fertile regions here are along the Danube, Europe's second longest river. The temperate regions of the north have a very similar climate to northern Europe, and on the coast, grains and vegetables can be grown,

along with fruit trees like apples, cherries, figs, pears and pomegranates. Olive trees are grown here in great numbers, surviving well on the rocky soil, Inland, there are terraced vineyards and orchards, while the higher mountain regions are used for herding goats and sheep. Across the narrow channel of the Bosphorus is Anatolia, again around the region of modern Turkey. In the west, the earth here rises gently out of the Aegean Sea and forms a fertile coastal plain, where the Greeks once founded city-state colonies. But in the north and south, huge massive. mountains loom, among them the range known as the Taurus. These form an almost unbroken wall along the length of southern Turkey, and they're broken only by the famed Cilician gates, a path

through the rocky hills, along a narrow gorge that in ancient times took about five days to cross, leading travelers out of Anatolia and into Syria. In Byzantine times, much of this land wasn't suitable for crop production, but the sloping plateaus of Anatolia were perfect for raising vast pastures, and medieval writers regularly mention the enormous herds of cattle, goats, and sheep that roamed here. Despite the administrative division of the empire, the Romans of the time didn't consider their empire to have been split. For much of their shared history, the Romans of both halfs went on viewing it as a single entity, although governed by two different imperial courts, but there were significant differences between the two halves.

The overwhelming culture of the East was Greek, and the Byzantines spoke the Greek language throughout the Empire's history, in contrast to Western Rome, which spoke Latin. But the people of the Byzantine Empire never referred to themselves as Greek. Even the name Byzantine is a much later invention. In fact, until the end of their history, right through the Middle Ages, they referred to themselves simply as Romans and their lands as Romania. Byzantine rulers were in fact greatly offended whenever Westerners referred to them as the Emperor of the Greeks. The people of Constantinople viewed their city and the city of Rome as what the Byzantine philosopher Themistius describes as the world's two mother cities. Although, of course, he argues that Constantinople deserves just a little more credit, since it had to build itself up from nothing.

And yet of the two mother cities of the world, that of Romulus and that of Constantine, it is ours, I would say, that is in greater harmony. for she had no association with the race of rulers, and yet she became a partner in empire with the great city through her virtue. In the year 381, theologian and Archbishop of Constantinople, Gregory Natsyanson, wrote about how these two cities seemed like a light to the world. Nature has not given us two sons, but it has given two roms, beacons of the whole world. one an ancient power and one anew, differing from each other only to this extent, that the one outshines the sun, the other the evening star.

But they hold up beauty to match beauty, a balanced pair. So it's hard to imagine how it must have felt during this time to be a citizen of Constantinople and to hear stories about what was happening in the West. While the administration of the Emperor's Court had moved elsewhere, in the 4th century, the city of Rome was still the symbolic heart of a powerful empire and the home of an immensely rich aristocracy with estates all over the Mediterranean. But as the 5th century dawned, its position began to falter. Only 45 years after the destruction of the city by Alaric, a second century.

sacking of the city by the Vandals once again halved its population, and by this time Rome's influence extended no further than the borders of the Italian peninsula. Despite its claims, wealth no longer flowed to it from the rest of its empire, and the complex economic web it sat at the heart of began to unravel. We can see the decline of Rome written in the stones of its buildings. One example is the massive Basilica Emilia, which stood next to the Senate House. It was destroyed by fire sometime in the 5th century, possibly during one of the sacks of the city, and while the Romans rebuilt its outside facade, making sure it looked suitably grand to onlookers, they never repaired its interior. This building presented a grand face to the world, while inside

it was a burned-out shell. And by this time, the same could be said for the whole city of Rome, and the western part of its empire. Excavations have shown that by the mid-fifth century, rubbish was being dumped within Rome's great monumental buildings, that the buildings themselves were beginning to crumble, and that new, rough paths were being cut by people walking and dragging carts and horses through its fine gardens and monuments. By the four-70s, the Roman emperor in the West, who now ruled from the city of Ravenna, was little more than an Italian warlord. Rome could no longer pay to maintain its legions, and increasingly relied on the services of German mercenaries. Eventually, they could no longer pay these either, and when one group of mercenaries

known as the Heruli demanded lands in Italy as payment, the Romans refused. The Heruli rebelled and the remnants of the Roman army was defeated in the Battle of Ravenna in the year 476. The Roman Emperor was forced to resign and the Western Empire vanished as a political entity entirely. For those in the East, watching this collapse over the 5th century must have sent chills down their spine. The writer, St. Jerome, encapsulates what must have been the fear and uncertainty of that age. What is safe if Rome perishes? But for the most part, life in the east was virtually unaffected by the fall of the West. In fact, Constantinople continued its expansion and rise in importance, becoming now the undisputed capital and center.

of the Mediterranean world. Throughout the whole period of Rome's collapse, the East was seen as a safe haven, and it must have received an influx of refugees fleeing the destruction in the West. One writer Paulinus of Pella writes in his work Eucharistichos that he considered leaving the West and heading back to his Byzantine estates in Greece and Albania. His wife ultimately convinced him that the journey would be too dangerous, but we can assume that many did make this trip, swelling the population of the East and its capital of Constantinople. This was the beginning of the city's role as a sanctuary to the destitute, the city that later poets would refer to as the refuge of strangers. Beloved refuge for strangers, queen of the queens of cities,

Song of songs and splendor of splendors. Before the Christians of the East, the fall of Rome posed a religious conundrum. The empire had converted to Christianity little more than a century earlier, and now destruction was raining down on it from all sides. Many back in Rome believed that this was a punishment for abandoning their ancient pagan gods. But Christian scholars in the East were busy arguing that it was just these remnants of paganism that had brought about the collapse, as the writer Nylos describes. You have said that hordes of barbarians have often invaded Romania because everyone

was not willing or eager to worship the pagan gods with sacrifices. No, however, something more distinct and unveiled. Inroads of the barbarians, earthquakes and conflagrations, and all other grievous things are occurring for no other reason than the wickedness and foolishness of the superstitious and impious men among you, who have not ceased your idolatry, but continue to sacrifice to worthless deities every day in the suburbs. The eastern half of the empire endured the tremors of the 5th century well. It suffered some damage from the Hun and Ostrogoth invasions, but it ultimately managed to buy off these attackers. It was plagued by Vandal Pirates. It was plagued by Vandal Pirates.

sailing from their bases in North Africa and nomadic tribes like the Blemias and Nobadas in Upper Egypt. But these enemies inflicted no permanent damage. And soon one man, an emperor of the East, would go on a crusade to recover the fragmented lands that had once belonged to the Western Empire. He was one of the most remarkable characters from history, and his name was just Justinian. The story of Justinian begins with his uncle, a man named Justin. And Justin was a prime example of one remarkable aspect of Byzantine society, that is, the ability of just about anyone to rise through its ranks, and even reach the very pinnacle of imperial power. In fact, Justin began his

life as a swineherd in the region of Dardania, a mountainous area in the Balkans next door to Macedonia. As a teenager, he and two of his friends fled the chaos in the west. They crossed the mountain passes in what must have been columns of refugees, with the smoke of their homeland rising in the skies behind them, and everyone in that column had only one name on their lips. The only place in the world that at that moment seemed like a place of safety, the refuge of strangers, the city of Constantinople. The historian Procopius gives one account of this humble journey. Three young farmers of Illyrian origin came from Vederiana, determined to join the army. They covered the whole distance to Byzantium on foot, carrying on their own shoulders cloaks

in which on their arrival they had nothing but twice baked bread that they backed at home. When they arrived at the Great Capital, life must have been hard. Justin spoke Latin, but only very simple Greek, and he must have been at sea in the hubbub of different languages spoken in Constantinople. Like most peasants, he was also illiterate, but he managed to secure a place in the palace guard and rose through the ranks of military life to become a tribune and then a senator. Finally, under the Emperor Anastasius, he was appointed commander of the palace guard.

When the emperor died, as so often happened upon the death of Byzantine emperors, the palace exploded in intrigue. The Grand Chamberlain, a man named Amantius, is said to have given a large amount of money to Justin, intending to buy his support, but Justin took his money and gave it out to numerous other people, ensuring their loyalty to him. When the dust settled, Justin was elected as the new emperor. Justin soon reached out to his peasant family, and he brought his young nephew, the boy named Justinian, to the capital to be educated. Justinian was also a peasant, but in Constantinople, He learned jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history,

he learned about the greatness of the empire that had once ruled in the West, and about the circumstances of its catastrophic fall. And perhaps it's here that he began to dream of an ambitious and seemingly impossible project. This he would later call the Renovatio Imperiai, the restoration of the empire. Justinian became emperor after his uncle's death, and he set about the job of ruling with enormous energy. He became known as the emperor who never sleeps, but his reign was not without controversy. He married a lower-class woman named Theodora, a courtesan with a lascivious reputation, and this caused great scandal across the empire.

The contradictory and contrasting ways that Justinian has been portrayed are nowhere better shown than in the writings of the scholar Procopius. Early in his life, Procopius writes about Justinian and Theodora as a pious and dedicated couple. But later, he also wrote another text, entitled The Anecdotta. This was a scandalous tell-all about the true Justinian and Theodont. Dora, a text that has come to be known as the secret history. In his anecdota, Procopius portrays the Emperor Justinian as a cruel, incompetent ruler. He committed numberless murders through his notion of piety, for in his zeal to bring all men to agree in one form of Christian doctrine,

he recklessly murdered all who dissented therefrom under the pretext of piety, for he did not think that it was murder if those whom he slew were not of the same belief as himself. Procopius even goes so far as to claim that Justinian and his wife had been possessed by evil spirits and recounts tales of them wondering the palace without their heads. And some of those who have been with Justinian at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit have thought they saw a strange demoniac form taking his place, One man said that the emperor suddenly rose from his throne and walked about, and immediately Justinian's head vanished, while the rest of his body seemed to ebb and flow, whereat the beholder

stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. Justinian's reign was also marred with riots. In the year 532, the famous chariot-racing factions of Constantinople, those rival gangs who had helped to rebuild the city's walls against the advance of Attila, joined forces once again to rise up in the streets against what they saw as the corruption of Justinian's rule. They marched through the streets of the capital, setting fire to the city, and chanting the word Nika, Nika, the Greek word for victory. These riots became known as the Nika riots, and they were so severe that the emperor considered

fleeing by sea. During the riots, the old church that had stood on the hill beside the imperial palace burned to the ground, and Justinian's reaction was brutal. In the next few days, he ordered the crushing of the riots by the army. Procopius records that 30,000 citizens of Constantinople were killed during this repression, and the sands of the hippodrome were stained with their blood. Whatever the truth of Justinian's character, we can at least be certain that he was ambitious. In the wake of the riots, he resolved to rebuild the city, and in the blackened ruin of the old church,

he ordered plans to be drawn up for a new cathedral that would rival St. Peter's tomb in Rome. What resulted was one of the world's most remarkable buildings. columns and other marbles were brought from all over the empire, and more than 10,000 people were employed in its construction. Its vast dome rises 55 metres above the ground, with a span of 30 meters. This is the Church of St. Sophia, more commonly known by its Greek name, the Hagia Sophia, and today it's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Justinian was also determined to increase the economic potential of his empire. And one of the ways he did this was through perhaps history's first act of corporate espionage.

That's the theft of the secret of silk from China. As we discovered in the last episode, for centuries, silk had been the sole reserve of Chinese craftsmen. The product of their silkworms had spread throughout the world, long before any diplomatic contact with China was established. But in the year 551, two Byzantine monks who had been preaching in India made their way to China and observed the intricate methods used in the raising of silkworms and the production of silk. They hurried back to Constantinople and sought an urgent audience with the Emperor Justinian. They told him that they had found the source of the miracle material silk, and the emperor was impressed.

He offered them a great fortune if they were able to smuggle some of these mysterious worms back to the capital. The monks set out once again, likely traveling along a northern route along the Black Sea. They would have passed through the Tarim Basin

basin and the Taklamakan Desert, through the gate of Jade and down the Hershey corridor into the heartlands of China. With them, they carried bamboo canes, hollowed out on the inside with hidden compartments. In China, they convinced others to smuggle the silkworms out for them, likely in the form of eggs or very young larvae, since adult silkworms are very delicate and easily killed by temperature variations.

The entire expedition may have taken up to two years, but they eventually returned successful. and established a breeding population of silkworms on the other end of the Silk Road. Their actions began a Byzantine trade in silk, with silk factories setting up in Constantinople, as well as Beirut, Antioch and Thebes. The Byzantine Empire quickly established a monopoly on silk in Europe, and this formed one of the bases for their economy throughout the medieval period. swelling the wealth of Byzantium to unprecedented size. By the early 6th century, the city of Constantinople was unmatched around Europe. It had constructed the longest aqueduct in the ancient world,

winding for around 250 kilometers through the countryside. The early emperors had also supplemented the city's defenses with another series of defensive walls, more than 60 kilometers from the the capital, known as the long walls. These stretched 56 kilometers from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora. But the Emperor Justinian had even greater ambitions. He wanted to recover all the lands of the Western Roman Empire and restore Rome to its ancient size, and he would be incredibly successful. Justinian never took part in the military campaigns he he ordered, he left that to a talented general named Belisarius, and from his throne in Constantinople, Justinian watched as the lands of Old Rome fell once more under his banner.

The general Belisarius marched across North Africa and conquered the vandals who still occupied it in only nine months. Then he set his sights on Italy, where an Ostrogoth king still ruled. Belisarius swept into Italy and laid siege to Rome itself, encircling it for over a year, and finally marching through its gates in the year 536. When Belisarius marched into the city of Rome, he would have seen a place much faded from the greatness of its past. Two large earthquakes in the 5th century had damaged many of its great buildings. but its aqueducts were still running, and its baths still functioned. Gladiators and animals still fought in its Colosseum,

and a threadbare population had begun to reclaim some of their importance in the region, if nothing like the European Empire they had once ruled. For the Emperor Justinian and Belisarius, Rome was the ultimate symbol of the revitalized empire, and they would not give it up for anything. The Ostrogoth king, who ruled over Italy, a man named Vitigus, quickly responded, marching on Rome with an army of his own. And now it was the turn of Belisarius to be under siege. The Ostrogoth king offered him and his men safe passage if he left the city in peace,

and Belisarius responded with this reply. It was you who trespassed upon this city in former time. though it did not belong to you at all. And now you have given it back, however unwillingly, to its ancient possessors, and whoever of you has hopes of setting foot in Rome without a fight is mistaken. For as long as Belisarius lives, it is impossible for him to relinquish this city. Ultimately, the Romans succeeded in holding the city. But this was only the beginning of a long and costly series of wars in Italy. In the years that followed, the city of Rome would be besieged and captured a further three times,

each time more brutally and more costly than the last. But finally, the Ostrogoth hold on Italy collapsed, and the Byzantine Empire reclaimed the Eternal City for the Empire of Rome. But there was a tragic irony to this situation. In trying to return Rome to its empire, the Byzantines had done immense damage to the city. In the wars of Belisarius, perhaps as many as 90% of all Rome's citizens had either been killed or fled the city, leaving a population of perhaps only 30,000 people. The inhabited area of the city was reduced to only a tenth of its previous size,

and of the 13 great aqueducts that had once carried water directly into the city, only two remained in operation. If there had ever been hope of Rome rebuilding the glory of its ancient past, then the Byzantines had ended that hope forever. And the conquests of Justinian, though remarkable as achievements in themselves, were short-lived. The Byzantine Empire simply didn't have the resources to maintain such a large territory for any period of time. The Gothic wars drained its wealth and distracted its military, and in the 540s another plague spread throughout Europe, weakening it even further. The so-called plague of Justinian may have killed anywhere between 25 to 100 million people. over the next two centuries. Modern science has confirmed that it was caused by a strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same organism that caused the black death in medieval Europe. The outbreak in

Constantinople is thought to have been carried to the city by infected rats on grain ships arriving from Egypt, and the Emperor Justinian is even reported to have contracted the disease, although he was one of the approximately 50% of people who would recover. Procopius records that at its peak, the plague was killing 10,000 people in Constantinople every day, and of course he blames Justinian for its arrival. The plague began to rage and swept away nearly half the survivors. Such were the disasters that afflicted mankind from the day when Justinian first commenced to manage the of the kingdom, and after he had ascended the imperial throne.

Procopius also reserves harsh words for the way Justinian reacted in the face of this plague, and his unwillingness to offer support to the stricken peasants of the empire. When pestilence swept through the whole known world, and notably the Roman Empire, wiping out most of the farming community and of necessity, leaving a treacher. of desolation in its wake, Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined freeholders. Even then, he did not refrain from demanding the annual tax. The plague weakened the Byzantine Empire at a critical point, when Justinian's armies had nearly retaken all of Italy and the Western Mediterranean coast.

Soon, the Germanic people known as the Lombards invaded northern Italy, defeated the the small Byzantine army left there and established their own kingdom. The dream of resurrecting the ancient empire was dead. In the 550s, two earthquakes shook the capital of Constantinople, and, in an event that seemed redolent with symbolism, the great dome of the Hagia Sophia cracked. In the year 558, a final earthquake caused the dome to collapse entirely. To the citizens of Constantinople, this devastating event must have seemed like the final judgment of God on an emperor who had such lofty ambitions, but had in the end fallen so short. Justinian died in the year 565, having left no children.

He was buried in a grand mausoleum in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and the emperors who followed after him would reap the consequences of his over-ambitious conquests. Justinian had inherited an imperial treasury of 29 million gold coins, but his wars had all but emptied it. In the east, Byzantium was now under pressure from the powerful Sassanid Empire, a Persian empire that ruled from the city of Ketephanin near modern Baghdad. Wars with the Sassanids dragged on for decades, weakening both empires, and usually resulting in a bitter and costly stalemate.

By the year 6.30, the empire had lost most of Italy and North Africa once more, and held only a foothold in the island of Sicily. But in the early 7th century, one emperor named Heraclius seemed like he could return the empire to its previous glory. He ruled for 30 years, won an impressive series of battles, and beat the Sassanids back in Anatolia, even recapturing the holy city of Jerusalem. In the year 629, Heraclius brought the relic of the true cross back to the city of Jerusalem in a lavish and triumphant ceremony. For a time, it must have seemed that he was leading the empire to a new golden age.

But little did the people of Byzantium know that a new rival was rising out of one of the most unlikely places, the seemingly empty desert sands of Arabia. The Arabian Peninsula is a wedge of land pinched between the Persian Gulf in the north and the Red Sea in the south. It's technically a subcontinent since it sits on its own tectonic plate, and over millions of years it has torn. away from the rest of Africa in the south, while slowly crashing into the Eurasian plate in the north, forcing up Iran's Zagros Mountains. This is an arid land, divided between rocky mountains and dry coastland lined with coral reefs, and separated by small strips of fertile pastures in its rocky valleys. But perhaps most famously, the region is home to a vast range of deserts.

The largest of these, the Great Arabian Desert, is the fifth largest in the world, and one of the deepest. Its sands are thought to extend up to 180 meters below its surface, or more than 50 stories. And it's here that a warrior visionary had risen to topple the established powers of the region, and gathered a powerful military force. The man known to history as Muhammad was a revolutionary, a guerrilla warrior, a poet and an innovative military strategist, and during the final 10 years of his life, he led a successful campaign to capture the city of Mecca from the Quraysh tribe who had ruled it for centuries. After his death in the year 632, the successors of Muhammad took up his mantle. To their

north, they spread out of the Arabian Peninsula and faced ahead of them the lands of both the Sassanids in Mesopotamia and Persia and the Byzantines in Egypt. But these two great ancient empires had been hollowed out from within, weakened and bankrupted by their incessant wars. The last great war between these two empires had ended only a few years before, after grinding on for nearly three decades and critically weakening them. And the Arab advance came as a complete surprise. The Byzantines were distracted by their wars and paid little heed to news that was trickling across the desert to the south. They had also stopped paying tribute to the desert tribes who they usually relied on to pass them information. In the year 634, to the surprise of the entire,

world, the Arab armies defeated a Byzantine force sent into Syria and captured Damascus in a lightning strike. The Byzantines tried again in 636, but a sandstorm scattered their forces, and when the Arab cavalry bore down on them, they were utterly annihilated. Arab armies fought using swords made of the finest Indian steel, riding on the backs of camels and horses, versatile and fast across the desert landscape. Their tactics were primarily defensive, luring their opponents into ill-advised attacks, with large groups of archers placed on both flanks. The only hope for the Byzantines was now that their great rivals, the Sassanids, would halt the Arab advance, but this hope would be in vain.

In fact, Arab attacks would bring about the complete disintegration and collapse of the Sassanid Empire. Four hundred years later, the Persian poet Ferdusi would write the following lament about the end of this great power. Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate. Where are your valiant warriors and priests? Where are your hunting parties and your feasts? Where is that warlike spirit and where are those great armies that destroyed our country's foes? Count Iran as a ruin, as the lair of lions and leopards, look now and despair. The Byzantines watched helplessly as their Asian territories were swallowed up.

Jerusalem, recaptured less than a decade before at enormous cost, surrendered to Arab armies in the year 637. and for the General Emperor Heraclius, on whom the Byzantines had pinned such hopes, this catastrophic defeat proved too much. He had once been the commander of his father's fleet, a bold and accomplished sailor, but in his old age he developed an overwhelming thalassophobia or fear of the sea. On his way back to Constantinople from Asia, he found even the 700-meter-competre. crossing of the Bosphorus too terrifying. His men had to tie boat together across the whole length of the crossing, covering them with shrubs and matting, so that the terrified old emperor couldn't see

the water, rocking dark and deep beneath him. When Egypt fell to Arab forces in the year 642, the Byzantine Empire lost its rich food supplies, which had been a major source of grain for the capital. This arrangement had been in place since the time of the ancient Romans, and now the entire economic structure of the Byzantine Empire was have to be rearranged overnight. Food shortages were now added to the list of the empire's problems. By 647, the last Byzantine territory in Africa, the ancient city of Carthage, had also fallen to the advancing Arab armies.

and, in the year 644, to the Byzantines' horror, the Arab Empire began building a navy. Only a decade later, it was strong enough to raid the island of Cyprus and Rhodes. Neither island put up even a scrap of resistance, and it soon became clear that Byzantium was no longer able to defend its empire. In the year 654, the Emperor Constance personally set sail to. with the Byzantine Navy, the pride of the Empire, and its last line of defense, to meet the Arab fleet in battle. The writer Theophonese the Confessor recalls what happened next.

In this year, Muawiya commanded that a great naval armament should be made with a view to his fleet sailing against Constantinople. This man arrived at Phoenix in Lycia, where the Emperor Constance lay with the Roman. Roman fleet and engaged him in a sea battle. Now the emperor, who had taken no measures to draw up his battle line, ordered the Roman fleet to fight. When the two sides engaged, the Romans were defeated and the sea was died with Roman blood. In the ensuing struggle, 500 Byzantine ships were destroyed.

The Emperor Constance was forced to swap clothes with another man and flee in the garb of a common soldier, a stinging humiliation for this emperor of the Byzantines. The emperor then put his robes on another man. This courageous man then stationed himself bravely on the imperial ship and killed many of the enemy before giving up his life on behalf of the emperor. The enemy surrounded him and held him in their midst, thinking he was the emperor, and after he had slain many of them, they killed him too, as the man was wearing the imperial robes. Thus routed, the emperor escaped, and leaving everyone behind, sailed off to Constantinople. The city of Constantinople was now completely defenseless.

Now, firmly in control of Syria and the Mediterranean coast, Arab armies were able to send frequent raiding parties deep into Anatolia, and in the year 6.74, they felt bold enough to make a strike at the great city, Constantinople itself. The Arab fleet began by capturing port towns along the coast and then setting up a blockade of Constantinople, attempting to choke the life from the city. Theophanes the confessor recalls these events in his chronicle. In this year in March, a rainbow appeared in the sky and all mankind shuddered.

Everyone said it was the end of the world. In this year, the deniers of Christ readied a great expedition. The emperor at the time was named Constantine IV, and he must have wondered whether this was finally the end of the empire that had once ruled all of Europe. But the Byzantines had one more trick up their sleeve. In fact, in recent years, they had developed a secret superweapon of ten. terrifying power, that would soon become famous around the world. This weapon is so mysterious

that today there is still lively debate over what exactly it was, and the scholars of Byzantium guarded its secrets so jealously that today its name is synonymous with the Greek Byzantines who developed it. That weapon was Greek fire. Incendiary weapons had been used in warfare for centuries before Greek fire was invented. Flaming arrows and pots containing combustible substances were used by the Assyrians as early as the 9th century BC, but the substance known as Greek fire was different. It was reportedly developed by a man named Kalinikos, who had fled the Arab conquests as a refugee and had been given refuge in the city of Constantinople. This, this city, which had seen refugees rise to become emperors, now saw the secret of its survival

come to it from the midst of those huddled masses. The medieval writer Anna Komnena gives one account that is thought to describe this terrifying weapon. This fire is made by the following arts. From the pine and the certain such evergreen trees, inflammable resin is collected. This is rubbed with sulphur and put into tubes of reed. and is blown by men using it with violent and continuous breath. Then in this manner, it meets the fire on the tip and catches light and falls like a fiery wellwind on the faces of the enemies. The refugee Kalinikos is said to have demonstrated his Greek fire to the Byzantine Emperor. It was a flaming substance, possibly based on petroleum,

that seemed to set even the surface of the sea ablaze. Water, Water couldn't douse its flames, and by some accounts even made them more intense. Its use was accompanied with smoke and the sounds of thunder. One remarkable Norse saga relates the story of a Viking warrior named Ingvar the Far Travelled, a traveler who sailed down the Volga River and into the Caspian Sea to explore the lands of Asia. Ingvar apparently faced ships, equipped with Greek fire weaponry, which is described in the saga. They began blowing with Smith's bellows at a furnace in which there was fire, and there came from it a great din. There stood there also a brass or bronze tube, and from it flew much fire against one ship,

and it burned up in a short time so that all of it have become white ashes. Whatever its exact composition, we know the effect that this weapon had. The writer Theophanes recalls these dramatic events in his chronicle as the ships of the Arab forces bore down on the great city. When Constantine learned of the movement of God's enemies against Constantinople, he prepared huge two-storied warships equipped with Greek fire and siphon-carrying warships, ordering them to anchor in the harbor of the Caesarium. All day long from dawn to dusk there was combat,

from the outworks of the Golden Gate to Cyclobian. Both sides were thrusting and counterthrusting, but with the aid of God and his mother, they were disgraced, expending a host of warlike men. They retreated in great distress, with severe wounds. As their expedition was going away after God had ruined it, It was overtaken by a tempestuous winter storm near Salaeon. It was shivered the atoms and completely destroyed.

This defeat on sea was coupled with a Byzantine victory on land, and the Arab forces withdrew, suffering enormous losses. Growing divisions in their own lands soon forced them to attend to their own affairs, and a peace deal was struck. A second siege of Constantinople, was attempted at the start of the 8th century, but once again the use of Greek fire drove the enemy armies back into their lands. The Byzantine Empire had survived yet another existential threat, and the city of Constantinople remained the impregnable fortress that the

Emperor Theodosius had hoped. 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, and 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'll be unable to see or kiss a single saint. Another pilgrim named Foti 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. Foti even witnessed an imperial procession, although he does fall foul of the hands-on a approach of some of the Byzantine Imperial Guards. We set out the next day for the Blackaray 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.

It was splendid 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 Varanjian 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 sea birds 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, Allens, Comans, Pygmaticans, 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 store rooms 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 hyper-cost 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. and 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 gray mullet and drank spiced wine called Conditon, 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 obejines 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 described 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 head first, 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 roved over with rushes and flawed with beaten earth. From the 5th century onwards, skyscraper blocks of flats, containing anything from 5 to 9 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 Dyo, 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 travellers. 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, Nicatus coniites 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 favoured luxury foods, while others recreated their own native dishes, such as ox-ribber piece, as slices of salt pork cooked with beans, and sauces made with garlic or a combination of other bitter flavours. And 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 Regul's book of Regul's, regulations shows. They are to sell pepper, spikenard, cinnamon, aloeswood, ambergris, musk, frankincense, mure, balsam, indigo, dyers herbs, lapis lazuli, fustic, storex,

and in short any article used for perfumery and dying. Their stools 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 festival 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 rose-mer. 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 Constantinus of Rhodes wrote about the effect this city had on

arriving travellers. 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? And 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 Latin's, 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 Latin's 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 Basilios I, 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. And 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 rosewater. 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 the 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% of the empire's population, and 5% of all adult males. The army was divided into local defense forces, known as Tehmata, 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 turn to be. 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 links 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's 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 india

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, Romanoz split his army in two, intending to send one half in a flanking maneuver against the Turks. But instead, these 20,000 soldiers seemed to have disliked. banded, 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 Romanoz 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. And 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 army's fighting in the army's fighting in the state of, 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 Komnena, 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 Atalieties, 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 comnenos 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. And 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 Claremont and urged all those present to take up arms under the sign of the cross. For centuries now, European pilgrims had travelled 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 The Hawaiian historian Anna Komneno, 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 a hundred thousand 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

Eliasa 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 hoard gathered outside the walls of Constantinople, his blood must have run cold. One particularly unruly group of crusaders, led by a man named Peartan, 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 source, 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. And the Crusaders, despite their general lack of experience and equipment did very well. Their vast army took the city of Nicaea 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. And for a period of about two centuries, the gamble that the emperor Alexios had made paid off. The five emperors of his Comnenos 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 Ayubid Sultanate. Crusades had always been chaotic, poorly organized affairs, run as a kind of directed anarchist, 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 their by-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 the city of the war. Zara, one of their rival cities in modern Croatia, that was then held by the Christian

kingdom of Hungary and burned 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.

And 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 to 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 San Paul, recalls. We passed by the arm of St George and made port on solid ground in the direction of Econium. 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 Villarduin, 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 reigns 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 War, 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 Varanjian 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 so served. 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. 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. Constantinople had come out to Jir 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 Crusader's 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's 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. 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 Dukas. He was strangled in February of the year 1204. The Crusaders demanded that the new Emperor Dukas 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 Nikitas Konyartis, 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. Nikitas Konyatis 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 façade

of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, where they remained to this day. Other statues were melted down to make bronze coins, as Nikitas Konyati recalls. These barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not allow the statues standing in the hippodrome and other marvellous 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 sanctuary. 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. Nekitos Konyartis describes a column of aristocratic refugees fleeing the city, and being mocked for their ill fortunes. by Byzantine commoners. The peasants and common riffraff jeered at those of us from Byzantium and were sick-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 out 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 Francocratia, 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 Nicaea and Trebizond claimed the true mantle of Byzant.

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 Foti travelled through the ancient. 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 harbor. 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 Bertrande de la Brochiere 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 Brockardos, wrote with barely concealed disappointment about the city he found within the great Theodos. adhesion 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 Nicosea 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. Allows, 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 floges of wild rambling overgrowth.

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% 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 command. Manda 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 11 times over the next hundred years,

and each wave of the disease had devastating consequences. The Greek writer Nicophorus Gregoras wrote about the horrifying effects of this disease on the city. During that time, a serious and pestilential disease invaded humanity. Starting from Skiffia and meiotis, it lasted for the 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, Johannes 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 plague started from the Skithians, 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 man.

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.

And while this was nominally alone, Venice paid 30,000 ducats for these jewels, which included the Imperial Crown. 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 cities 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 Beeliks. 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 Balik, 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 pincea 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, Lucas Notaris, 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. And 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 Mechmad II, and he would be known to history as Mechmad 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 sworent, 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 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. And 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. And 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. Mechmad asked Orban if he could build a cannon that would bring down the theodosian walls of Constantinople, and Orban gave this rabbi. 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. And 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 day that the full might of the Ottoman army appeared outside the walls of Constantinople. On the 5th 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 cannon balls 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 oils 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 thunder-clap. 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.

And 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 the 11th 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.

The siege of Constantinople is one of those historical events that has been told and retold countless times, and its events have passed into legend. The fighting on the water, the defenders waiting for the Venetian reinforcements that never came, the Turkish sappers digging tunnels under the walls and the Byzantines discovering them, the Sultan Mehmed's daring surprise plan to carry his boats over the land, rolling them on wooden rollers and into the waters of the golden horn past its long chain. The events of the siege read like a Hollywood movie, but I think this story has been told enough times by other people.

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, sombre 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 its 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 marvellous 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. And 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, St. Mary, and of St. 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.

Zwan Zostignan, that Genoese of Genoes Genoa decided to abandon his post and fled to his ship which was lying at the boom. The emperor had made this Zwan Zostignan 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 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 centuries 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 raised to the ground. 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 rainwater 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 Turk's. 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 said that when he stepped into the haunting ruins of the ancient palace of Bukolian, probably built by the Emperor Theodos in the 5th century, a thousand years before, Mehmed uttered two haunting lines by the famous Persian poet Ferdusi, 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 Arrasyab. 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 south. 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 Blackanay, now crumbling and in ruins, he began a series of renovations, laying out magnificent gardens that the historian Cretobulus of Imbros recalls with all. 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.

And although his successors abandoned much of these efforts, and any claimed 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. And the legacy of Byzantium left its mark two 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 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 Demostanese and Xenophon, Plato, Ascalus, and the Iliads. 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 emigrants

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 Marcillio 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 size, 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, and the developing technology of sailing ships, like the Caravelle became increasingly crucial. Only 35 years after the fall of Constantinople,

in the year 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz 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 text 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. And 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 anti-Semitism 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. And 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 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 Hegea 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 told me that it was their grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren

who now ran the shoe stores and haberdashery shops of Bealglu. 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 resists Beauty resides entirely in the crumbling walls, in the grass, ivy, 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 plain trees intertwining to shade the old blackened walls of wooden house. These sad, now vanished ruins, gave Istanbul's 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.

Parmuk 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 teke, 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, person foremost, be a stranger to them. Today, the lonely ruins of the theodosian walls of Constantinople still lie in 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 Nikitas Konyatis, 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's 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 marketplaces 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 rindexamines.

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 plain 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. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Annie Kelly, Cleo Madeline, Joey L, and Nicholas Roxton. 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 by Z. Byzantine chanting. The members of the choir were Michael Georgio, Alexandros Gikas, Matthew Tomko, and Stephanos Toméides. We were also joined by musicians playing a number of traditional instruments to bring us the authentic sound of Byzantium. On vocals, Monica Lucia Madas, also known as Monuca,

on the Byzantine Lyra, Alexandros Custas, and on the Byzantine Lyra, Alexandre, and on the Byzantian, the Canoon Constantinus Glinos. Theophilos Lais was playing the Cretan Lyra, and Dario Papa Vasilio was on the Greek Santor. If you enjoyed these traditional performances, they will be available to download for all Patreon subscribers. As some of you may know already, Fall of Civilizations now has a visual accompaniment, which we're calling Fall of Civilizations TV, available now on YouTube. These videos bring maps, artwork, drone photography, and reenactments to the screen alongside the usual stories, all in glittering 4K resolution. I know many of you like to return to old episodes and I hope this brings something new to the

experience. As a thank you for supporting the show, all Patreon subscribers will be able to watch these video episodes completely ad-free. As a final note, if you enjoyed the discussion of Byzantine cuisine on this episode, you may enjoy the podcast, The Delicious Legacy by Thomas Tynus. Tom has been a part of the fall of civilization's team from the beginning, and now has his own show, looking at the history of food in the ancient world. And he'll have a special episode coming soon, looking at the food culture of Byzantium. If that sounds like your thing, go check out his show.

The Delicious Legacy Today. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul M.M. Cooper. And 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 SivPod,

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