Crusade

Both Duke Godfrey and Count Raymond had had difficult journeys, beset by indiscipline, poor morale and clashes with local communities. Robert called several Councils of War to try to restore discipline, but each ended in chaos as the rival lords argued every point. I tried hard to use common sense in the debates and argued vociferously for unity. I think my words won me some admirers, but they made little difference to the outcome. Obduracy ruled — egos were too big to listen to reason.

When we reached Byzantium’s fabled capital, we found its gates barred against us and an envoy from Emperor Alexius waiting to escort us to an audience with the man who wore the Purple of Rome — a ruler whose empire was over 1,200 years old and who still thought of himself as Roman.

Just as we called the Byzantines ‘Greeks’ because of their language and affiliation to the Eastern Church, they called western Europeans ‘Latins’ because of our use of the Latin language for all our formal documents and because of our adherence to the Church of Rome. Although it had been only forty years since the Great Schism between the two Churches, it looked like it was going to be a permanent rupture in the faith.

All the senior command staffs of the Crusader armies were summoned, and Robert managed to obtain places for Adela and Estrith in the entourage as interpreters. The cream of European aristocracy — over 200 dukes, counts and knights, and some of their wives and daughters — were escorted through the gates of the world’s most magnificent city and seated in royal carriages to be given a ceremonial entrance.

Horns and trumpets signalled the beginning of the procession as a company of the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, the legendary Varangian Guard, led the procession. The entire route was lined with soldiers from the many themes of the Byzantine army: Macedonians, Thracians, Thessalonians and men recruited from as far away as Cyprus, Mesopotamia and Crete.

We ‘Latin Princes’ were people used to the best that money could buy, but none of us had seen anything on such a scale or possessed of such opulence and grandeur.

Shaped like a triangle pointing at the sea, the city was surrounded by water on two sides. On the landward side, it was defended by not one but two mighty walls — each five miles long, sixteen feet thick and over seventy feet high — with huge open spaces in between. It was impossible to imagine them ever being breached.

We were told that more than half a million people lived in the city, ten times the number of inhabitants in the biggest cities in the West. We had seen Rome, and the superb basilica of St Peter’s, but most of the population lived in modest wooden homes amidst the crumbling remains of the city’s former imperial glory. But Constantinople was awash with magnificent palaces, churches and public buildings; its homes were full of the finest furnishings, marbles and mosaics; its people were dressed in the finest cottons and silks and adorned in gold and precious gems.

Constantine himself watched over the city, represented as Apollo in a huge bronze statue atop a column 170 feet high. The Emperor Justinian, captured on horseback in marble three times lifesize, presided over the Hippodrome, an arena with a capacity for 100,000 people. The most impressive sight of all was the Basilica of St Sophia, a building of great antiquity, but far bigger than any Christian church in the West, even the ones newly constructed. The top of its dome was as high as the statue to Constantine and over a hundred feet across.

Estrith stared at it, open-mouthed.

‘My mother told me about it. Isn’t it magnificent? The calculations are outstanding! They were done by the architect Isidorus of Miletus and the mathematician Arthamius of Tralles. No need for my hammer beams; the key is the circular dome. The weight is distributed evenly to the massive walls, buttressed by the even bigger corner columns. But the strength comes from the apex, which holds the roof like the locking ring at the top of a tripod; the pressure from any one direction is held by an equal force fighting against it.’

She made it sound simple; I was sure it wasn’t.

The Emperor’s palace, the Blachernae, stood proudly on a hilltop in the north-west corner of the city with views of the sea and the surrounding countryside. Without wishing to be too disparaging about the abodes of my noble comrades, it made their ducal palaces look like peasants’ hovels. Emperor Alexius had granted us a rare privilege in greeting us at the Blachernae, his private palace, rather than at the Great Palace, usually used for ceremonial occasions. The Great Palace had been built by the Emperor Constantine hundreds of years ago but had, like Byzantium itself, fallen on hard times. An important part of Alexius’s rebuilding of his city and empire had been the commissioning of a new palace to match those of the great Caesars of the past.