The Walls of Constantinople AD 324-1453 by The Walls of Constantinople 324-1453

Author:The Walls of Constantinople 324-1453
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-24T10:44:24+00:00

walls. In AD 626, during the siege of Constantinople by the Avars, the besiegers The aqueduct of Valens. The

cut the aqueduct of Valens, but the act had no serious consequences. This was growing population of the new

probably because the damage was slight, and also because of the storage facilities.

capital founded by Constantine led

in

For example, Justinian built the Yerebatan Saray, the huge pillared underground AD 373 to the building of the first aqueduct to take water into

cistern that is one of the great sights of Istanbul, during the AD 530s. Curiously, the heart of the city. This was the knowledge of this colossal urban reservoir was lost in the century following the aqueduct of Valens, named after the conquest by the Ottomans. It was only rediscovered in AD 1545 when Petrus emperor who commissioned it.

Gyllius, a traveller to the city engaged upon the study of Byzantine antiquities, The aqueduct still stands as a heard that the inhabitants of this area obtained their water supplies by lowering striking monument in the middle buckets through the floors of their houses, while some even caught fish there!

of busy Istanbul, straddling a

multi-lane highway.

As for food supply, by AD 1200 the empire had lost its richest provinces for good, notably Egypt, once the source of grain that had fed the population up to the time of Heraclius. This could have posed serious problems, particularly when an attack loomed, but Constantinople was actually able to feed itself from its lands in Thrace and the fields round the Aegean. Ships and carts ferried the grain to Constantinople, where it was stored and distributed through a commercial network.

Siege weapons and the defence of the walls

The defenders of Constantinople had several types of siege weaponry at their disposal. Various forms of catapults designed to throw stones or arrows were used both to defend Constantinople and attack it until the early 15th century, but it is not clear how much continuity there was between the Roman war machines of the 4th and 5th centuries AD and the later Byzantine weapons. The classic Roman model was the two-armed horizontally mounted torsion-powered catapult. This was a device that required considerable technical knowledge and expertise both to produce and maintain. The crucial factor of having equivalent torsion levels in both springs required great mathematical and engineering knowledge, and this does not appear to have been available in abundance from the 5th and 6th centuries AD onwards. Instead the Byzantine historian Procopius described the use of the onager, the familiar Roman torsion catapult that used one vertical arm threaded through some form of torsion spring in a horizontal plane. Such machines could throw stones and incendiary missiles. They had the disadvantage of having to be constructed very solidly to give the stability they needed to operate, but these skills were generally available. The Tactica of Leo tells of field artillery units that accompanied the infantry. They were wagon-mounted and with a single pole, which rules out the two-armed torsion catapults. At the siege of Adrianople by the Goths in AD 378 the defenders hurled a huge stone ball from 37

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