Meantime, the Blues on the opposite side of the arena have watched this scene in silence. Now they begin to take a part. Loudly they call to the girls to come across to their side.
Gently they coax them over and as the frightened children approach, they are showered with gold from the benches of the Blues. Men leap down to help them gather up the coins and still the golden shower comes down.
Finally, loaded with gifts, the children are conducted to the gate of the Blues and carried home to their mother. From that day forward, there was one little girl in Constantinople who knew exactly what she wanted and also how to get it.
Her name was Theodora and when she became the wife of Justinian and Empress of the World, she remembered that day in the Hippodrome and she paid the Greens in full measure for what she and her sisters had suffered then. They were firmly and vigorously suppressed, and for many a long day the visibility of the Green was very low indeed in the capital of the Roman Empire. Not so bad for a little girl of seven and a beggar girl at that. In the meantime, however, the Hippodrome witnessed a scene of another kind.
In the early days of Justinian, the two factions came into violent conflict and for five days fighting went on in the streets. Then the two parties suddenly decided to come together, and to compromise their differences they agreed to depose the Emperor Justinian and choose another acceptable to both sides.
They all went to the Hippodrome, there to give effect to their decisions. On that day the Hippodrome was packed by the noisy mob of united Blues and Greens bent on having their way and feeling themselves complete masters of the situation.
Then Belisarius, commander in chief of the army, divided his small force into three parts. One of his divisions he gave in command to Mundus, and sent him to the gate of the Greens.
The second, he placed under Narses and sent him to a second gate. He himself, commanding the third division, went to the gate of the Blues. Being merciful, he left the fourth gate free as a way of escape for the crowd within.
As Belisarius appeared at the head of his column inside the gate of the Blues, Mundus led his column through the gate of the Greens, and Narses led his column through the third gate.
Justinian kept his throne and reigned with Theodora by his side for thirty eight years. They were years of profound peace and great prosperity for Constantinople. Everybody attended strictly to his business. After that day when Belisarius and his two generals cleared the Hippodrome, it was in such a mess that it was not used again for two years. Meantime Belisarius was in North Africa, where in a victorious campaign he destroyed the Vandal Kingdom.
Now he was coming home bringing the captive Vandal king and a. Again the Hippodrome was packed to its utmost capacity. The Emperor Justinian, robed and crowned, sat on his golden throne. Through the gate of the Blues came the long procession, Belisarius, in full armour and carrying his sword, walking in front, having refused to ride in the triumphal car drawn by four white horses as was customary, for he was modest as well as merciful.
Then came the cap- tured treasure—the massive golden throne of the Vandal king, his crown, his chariot, hampers full of gold and silver and precious stones.
Among that treasure was the sevenbranched golden candlestick and the golden vessels that had been taken from the Temple in Jerusalem to Rome by Titus four hundred and eighty years before and captured by the Vandals in their sack of Rome and now recaptured by Belisarius from the Vandals. It was a magnificent and a moving spectacle that was seen that day in the Hippodrome. Let us go forward from that day six hundred and fifty years to the year The Fourth Crusade, ostensibly on it way to Palestine arrives at Constantinople, the Christian capital of the world.
The city is fabulously rich. The Crusaders decide to take and plunder it. Constantinople is unprepared for the treacherous assault and the reigning emperor is a weak and foolish man. The Christian capital for the first time is captured and sacked; the palaces are spoiled; the Hippodrome is stripped of its priceless collections of art; the bronzes are melted down ; the marbles are broken up ; the whole Hippodrome becomes a ruin.
Saint Sophia is filled by day and by night with scenes of revelry and lust. The greatest and richest church in the world is stripped of its treasures; the great golden altar is broken up and carried away with the golden ornaments and vessels; the seven-branched golden candlestick and gold vessels captured by Belisarius six hundred and fifty years before and taken by Titus from Jerusalem eleven hundred years before, are stolen with the rest and all this golden loot is loaded on a ship and despatched to Venice.
The sack of Constantinople took place in and the city never recovered from the blow. Never again was the Hippodrome used, except as I shall mention, for it remained a gutted ruin.
Two hundred and forty nine years have passed. The Empire has dwindled till nothing is left but the Capital itself. It is the year The Ottoman Turks to the number of three hundred thousand cross the Bosphorus and draw up before the walls. Within those walls, the Emperor Constantine XIII is able to muster seven thousand men to defend the city against three hundred thousand. On May 20, , Mohammed the Ottoman leader, caused it to be made known within the city that he was going to make his supreme assault at dawn on the morning of May 29th.
At midnight on the twenty-eighth of May, Constantine went to Mass in Saint Sophia, the last time that Mass was ever celebrated there.
From Saint Sophia, he went to the ruined Hippodrome and there, an hour after midnight, he addressed himself to his soldiers. He begged that if he had ever offended any man he might be forgiven.
He made no promises. He did not speak of victory. He simply asked every man to go with him on the walls and die fighting in the morning. But not a man faltered; no one failed him and before another sun had set Constantine XIII and his seven thousand had died fighting on the walls and Mohammed II entered Constantinople in triumph and proclaimed Mohammed the Prophet in the Church of Saint Sophia. It was the 29th day of May in the year The Ottoman Turk is still in Constantinople.
The Hippodrome has almost disappeared. Saint Sophia is still a mosque. It was the Crusader that destroyed Constantinople, two hundred and forty nine years before the conquest by Mohammed II. The site of the Hippodrome is today in part a large open space called the Atmeidan and part of it is occupied by the great mosque of Achmet. The ground level is now twelve feet above the floor of the arena. Three monuments still standing on the buried Spina mark its position.
Here is the Egyptian obelisk, here the serpents of Delphi, and here the Built Column. The Egyptian obelisk stands where it did, marking the centre of the arena. It was brought to Constantinople by Constantine the Great, and by Theodosius II it was erected on the top of the Spina in the center of the Hippodrome.
So far as I am aware this obelisk is the oldest thing to be seen today in Constantinople. That son of Zeus and Io that laid the first stone beside the Golden Horn is an infant as compared with me. I saw the first Phoenician galley launched when Tyre was a fishing village. I can remember the sack of Troy as if it happened yesterday. I knew Joseph and his brethren. I saw Moses turn the Nile water into blood, a trick I had seen a hundred times before.
I saw Hellas rise and Rome fall. And now I hear a noise of upstart nations scrapping their nutshell navies. In line with the obelisk on the axis of the arena a slender twisted bronze pillar rises up out of the earth in which an excavation has been made to reveal the base on which it stands on top of the Spina. You may look well at this twisted pillar of bronze, for even if you are not a worshipper of relics, it will not fail to claim your veneration.
It represents three serpents twisted about each other. Their heads, now broken off, were spread apart and supported a tripod of solid gold. Constantine brought it to Constantinople in and set it up in the Hippodrome exactly where we see it. The gold tripod was carried away by the Crusaders and the three heads of the serpents have been broken off. One of them may be seen in the Imperial Ottoman Museum. Farther to the south on the same axis and also raised on the Spina, is a bare column built up of blocks of stone.
It was built by Constantine IV as a memorial to his mother and it was covered on the outside from top to bottom with plates of brass, which were stripped off and melted down by the Crusaders. It is the most pathetic object in Constantinople.
We are in Venice for a moment. They were carried from Greece to Rome by one of the Caesars to adorn the square in front of the Senate. From Rome they were carried by Constantine to the new capital on the Bosphorus and set up on the Hippodrome. From the Hippodrome, they were carried in to Venice by the Crusaders.
Napoleon carried them away to Paris but in they were returned to Venice. During the late war when an attack on Venice seemed imminent they were removed to Naples for greater safety. Since the Armistice they have been taken back and replaced on their pedestals.
These horses have not yet seen Chicago, but then time is nothing to them. They can wait. In another part of Stamboul, rises a battered column bound together with iron hoops to keep it from falling. On account of these sacred relics under its base, the column was believed to work miracles and it was regarded with the greatest veneration.
Everybody attended strictly to his business. After that day when Belisarius and his two generals cleared the Hippodrome, it was in such a mess that it was not used again for two years. Meantime Belisarius was in North Africa, where in a victorious campaign he destroyed the Vandal Kingdom.
Now he was coming home bringing the captive Vandal king and a. Again the Hippodrome was packed to its utmost capacity. The Emperor Justinian, robed and crowned, sat on his golden throne. Through the gate of the Blues came the long procession, Belisarius, in full armour and carrying his sword, walking in front, having refused to ride in the triumphal car drawn by four white horses as was customary, for he was modest as well as merciful.
Then came the cap- tured treasure—the massive golden throne of the Vandal king, his crown, his chariot, hampers full of gold and silver and precious stones. Among that treasure was the sevenbranched golden candlestick and the golden vessels that had been taken from the Temple in Jerusalem to Rome by Titus four hundred and eighty years before and captured by the Vandals in their sack of Rome and now recaptured by Belisarius from the Vandals. It was a magnificent and a moving spectacle that was seen that day in the Hippodrome.
Let us go forward from that day six hundred and fifty years to the year The Fourth Crusade, ostensibly on it way to Palestine arrives at Constantinople, the Christian capital of the world.
The city is fabulously rich. The Crusaders decide to take and plunder it. Constantinople is unprepared for the treacherous assault and the reigning emperor is a weak and foolish man. The Christian capital for the first time is captured and sacked; the palaces are spoiled; the Hippodrome is stripped of its priceless collections of art; the bronzes are melted down ; the marbles are broken up ; the whole Hippodrome becomes a ruin.
Saint Sophia is filled by day and by night with scenes of revelry and lust. The greatest and richest church in the world is stripped of its treasures; the great golden altar is broken up and carried away with the golden ornaments and vessels; the seven-branched golden candlestick and gold vessels captured by Belisarius six hundred and fifty years before and taken by Titus from Jerusalem eleven hundred years before, are stolen with the rest and all this golden loot is loaded on a ship and despatched to Venice.
The sack of Constantinople took place in and the city never recovered from the blow. Never again was the Hippodrome used, except as I shall mention, for it remained a gutted ruin. Two hundred and forty nine years have passed. The Empire has dwindled till nothing is left but the Capital itself.
It is the year The Ottoman Turks to the number of three hundred thousand cross the Bosphorus and draw up before the walls. Within those walls, the Emperor Constantine XIII is able to muster seven thousand men to defend the city against three hundred thousand. On May 20, , Mohammed the Ottoman leader, caused it to be made known within the city that he was going to make his supreme assault at dawn on the morning of May 29th.
At midnight on the twenty-eighth of May, Constantine went to Mass in Saint Sophia, the last time that Mass was ever celebrated there. From Saint Sophia, he went to the ruined Hippodrome and there, an hour after midnight, he addressed himself to his soldiers.
He begged that if he had ever offended any man he might be forgiven. He made no promises. He did not speak of victory. He simply asked every man to go with him on the walls and die fighting in the morning. But not a man faltered; no one failed him and before another sun had set Constantine XIII and his seven thousand had died fighting on the walls and Mohammed II entered Constantinople in triumph and proclaimed Mohammed the Prophet in the Church of Saint Sophia.
It was the 29th day of May in the year The Ottoman Turk is still in Constantinople. The Hippodrome has almost disappeared. Saint Sophia is still a mosque. It was the Crusader that destroyed Constantinople, two hundred and forty nine years before the conquest by Mohammed II. The site of the Hippodrome is today in part a large open space called the Atmeidan and part of it is occupied by the great mosque of Achmet. The ground level is now twelve feet above the floor of the arena. Three monuments still standing on the buried Spina mark its position.
Here is the Egyptian obelisk, here the serpents of Delphi, and here the Built Column. The Egyptian obelisk stands where it did, marking the centre of the arena. It was brought to Constantinople by Constantine the Great, and by Theodosius II it was erected on the top of the Spina in the center of the Hippodrome.
So far as I am aware this obelisk is the oldest thing to be seen today in Constantinople. That son of Zeus and Io that laid the first stone beside the Golden Horn is an infant as compared with me. I saw the first Phoenician galley launched when Tyre was a fishing village. I can remember the sack of Troy as if it happened yesterday. I knew Joseph and his brethren. I saw Moses turn the Nile water into blood, a trick I had seen a hundred times before. I saw Hellas rise and Rome fall.
And now I hear a noise of upstart nations scrapping their nutshell navies. In line with the obelisk on the axis of the arena a slender twisted bronze pillar rises up out of the earth in which an excavation has been made to reveal the base on which it stands on top of the Spina. You may look well at this twisted pillar of bronze, for even if you are not a worshipper of relics, it will not fail to claim your veneration.
It represents three serpents twisted about each other. Their heads, now broken off, were spread apart and supported a tripod of solid gold. Constantine brought it to Constantinople in and set it up in the Hippodrome exactly where we see it. The gold tripod was carried away by the Crusaders and the three heads of the serpents have been broken off. One of them may be seen in the Imperial Ottoman Museum.
Farther to the south on the same axis and also raised on the Spina, is a bare column built up of blocks of stone. It was built by Constantine IV as a memorial to his mother and it was covered on the outside from top to bottom with plates of brass, which were stripped off and melted down by the Crusaders.
It is the most pathetic object in Constantinople. We are in Venice for a moment. They were carried from Greece to Rome by one of the Caesars to adorn the square in front of the Senate.
From Rome they were carried by Constantine to the new capital on the Bosphorus and set up on the Hippodrome. From the Hippodrome, they were carried in to Venice by the Crusaders. Napoleon carried them away to Paris but in they were returned to Venice. During the late war when an attack on Venice seemed imminent they were removed to Naples for greater safety. Since the Armistice they have been taken back and replaced on their pedestals. These horses have not yet seen Chicago, but then time is nothing to them.
They can wait. In another part of Stamboul, rises a battered column bound together with iron hoops to keep it from falling. On account of these sacred relics under its base, the column was believed to work miracles and it was regarded with the greatest veneration. On top of the column, Constantine placed a bronze statue of Apollo, the work of Phidias, taken from Athens, and the public was allowed to believe that this statue represented Constantine himself.
Another antiquity is the Aqueduct of Valens, erected by that emperor about and often repaired. It is a huge and impressive structure cutting through the heart of Stamboul and rising to a height of seventy feet with its twenty feet of thickness. The ancient underground cisterns are among the most astonishing sights in Constantinople, or rather, beneath Constantinople, for the city is built over them.
More than twenty of these cisterns are known. These columns stand in sixteen rows and each column is built in three sections fitted into each other by means of sockets. In some mysterious way, this reservoir has become more than half filled with earth.
You see only the upper section of each column and a part of the middle section; all the rest of the middle section and all of the lower section is buried. Underneath all that earth, the floor of the cistern is made of cement and the height from that floor to the brick arches is sixty feet. The purpose of the cisterns was to store water for use in time of siege and they were never empty. Constantinople was a city full of churches for Church and State were closely united.
Some of these churches are still standing, most of them converted into mosques. Just inside the city wall, on the west, stands the Church of Chora. Its single minaret shows that it is now a mosque. This little church was built a hundred years before the time of Constantine when Byzantium was still a Pagan city.
It was built far outside the walls as they then stood. Hence, it is named Chora which means in the country, just as they have in London Saint Martin in the Fields. Many centuries later when Theodosius II enlarged the city, the little church of Chora was enclosed within the new and mighty ramparts of the Imperial city.
In outside appearance, the Chora is small and unimpressive. Inside, it is supremely beautiful. The walls of the sanctuary itself have been plastered over by the Mohammedans, but contrary to custom they have left exposed the wonderful mosaics of the narthax and the exonarthax. All of the interior of this wonderful church was encrusted with pictures in mosaic and those which remain uncovered present a continuous succession of the most exquisite fantasies wrought in Byzantine mosaic by consummate artists.
Glowing with color, these ancient walls greet you as you enter with a message of beauty from sixteen hundred years ago. On the life of Makarios Melissenos-Melis- sourgos and his elaboration of the Maius, cf. Thessalonica , esp. Dolger, "Ein literarischer und diplomatischer Falscher des Also cf. For an English translation of this letter see J.
In particular the 'Catalogue' of the defen- dants and their assigned positions on the fortifications in Melis- senos' account are based on Leonard to a large extent. It is not simply the arrangement of the combatants or the order of presen- tation of the events, already observed by Papadopoulos, that point to such conclusions; it will be shown that there is a linguistic dimension to this problem also, which clearly proves that Melis- senos' Greek account in Book III is frequently no more than a direct translation or paraphrase of Leonard's Latin text.
Most scholars have come to accept the fact that the siege section of Maius III is at best a secondary document and at worst a derivative work of dubious value. This position has recently been challenged in a lengthy series of articles by M. Her sug- gestion that Melissenos may have expanded a different version of the Minus, lost to us, which dealt with.
Most importantly, this challenge fails to recognize the importance of Leonard in the composition of the siege section of the Maius. Such speculation can be refuted by the combined results of Papadopoulos, Loenertz, Zoras, and the lin- guistic testimony presented in this study, which, in the final analy- 7 J.
Falier-Papadopoulos, ""H 1tepi Zoras, JIepi ulv " Pseudo-Phrantzes has exercised immense influence over nineteenth and twentieth century historians; in an earlier period Gibbon proved more cautious: "I am afraid that this discourse [the emperor's last speech] was composed by Phranza himself; and it smells so grossly of the sermon and the convent that I almost doubt whether it was pronounced by Constantine" The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Bury [London ], VII n. In this century Pseudo-Phrantzes still exercises considerable influence; cf.
Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople Cambridge , who is aware of the unreliability of the Maius but chooses to incorporate some of the more suspicious events into his narrative without due caution. In the sixteenth century Leonard was also used as a source by another Greek writer besides Melissenos. In S. Lampros described briefly a newly discovered manuscript Barberinus gr. The surviving passages were finally edited and published by G. Zoras in Neither writer seems to have been aware of the other, or of the accounts of Doukas and Kritoboulos; both, however, employed as a source, perhaps indirectly through a possible Italian translation,12 sections of Khalkokondylas, in addition to Leonard's letter.
Lampros, "IJepi! Arnakis in Speculum 36 I am currently preparing a translation with detailed historical commentary of this Chronicle. Codex is a later copy of a lost original. Thus the Chronicle can be dated either ca Zoras or after Zachariadou. Leonard B, Melissenos 5. Leonard's Latin text has been paraphrased by the Greek authors. Leonard c, Melissenos 5. Melissenos, at first sight, seems to have made a mistake in regard to the commander, whom he names as Manuel from Genoa.
Maurice was the captain of the Genoese ships that managed to break through the blockade of the Turkish fleet and provision Constantinople. Quite correctly Papadopoulos observed that 'Manuel' must be a copyist's error, which should be emended to 'Mauricius'. This reference is suppressed in Melissenos, who mentions only "the Gate called Golden. It is possible that both the anonymous author and Me- 15 Falier-Papadopoulos supra n. Grecu in his edition of the Maius.
It should be further observed that the Greek texts have neglected Leonard's qualifiers for Mau- rice, vir nobilis and prae ectus. Furthermore, the two Greek au- thors describe Maurice's duties in very similar phraseology, which does not derive from Leonard's letter; qJvliarrelV Melissenos and WI qJvAaY1J Anonymous may thus point to a version that both au- thors were using; this hypothetical text must have been in Greek, employing here some form of qJvliarrw.
The following is the clos- est parallel in all three texts: Leonard's ligneum castrum, pel- libus boum contectum oppositum accurate decertat is rendered as f. Leonard cD, Melissenos 5. Here are some of the closest paral- lels between the Greek texts and Leonard's account; Melissenos seems to have lifted whole phrases from the Latin letter. We are informed that the Bocchiardi brothers defended the Myriandrion and resisted prolonged attacks so bravely that their deeds can be compared to those of ancient heroes.
In this phrase Melissenos clearly betrays his Latin source. In this section only Melissenos has produced an approxi- mation of the correct form of this sector of the fortifications. The Myriandrion, also known as the Mesoteikhion, was situated in the middle section of the walls near the Gate of Polyandrion, which may explain Leonard's form, Miliandrio.
Perhaps the most impor- 17 Van Millingen supra n. Melissenos has deleted the reference to Hora- tius, who may not have meant much to Greek readers; his last sentence, however, indicates that the author had ancient heroes in mind, thus betraying his Latin prototype, as is suggested by d8Aa Kai yepa, words with archaic flavor, evoking the realm of myths and legends.
That some form of Leonard's letter was in front of Melissenos in the composition of this passage is undoubtedly demonstrated and confirmed by "the eternal memory" comment, which can only be regarded as a paraphrase of Leonard's conclu- sion. The anonymous author also indicates his dependence on Leonard rather differently: he compares the Bocchiardi brothers to Achilles, surely a more meaningful comparison to Greek readers and a stock formula for this author whenever he mentions antiq- uity.
Kai auroi rour; f. Mention must be made here of the sections in which the Greek authors agree with each other but do not seem to have drawn their information from Leonard's letter directly. In addition, both Greek authors mention hand-to-hand combat on the walls. Leonard D, Melissenos 5.
Melissenos' account, however, pro- vides the greatest departure from Leonard's information.
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