Constantinople’s other great advantage was the deimperialization, so to speak, of emperors. The word we use in English, “emperor,” derives through French from the Latin imperator—loosely, “commander,” the man endowed with the state power, the imperium. From Augustus to Theodosius, a few individuals who held the highest power were disinclined to the warlike arts and more at home in palaces than camps. Yet they were all in principle generals, and leaders of warlike men. Theodosius’s sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, learned to let others do their fighting for them, and emperors ever after imitated them as much as possible.
Honorius was comfortable in the narrow splendor of Ravenna, but Arcadius made his home in the seven hills of the new Rome, and he also enjoyed other splendors. By Theodosius’s time, that enthronement or, shall we say, empalacement of emperors had been in preparation for a century. Rulers from Diocletian’s reign (284-305) forward surrounded themselves with more and more ceremonial encrustations and ever-larger palaces. Diocletian’s retirement home was a vast palace complex in Salonae on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia. His retinue of courtiers and slaves numbered in the thousands, all for a ruler who had already relinquished ultimate power.
Constantinople’s rulers still saw the riches of worlds flow into their hands, and Constantinople grew and flourished in consequence. The supreme urban achievement in antiquity was the life of a parasite, drawing wealth from landholdings tilled by peasants or, for the courtier, from taxes. With few cities and many peasants, this model could last a surprisingly long time. Ancient cities, moreover, were created in ignorance and maintained in wasteful ostentation bulgaria private tour.
The city of Rome, for example, gained no special economic advantages in imperial times from its location.3 Although it lay close by the naturally flourishing port city of Ostia a few miles away, it mainly grew and thrived by collecting taxes, while attracting the empire’s richest landowners to live there as senators and citizens. The spectacular monuments of Roman greatness depend on coercing and seducing the outside wealth of its vast empire. As a vivid symbol of this dependence, witness the steady flow of grain ships across the Mediterranean year after year, feeding the populace of Rome on the produce of Africa. A tiny oligarchy like Rome and a vast peasantry like Africa can survive and go on that way for a long time.
Beginning Constantinople
So from the beginning Constantinople replicated the Roman model. Alexandria supplied much of Constantinople’s grain—and Egypt was naturally rich enough to be able to spare the surplus. Two or three times a year, whole fleets of grain ships arrived, filling a seemingly endless stretch of wharves with urgently welcomed cargo. Water was a different story—it was piped in from fifty miles and more away in Thrace. City fathers followed the example of the first Rome in constructing aqueducts, with only a meager local water supply (no helpful Tiber here), and they could look for help only northward into Thrace. For 500,000 people, there was usually enough, but such dependency was still often a source of deep anxiety. (One innovative answer to the problem still greets visitors today. After the great riot of 532, Justinian took advantage of the subsequent urban renewal to build a huge underground cistern 460 feet long and 230 feet wide, its roof supported by 336 columns 26 feet high. A sixteenth-century Swiss traveler claimed credit for rediscovering it when residents had forgotten it was there. It still amazes tourists The first Christian emperor.)
There were other anxieties. Slaves, soldiers, and the poor were there in abundance, living in cheaply constructed buildings too close together, easy prey to fire. One count has noted seven major fires in Justinian’s city, most notably after the great Nika uprising that defined the reign. There is no adequate count of the number of earthquakes Constantinople endured, including those severe enough to damage the greatest monuments.4 An ancient city like this was a spectacle bought at a high price and trembled on the edge of disaster every moment. Eventually, as we shall see, the worst did come: the plague of the 540s.
