11. Byzantium - Last of the Romans

Introduction to Byzantium

0:00In the year 1852, the French writer and translator Théophile Gautier made a journey to the city then known as Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the new technology of the steamship that now crisscrossed the

0:34Mediterranean, he made the journey from Paris in just under 11 days. Gautier stayed in the city for nearly three months, and during that time, he wrote a book full of his observations. As a young man, Gautier had dreamed of becoming a painter, and he'd spent much of his life as an art critic, and so his descriptions of the city of Istanbul during this time are always infused with the language of art, as though the city were a painting he was appraising.

1:10The harbour crowded with ships of all nations and rippled by caiques gliding about in every direction, and above all, the wonderful panorama of Constantinople itself displayed upon the opposite shore. This view is so strangely beautiful that it is hard to credit its reality, or to believe that it is anything but one of those theatrical scenes prepared to illustrate some eastern fairy tale, and bathed by the fancy of the painter and the brilliancy of the gas

1:40lights in a radiance purely celestial.

Gautier's Journey

1:43Gautier walked the streets of Istanbul for weeks, visiting its markets and cemeteries, wandering down the narrow alleys and crumbling cobbled boulevards, and all the time writing about what he saw. Everywhere he went, he became increasingly aware of the vanished history of this ancient city. While the Ottoman Turks who lived there increasingly referred to their city by the

2:14name Istanbul, Gautier, along with much of the rest of Europe, knew it by a different, much older name. That name was Constantinople, and it was a city that had been at the heart of another very different empire, one that had been the foremost power in Europe for centuries. This was a power known as the Byzantine Empire, or more simply, as Byzantium.

2:46Byzantium had its beginning as the eastern half of the Roman Empire. While the west of that empire fell, the east remained. It lasted for another thousand years after what people commonly think of as the fall of Rome. It stood and endured, and in its great libraries, it preserved and protected the knowledge of the ancients. But the ruins of that great city now littered the streets of Istanbul. Of all the ruins that Gautier visited, none affected him so

3:22deeply as the site of the great walls of Constantinople, which had once been legendary around the world.

Byzantium's History

3:32We would have gone along the whole outer extent of these ancient walls of Byzantium had we not been too much fatigued. I do not suppose that there is in the world a ride more austerely melancholy than upon this road, which extends for nearly a league between a cemetery and a mass of ruins.

3:52The ramparts, composed of two lines of wall flanked with square towers, have at their base a large moat, at present cultivated throughout, which is again surrounded by a stone parapet forming, in fact, three lines of fortification. These are the walls of Constantine, such as have been left of them, after time, sieges, and earthquakes have done their worst upon them.

4:20Gautier writes movingly about the masses of overgrown vegetation now growing on the ancient walls, fig trees sprouting from their towers, and vines and grasses bursting from the cracks in the masonry. Here and there a gigantic crevice severed a tower from top to bottom. Farther on a mass of wall had fallen into the moat, but where the masonry was wanting, the elements had supplied earth and seed.

4:50A shrub had supplied the place of a missing battlement, and grown into a tree. The thousand tendrils of parasitical plants had sustained the stone which otherwise would have fallen. The roots of trees became chains to confine them. The line of walls raised to the sky its battered profile, draped with ivy, and gilded by time.

5:14The whole haunting scene seemed like something out of a dream, or a magical tale, as the weight of the city's history seemed to weigh down on him. It was difficult to believe that a living city lay behind the defunct ramparts which hid Constantinople from our view. It had been easier to believe oneself near some of those cities of the Arabian legends, all the inhabitants of which had been, by some magical process, turned into stone.

5:45As he walked the length of those walls under the soft Istanbul sun, Gautier must have asked himself, how could the mighty walls of such a fortress city ever have fallen? How could a city that had once been at the center of the world now be home to such a scattering of rubble and ruin? And what in all the world had happened to the great legacy of Byzantium?

6:16And what in all the world had happened to the flag of the the palace? And what did you say? My name's Paul Cooper,

Podcast Introduction

6:50and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at one of history's most remarkable stories of survival.

7:21That's the thousand-year epic of the Byzantine Empire. I want to explore how this civilization suffered the loss of its western half and continued the unbroken legacy of Rome right through the Middle Ages. I want to examine how it formed a bridge between two continents and two ages before ultimately being crushed between them both. I want to tell the story of how it was that the impregnable walls of

7:52Constantinople were finally brought crashing to the ground.

Formation of Mediterranean

8:04Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was a very different place to the cool, dark waters we know today. In those days, our ape-like ancestors hadn't even begun to walk on two legs. But if you were able to go back and see that time, stand on the shores of Greece or Italy, Turkey or North Africa, all you would see before you would be a hellish, dead landscape. The land beneath would drop away for 1,500 meters into a rolling desert of bleak salt flats,

8:42broken by lakes of water so salty that if you tried to swim in them, you would float on the surface. For more than 600,000 years, this deep depression in the land had been cut off from the Atlantic Ocean by the movement of the Earth's plates. Over the millennia, the seawater that had once filled it had evaporated away, leaving only this harsh, salty land where nothing would grow. But this was all about to change in the most dramatic and apocalyptic way imaginable.

9:18This vast, deep basin was separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a thin strip of land, only 60 kilometers wide, joining the landmasses of what is today Spain and Morocco. Beyond that, the enormous weight of all the world's water heaved and rocked. And as 600 millennia passed by, those Atlantic waves ate away at that narrow strip of rock.

9:48The ocean waters ground down those cliffs until this strip of land was only 30 kilometers thick, 15 kilometers, then 5 kilometers. And then at some point around 5.3 million years ago, this narrow gate of rock burst apart, and the Atlantic Ocean was unleashed into Europe. What followed must have been one of the most impressive and terrifying sights that has ever occurred on Earth.

10:20The world's ocean burst into the Mediterranean and thundered in a raging torrent down a series of waterfalls that dropped for more than a kilometer. This channel is thought to have carried more than 200 billion liters of seawater every second, or as much water as a thousand Amazon rivers, reaching speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. The waters of the Mediterranean rose as much as 10 meters a day to create a sea 4,000 kilometers end to end,

10:56or enough to cover the whole of North America from California to North Virginia.

11:03This process took perhaps as much as three years, but some researchers believe it could have taken only a few months. The force of these thundering waters caused earthquakes and landslides that can be seen in the geological record. These triggered mega tsunamis more than 100 meters high, or enough to completely swallow a 30-story building. This deluge is known today as the Zanclean Flood, and it's in this violence that the peaceful sea we call the Mediterranean was formed.

11:42This was a body of water quite unlike anywhere else on Earth, a vast inland sea now joined to the open ocean by a narrow channel only eight kilometers across at the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe and Africa were now two separate landmasses, and the formation of this sea would have an immense impact on the shape and history of this region.

Human Arrival in Mediterranean

12:15Skull fragments found in the Apodema Cave in Greece show that modern humans arrived at the Mediterranean around 200,000 years ago, spreading out from Africa along its eastern coast. These early arrivals were initially outcompeted by Neanderthals, a species of archaic humans well adapted to life in the cold climate of Europe. But over the next hundred millennia, modern humans spread out of Africa in ever greater numbers.

12:48They gradually pushed the Neanderthals out into the fringes of Europe, and ultimately to extinction. When the last ice age ended, the climate of Europe warmed. The glaciers that had covered much of its northern regions disappeared, and humans spread all the way around this vast inland sea.

13:11Societies rose and fell here through the Bronze Age. But from about the year 530 BC, one city on the shore of this sea had been steadily growing in size and influence. It sat on a temperate peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean, and its people referred to its waters as Mare Magnum, or the Great Sea. This city was called Rome, and it would build an empire that would last in some form for more than 2,000 years.

13:49Rome succeeded because it excelled at organization, mass production, and military expansion. By the year 220 BC, its armies, armed with iron weapons and covering their bodies with iron chainmail or scales, had conquered all of the peninsula of Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. By 140 BC, they had spilled out into the Iberian peninsula, what is now Spain, and crossed the sea to conquer the ancient cities of Greece.

14:24The Romans found a way of expanding their territory that was financially self-sustaining. As more peoples were conquered, they provided the economic base for even further expansion.

14:38In 167 BC, the Romans captured the Macedonian treasury, and as a result, they were able to virtually abolish taxes in Rome. When they conquered Pergamon in the year 130 AD, their state budget doubled, and it nearly doubled again after the conquest of Syria. Rome's expansion during this time seemed as inevitable as the rushing torrents of water that had once poured through the Straits of Gibraltar. By the year 70 AD, the entire Mediterranean had been completely surrounded by its vast empire.

15:18Rome now stretched from the snowy hills of Scotland in the north to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara in the south, from the stony shore of the Atlantic in the west to the deserts of Arabia in the east. The Romans and their subject peoples built roads and postal stations, scattering their empire with public baths and theaters, and ushering in a new age of technological development. But they also ruthlessly exploited the lands they conquered

15:50and exterminated any who resisted them with extreme cruelty. In the second century, five great emperors ruled. Among them, the emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. And while wars went on at Rome's borders, a period of peace and prosperity reigned within its lands. But this age of relative peace wasn't to last, and the first signs of this empire crumbling

16:21came in the form of a devastating plague.

16:31In the winter of the year 165, Rome was at war with the Parthian Empire, a power centered in ancient Iran. Roman troops were besieging the Parthian city of Seleucia, close to the modern city of Baghdad, when they first began to experience strange symptoms. The Greek physician Galen describes these frightening occurrences. On the ninth day, a young man had a slight cough.

17:02On the tenth day, the cough became stronger, and with it he brought up scabs. After having Katar for many days, first with a cough, he brought up a little bright, fresh blood, and afterwards even part of the membrane, which lines the artery and rises through the larynx to the mouth. This terrifying new illness spread rapidly through the troops. We don't know exactly what this plague was, but by its description, it may have been smallpox,

17:34possibly combined with a simultaneous outbreak of measles.

17:38Whatever it was, the plague quickly spread up the rivers of Mesopotamia. In the city of Amida, where the Romans were trying to fight off a Parthian siege, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the horrific scenes.

17:57In the city, where the number of the corpses scattered over the streets was too great for anyone to perform the funeral rites over them, a pestilence was soon added to the other calamities of the citizens, the carcasses becoming full of worms and corruption from the evaporation caused by the heat and the various diseases of the people.

18:21Unable to fight both the Parthians and the disease, these Roman soldiers soon returned home, but they would unwittingly lead that invisible enemy right into the heart of the empire.

18:36The plague soon spread among the Roman soldiers stationed among the foggy pine forests on the Rhine River and then spread south along trade routes, finally reaching the densely packed metropolis of Rome. The Assyrian writer Lucian of Samosata writes about the houses of Rome standing empty with magical symbols and spells painted on their doors to ward off the evil that stalked the city's streets. The records of the Han dynasty in China

19:09also record a period of plague breaking out around the same time, suggesting a worldwide pandemic of deadly proportions.

19:20This outbreak, known to history as the Antonine Plague, is thought to have killed somewhere in the region of 2% of the empire's population, or around 2 million people. But in the worst affected areas, mortality seems to have reached 30 or 40%. This weakened the empire at a crucial time in its history. Industries like trade by sea were utterly devastated, and the Roman military was critically weakened.

19:51As the plague reached its height, Rome's political world fell apart too. As the dead littered its streets, the violent and selfish Emperor Commodus was crowned, and the long history of Rome's decline began.

20:08Soon, rival generals fought viciously over who would rule, burning cities to the ground and expending the empire's energy in pointless, self-destructive wars. By the end of the 3rd century, the vast Mediterranean empire could no longer be ruled from the declining city that had given birth to it. Rome was crippled by corruption, and its people increasingly suffered from a disease that the Romans believed was caused by bad air,

20:39or mal aria in Latin, which we know today as malaria.

20:45In a desperate bid to get the empire back on course and end the civil wars, in the year 285, the Emperor Diocletian ordered that Rome's territory be split almost exactly in two. Western Europe and Western North Africa would form the western half of the empire, with its capital at Mediolanum, or modern Milan. Meanwhile, the eastern regions, including the modern territories of Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Egypt,

21:17would pass to a new entity, which today we call the Eastern Roman Empire. Both halves of the empire would be governed by two rulers each, creating a system known as the Tetrarchy, or the Rule of Four. It was thought that this division of power would finally end the brutal civil wars that had hollowed out the empire from within, but this would not turn out to be the case. The Tetrarchy soon fell apart,

21:49and civil war once more rocked the empire, a devastating 20-year conflict that saw the Emperor Constantine fight with his rivals over who would rule. During these wars, Constantine made the remarkable decision to convert to Christianity. This was a young religion based around the worship of a Jewish rebel protesting against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, and this young faith

22:19had long faced brutal repression by Roman authorities.

22:26Constantine beat back his rivals and once more united the divided empire, ruling over it as the sole emperor and in stating Christianity as its official religion.

22:40Constantine was also to embark on what to some must have seemed like an even more remarkable decision. Constantine decided to construct a new capital in the East. He considered various options, but ultimately settled on a city that sat at the point, right where Europe and Asia met, a small Greek trading city in the far east of the Mediterranean. This was a city known to the Greeks

23:12as Byzantion, but the Latin Constantine would have called it by the name we recognize today, Byzantium.

23:24The vast Zanclean flood that filled the Mediterranean wasn't the only great inundation to rock this region in prehistory. In fact, on the eastern shore of that sea, around what is now Turkey, another very similar event would take place, on a smaller scale, but still no less dramatic. Around 7,500 years ago, it's believed that the waters of the Mediterranean were themselves pushing up

23:55against another range of cliffs that walled off a narrow valley known as the Bosphorus. Beyond this barrier was another depression in the land, filled with a large freshwater lake.

24:09As the Ice Age ended and the glaciers melted, global sea levels rose. And perhaps aided by the frequent earthquakes in this region, the dam holding back the seas once again broke, and the waters of the Mediterranean spilled through the valley of the Bosphorus in vast and unstoppable quantities.

24:32If this hypothesis is correct, it's thought that up to 50 cubic kilometers of water poured over this ledge each day, or 200 times the flow of the Niagara Falls. The lands beyond filled with salty seawater, flooding an area of 100,000 square kilometers, or about the size of Cuba.

24:56It's thought that Stone Age people would have witnessed this flood, and it must have been a terrifying sight, one that they would tell their children about, and their children's children. In fact, along with the flooding of the Persian Gulf around the same time, this event has been proposed as one source for the biblical story of Noah's flood.

25:21This body of water would become known as the Black Sea. Today, its shores belong to the nations of Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. And that narrow valley through which this vast flood of water poured is now a narrow sea channel, which we call the Bosphorus.

25:45Here, the continents of Asia and Europe are separated by only about 750 meters of sea at their narrowest point. A second narrow channel known as the Dardanelles sits nearly 300 kilometers to the west, where once the ancient city of Troy stood as a rival to the Bronze Age city-states of Greece. Between these two thin entryways is the world's smallest sea, known as

26:15the Sea of Marmara. And it's right here that the city of Byzantium was founded.

Founding of Byzantium

26:26Byzantium was an ancient Greek colony founded by settlers from the powerful port city of Megara around the year 667 BC.

26:38Folklore attributes the founding of the city to a prince of Megara named Byzas. And the inspiration for Byzas' journey came from the oracle at Delphi.

26:52Modern analysis has shown that this oracle was built at a place where volcanic gases were vented from the earth through cracks in the planet's crust. The priestesses of this oracle would descend into chambers flooded with these gases which would send them into a trance-like hallucinatory state ready to give prophecies to those who asked for them. According to this piece of folklore, the oracle at Delphi gave Prince Byzas

27:23a haunting piece of advice. You must set sail and search for the land opposite the city of the blind.

27:35And so, Byzas sailed across the sea through the narrow Dardanelles Strait and into the Sea of Marmara. And there, he saw what he was looking for. On the Asian side of the sea, a Greek colony named Chalcedon had been established. But Byzas saw immediately that the European side of the sea was a much better place for a colony, a defensible position with a large natural harbor. The settlers of Chalcedon had been blind to miss

28:07this perfect spot and so Byzas had found the land opposite the city of the blind. He landed on the shore and named the city he founded there Byzantion after himself.

28:23And the advantages that Byzas saw in the city were indeed formidable. It sat right at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus Strait, the point where Asia was less than a kilometer away over the water. This was a natural crossing point, controlling all the land-based trade that ferried between the continents, but it also controlled all shipping traffic that passed between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. On top of this,

28:54the swift currents that flowed through the narrow channel would make it very difficult for any army to attack by sea. The city's harbor was a long sliver of a river estuary, sheltered from the swift ocean currents and large enough to hold a thousand ships. This body of water would come to be known as the Golden Horn, either because of the enormous wealth that would flow through it in the ages to come, or for the rich yellow light that would often

29:24blaze on its surface as the sun set over the sea.

29:29Pinched between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, Byzantion was a perfect wedge shape. Any attackers who wanted to take the city were able to approach from only a single direction, and it was a perfect spot to build a fortress that would be virtually unassailable.

29:51For much of its early history, Byzantium was not a major city, although it was a wealthy one. No more than 40,000 people are thought to have lived here during those times compared to the more than a million that may have lived in Rome during its height. But it was an abundant place. The Roman geographer Strabo writes about the rich stocks of fish that could every year be brought out of the narrow channel of the Bosphorus.

30:21The horn, which is close to the Byzantian city wall, resembles a stag's horn. Into these young fish stray, and then are easily caught because of their number, and the force of the current, and the narrowness of the inlets. They are so tightly confined that they are even caught by hand, providing the Byzantians and the Roman people with a considerable income. But despite its natural defensibility,

30:52Byzantium was conquered a number of times by the Persian Empire and the Spartan and Athenian Greeks. It was even besieged and burned to the ground by the ruthless Roman emperor Septimius Severus during one of the empire's more destructive civil wars. When the emperor Diocletian split the empire in two, Byzantium was chosen to be the capital of the eastern half. And finally, in the year 330 AD, it was chosen to be the

31:22new imperial capital of the entire Roman Empire under the emperor Constantine, as he writes in this fourth century decree. We have resolved that it is fitting that my rule and the power of my kingdom be transferred and transmuted to the regions of the east, and that in the province of Byzantia, on an excellent site, a city be built in my name and my rule be established there.

31:52Like the ancient explorer Byzus, Constantine saw his own reflection in this golden city. He renamed Byzantium after himself, calling it Constantinopolis, or the city of Constantine, and today we know it as Constantinople. during this time, the city was also known by the informal title Nova Roma, or the New Rome.

32:21In his new capital, Constantine immediately began an enormous building project with the goal of turning Constantinople into a city worthy of its empire. Constantine laid out a new square at the center of Old Byzantium, naming it the Augustaeum with a new senate house in a grand basilica on the east side, while on the south side the great palace of the emperor rose. The Byzantine poet Marianas

32:52wrote about the beauty of the city in these early days. Where the land is cut in two by the winding channel, whose shores open the way to the sea, our divine emperor erected this palace. O far-ruling Rome, you look from Europe at a prospect in Asia, the beauty of which is worthy of you.

33:16Near to the imperial palace was the vast hippodrome used for chariot races. Its track was 450 metres long, with stands capable of holding up to 100,000 spectators. Up to eight chariots could race on its track at one time, each powered by four horses each, and these events must have been an electric spectacle.

33:44Nearby was the famed baths of Zoixippus, adorned with opulent mosaics. The 5th century writer Leoncius writes one invitation to a friend that gives a glimpse of the leisurely life of this city.

34:00On one side I have close by me the Zoixippus, a pleasant bath, and on the other the race course. After seeing the races at the latter and taking a bath in the former, come and rest at my hospitable table. Then, in the afternoon, you will be in plenty of time for the other races, reaching the course from your room quite near at hand.

34:27Constantinople would even create its own obelisk to adorn its hippodrome, built of square stone blocks to a height of 32 meters tall. That's exactly the same height as the obelisk that decorates the Circus Maximus in Rome. This was a statement of clear intent that Constantinople was every bit the equal of the eternal city.

34:54Around the year 330, Constantine also built an imposing city wall running between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, closing off the wedge-shaped city and taking full advantage of its defensible shape. The first Christian emperor claimed that an angel had guided him about where to place the walls, and he built them a great distance from where the old city walls had been, an impressive statement about how

35:25large he expected his new capital to grow. And he was right. In the next century, Byzantium would grow at an immense rate, and by the beginning of the 5th century, the city had spilled out even beyond Constantine's ambitions. Today, we can trace the expansion of the city in the advancing rings of its city walls, growing outwards like the rings of a tree. By the year 404,

35:55the emperor in the east, a man named Theodosius II, embarked on an even more ambitious building project to protect the expanding city and build a new set of walls two kilometers to the west. These would stretch for 6.5 kilometers and massively increase the enclosed area of the city. But while these walls demonstrate the ambition of this expanding city, they also testify to the increasingly dangerous world

36:26that the young capital found itself at the heart of.

36:32When you look at the situation that the emperor Theodosius faced at the time he embarked on the building of these walls, it's not hard to see why he considered them necessary.

36:44Around this time, vast migrations of people had been pushed out of the Eurasian steppes by some unknown force and were now crossing en masse into Roman lands, and the Roman state crippled by civil war was struggling to cope. One writer Synesius summed up the mood of impending doom in a speech he gave to the emperor Arcadius around the year 399.

37:14Everything balances on a razor's edge, and the state needs the assistance of God and the emperor to crush that danger which has been troubling the Roman empire for so long. Two years into his reign, in the year 410 AD, the emperor Theodosius received news of an unthinkable tragedy. An army of Goths led by the general Alaric had laid siege to the great city of Rome three times,

37:44and on the third time, they had burst over its walls and sacked the city. While the sack of Rome was relatively constrained by the standards of the time, it was still an act that shocked the world. The writer Saint Melanius the Younger, writing about ten years later, describes this horrifying event. A barbarian storm of which prophecies long ago spoke fell upon Rome, and it did not even spare

38:15the bronze statues in the forum. Plundering with barbarian madness, it destroyed everything. Thus, Rome, beautified for 1,200 years, became a ruin.

38:30The writer Saint Jerome, a native of the Western Empire, then living in Bethlehem, wrote a passionate outburst of sorrow at the news.

38:42Oh, horrid, the universe tumbles and yet our sins do not fall. A renowned city and head of the Roman Empire is consumed in one blaze.

38:55The disaster sent refugees from Rome fleeing across the Mediterranean, piled into boats. They landed on the shores of Africa, Egypt, and the East. Saint Jerome describes the desperate plight of these citizens.

39:13Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed that the mother of nations had become also their tomb, that the shores of the whole East, of Egypt, of Africa, which once belonged to the imperial city, were filled with the hosts of her men servants and maid servants.

39:35Wherever the Roman refugees landed, piled into boats, starving and thirsty, the people saw their fine clothes and thought they must be carrying some hidden wealth on them, as Saint Jerome remembers.

39:51Who would have believed that mighty Rome, with its careless security of wealth, would be reduced to such extremities as to need shelter, food, and clothing? Some are so hard-hearted and cruel that, instead of showing compassion, they break up the rags and bundles of the captives, and expect to find gold on those who are nothing more than prisoners. The emperor

Constantinople's Defense

40:16Theodosius was determined that his city of Constantinople would not follow the fate of Rome.

40:24So, the walls he built in the following years would be one of the most imposing defensive structures ever to be built in either the ancient or the medieval worlds. This was a ring of three walls, arranged one after the other, each taller than the last, with a wide moat