Free The Dream and the Tomb by Robert Payne Page A

on marble pedestals. Both the palaces and the churches were decorated with sheets of mosaic. Sometimes the doors of palaces and churches were made of solid silver.
    Long ago the Arabs had conquered Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and recently the Seljuk Turks had conquered Asia Minor, but the Byzantine empire in its diminished condition was still a power to be reckoned with. The honey-colored walls, with their 370 towers, were so well designed that the city was virtually impregnable. Along the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora the walls went straight down to the water. The Byzantine army at full force numbered about 100,000 men, and in addition, there were multitudinous mercenaries whose chief purpose was to protect the lives of the emperor and the imperial family.
    If he could have peered over the walls, the Crusader would have seen a city as busy as a beehive, throbbing with urgent life, noisy with church bells and the hammering of metal, with factories next to the churches and with the workers’ tenements next to the palaces. The crowning glory of the city was Justinian’s Church of Sancta Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, a church so vast, so brilliantly colored with mosaics, and so full of shimmering perspectives that a man standing under the dome could believe himself in heaven. On the south shore, facing the Sea of Marmora, stood the Great Palace, a vast complex of a hundred buildings and at least twenty chapels, set amid gardens and poplars, where the emperors had always lived in great state. This palace was also known as the Bucoleon, because a statue of a bull and a lion had stood there from earliest times. In a corner of the palacewas the small church of the Virgin of the Pharos, which served as a reliquary for the grave-clothes of Christ, the Veronica, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Lance, the Nails, and a considerable portion of the True Cross.
    Constantinople was shaped like a triangle, its sides about four miles long. At the apex of the triangle stood the Blachernae Palace, the favorite palace of the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus. Within its walls was the church of the Virgin of Blachernae, and here the Mantle and the Robe and other relics of the Virgin were preserved.
    In the north were the relics of the Virgin, in the south were the relics of Christ. To the Byzantines this divine symmetry afforded divine protection, or so they hoped.
    At the heart and center of the city there stood, like a powerful generator of vast and imponderable forces, the figure of the emperor, whose power was absolute in a very special way. He had many titles but the one most commonly used was
en Christo Autocrator
, meaning “Autocrat in Christ.” He was more than the representative of Christ on earth: in the eyes of Orthodox believers he was very nearly an incarnation of Christ. He walked and talked in a special Christlike way; and when he was enthroned he was more especially like Christ than at any other time. He wore stiff brocaded gowns said to be copied after gowns given by the angels to Constantine, the first Christian emperor. He wore a cross in his crown, from which there dangled ropes of jewels and pearls, and there were more ropes of jewels and pearls dangling from his arms and shoulders. These ropes were intended to signify the radiance of Christ. All his public acts took on the form of ritual. Since there were rituals for every hour of the day, and on nearly every day there were public ceremonies to be performed, the wonder is that he had any time to conduct affairs of state. He possessed executive, legislative, judicial, military and religious power, and he was answerable to nobody except Christ. In theory everything that happened within the Byzantine empire took place with his permission or consent.
    The theory, however, was far from the reality. The all-seeing eye and the all-judging intelligence of the emperor were at the mercy of thousands of officials who diluted his powers. They ruled in his name, and far too many of