Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. "For my part," says La Brocquicre,8 "I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else."

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. "These cisterns," says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, "resemble lakes, or even seas." Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

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