Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [8]
But none of Justinian’s cities matched the splendor of his Constantinople.
Medieval visitors from the rural West, where Rome had shrunk to a cow town, were struck dumb by this resplendent metropolis, home to half a million, its harbor crowded with vessels, its markets filled with silks, spices, furs, precious stones, perfumed woods, carved ivory, gold and silver, and enameled jewelry. “One could not believe there was so rich a city in all the world,” reported the crusader Villehardouin.
The first Rome, on the Tiber, did not fall in 476, as school-books often say; it withered away. No emperor died on its walls when it was sacked by Visigoths in 410, or by Vandals from Carthage in 455; emperors had long resided elsewhere. From the third century the course of empire had set eastward.
The Dark Ages are dark only if you look at Western Europe, for long centuries a backwater: decaying towns, isolated manors, scattered monasteries, squabbling robber barons. In the East blazed the light of Byzantium, studded with cities such as Thessalonica, Antioch, and Alexandria, more cosmopolitan than any Western society before the modern age.
While Charlemagne could barely scrawl his name and only clerics had clerical skills, many Byzantine emperors were scholars. Even laymen knew their Homer as they knew their Psalms. While men in the West for centuries tested guilt by ordeal—picking up a red-hot iron (you were innocent if you didn’t burn your hand)—Justinian set scholars to compiling his famous Corpus Juris Civilis, the foundation of Roman law in continental Europe today. Via the Code Napoléon, Byzantine precepts were transmitted to Latin America, Quebec Province, and Louisiana, where they still hold sway.
Though the empire became officially Greek in speech soon after Justinian’s day, people of the East still considered themselves Romans. (Westerners they called Latins or Franks, when they weren’t calling them barbarians.) Their Emperor of the Romans was the legitimate heir of Augustus Caesar. Down to 1453 theirs was the Roman Empire. But it was the old pagan Roman world Christianized and turned upside down, the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Such was the Byzantine worldview: a God-centered realm, universal and eternal, with the emperor as God’s vice-regent surrounded by an imperial entourage that reflected the heavenly hierarchy of angels, prophets, and apostles. One God, one world, one emperor. Outside this cosmos was only ignorance and war, a fury of barbarians. The emperor had a divine mandate to propagate the true faith and bring them under his dominion.
Ceremony reinforced his role. His coronation procession moved through the Golden Gate along the Mese, the arcaded, shop-lined avenue leading through the Forum of Constantine and past the Hippodrome to the Augusteum, the main square with its gargantuan statue of Justinian on horseback gesturing eastward atop his pillar, and the Milion, the milestone where the routes of empire converged. Along the way a legitimate successor or victorious usurper transformed himself by a series of costume changes from a hero in gleaming armor to a robed personification of Christ. On Easter and at Christmas twelve courtiers symbolically gowned as the Apostles would accompany him in procession to worship in Hagia Sophia, the populace prostrating in adoration.
Ruling from his labyrinthine sacred palace, the emperor, crown and gown festooned with precious stones, invested his officials in silken robes and bestowed titles such as Excellency (used by ambassadors, governors, and Roman Catholic bishops today) and Magnificence (still used by rectors of German universities). Popes would adopt his tiara; England’s monarchs, his