Jesus Christ over the heathen world

When Constantine, 1500 years ago, was marking out lines of fortification for his new capital, some of his couriers, surprised at the greatness of the included space, asked “ How far are you going to carry the lines?” “ Until lie stops who goes before me,” was the answer of the Emperor. He deemed the city to belong to Jesus Christ; a token of the triumph of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ over the heathen world. To emphasize this idea, Justinian in reconstructing the Cathedral of St. Sophia, tore from the temples of Jupiter, and Venus, and Diana, and Baal, and Astarte, and Isis, and Osiris through all the region of the Eastern Mediterranean, their finest marbles and most noble columns. And the gracious majesty of that venerable monument to the overthrow of paganism still draws visitors from all parts of the world.

The name of Mohammed gleaming

The church is now a Mohammedan mosque. The name of Mohammed gleaming in letters of gold by the side of the name of God above the place where the Christian altar used to be, testifies to the failure and downfall of Oriental Christianity in that place, and makes this ancient Cathedral a monument to warn men of the doom awaiting political Christianity everywhere. Knowing by experience, ourselves, the blinding splendour of the temptation when the devil insidiously offers to satisfy all cravings of selfishness in return for some small concession—the Kingdoms of the earth in return for admission that the glory of such possession will content our cravings —we may not judge too harshly the fall of the early Church into this snare. But thus it was that this Church, after celebrating here in the fourth century the triumph of Christianity over the pagan world, became itself in the tenth century an object lesson in the capacity of the old pagan covetousness and lust for power to deaden disinterested devotion to Jesus Christ, so that in the fifteenth century the Lord “ removed its candlestick out of its place sightseeing sofia.”

Eastern Roman Empire

By the time that Islam finally crushed the Eastern Roman Empire, the name of Constantinople had long been synonymous in Western Asia with Imperial power. The Arabs to this day give it the dreadful name of Imperial Rome (Rourn) and know its sovereign as the Sultan of Rome. To the people of the whole region between Bokhara and Afghanistan and the Mediterranean this city is the wonderful place where might and wealth and knowledge take their source. As for the Turkish Empire the whole mass of doleful, disheartened territory is a mere appendage to Constantinople. Throughout its whole extent not a church nor a school, nor a factory nor a sawmill nor a village road nor a bridge over a rivulet can be built, not a book or newspaper can be printed nor a printing press set up, not a single petty official can take office without examination of the question at Constantinople. To this city young men in all Turkey look for their career, merchants for their goods, farmers for their market, mechanics for a field for their skill, and day-laborer’s for unlimited employment.

The whole male population of the Empire has for its ideal of success in life the opportunity to spend some years in Constantinople, and a large part of each successive generation attains to this ideal and is thus more or less formed by the influences of the great city. The eyes of all religious denominations too, instinctively turn to Constantinople for instruction in doctrine and polity and for the crown of successful effort. There lives the great head of Mohammedanism in all the world. There the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church still sits in the chair of Chrysostom, unmoved by the vain and restless curiosity respecting the nature of truth which first drove the Western Church into schism, and then tore the wandering schismatics of Rome into separate and discordant sects of many names.

Four or five miles from Constantinople

We had a wild scamper over the hills again ; but, when four or five miles from Constantinople, it got so dark that we were obliged to pull up and walk our horses, on account of the bad road and the holes. At last we saw the lights of Pera, and once more threaded our way amongst the dogs and people, along its narrow Street, to the hotel.

It was very hot indeed that night. The wind went round, and changed to the stifling sirocco. As such, I knew my fate, and prepared to lie down the whole of the next day with a feverish head-ache, gasping instead of breathing — such being the invariable effects of the blighting wind upon me. These, however, lasted no longer than the cause, and when the refreshing breeze came down again from the Euxine, I was at once as well as ever. As this was the only indisposition I suffered from, during the whole of my absence from England, with every change of temperature, climate, diet, and general habits, that could try a constitution, T always considered myself very fortunate, and was grateful accordingly city tours istanbul. It must be very sad to be laid up for any time with illness in a strange country; and although a clever Turkish member of our own College of Surgeons, Mr. Zohrab, is practising in Pera, I preferred dispensing altogether with his assistance.

PRINCE’S ISLAND, AND ITS POPULAR AMUSEMENTS

Home superstition becomes sadly upset when we find that Friday is considered the most fortunate day of the week, in the East, and the Turks like to begin or perform any work on that day, accordingly- It is also their Sabbath; and, during the fine weather, the women go in crowds to the Sweet Waters of Asia — a beautiful valley near the fortress of Hissari, on the Bosphorus, watered by the River Goksu. They spread their carpets here, and pass the day in admiring themselves in mirrors, smoking, chatting, and eating sweetmeats. I was told that many flirtations were originated on these occasions, but with Moslem gallants. There is not a chance for a Frank traveller to establish one ; and, therefore, when such a one boasts of any success in this particular line, whatever else he says may be believed as fully — at least, in nine cases out of ten. All I know from my own experience is, that every attempt I made at philandering with the belles of Stamboul, and once or twice under unusual advantages, turned out a total, not to say contemptible, failure.

Cashmere shawls

Smyrna had, in some measure, prepared me for the general appearance of an oriental bazaar; but the vast extent of these markets at Constantinople created a still more vivid impression. To say that the covered rows of shops must, altogether, be miles in length — that vista after vista opens upon the gaze of the astonished stranger, lined with the costliest productions of the world, each collected in its proper district — that one may walk for an hour, without going over the same ground twice, amidst diamonds, gold, and ivory; Cashmere shawls, and Chinese silks; glittering arms, costly perfumes, embroidered slippers, and mirrors; rare brocades, ermines, Morocco leathers, Persian nick-nacks; amber mouth-pieces, and jewelled pipes —that, looking along the shortest avenue, every known tint and color meets the eye at once, in the wares and costumes, and that the noise, the motion, the novelty of this strange spectacle are at first perfectly bewildering — all the possibly gives the reader the notion of some kind of splendid mart fitted to supply the wants of the glittering personages who figure in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; yet it can convey but a poor idea of the real interest which such a place calls forth, or the most extraordinary assemblage of treasures displayed there, amidst so much apparent shabbiness.

Elegant street

No spot in the world — neither the Parisian Boulevards, nor our own Elegant-street — can boast of such an accumulation of valuable wares from afar, as the great bazaar at Constantinople. Hundreds and thousands of miles of rocky road and sandy desert have been traversed by the moaning camels who have carried those silks and precious stones from Persia, with the caravan. From the wild regions of the mysterious central Africa, that ivory, so cunningly worked, in the next row, has been brought — the coal-black people only know how — until the Nile floated it down to Lower Egypt. Then those soft Cashmere shawls have made a long and treacherous journey to Trebizond, whence the fleet barks of the cold and stormy Euxine at last brought them up the fairy Bosphorus to the very water’s edge of the city. From the remote active America; from sturdy England ; from Cadiz, Marseilles, and all along the glowing shores of the Mediterranean, safely carried over the dark and leaping sea, by brave iron monsters that have fought the winds with their scalding breath, — these wares have come, to tempt the purchasers in the pleasant, calm, subdued light of the bazaars of Stamboul.

I have said that each article has its proper bazaar assigned to it. Tims, there L one row for muslins, another for slippers, another for fezzes, for shawls, for arms, for drugs, and so on. let there is no competition amongst the shopkeepers. No struggling to out-placard or out-ad verity each other, as would oeuvre with us in cool-headed, feverish, crafty, credulous London. You must not expect them to pull one thing down after another for yon to look at, until it appears hopeless to conceive that the counter will ever again be tidy, or everything returned to its place. The merchant will show you what you ask for, but no more. He imagines that when you came to buy at his store, you had made up your mind as to what you wanted; and that, not finding it, you will go elsewhere, and leave him to his pipe again.

He knows how to charge, though, but he is easily open to conviction that he has asked too high a price. For the way of dealing with him is as follows. Wanting one of the light scarfs with the fringed ends, which supersede the use of braces in the Levant, I inquired the price at a bazaar stall. The man told me fifty piastres, (half a sovereign.) I immediately offered him five-and- twenty. This he did not take, and I was walking away, when he called me back, and said I should have it. I told him, as he had tried to cheat me, I would not give him more than twenty, now; upon which, without any hesitation, he said it was mine. This plan I afterwards pursued, whenever I made a purchase at Constantinople, and I most generally found it answer. My merry friend at Smyrna had given me the first lesson in its practicability private tour ephesus.

I do not suppose that they ask these high prices, as the French do, because they suppose we are made of money; I believe, on the contrary, that they try to impose on their own countrymen in the same manner; for, to judge from the long haggling and solemn argument which takes place when they buy of each other, the same wide difference of opinion as to a fair value exists between the purchaser and vendor, under every circumstance.

Considered contagious except money

When a ship arrives in a quarantine port, from a suspected district, she is placed under the strictest surveillance. Attendants from the health-office are put on board: everything sent on shore has to undergo purification—if goods, by quarantine; if letters, by fumigation—in fact, everything is considered contagious except money, which is simply received in a vessel of water at the end of a pole by the people in the boats. On the other hand, everything from the shore, touched by anything or any body on the ship, is at once contaminated, and subject to the same quarantine. At Malta, this circumstance leads to many rows with the homeward bound passengers. Yaletta is famous for the manufacture of fine mittens and black lace; and when the overland steamers arrive, the quarantine harbour is filled with the boats of the dealers.

The articles are handed up in boxes at the ends of poles for inspection. The unthinking passengers turn them over to look at, and are immediately compelled to take the whole, because their touch has infected them. At Beyrout, speculators occasionally put off with Syrian curiosities—chaplets of olive-stones, from the Mount of Olives; cedar cones from Lebanon, and the like. On the occasion to which I now allude, a sharp touter had got ahead of his companions, and was beginning to treat with some passengers; selling the aforesaid wonders, and recommending dragomen. The engineer had, as is common, a little bird in his cabin, that was very tame, and used to be permitted to fly about the deck and rigging. It was loose on the morning of the arrival, and when the tooter came alongside, innocently perched on his shoulder. In an instant the quick-eyed guardians observed it. The poor tooter was declared compromised by the contact. He was hurried off to the lazaretto, in spite of his protestations and arguments, for ten days; and the engineer, as owner of the bird, was compelled to pay all the expenses of his incarceration.

The other case was more annoying still. In every lazaretto is a place called the parlatorio, at which the inmates may communicate with their friends. It is very like the grating used for the same purpose at our prisons. There is a double wall of bars, with a space of six or seven feet between them; and articles are pushed backwards and forwards on boards which run across communist bulgaria tour, in boxes fixed to poles. A person in quarantine received a visit from a friend on the first day of his confinement. Laden with treasures of travel, he was exhibiting some beautiful feathers to his friend, when a sudden puff of wind dispersed the collection, and by an evil chance blew one between the bars into the bosom of his innocent visitor.

The unfortunate weight

The unfortunate weight was directly condemned. All egress was denied him; he was told that, of all things, feathers were peculiarly susceptible of plague; and he had to join his friend for the whole term of his imprisonment. In fine, the laws of quarantine appear to be the most rigid of any existing, and cannot by any influence or interest, be evaded. This is not so much to be wondered at when the various incomes derived from enforcing them are taken into consideration; and, indeed, this appears to be, at present, the sole cause of their continuance.

There was a large quantity of beasts of burden awaiting the turn-out—camels, horses, and donkeys. The boys who attended the latter were sad young scamps—little dusky chaps with nothing on but what seemed to be a long blue bedgown. When a stranger appeared, they caught their donkeys by the head, and backed them, all in a heap, against him. In vain the valet beat them furiously about the head, face, and naked legs. They only fell back for an instant, and then all returned to the charge again, shouting, “ I say, master—good jackass ! ” Somehow or another, I was hustled on to one of the donkeys—I am sure I don’t know how; I never chose one—and then we set off at a quick easy amble towards Alexandria.

Arnaudkoi

Our men rowed very well, and we soon came to a village called Arnaudkoi, where the current is very rapid, and at times dangerous, the banks forming the outer curve of a sharp sweep in the stream. The boatmen here shipped their oars, for persons were in waiting to tow the caiques round the bend, it being impossible to row against the current. They were here always for the purpose, taking the boats in turn, and they received a few paras for their trouble. Further on, the same thing was repeated, and indeed at every sudden turn some poor fellows were waiting to track us.

The houses continued uninterruptedly along the shore, and they were nearly all built after the same style, and of wood. Here and there a new edifice was being raised upon a European model, but it did not appear to be so much in keeping with the scene, as the green, and dove, and claycoloured houses of the Turks. There is a lightness about these little buildings which is very pretty and effective. They look, from a short distance, as if made of card-board, and one cannot help thinking that a single candle within would illuminate their entire form, like the cottages the Italians carry about on their heads in our streets private tour Istanbul.

There are very many palaces amongst them, belonging to the Sultan and the great people of his court; and on the summits of some of the mountains are royal kiosks, wherever a beautiful view is to be commanded. In the absence of all artistic impressions, the Turks are great admirers of Nature. Fields and forests, blue water and skies, sunny air and bright flower gardens, are the great sources of their happiness. The state of idle listless dreaming into which the contemplation of these objects throws them, they call Kef. We have no word that answers to this; busy anxious England has not allowed one to be invented.

But it is a very pleasant repose—one that teems with images far more real and beautiful than the deadly opium or hasheesh can call up, and so, these little kiosks, dedicated to the idlest inactivity of mind and body, are perched about the hills of the Bosphorus, and there the Turk dreams away his leisure time, drinking in the bright and lovely prospects around him, with only the bubbling of the narghile to assist rather than intrude upon his unstrained contemplations.

 Monte Cristo

With respect to the hasheesh, of which I have just spoken, a word or two may not be out of place. I had been so excited by the accounts I had read of its effects in “ Monte-Cristo,” that I was very anxious to try some; and Demetri bought me samples of two or three different preparations of it, somewhere on the sly. One sort was like greenish candy; another was of the same colour, but soft, and in a tin box; another was dark, and resembled black-currant jam; and a fourth was in powder. All tasted sufficiently nasty.

The second was the least offensive, being mixed up with honey and bitter almonds. Of the first I took a tolerable quantity; but the effect was not proportioned to my expectations. I felt rather giddy and buoyant, but nothing further: yet the dragoman assured me that I had swallowed more than the ordinary quantity. “ Once,” he said, “ a waiter found some in the hotel, and ate it all, not knowing what it was. He laughed all night long, and the next day was very sick, and cried.” Much, in a case of this kind, must depend upon the idiosyncrasy of the individual who swallows it. I have said, with myself, the hasheesh was a failure: I may mention, at the same time, that no quantity of wine or spirits, however large, has ever any effect upon my head; so that it does not follow that its exhibition would be similarly innocuous upon everybody.

PROFIT TO BE DERIVED FROM THE THREATENINGS OF GOD

Now let us return to our subject, and proceed. After we had escaped from these two perils, the king sat himself on he bulwark of the ship, and made me sit at his feet, and spoke hues: “Seneschal, our God has shown us His great power 1 this: that a little wind not one of the four great master hends! has come near to drowning the King of France, is wife, and his children, and all his company. Now are we found to give Him grace and thanks for the peril from which .e has delivered us. Seneschal,” said the king, “ such tribulations, when they come to people, or great sicknesses, I great persecutions, are, as the saints tell us, the threaten- digs of our Saviour.

For just as God says to those who scape from great sicknesses: ‘ Now see how I might have trough your life to an end, had/such been My will,’ even so oculi He now say to us: ‘ You see how I might have drowned of all, had such been My will,’ Now ought we,” continued he king, “ to look to ourselves, and see if there is anything n us that displeases Him, and on account whereof He has hues placed us in fear and jeopardy; and if we find anything n us that displeases Him, we should cast it out. For if we lo otherwise, after the warning He has given us, He will mite us with death, or with some other great tribulation, to he destruction of our bodies and of our souls.” And the The present king, Philip the Fair, whose sister Blanche named Rudolph, the son of the King or Emperor of Germany.

king added: “ Seneschal, the saint says: Lord God, why dost thou threaten us? For if thou destroys us all, Thou wilt be none the poorer; and if Thou saves as alive Thou wilt be none the richer. Whereby we may see,’ says the saint, ‘ that the warnings that God gives us can neither be to His advantage, nor save Him from harm; and that it is only out of His great love that He sends His warnings to awaken us bulgaria tour, so that we may see our defects clearly, and remove from us all that is displeasing to Him.’ Now let us do this,” said the king, “ and we shall be acting wisely.”

THE ISLE OF LAMPEDOUSA

We left the island of Cyprus after we had watered there, and taken in such other things as we required. Then we came to an isle called Lampedousa, where we took a great quantity of conies; and we found an ancient hermitage ir the rocks, and found the garden that the hermits who dwell there had made of old time: where were olives, and figs, and vines, and other trees. The stream from the fountain rare through the garden. The king, and we all, went to the end of the garden, and found an oratory in the first cave, white-washed with lime, and there was there a cross of red earth We entered into the second cave, and found two bodies oil dead men, with the flesh all decayed; the ribs yet held al together, and the bones of the hands were on their breasts and they were laid towards the East, in the same manner that bodies are laid in the earth. ‘When we got back to out ship, we found that one of our mariners was missing; and the master of the ship thought he had remained there to be a hermit: wherefore Nicholas of Soisi, who was the king’s master sergeant, left three bags of biscuit on the shore, so that the mariner might find them, and subsist thereon.

Soldan without first speaking

The master told these things to the king; and the king was greatly surprised, and sari; the master had been over bold in holding speech or negotiating with the Soldan without first speaking to him, the king; and the king added that reparation should be made. And the reparation was made in this wise: The king caused the flaps of three of his pavilions to he raised; and all the commonalty of the host who would, had leave to assemble there and see what was toward. And thither came the Master of the Temple, and all his brotherhood of knights, all barefoot, right through the camp, because their quarters were outside.

Soldan’s envoy

And the king caused the Master of the Temple to sit in front of him, and also the Soldan’s envoy; and the king said to the master, in a loud voice: “ Master, you will tell the Soldan’s envoy that it repents you that you have made any treaty with the Soldan without first speaking to me; and because you did not first so speak to me, you must hold the Soldan discharged from what he has covenanted, and return him all his cove nans.” Thereupon the master took the written agreements and gave them to the emir; and then the master said: “ I give you back the agreements that I entered into wrong fully; whereof it repented me.”

Then the king told the master to rise, and to cause all the brethren to rise; and he did so. And the king said: “ Now kneel, and make reparation, because you have gone to the Soldan against my will.” The master knelt, and handed the end of his mantle to the king, and gave over to the king all that they possessed to take therefrom such fine and penalty as the king might determine. “ And I declare in the first place,” said the king, “ that Brother Hugh, who made these agreements, shall be banished from all the realm of Jerusalem.” Neither the master, who was godfather with the king to the Count 01 Alenfon, boom at Castle Pilgrim, nor even the queen, no: any other, was able to do aught on behalf of Brother Hugh he had to avoid the Holy Land and the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The queen was brought to bed of a son

The queen was brought to bed of a son, who had for name John; and they called him Trist ram for the great sorrow and anguish that were about his birth. On the very day that she was brought to bed, she was told that those of Pisa, and Genoa, and the other free cities, were minded to flee away; and on the day following she had them all called before her bed, so that the chamber was quite full, and said to them:

Lords, for God’s sake do not leave this city; for you see if this city were lost, my lord the king would be utterly 1st, and all those who have been taken captive with him. nd if this moves you not, yet take pity upon the poor weak renature lying here, and wait till I am recovered.”

And they replied: “ Lady, what can we do? For we are yang of hunger in this city.” And she told them that for imine they need not depart, “ for,” said she, “ I will cause all re food in this city to be bought, and will keep you all from henceforth at the king’s charges.” They advised together, ad came back to her, and said they consented to remain got willingly. Then the queen whom may God have in [is grace! caused all the food in the city to be bought at a of three hundred and sixty thousand liters and more, re due time she had to rise from her bed, because the city lust needs be surrendered to the Saracens. Then the queen rime to Acre to await the king.

THE KING ADJOURNS HIS CLAIMS AGAINST THE SARACENS PASSAGE TO ACRE

While the king was waiting for the deliverance of his rother, he sent brother Raoul, a preaching brother, to an , whose name was Faress Eddin Octay, one of the most Saracens I have ever seen. And the L ng notified to le emir that he greatly marveled how he and the other could suffered the treaty to be so villainously ; for they had killed the sick whom they were bound o entertain, and made litter of his engines of war, and had the sick, as well as the salted swine’s flesh that they ‘ere bound to preserve.

Lord Guy of Mauvoisin

After the troops belonging to the Temple came the troops of my Lord Guy of Mauvoisin; and these troops the Turks were never able to overcome. Notwithstanding the Turks had so covered my Lord Guy of Mauvoisin with Greek fire that his people could hardly extinguish it.

Starting from the place where my Lord Guy of Mauvoisin was stationed, the barriers that defended our camp went down about a stone’s – throw towards the river. Thence the barriers passed before the troops of Count William of Flanders and extended to the river that went towards the sea. In face of the barrier which came from the side of my Lord Guy Mauvoisin was our battalion; and because the troops of Count William of Flanders stood facing them, the Turks never dared to come and attack us; wherein God showed us great courtesy, for neither I nor my knights had our hauberks and shields, because we had all been wounded in the battle on Shrove Tuesday.

The Turks charged the Count of Flanders with great vigour and spirit, and on foot and horse. When I saw this I commanded our crossbowmen to shoot at those who were mounted. When those who were mounted saw they were being wounded from our side, then they took to flight; and when the count’s people saw this, they left the camp, scrambled over the barriers, ran in among the dismounted Saracens, and discomfited them. Many were killed, and many of their targes taken. There acquitted himself right valiantly Walter of the Horgne, who carried the banner of my Lord of Apremont.

Count of Flanders

After the troops belonging to the Count of Flanders came the troops of the Count of Poitiers, the king’s brother. These troops of the Count of Poitiers were on foot, and he alone mounted; and the Turks discomfited them immediately, and led away the Count of Poitiers captive. When the butchers, and the other camp followers, and the women who sold provisions, saw this, they raised the cry of alarm throughout the camp, and with God’s help they succored the count, and drove the Turks out of the camp.

After the troops of the Count of Poitiers came the troops of my lord Josserand of Brancion, who had come with the count into Egypt, and was one of the best knights that were in the host. He had so arranged his people that all his knights were on foot; and he himself was on horseback, as also his son my Lord Kenry, and the son of my Lord Josserand of Nanton, and these he placed or horseback because they were but children. Several times the Turks discomfited his people. Every time that he saw his people discomfited, he set spurs to his horse, and took the Turks in the rear; and oft, when he did this, the Turks left off attacking his people to set upon him.

Nevertheless this would not have availed to prevent the Turks from killing them all on the field of battle, had it not been for my Lord Henry of Cone, who was in the Duke of Burgundy’s division, a wise knight and valiant and of good counsel; for every time that he saw the Turks falling upon my Lord of Brancion, he caused the king’s crossbowmen to shoot at the Turks across the river. Thus did the Lord of Brancion escape from the peril of that day; but only in such sort that of the twenty knights he had about loom he lost twelve, without counting the other men-at-arms; and he himself was so sorely mishandled that never afterwards could he stand upon his feet, and he died of that wound in the service of God.

THE WARNINGS OF GOD

THE WARNINGS OF GOD HOW THEY ARE TO BE TURNED TO ADVANTAGE

You shall be told here of one of the lessons he taught me at sea, when we were returning from the lands oversea. It chanced that our ship struck before the island of Cyprus, when a wind was blowing which is called garban ; and this wind is not one of the four great winds. And at the shock that our ship received, the mariners so despaired that they rent their garments and tore their beards. The king sprang from his bed, barefoot, for it was night, and having on no more than his tunic, and went and placed himself cross-wise before the body of our Lord, as one who expected nothing but death. The day after this happened, the king called me to him alone, and said: “ Seneschal, God has just showed us a portion of His great power; for one of these little winds, a wind so little that one can scarcely give it a name, came near to drown the King of France, his children, his wife, and his men.

God meant to say to us

Now St. Anselm says that such are warnings from our Lord, as if God meant to say to us, See how easily I could Have compassed your death, had it been my will.’ ‘ Lord 15od,’ says the saint, ‘ why dost Thou thus threaten us? For when Thou dost threaten us, it is not for Thine own profit, loafer Thine advantage seeing that if Thou hardest caused is all to be lost, Thou wouldst have been none the poorer, and if Thou hardest caused us all to be saved, Thou oudist lave been none the richer. Therefore, this Thy warning is lot for Thine own advantage, but for ours, if so be that we offer it do its work.’ Let us therefore take the warning hat God has given us in such sort that, if we feel that we lave, in our hearts or bodies, anything displeasing to God, we hall remove it hastily; and where be anything we think will please Him, let us try hastily to do it. If we so act, then Lord will give us blessings in this world, and in the next blessings greater than we can tell. And if we do not act thus,

I 3e will deal with us as the good lord deals with his wickeder ant; for if the wicked servant will not amend alter yarning given, the lord punishes him with death, or with their great troubles that are worse than death.”

Let the king that now is beware; for he has escaped from peril as great as that in which we then were, or greater. Therefore let him amend from his evil deeds in such sort that Hod smite him not grievously, either in himself or in his possessions customized guided tour.

WHAT ST. LEWIS THOUGHT ABOUT FAITH

The holy king endeavored with all his power as you ;hall here be told to make me believe firmly in the Christian .aw, which God has given us. He said that we ought to believe so firmly the articles of faith that neither from fear of death, nor for any mischief that might happen to the body, should we be willing to go against them in word or deed. And he said that the Enemy is so subtle that, when people are dying, he labours all he can to make them die doubting as to some points of the faith. For he knows that he can in no wise deprive a man of the good works he has done; and he knows also that the man is lost to him if he dies in the faith.

Wherefore we should so guard and defend ourselves from this snare, as to say to the Enemy, when he sends such a temptation: “ Away! ” Yes, “Away! ” must one say to the Enemy. “ Thou shalt not tempt me so that I cease to believe firmly all the articles of the faith. Even if thou didst cause all my members to be cut off, yet would I live and die in the faith.” And whosoever acts thus, overcomes the Enemy with the very club and sword that the Enemy desired to murder him withal.

He said that the Christian faith and creed were things in which we ought to believe firmly, even though we might not be certain of them except by hearsay. On this point he asked me what was my father’s name? And I told him his name was Simon. And he asked how I knew it. And I said I thought I was certain of it, and believed it firmly, because my mother had borne witness thereto. Then he said, “ So ought you to believe all the articles of the faith, to which the Apostles have borne witness, as also you chant of a Sunday in the Creed.”

Theodore Lascaris pretends to the empire

At the feast of St. Martin after this (nth November 1204), Henry, the brother of the Emperor Baldwin, went forth from Constantinople, and marched down by the straits to the mouth of Abydos; and he took with him some hundred and twenty good knights. He crossed the straits near a city which is called Abydos, and found it well furnished with good things, with com and meats, and with all things of which man has need. So he seized the city, and lodged therein, and then began to war with the Greeks who were before him. And the Armenians of the land, of whom there were many, began to turn towards him, for they greatly hated the Greeks.

Towards Philippopolis

At that time Renier of Trit left Constantinople, and went towards Philippopolis, which the emperor had given him; and he took with him some hundred and twenty very good knights, and rode day by day till he passed beyond Adrianople, and came to Philippopolis. And the people of the land received him, and obeyed him as their lord, for they beheld his coming very willingly. And they stood in great

need of succour, for Johannizza, the King of Wallachia, had mightily oppressed them with war. So Renier helped them right well, and held a great part of the land, and most of those who had sided with Johannizza, now turned to him. In those parts the war with Johannizza raged fiercely city tours istanbul.

The emperor had sent some hundred knights over the straits of Saint George opposite Constantinople. Macaire of Sainte- Marehould was in command, and with him went Matthew of Wallincourt, and Robert of the Ronsoi. They rode to a city called Nicomedia, which lies on a gulf of the sea, and is well two days’ journey from Constantinople. When the Greeks saw them coming, they avoided the city, and went away; so the pilgrims lodged therein, and garrisoned it, and enclosed it with walls, and began to wage war before them, on that side also.

The land on the other side of the straits had for lord a Greek named Theodore Lascaris. He had for wife the daughter of the Emperor Alexis, through whom he laid claim to the land this was the Alexius whom the Franks had driven from Constantinople, and who had put out his brother’s eyes. The same Lascaris maintained the war against the Franks on the other side of the straits, in whatsoever part they might be.

In Constantinople remained the Emperor Baldwin and Count Lewis, with but few people, and the Count of St. Paul, who was grievously sick with gout, that held him by the knees and feet; and the Doge of Venice, who saw naught.

Reinforcements from Syria death of Mary, the wife of Baldwin

After this time came from the land of Syria a great com pany of those who had abandoned the host, and gone thithei from other ports than Venice. With this company camt Stephen of the Perche, and Reginald of Montmirail, who was cousin to Count Lewis, and they were by him much honoured, for he was very glad of their coming. And the Emperor Baldwin, and the rest of the people also received them very gladly, for they were of high rank, and very rich, and brought very many good people with them.

From the land of Syria came Hugh of Tabarie, and Raoul his brother, and Thierri of Tenremonde, and very many people of the land, knights and light horsemen, and sergeants.

PROGRESS OF THE YOUNG ALEXIUS THROUGH THE EMPIRE

PROGRESS OF THE YOUNG ALEXIUS THROUGH THE EMPIRE

Afterwards, by the advice of the Greeks and the French, the Emperor Alexius issued from Constantinople, with a very great company, purposing to quiet the empire and subject it to his will. With him went a great part of the barons; and the others remained to guard the camp. The Marquis Boni face of Montferrat went with him, and Count Hugh of St. Paul, and Henry, brother to Count Baidwin of Flanders and Hainault, and James of Avesnes. and William of Champlitte, and Hugh of Colemi, and many others whom the book does not here mention by name. In the camp remained Count Baldwin of Hainault and Flanders, and Count Lewis of Blois and Chartres, and the greater part of the pilgrims of lesser note.

And you must know that during this progress all the Greexs, on either side of the straits, came to the Emperor

Alexius, to do his will and commandment, and did him fealty and homage as to their lord all except John, who was King of Wallachia and Bulgaria. This John was a Wallachian, who had rebelled against his father and uncle, and had warred against them for twenty years, and had won from them so much land that he had become a very wealthy king. And be it known to you, that of the land lying on the west side of the Straits of St. George, he had conquered very nearly the half. This John did not come to do the will of the emperor, nor to submit himself to him.

CONFLICT BETWEEN THE GREEKS AND LATINS IN CONSTANTINOPLE BURNING OF THE CITY

While the Emperor Alexius was away on this progress, there befell a very grievous misadventure; for a conflict -arose between the Greeks and the Latins who inhabited Constantinople, and of these last there were many. And certain people who they were I know not out of malice, set fire to the city; and the fire waxed so great and horrible that no man could put it out or abate it. And when the barons of the host, who were quartered on the other side of the port, saw this, they were sore grieved and filled with pity seeing the great churches and the rich palaces melting and falling in, and the great streets filled with merchandise burning in the flames; but they could do nothing.

CRUSADERS OBTAIN A RESPITE

THE CRUSADERS OBTAIN A RESPITE BY PROMISING TO HELP THE VENETIANS AGAINST ZARA

Then the Doge spoke to his people, and said unto them:

“ Signors, these people cannot pay more; and in so far as they have paid at all, we have benefited by an agreement which they cannot now fulfil. But our right to keep this money would not everywhere be acknowledged; and if we so kept it we should be greatly blamed, both us and our land. Let us therefore offer them terms. …

“ The King of Hungary has taken from us Zara in Sclavonia, which is one of die strongest places in the world; and never shall we recover it with all the power that we possess, save with the help of these people. Let us therefore ask them to help us to reconquer it, and we wall remit the payment of the debt of 34,000 marks of silver, until such time as it shall please God to allow us to gain the moneys by conquest, were and they together.” Thus was agreement made. Much was it contested by those who wished that the host should be broken up. Nevertheless the agreement was accepted and ratified.

TIIE DOGE AND A NUMBER OF VENETIANS TAKE THE CROSS

Then, on a Sunday, was assemblage held in the Church of St. Mark. It was a very high festival, and the people of the land were there, and the most part of the barons and pilgrims

Before the beginning of High Mass, the Doge of Venice, who bore the name of Henry Dandolo, went up into the reading-desk, and spoke to the people, and said to them:

“ Signors, you are associated with the most worthy people in the world, and for the highest enterprise ever undertaken; and I am a man old and feeble, who should have need of rest, and I am sick in body; but I see that no one could command and lead you like myself, who am your lord. If you will consent that I take the sign of the cross to guard and direct you, and that my son remain in my place to guard the land, then shall I go to live or die with you and with the pilgrims.”

Story of Alexander

But that one was critical. Though they knew the story of Alexander, the Romans never really learned his lesson. The fatal flaw of the Roman empire—if we must think empire is a good thing—was that it had for-gotten how to be imperialist. It had no strategy for north, south, or east, and when from any of those directions enemies arose who understood the Romans and their achievement full well and better than the Romans understood their rivals, then the Roman venture faltered.

The prosperity and peace of the Roman empire were unmistakably good things, however one assesses the price that was paid to achieve them. It is reasonable to lament their passing, or at least to wish that more could have been preserved. In the absence of strategy or vision, though, Rome had few unexploited advantages left.

The city of Rome

The city of Rome, once Justinian’s wars did their worst, never rebounded to more than a shadow of itself, rising in the time of the Renaissance from long misery as a malarial swamp, then settling from the Renaissance until the present for being a showplace—that is, a tourist trap. To be sure, in the irony of history, the final lesson that societies learned from Rome was a variant on Tacitus’s quip about making its emperors somewhere else. The long-term lesson now was that “Romes”— new Romes—could themselves be made someplace else, no longer just on the Tiber. Nowhere west of Tibet have we seen, since late antiquity, the emergence of great powers with wide territorial ambitions that weren’t imitating Rome in one way or another.

Constantine was the first to imitate it, with his parody of the seven hills plunked down on the Bosporus, and the Arabs would make Damascus and Baghdad Romes in their own time. To the northeast, Kiev would become the third Rome and Moscow its rival, the latter clinging to the word czar (which is merely Caesar heard at a distance) to the end of its ambitions. The Frankish king Charles, whose spin doctors persuaded us to call him Charles the Great (Charlemagne), and the later Frankish monarch Napoleon, sought restoration of empire on various pretexts. Charlemagne thought empire was his for the taking because the throne in Constantinople was inappropriately held by an impossible pretender; Napoleon, observing the panoply and politi¬cal disunity of the last days of the Holy Roman Empire, compelled it to dissolve in 1806 to make way for his own imperial pretensions. Each of these rulers of the Franks made sure that Rome’s religious power—in the person of the reigning pope, who crowned him—would underscore the legitimacy of his role.

Monks to be sure

Monks, to be sure, found themselves in communities more often than not, and a social expectation developed that only the holiest could be allowed to live on their own, entirely detached. They were the ones most willing to expose themselves to public view by enacting a visible role, or the ones most willing to retreat entirely and genuinely from human contact. Others were expected to remain in houses with fellow monks and place themselves under some supervision.

Long influence

One sixth-century monk whose views would have long influence, an Italian from the hill country southeast of Rome, began his set of rules for monastic life by sternly insisting on stability—that is, on regular residence in one place under a particular authority. He had stinging rebuke for the monks he called “sarabaites” and “gyrovagues”—the kind who went about on their own, begging for sustenance, and offering contact with their presumed holiness promiscuously to one and all. Such a vigorous rebuke must mean that the practice was common, and one man’s fraud is another man’s saint. To see those figures as atypical and necessarily either virtuous or vicious is a mistake. We should instead see and admire their instability and their ability to elude the nets their society would set out to control them, even when monasteries themselves began to wield such nets.

In different parts of the Christian worlds, monks took on different appearances and had different fates. In Egypt, they were by now long settled in desert fastnesses not far from the cities of the Nile, and they also thronged the cities, particularly Alexandria. The financial resources that went into the churches, and that grew as churches acquired property, were the underpinnings of the communities, the implicit tax that sustained unproductive hands. The urban oppressed poor of classical antiquity were now joined by the urban privileged poor, these monks. A monk might be poor by choice, but he had little risk of starving to death. The monasteries in town and outside it were hotbeds of spiritual authority, which some would call charlatanism. Wanderers and the renegades might be reined in not by sage teaching but by their own desire to settle down and share the power of great monks and great houses.

Preoccupied by dreams of Romanness

What must it have been like to be in the Italy that suffered these waves of war back and forth for seventeen years? Many people, away from the beaten path, were spared direct experience of savagery and loss, though even those who saw no battles saw soldiers and worse coming to seize what they needed by the brutal informal taxation of wartime. Famine in Emilia and Etruria in 549, Procopius tells us, left men desperate enough to grind acorns into a kind of wheat and bake bread from them, and there were rumors of cannibalism.10 A few people, most of them probably among the wealthy elite whom we know, preoccupied by dreams of Romanness and very likely power, may have wished or even schemed for a Justinianic invasion, but none can have taken any satisfaction in the melancholy sequence of events that unfolded or in the devastation of society and landscape that came afterward. No good thing came from this war. Most people simply suffered, dreaded, and hoped for release.

Totila risked a pitched battle

Belisarius was gone by the time it ended, and Totila was dead. Unable to resist the temptation to achieve a lasting victory, Totila risked a pitched battle at Busta Gallorum in 552, and there defeat and death caught up with him. Procopius gives us a rousing picture of the wild war dance the king performed on the threshold of battle, but for a man whose whole experience of war had come fifty years after Theoderic’s settlement in Italy, anything that risked attracting such a parody must have been a gesture rather than a living tradition, like a modern army officer carrying a sword with his dress uniform. The Amalization and gothicization of the army and regime in Italy during Theoderic’s last years could have encouraged such posturing, but the almost instantaneous evaporation of Gothic culture in Italy when the war was finally over suggests how little could now be credited to barbarian vitality.

The eunuch general Narses had replaced Belisarius a few months before Busta Gallorum, coming from the Balkans, up the coast from Salona, making his way to Ravenna by June 552 with an army of 30,000. Fresh troops, they faced Totila and defeated him. Only a fragment of resistance faded away into the lands north of the Po, there to go to ground and disappear. Procopius says the Goths were expelled, but his successor in the writing of semiofficial history, Agathias, says not. It may have made no difference.

Military occupation was now the formal means of Roman governance in the land that had known the oligarchic liberty of the Roman republic. Narses would remain in Ravenna off and on until 568, and Byzantine rule would continue there until the eighth century, always based in the cowards’ capital—marsh-girt for defense—with a port nearby offering the most direct boat route to Constantinople. (Narses’s departure coincided with the Lombards’ arrival in Italy, leading later generations to tell an improbable story about Italians who were unhappy with his rule complaining to the emperor Justin II, and Narses retiring in a snit to Naples as a result. It is just as likely that Narses thought the Lombards would make useful soldiers and so invited them in, then lost control of them customized tours balkan.)

A quarter century

Justinian’s response to the victory—after a quarter century on the throne, at the end of a dispiriting decade—was to try, ever the man of legal codification, to define and shape the society he controlled by writing a prescriptive text. In this case, the text was legal, not ecclesiastical: the “Pragmatic Sanction,” issued in 554 .

The document is not without fantasy. It annuls all of Totila’s acts, a dangerously destabilizing decision, tearing open wounds that would otherwise have begun to heal. Those who had sold property under duress in Totila’s time could now recover it by refunding the price they had collected for it. It restored exiles, prisoners, slaves, and indentured farmworkers to the status they had enjoyed before Totila, on the assumption that the state of affairs in the early 540s, after Belisarius’s first victory, was legal and Roman.

Scapegoating of Christianity led to outrage

His blindnesses, moreover, were significant, not least his inability—for he published his first volumes in the same year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations—to grasp the main lines of economic argument that need to be spun around these societies in order to understand their development. In his own time, his scapegoating of Christianity led to outrage, but his scholarship defeated objections. Not until the last two generations did scholars rehabilitate priests and barbarians alike, not to whitewash, but to recognize that simplistic solutions always mislead. “They were, those people, a kind of solution,” the poet Cavafy said ruefully of barbarians who failed to materialize and could not play the role of scapegoat assigned them.

The myth has two things wrong with it. First, this expansive multiethnic and long-lived community of nations had little do with anything Roman. The most prominent citizens of the Roman empire in its most prosperous times lived far from Italy (mainly in the cities of the east) and owed their wealth to many factors, of which the brutal imposition of the Roman peace was only one, and not indispensable. To make sense of the economic, social, cultural, religious, and even political history of, for example, Asia Minor in the second century CE requires various kinds of competence and broad specific knowledge. It’s narrow and limiting to connect the urbane people and societies of that period and place with a community that had its base in a trading post at a crossing of the Tiber River 900 years earlier. But because men and women in the second century believed the story of Romulus and Remus and how that trading post became a great city and founded a great empire, they made it true and relevant—at least to some extent.

Second, the traditional story offers a single narrative point of view, one focus, and a sole omniscient narrator who identifies with an empire seen at the scale of empire itself. The historian who chooses the Roman empire for his topic will inevitably under-imagine the distinctiveness of local cultures and places in that world. Even worse, looking at the history of the Roman empire makes it easy to neglect points of view beyond the ken of the Roman elite. We lose the perspective of provincials, soldiers, women, slaves, businessmen—everyone who lived outside the Beltway, so to speak. Much of the best and most exciting scholarly investigation of our time has plunged with relish into Rome’s provinces and sought out its many and various peoples.

Here’s an example: in the late fifth century, the Isaurians at last fell under Constantinople’s political control. But to judge by the brightly colored maps we post on classroom walls, Isauria, in southern Asia Minor, had long been part of the empire. Because it was mountainous, sparsely populated, and off the beaten track, and so had long been a marginal outpost from which a few soldiers or adventurers might occasionally emerge, there couldn’t have been much “Roman” about it. Isaurians first show up in the Roman empire’s lore more than sporadically when they are the stereotypical heavies in narratives of the fourth and fifth centuries— “barbarian” in every way except that they found their homes inside rather than outside the empire’s borders. Then suddenly their chieftain, Tara- sicodissa, famous for having no kneecaps and thus being able to run faster than ordinary men, ascended the imperial throne. By promptly taking the reassuringly and traditionally Greek name of Zeno, he guaranteed that he would disappear into the imperial lists unremarked, as he wished. Within a generation, Isauria was quietly paying taxes and we hear no more of Isaurian bandits and brigands. The Roman empire had just gotten there a few centuries late stoletov bulgaria tours.

Eurasian landmass

No empire is an island, least of all one in a dead-end corner of the Eurasian landmass. The forested, mountainous, but well-watered and fertile land of the remote western peninsula that trapped all the migrating peoples who moved into it was only a small part of a great stage on which many others interacted. Travel east from Rome’s Rhine through land progressively less promising, skirting your way through the marshes of Poland, shying away from the northern winter toward the plains of Scythia not yet turned into farmland, and go on into the steppes of western and central Asia, and you’ll have seen a little of the neighborhood that Rome lived in.

Rome, to be sure, still holds our imaginations. The ancient Greeks appeal easily to lovers of beauty and tragedy, but also to flinty-eyed political hawks who prefer to relive Persian, Peloponnesian, and Alexandrian wars. The traditional middle ages call to sentimentalists who admire virtuous primitives, and the Renaissance endures for Whigs of all generations with their self-glorifying provincialism.

Huns and Persians draw few modern enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the allegiance that several generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German scholars expressed to the “Germanic” invaders of the Roman empire (the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, above all) has largely collapsed, toppling under the weighty disgrace of German nationalism following World War II, and undone by more keenly skeptical scholarship. But classical Rome lives for moralists, those people who always know exactly what other people should be doing.