The 'New Rome'

'CONSTANTINOPLE, the glory of the Greeks, rich in renown and richer still in possessions....' So wrote a chaplain to Louis VII who accompanied his master on the Second Crusade. The city had been founded some 800 years earlier, in AD 330, by Constantine as a 'New Rome' -- it too had a senate and was built on seven hills -- and as a new capital was rapidly provided with the necessities of civilized life: palaces and public buildings, a hippodrome, monumental squares, markets and baths. As befitted the capital of the first Christian emperor, there were man spendid churches but no temples to the pagan gods.

For centuries Constantinople stood as a bulwark between Europe and Asia, holding at bay the advancing Arabs and then the Turks, and preserving much of western Europe's inheritance from the Graeco-Roman civilization. Yet in 1204 it was crusaders from the West who captured and sacked the city, establishing a short-lived Latin empire.

Constantinople occupied a peninsula between the Bosporus and the Golden Horn. The landward side was cut off by an impressive double line of walls erected in the 5th century, the first sight to greet a visitor from the West. At their northern end a great pleasure garden and game reserve had been built for the imperial palace of Blacharnae. Within the city walls there were several exquisitely wrought palaces and churches,

Above The ruins of Itanbul's walls,
originally build in about AD 413, still show
traces of the magnificence and strength
described by medieval chroniclers.

churches, but the most remarkable building was Justinian's Saint Sophia whose massive golden dome floated, according to the 6th-century Greek historian Procopius, as if 'suspended from heaven'.

Fresh water was piped into the city and stored in vast cisterns, of which nearly 60 survive. Like all great cities it had its dark side -- the dank and lawless slums which the wealthy shunned.

The jealousy of westerners was excited each time they visited Constantinople on their way to the Holy land it was, wrote on of its attackers in 1204, 'a city richer than any other since the beginning of time ... there was at that time as many people in Constantinople as in all the rest of the world'.

In contained immeasurable wealth in precious metals, stones and cloths, and its churches were packed with the holiest relics of the Christian Church -- the holy lance, part of the true cross, the crown of thorns and the shroud in which Christ had been wrapped. In the West its inhabitants were widely thought to be treacherous and heretical, and to kill them was judged no crime. It was only a matter of time before an attempt was made to seize this jewel.