THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CONSTANTINOPLE

The beginning o£ the story took place a long time ago, and not even in the same land.

Back in the days when our ancestors still dressed in skins and hides and had just given up stone weapons for bronze, a group of people moved out of central Europe to the north of Italy. They stayed there for a thousand years, made pottery and grew beans, beets, barley, and millet and finally learned how to use iron. They also grazed cattle and herded sheep, and so one day when they learned that the coastland from the Tiber River to the Bay of Naples was so lush with tall green grass that it was called Vitelia (the name Italy comes from mispronouncing this), or Calfland, they moved south again.

There they settled in the rugged blue hills, and there they became the various Italian tribes. Most important of these to our story were the Latins. For reasons of safety, these Latins, like the others, lived in the craggiest places they could find, but they always came down to the campania, as the level land was called, to fatten their lowing herds. And in 754 B.C., according to Roman legend, twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, decided to stay there. They became chieftains of a band of robber cattle-herders, and at the exact spot where the twins said they had been nourished as babes by a she-wolf (who some say was a woman named Lupa, the Latin word for “wolf”), they founded a small town of mud-and-wattle houses.

They named it Rome after Romulus, the older twin. Little did anyone dream that one day it would be one of the most famous cities in the world! Still less did anyone imagine that the Romans would march out of it to conquer the world!

But that is just exactly what they did. In the beginning, they had troubles and trials. In fact, an old story says that when the Gauls from France invaded the city, the capital was saved only when a gaggle of geese cackled and warned the senators.

But the Romans were stubborn, good fighters, well-disciplined, and no matter how bitterly they battled each other in more than one bloody civil war, they always stood together when they faced an enemy. By the time of Julius Caesar 700 years later, they had reached the English Channel in one direction and the Caspian Sea in the other. When Trajan was emperor (about 100 A.D.), practically every part of the known civilized world was included in their empire. Of the eighty-two countries in the United Nations at the time this book was written, all or a part of at least thirty were in Trajan’s empire, and a great majority of the other fifty-two countries are in lands, like America, that hadn’t been discovered. They were ruled by one man.

What is more, soon all the inhabitants of all these lands were Roman citizens. Civis Romanus sum. I am a Roman citizen. This could be said by longhaired Celts walking the heather in Britain; by Berbers in the Atlas Mountains in Africa; by haughty Spaniards (Trajan himself was born in Spain); by Gauls in France, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Arabs; even by Scythians and Sarmatians from South Russia, and by Germans from across the Rhine.

This was a great achievement that had never happened before, but it also made a lot of difficulties.

Take size alone. The Roman Empire was now too big to manage. In those days, you couldn’t fly a general (or a tax collector, or an imperial officer, or the emperor himself) from York, England—that’s where Constantine the Great was when he started toward Rome to become the Roman emperor—to the Persian border in a matter of hours. You couldn’t even put him on a fast train. The Roman roads were famous, but the only way you could travel them was on foot, on horseback, or in a litter or chariot. And from one end of the empire to the other was 3,000 miles!

Two centuries after Trajan, an emperor called Diocletian decided to do something about it. Diocletian was the son of a freed slave, but he became the first absolute ruler the Roman Empire ever had. Before that the emperor was merely princeps (from which the English word “prince” is derived), or first citizen. But once Diocletian had all this power, he proceeded to divide it up. He appointed a co-emperor (a second Augustus) with an assistant emperor called a caesar to help him, and put him in charge of the Roman Empire in the West. Diocletian himself, with his own caesar, kept the East. Although he was still head emperor and the other emperor was supposed to obey him, the Roman Empire was now divided into two parts.

About forty years later, another emperor took an even more important step. Constantine the Great decided that the empire needed a second capital as much as it needed two rulers, and since he was a Christian emperor—actually he was the first Christian emperor—he decided it must be a Christian city.

He looked around him carefully. First he thought of Nicomedia (now Ismid in modern Turkey) where Diocletian had had his camp; but it had been the capital of a heathen king. Then he considered ancient Troy, for the Romans were supposed to be descended from the Trojans. He even began to build walls there. But one day somebody reminded him of the ruined city of Byzantium with its wonderful location.

“That is the place!” he cried.

On foot, with lance in hand and followed by a solemn procession, he marched over pleasant hills and valleys that were still covered with vines and greenery.

As they tried to keep up with him his panting courtiers asked him how big he planned to make the place.

“I shall walk,” he replied, “until God, my invisible Guide, bids me to halt.”

An emperor could get things done in those days. Not much more than four years from the day, hour, and minute that Constantine ordered his architects and engineers and builders to get to work, the city was completed and ready to live in. It was equipped with theaters, public baths, senate houses, a university, courts of justice, granaries, palaces, and magnificent private dwellings, many of them the very ones described by Robert of Clari. It had broad squares, paved avenues, classic porticoes, and aqueducts that brimmed with clear, cool water. It was decorated with marbles, statues, and priceless works of art; at the emperor’s command, the cities of Greece and Asia Minor had been rifled of their most precious treasures to make sure of this.

It was filled with people too. Constantine invited (that was the same thing as ordered) senators to move from Rome. He presented costly buildings to his favorites. He confiscated the estates of many of his rich subjects, especially in Asia Minor, and gave the income to those of his subjects who agreed to live in the new city. Of course, a lot of people came of their own accord. They wanted to get in on something good.

It was lucky indeed that Diocletian and Constantine had taken these steps. For suddenly the Roman Empire began to quake and tremble. All through recorded history and long before, the barbarians from the northern swamps and forests of Europe kept pouring down upon the lands to the south of them. As a matter of fact, the Romans, as well as the Greeks whom Homer wrote his poems about, were from the north. When Homer spoke of the “golden-haired Achaeans,” he was talking about the Greeks. But the men around the Mediterranean—the original Greeks—were dark, as they are today. The Achaeans came from the north.

For a long time Roman might had kept these tribesmen back, and civilization and a comfortable life had flourished. As many men lived in peace or happiness as ever have before or since.

But now all at once Rome grew weak almost as fast as it had grown powerful, and the barbarians rode again. Almost immediately they were able to cross the frontiers whenever they wanted to. Soon the empire couldn’t hold them off at all.

Less than a century after Constantine, Alaric the Goth marched into Rome and burned a great deal of the city. Forty-five years later another tribe, the Vandals, destroyed the rest. We get the word “vandalism” from the Vandals. It means the willful destruction of something beautiful, which is what the Vandals did. After the Vandals other Germanic tribes, with their horned helmets and their long yellow hair, came streaming in, bringing their women and children with them. They were followed by the Mongolian Huns and Avars.

In 476 A.D., one of the barbarian chiefs decided it was foolish to pretend any longer. He deposed the then Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a Latin name meaning “Romulus, the little Augustus”), and proclaimed himself king of Italy. Thus ended the Roman Empire in the West.

If it had not been for Diocletian and Constantine, it would also have ended the Roman Empire everywhere. It might have ended Western civilization, too.

But the emperor of the Roman Empire in the East stood safe behind his mighty walls, and he announced as quickly as possible that he was now emperor of the whole Roman Empire. He ordered this barbarian king of Italy and all the other barbarian kings to acknowledge him as emperor and overlord.

Many of them did.

That is probably the most important thing to remember about the Byzantines. They considered themselves Romans. Most people in the West called them Greeks, and indeed they spoke Greek and were Greek in many other ways. They were also Orientals in their splendor. But for at least the first 900 years of their history they thought of themselves as Romans and were proud of it. Their emperor was still the Augustus, and his other title autokrator was a Greek translation of the Latin imperator, or commander in chief. Even when he later took the proud title of basileus, a Greek equivalent for the Persian “king of kings,” he was basileus tou Romaion, king of the Romans. To call him “Greek emperor,” as did some Westerners, was to use a fighting word.

The second most important thing to remember about the Byzantines was that Constantinople never fell into the hands of the enemy. This means that the empire never fell into the hands of the barbarians, for in those days the capital was even more important than it is today, and so in spite of all the lands it governed, Constantinople was the empire. As long as it stood, the empire stood. The Byzantines had plenty of troubles, and more than once saw the turbans and scimitars of the Arabs, and the felt hats and yellow faces of the followers of some steppe-riding khagan, right beneath their walls. But except when he was invited, no foreign invader had ever set foot in the streets of Constantinople until Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari came with their fellow crusaders.

It is a fact that for century after century, when almost every other important city in the world was sacked and looted over and over again, the Byzantines were able to make and keep Constantinople safe. It was a place of refuge for men and for ideas and for the civilization the Greeks and Romans had given them and for the ideals of Christianity in the midst of a stormy world.

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