Constantinople and its Hinterland

Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993

Cyril Mango, Gilbert Dagron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351949422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From its foundation, the city of Constantinople dominated the Byzantine world. It was the seat of the emperor, the centre of government and church, the focus of commerce and culture, by far the greatest urban centre; its needs in terms of supplies and defense imposed their own logic on the development of the empire. Byzantine Constantinople has traditionally been treated in terms of the walled city and its immediate suburbs. In this volume, containing 25 papers delivered at the 27th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at Oxford in 1993, the perspective has been enlarged to encompass a wider geographical setting, that of the city's European and Asiatic hinterland. Within this framework a variety of interconnected topics have been addressed, ranging from the bare necessities of life and defence to manufacture and export, communications between the capital and its hinterland, culture and artistic manifestations and the role of the sacred.

1 Introduction

C. Mango

The scholarly study of Constantinople was intitiated 450 years ago by a Frenchman. He was called Pierre Gilles (Latinized to Gyllius) and was by avocation a zoologist in addition to being an excellent classicist. Scholarship often follows in the wake of politics, and so it was in this case: the mission of Gyllius to the Levant was made possible by the unholy alliance between the very Catholic king Francis I and the infidel Sultan Süleyman. Even under these favourable conditions, Gyllius had a hard time. He ran out of funds, was obliged to join the Turkish army, which was setting out on campaign against Persia, was rescued at Aleppo by the French ambassador and eventually shipped back to the West, barely escaping capture by pirates on his homeward journey. The mission of Gyllius contributed little to the cause of zoology except a ‘new description’ of the elephant and the hippopotamus,¹ but produced another, unforeseen result. Having been allowed to explore systematically the Ottoman capital and its suburbs, Gyllius set down his antiquarian notes, which he proceeded to integrate with the evidence of ancient authorities. He was not, of course, the first westerner to have described Constantinople, but he was the first to have done so in the light of Renaissance scholarship, which is still our scholarship. His two monographs, entitled De Bosporo thracio and De topographia Constantinopoleos were published posthumously in 1561 and immediately acknowledged as classics.

The next important step in the study of Byzantine Constantinople was again taken by a Frenchman, the indefatigable Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, author of the standard lexicon of medieval Latin and what is still, after 300 years, the best lexicon of medieval Greek. Having read all the Byzantine texts that were available at the time, Du Cange, who never travelled to the East, extracted from them a rich harvest of testimonia, which he stuffed, duly categorized, into a large folio volume entitled Constantinopolis Christiana (1680). Gyllius and Du Cange constituted the twin pillars of the study of Constantinople until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

In view of the decisive French contribution to this topic, a contribution that was further enriched in the past hundred years by scholars such as Pargoire, Ebersolt, Janin and others, it seemed only proper that this symposium should be an Anglo-French effort, and I should like to thank our French colleagues for their willingness to bring their lumières across the Channel.

Gyllius and Du Cange defined Constantinople as the walled city and its immediate suburbs within a radius of about fifteen miles, i.e. to the northern mouth of the Bosphorus. That definition would have appeared over-generous to the medieval Constantinopolitan, who had little inclination to venture any distance beyond the walls. A ninth-century intellectual, who had been relegated to a monastery on the Golden Horn, barely a mile or two outside the city, described himself as dwelling beyond the straits of Cadiz,² just as a twelfth-century historian, who had retired to a posh monastery at modern Tuzla, today well within the suburban belt, referred to it as being at the extremity of the world.³ It seems that the comforts, civilized amenities and cultivated company (not to speak of books) that were available in the city hardly extended beyond the walls. Outside, you found yourself in the realm of rustic solitude, fit only for peasants, fishermen and monks.

Yet it is an optical illusion to imagine Constantinople as an isolated wonder, a city without hinterland; which is why in this symposium we shall attempt to cast our net a little wider — but how much wider? To this question I have no clear answer. Whereas every ancient city had its territorium, an area of land administratively subject to it, Constantinople, as far as I know, did not have a defined territorium. Its governor, called Prefect, had in the ninth century jurisdiction over offences committed within a radius of 100 miles,⁴ and if we draw on the map a circle of 100 Roman miles, we shall find that in Asia it encompasses the peninsula of Cyzicus and passes well south of Nicaea, whereas in Europe it reaches the present Bulgarian frontier while falling considerably short of Adrianople. That, of course, is a purely arbitrary delimitation, but it may do as a starting point, especially as it coincides more or less with a definition made on different grounds by Professor Ševčenko. In his eyes the zone of the capital extended to a distance of what was then three to four days’ journey and was, furthermore, the belt of country in which the richer citizens often owned property.⁵

Let us look more carefully at the map to understand some of the advantages and constraints that geography imposed on the development of Constantinople. ‘A situation unrivalled by any other in the world’, The bridge that unites Europe to Asia’, ‘The crossroads of the universe’, ‘One of the brightest gems in the diadem of nature’ — such expressions have been repeated over the centuries from one travel book to another. And so the conviction has grown that Constantinople was destined by virtue of its setting to become the capital of an empire extending over both Europe and Asia. By choosing it as his seat, Constantine made not only the right decision, but the obvious decision. Great men, it seems, have the gift, denied to lesser mortals, of seeing the obvious.

And yet, was his decision so natural after all? The ancient Greek colony of Byzantium had existed 1,000 years before Constantine, and although it had played a notable part in Greek history, never became a really big and important city. For a shrewd assessment of the matter we may consult the historian Polybius, who lived in the second century B.C. ‘The site of Byzantium’, he writes,

is as regards the sea more favourable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the world, but as regards the land it is most disadvantageous in both respects. For, as concerning the sea, it completely blocks the mouth of the Pontus in such a manner that no merchant can sail in or out without the consent of the Byzantines. They have control over the supply of products from the Black Sea, namely cattle, slaves, honey, wax and preserved fish traded for oil and wine. As for corn, they sometimes export it and at other times import it.⁶

The disadvantage of the site in the eyes of Polybius was that it lay at the mercy of the Thracian barbarians who could devastate, whenever they so wished, the land owned by Byzantium.

Polybius saw clearly that the natural role of Byzantium was to serve as the gateway for trade with the Black Sea basin. The current of the Bosphorus carries all ships to Byzantium whether they like it or not, while it bypasses the rival city of Chalcedon (modern Kadiköy) situated on the Asiatic shore. But was trade with the Black Sea an important factor in the fourth century when Constantine founded his capital? The answer is probably negative, for the Greek colonies dotted along the northern shore, colonies that had prospered earlier on, had collapsed in the third century under the onslaught of the Goths. Paradoxically, it was only at infrequent intervals that Constantinople was able to fulfil its natural trading role. This may have happened on a small scale in the ninth and following centuries when Black Sea navigation was opened up by the Russian Vikings. It happened again under Genoese control in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but when the Genoese had been ousted by the Ottoman Turks, the Black Sea was practically closed to international commercial traffic and remained so until the foundation of Odessa by Catherine the Great of Russia.

Maritime links with west and south were a different matter. In the days of Polybius, as in the days of Demosthenes, Byzantium was a point of transmission of products destined for or originating from the Aegean basin. Constantine’s enormous city created instead a centre of consumption of goods coming mostly from the south. The all-important problem of provisioning is discussed by Professor Durliat, and it is enough to say now that the Egyptian corn which fed the population until the early seventh century not only had to travel a distance of 1,000 miles, but also had to be conveyed up the Dardanelles during a season when the prevailing winds were northerly. The pagan Eunapius, referring to the time of Constantine, observes that ‘the site of Byzantium is not adapted for the approach of ships that touch there, except when a strong wind is blowing due from the south’⁷ — which it hardly ever does during the normal season of navigation. As a result the populace was in constant danger of going hungry until a highly elaborate infrastructure of storage and unloading facilities had been built up.

Another consideration may be worth mentioning. In the period of the Tetrarchy, i.e. at the end of the third century A.D., the Roman emperors set up a number of provincial capitals in which they periodically resided. The military importance of the Straits did not escape their attention and two new imperial residences were established, one at Nicomedia (Izmit) about 100 km east of Byzantium, the other at Perinthos, renamed Heraclea, an equal distance to the west. Diocletian, the senior emperor, habitually lived at Nicomedia, where he initiated important public work, ‘striving’, we are told, ‘to make it the equal of Rome’.⁸ Why, we may ask, were Nicomedia and Heraclea elevated to imperial status and Byzantium passed over? If Byzantium was perceived as possessing such overwhelming natural advantages, was Diocletian too blind to see them?

Following Polybius, let us now look at the land. Constantinople is situated in Thrace, a part of the world that was regarded at the time as being rude and barbarous. It was on the edge of the civilized world, had a cold climate by Mediterranean standards and was subject to earthquakes. The tapering tongue of land, at whose eastern extremity Constantinople lies, is windswept, rolling country with two mountain ranges, both running east-west:

the Yildiz or Istranca dağlar1, a prolongation of the Rhodope range along the Black Sea coast, and the Ganos dag, which forms the backbone of the Gallipoli peninsula and terminates near Rodosto. The direction of these mountain ranges means that Constantinople had no natural defence against attack from the west - a most severe disadvantage that may not have been so evident at the time of Constantine, when no immediate threat loomed from that quarter, but became acute with the Gothic invasion in the latter part of the fourth century and remained a grave problem throughout the Middle Ages. There is simply nothing to stop an invading enemy — hence the huge works of fortification of which more will be said hereafter.

Another problem on the European side had to do with water supply, which has always been and remains today very deficient. Constantine himself appears to have given little thought to it, for we are told that in the reign of his successor, Constantius II, the city was dying of thirst.⁹ A Roman imperial capital needed plenty of water, not only for drinking but also for public baths and ornamental fountains. To obtain this water proved an enormous task: it had to be brought by a network of aqueducts over a distance of over 100 km from the Istranca mountains and the supply proved, of course, vulnerable to enemy attack. Of that, too, more later.

Furthermore, Constantinople suffered from isolation on the European side. The Black Sea coast is extemely inhospitable, lacks any indentation and has no natural harbour until one reaches Sozopolis in what is now Bulgaria. The south or Marmara coast, though somewhat more agreeable, is also deficient in harbours, those being limited to Heraclea and Selymbria. The interior had and still has no sizable towns except for Adrianople, whose expansion dates from the Ottoman period. Anyone who has travelled by car from the Greek border to Istanbul knows that crossing European Turkey is a very long and a very dull trip.

The Asiatic side on the Marmara coast is pleasanter and softer than the European and remains today the preferred place for summer villas and country houses for the better off. Its main feature is the very deep gulf of Nicomedia dominated on its southern shore by a steep mountain range rising to 5,000 ft. If you wished to travel from Constantinople in a southeasterly direction to Nicaea and beyond - which became, indeed, a highly important destination - you either had to go all the way round the gulf or cross it by ship and then climb over the mountains. That, too, proved a great inconvenience.¹⁰ In the Middle Ages the journey from Constantinople to Nicaea took about four days and was not free of danger when the weather was rough.

In the light of these geographical imperatives we may begin to see that Constantine’s ‘obvious’ decision was in fact quite a gamble. He himself did not pay the price for it, but his immediate successors had to do so in the form of immensely expensive works of engineering and a diversion of funds on a huge scale to make sure that the imperial capital was properly supplied and defended. Great men place great burdens on their descendants. Once the investment had been made in the fifty to eighty years after Constantine’s death, it was too late to change course, i.e. to relocate the capital. And...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The land and its products
• PART II Administration
• PART III Defence
• PART IV Communications between capital and hinterland
• PART V Inhabitants, colonists, conquerors
• PART VI Manufacture and export
• PART VII Cultural relations
• Index