The Walls of Constantinople AD 324-1453 by Stephen Turnbull

The Walls of Constantinople AD 324-1453 by Stephen Turnbull

Author:Stephen Turnbull
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: The Walls of Constantinople AD 324–1453
ISBN: 9781782002246
Publisher: Osprey Publishing


Water and food supply

No matter how strong a city’s walls might be, its population has to be supplied with food and water, and Constantinople was no exception. The original site of Byzantium was poorly supplied with natural water sources. The stream called the Lycus that has long since disappeared once flowed into the city, and there were a few small springs. At a further distance two streams once known as the ‘Sweet Waters of Europe’ flowed into the Golden Horn.

The first aqueduct to bring water to Byzantium was built by the Emperor Hadrian. Records note that it soon proved inadequate, and the growing population of the new capital founded by Constantine led in AD 373 to the building of the first aqueduct to take water into the heart of the city. This was the aqueduct of Valens, named after the emperor who commissioned it. The aqueduct still stands as a striking monument in the middle of busy Istanbul, straddling a multi-lane highway. What we see today was only part of a huge network that took about 30 years to complete and was described by Gregory of Nazianzus as ‘a subterranean and aerial river’.

But to bring water in is one thing. It also needed to be stored, so very large underground and surface cisterns and reservoirs were added within the city walls. In AD 626, during the siege of Constantinople by the Avars, the besiegers cut the aqueduct of Valens, but the act had no serious consequences. This was probably because the damage was slight, and also because of the storage facilities. For example, Justinian built the Yerebatan Saray, the huge pillared underground cistern that is one of the great sights of Istanbul, during the AD 530s. Curiously, knowledge of this colossal urban reservoir was lost in the century following the conquest by the Ottomans. It was only rediscovered in AD 1545 when Petrus Gyllius, a traveller to the city engaged upon the study of Byzantine antiquities, heard that the inhabitants of this area obtained their water supplies by lowering buckets through the floors of their houses, while some even caught fish there!



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