Constantinople: the Fortress City That Sustained Byzantine Empire for Eleven Centuries

Constantinople was not a capital that happened to sit on a strait. It was an instrument. The walls, the water system, the granaries, and the harbors formed the empire's true strategic reserve, and for eleven centuries the survival of the state depended on whether that instrument still worked. Its components failed one after another and in a fixed order: the grain fleet in 618, the aqueduct in 626, the coinage between 1030 and 1080, the customs revenue after 1082, the fleet around 1285, the bronze and books melted or carried off in 1204, and finally the walls in 1453. The physical condition of the city is a better index of the empire's real strength than any chronicle.This book follows Constantinople from its founding by Constantine in the fourth century to its capture by the Ottomans in 1453, and treats the city as the load-bearing structure of the Byzantine Empire rather than as its backdrop. It examines the aqueduct system that carried water more than one hundred kilometers from the hills of Thrace, the Theodosian Walls and sea defenses that turned sieges into stalemates, the mint and the customs house that funded the government, and the quarters where foreign merchants lived and traded under treaty. Drawing on the surviving Byzantine chronicles, archaeological work at sites including Yenikapi and Sarachane, and the administrative manual known as the Book of the Prefect, it gives the city's long decline and eventual fall their proper scale: the failure of an infrastructure, not merely the end of an empire.A structural account of the city that carried an empire, and of what gave out when it finally could not.