Chapter 20
That Same Morning
Pons woke Cyn from his side of the bed before dawn even broke. They had spent the night at an inn near the city and he knew they were in for a busy day. They saddled their horses in the foggy prelight. It was still early morning when they came over a rise in the road and could look down to the sea. The first they could see of the city was the dome of the church of the Holy Apostles, on the top of the highest of the seven hills of this New Rome, there in the far distant background, rising out of the sea mist and looming over the walls.
Madonna. What walls. Twelve meters high and five meters wide running ten kilometers, from the Sea of Marmara in the south to the waters of the Golden Horn in the north, cutting off the peninsula. A tower twenty meters tall rose every one hundred paces of its length. Made of finished limestone blocks - the wall almost gleamed. It ran straight as an arrow, to the north, dipping over the seventh hill before turning to the northeast. In front of the wall was another wall. This one was a mere seven meters tall, and in front of that was a moat eighteen meters wide. Every two kilometers the wall was punctured by a massive gate with a formidable bastion. Cyn was amazed.
“Close your mouth. You look like a yokel.” Pons advised. He remembered himself as a young man, younger than Cyn here now, first viewing these same walls and thought he had also probably looked as dumbfounded. In those days he had been merely a man-at-arms in the retinue of Lord Guilhem, who was accompanying his cousin, the German Kaiser, to the Holy Land.
“Can’t be taken.” Cyn said succinctly. Throughout the journey, whenever they had traveled near a castle or walled town they would discuss various ways of breaching the defenses. Catapults or undermining the walls? The benefits of an attack with ladders as opposed to using a ram. How long would it take to capture a place by assault? By starving them out? Soldiers talk.
“Can’t be done.” Cyn said again. “Never in a hundred years. Look at those walls will you. A donkey could kick at them all day, every day, for an entire season and not knock it down.” He referred to the onager style catapult which, though easy to construct on campaign, kicked like a mule every time it fired a rock. “And to defend. Christos, those towers. I could hit anything with a crossbow from up there, and they would have bugger all chance of shooting me. Nah. You’d have to take it by sea.”
Pons pointed. “Have you noticed the sea wall?”
Riding closer they could see the walls continued at a height of ten meters running northeast for eight kilometers along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara to the tip of the peninsula, near to where the basilica of Holy Wisdom and Imperial Palace dominated the landscape. There it met up with the northern seawall running along the Golden Horn which continued back to the west before vanishing from their view behind hills covered in buildings, sea mist, and the smoke of ten thousand fires.
Constantinople. The largest city on Earth.
Cyn insisted on seeing the golden milestone, the Milion. Throughout the long journey the milestones had been constant companions. Both men had looked forward to spotting them. Sometimes they were in plain sight, sometimes they were hiding in the grass which their horses would crop to reveal, others were prominently set into bridges. As the numbers counted down their trip Pons and Cyn cheered the loss of each D and C. It wouldn’t be right, to Cyn’s way of thinking, not to go all the way to the beginning.
Pons did not mind. He remembered from his previous trips the Milion was right next to the Basilica of Holy Wisdom, the Imperial Palace, and the Hippodrome. Three of the first places he wanted to go to anyway.
The via Egnatia entered the city at the Porta Aurea, the great Golden Gate, the land wall’s largest and most imposing entrance. Made, not of limestone like the rest of the wall, but of white marble and capped with a golden statue of a chariot drawn by elephants. A line of carts trundled in through the main portal bringing everything needed to keep the hundreds of thousands of souls inside alive. Wagons loaded with jars of olives and oil, donkeys piled high with firewood, monks sitting on top of sacks of flour - their cart pulled by a yoke of bullocks. Foot traffic, such as the old women with baskets on their backs stuffed full of clucking chickens, the children leading goats, and farmers pushing barrows full of vegetables, all passed to a second smaller door to the left of the main portal. A third doorway to the right admitted traveling friars, messengers, officials traveling by covered litter, priests, and the like. It was to this gate they made their way.
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As they crossed the sturdy bridge which spanned the moat, Cyn could see it was not filled with water. Instead there was a grassy trench with stone walls two meters high running at the top along both sides of its length.
“Why do they let it go dry?” he asked.
Pons shrugged. “The moat used to be fed by an aqueduct and a system of pipes running from the river. The Romans built it long ago. Clever builders, the Romans. But this stuff is as old as sin. Nobody knows how to fix it when it breaks. So they think, ‘We got no moat, but we got no invaders, either. So what do we need a moat for?’ Pretty soon though, who’s gonna come calling? Could be the Hun? Could be the Saracen? The Turk? And let’s not forget yon King of Sicily our blind Venetian friend was off to see.”
“To see?”
“You know what I mean. Once an invader shows up the Greeks will be running around like a bride’s sisters on her wedding day. ‘Oh save us. Who can fix the moat?’ Sometimes they get a monk to look at some old drawings and parchments. They think that is gonna solve their problems. There is a lot of that here. Something is broken. Don’t know how to fix it. Not gonna learn how to fix it. Don’t care if it ever gets fixed. I hope the old hot baths are still working.”
They joined a short queue at the third door. One of the bored looking guards asked them to state their business in the city. Pons lied and said they were pilgrims who had come to see the Holy Relics before taking ship for Jerusalem. Thousands of pilgrims traveled to Constantinople every year, but since the massacre of the Latins a few months back, there had been none. The guard appeared surprised, but perhaps a pilgrim was a sign things were beginning to return to normal. Pons asked the guard to recommend a stable where the horses would be well tended to and where he wouldn’t be swindled. Then he pressed a silver coin into the guard’s hand. Both the guard and Cyn were shocked at this extravagant largess.
“Um… Outside of the old golden gate, the monks of St. Andrew the Holy Fool. They can stable them for you.”
“Also, you see how my friend and I are dressed? If you see a messenger with a white surcoat and a scarlet cloak ask him if he is the Marquis of Montferrat’s man. Let me hear you repeat the word. Mont-fer-at.” He remembered Greeks had trouble with Latin words. “If he is, then send him to… is the Golden Eel near the Forum of Constantine still in business?”
The guard nodded.
“Good send him there. Then follow along yourself, there is a jug of wine and another coin for the man who does this thing for me.” He added in the language of Occitan for Cyn, “I had a fine meal there last time I was in this city.”
The guard nodded eagerly. Pons knew he would not connect the Marquis of Montferrat to the late Caesar Ionnes, for who could keep all these Frankish families with their outlandish names straight?
They passed through the gate, but to Cyn’s surprise, did not enter the city. Beyond the great land wall built by the Emperor Theodosius over seven hundred years before, were acres of estates, villas, and monasteries each with their own vineyards, fields, and pastures. Further up the wide road, a mile in the distance was, Christ-in-Heaven, another wall. This one, though was sadly crumbling, and had completely fallen in for stretches due to some earthquake in the distant past, but another magnificent gate had survived and towered above the avenue. Off to the left of the gate stood an orderly walled monastery. They entered and Pons negotiated a price with a long bearded monk while Cyn and a novitiate led the horses to the stables. Cyn surprised the young monk by taking the brush from his hand and rubbing the horses down and fetching their fodder himself. Taking satisfaction now the journey was finished in having finally paid off the wager.
They passed through the old golden gate and entered the city proper. An arcade with shops selling every sort of good imaginable lined both sides of the long avenue. The traffic ebbed and flowed past street vendors offering tender chunks of mutton roasted on sticks over charcoal braziers. Merchants hawked bolts of felt, linen, cotton, and wool and scarves made of silk - all available in every color the dyer’s art could create. A man with scabby skin and few teeth displayed belts of every length and girth. A hatchet-faced woman unwound lengths of rope from a large spool and measured it out against the official yardstick as her customer eyed her - closely counting with her as she went. A man with a cask of wine had set up two tables and four benches in the open air - restricting progress through his share of the boulevard. Four pretty little girls and their equally pretty mother had swept off a patch of the cobbles and spread out wild flowers they had spent the morning gathering. The mother sang a sweet song extolling lovers passing by to remember their sweethearts and buy a few blossoms. Rats rooted through piles of garbage and manure - both human and horse. A coppersmith mended a cooking pot, his hammer added to the din from a woman next to him who called out to passersby to buy the lye soap she was selling.