Iron, Fire and Ice by Ed West

Author:Ed West [West, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510735644
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

*Gulf Arabs still have this practice, so that the notorious terrorist’s full name was Osama ibn Mohammed ibn Awad ibn Laden.

20

WILDFIRE

Why is it no one trusts the eunuch?

—VARYS

Rome did not die. In the fifth century, while the West was overrun by Lombards, Vandals, Goths, Franks, and Saxons, in the East the Empire and people survived and thrived, and would continue for another thousand years, in a new city that was for many centuries the beating heart of Christendom. Its magnicifent churches would marvel blond-haired barbarians from the north, its greatest jewel being the Hagia Sophia. It is said that envoys of the Grand Prince of Kiev, upon entering the basilica, were moved to tears and could not tell whether they were on heaven or earth. Constantinople was the greatest city that was or ever will be.

Sick of the corruption in Rome, in the early fourth century the Emperor Constantine had sought a new capital. He chose a spot close to the Black Sea on the site of the old fishing village of Byzantium, founded in 658 BC by a semi-mythical Byzas and colonists from Megara, thirty miles west of Athens. The city was in a prime location, controlling the Bosporus waterway that led from the Black Sea to the Aegean, but it had never been able to grow because of the lack of available fresh water. Roman engineering was able to solve that problem and it grew to become the largest city in the world, initially called New Rome, but inevitably better known after its founder. At one point it would be home to more than a million people.

The city Constantine built was laid out “in a grid of colonnaded streets, flanked by public buildings with elegant columns, great squares, gardens and triumphal arches.”1 The streets were lined with statues and monuments from around the classical world, “a city of marble and porphyry, beaten gold and brilliant mosaics,” and gigantic in comparison to anything in the west.2 It had imperial palaces and churches “more numerous than days of the year,” westerners observed, calling it “the city of the world’s desire.”3

The Queen of Cities had street lighting, sewers, drainage, hospitals, “orphanages, public baths, aqueducts, huge water cisterns, libraries and luxury shops,” as well as seven palaces, among them the Triconchus roofed in gold.4 It was the crossroads of Europe and Asia, between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Bosphorus bringing icy winds down from Russian steppes, clouding the city in winter with fog and snow. As Pierre Gilles, a French traveler of the fifteenth century, wrote of Constantinople: “with one key it opens and closes two worlds, two seas.”5

Straddling Asia and Europe, it was the finest city the world had ever seen, but its position made it vulnerable to attack from numerous nomadic tribes, among them the Huns, Goths, Slavs, Gepids, Tartars, Avars, Turkic Bulgars, and the Pechenegs. They came down from the steppes of Asia, the forests of Russia, the Balkan mountains and the plains of Hungary. In 626, the

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