Chalke: Principal Gate to the Sacred Palace
Sea Walls
The City reconstructed: http://www.arkeo3d.com/byzantium1200/contents.html
With the creation of the Roman Empire, Byzantion continued
as a modest city, with no substantial development discernible. At the end of
the second century AD, however, after the death of Commodus, it backed the
losing side in the civil war between Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger.
After a siege of two-and-a-half years (an indication of the strength of its
position), it was starved into surrender. The walls were destroyed, and the
city reduced to the status of a mere village in the territory of its neighbour,
Perinthus. Its position, however, was still incomparable, and some revival,
encouraged by Severus' son Caracalla, was inevitable, and the city was probably
refortified. It played a role in the war between Maximinus and Licinius, and
again between Licinius and Constantine. The importance of the site was clearly
much greater than the small Greek city which occupied it. It could dominate not
only the passage through the Bosporus to the Black Sea, but also one of the
crucial crossings from Europe into Asia. It was adjacent to the still-wealthy
provinces of Asia, while behind it were the rich and populous agricultural
lands of the Balkans, which were now one of the primary areas for recruitment
into the Roman armies, a fact demonstrated by the origin of the emperors themselves,
including Constantine. Having gained the
Empire, Constantine saw here the obvious place for the new Rome.
Thus the new city had as its raison d'etre the function of
an Imperial capital, rather than as a city in the conventional, normal,
Graeco-Roman manner. It was, like its Hellenistic forerunners, a dynastic city,
and took its name (in Greek) from the emperor who founded it. It is now
Constantinoupolis, Constantinople, Constantine's city, not Byzantion, and it
owes nothing, other than its position, to its predecessor. From the outset it
was intended for development on a grandiose scale, necessary if it was to be an
effective alternative to Rome. An outer wall, running from the sea across the
promontory to the Golden Horn, was placed some 4 km to the west of the old
Greek city. Even this proved inadequate, and under Theodosius II the defensive
fortifications were built 1.5 km further to the west, the area enclosed being
extended from 6 to 14 km2. Even for Constantine's city, the population cannot
have been found from the inhabitants of Byzantion. People must have been moved
in on a colossal scale from other Greek communities in the area.
Functionally, however, the city did not depend on its
population (for the size was largely a matter of prestige), or, strictly
speaking, on its needs. Architecturally, the important element in the new plan
was not a forum and its related public buildings, like traditional Rome or the
lesser Graeco-Roman cities, but the palace, the building for the emperor, and
the structures related to it. The antecedents for this, of course, go back to
the palace buildings at Rome, and the palace buildings of Galerius, grafted
onto the existing city of Thessalonike. At Constantinople the palace was placed
over a substantial part of the old city, which was cleared for it, overlooking
the sea, on the south-west of the hill which had carried the original city. The
palace now had the role of an acropolis within the new, enlarged city. With it,
as with the Palatine and other palaces, was immediately related the Great
Hippodrome, which was not merely the locality for the chariot races, but also
the place where the emperor made his appearances to the public. Thus the
chariot races, and the factions that supported the different colours worn by
the charioteers, usurped the place of the forum as the locality for the political
interchange between the rulers and the ruled. Equally, and symbolic of the new
order, the palace was also directly related to the Great Church, which was in
an enclosure immediately to the north-east of the palace, on the ridge towards
the former acropolis. This was the church dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia
Sophia), a title which recalled Athena the goddess of wisdom and probably her
role of poliouchos, protectress of the city, thus easing the acceptance of the
new Christian forms by a population, many of whose members were probably of
recent conversion.
Very little of early Constantinople survives, for a variety
of reasons. Unlike Rome, Constantinople is quite prone to earthquakes, and
these have periodically ruined or damaged its buildings. The turbulent history
of the city, in its early days alone, was marked by riots and fits of
incendiarism, quite apart from fires that broke out by accident. Earthquakes
are recorded as having occurred, for example, in 407, 417 and 433, and there
was a series of fires culminating in those started in the Nike riots (the
watchword of the rioters), which led the Emperor Justinian to fear he had been
deposed, in AD 526. In this riot, much of the palace area and the Great Church
was destroyed and required total reconstruction, a dangerous consequence of the
proximity of the Hippodrome to the palace buildings.
The damage caused by these incidents seems to have been
exacerbated by another factor. When Constantinople was built, Constantine was
in a hurry. Unlike Rome, the proper and established support for a massive
building programme did not exist, and had to be developed. Moreover,
Constantinople did not have available the pozzuolana that was responsible for
the quality of Roman cement. Lime kilns had to be developed to provide the
necessary mortar (their smoke in later times became such a nuisance that
legislation had to be passed forbidding the presence of the kilns in the immediate
vicinity of the city). Although lime mortar seems to have been adequate for the
more limited building-programme of Galerius at Thessalonike, much of
Constantine's building seems to have been rushed and gimcrack, and so
particularly vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes. It was only after the
passage of time that building methods suitable both to the resources, as well
as the risks of the locality, were developed which made possible greater
durability for the main structures, so that Justinian's replacement church of
the Holy Wisdom had a dome made not from poured cement (as was the dome of Hadrian's
Pantheon at Rome), but from mortared brickwork, and even that was damaged by a
subsequent earthquake and reconstructed.
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