by Ed West
Sick of the corruption in Rome, in the early fourth century the Emperor Constantine had sought a new capital. He chose a spot close to the Black Sea on the site of the old fishing village of Byzantium, founded in 658 BC by a semi-mythical Byzas and colonists from Megara, thirty miles west of Athens. The city was in a prime location, controlling the Bosporus waterway that led from the Black Sea to the Aegean, but it had never been able to grow because of the lack of available fresh water. Roman engineering was able to solve that problem and it grew to become the largest city in the world, initially called New Rome, but inevitably better known after its founder. At one point it would be home to more than a million people.
The city Constantine built was laid out “in a grid of colonnaded streets, flanked by public buildings with elegant columns, great squares, gardens and triumphal arches.”1 The streets were lined with statues and monuments from around the classical world, “a city of marble and porphyry, beaten gold and brilliant mosaics,” and gigantic in comparison to anything in the west.2 It had imperial palaces and churches “more numerous than days of the year,” westerners observed, calling it “the city of the world’s desire.”3
The Queen of Cities had street lighting, sewers, drainage, hospitals, “orphanages, public baths, aqueducts, huge water cisterns, libraries and luxury shops,” as well as seven palaces, among them the Triconchus roofed in gold.4 It was the crossroads of Europe and Asia, between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Bosphorus bringing icy winds down from Russian steppes, clouding the city in winter with fog and snow. As Pierre Gilles, a French traveler of the fifteenth century, wrote of Constantinople: “with one key it opens and closes two worlds, two seas.”5
Straddling Asia and Europe, it was the finest city the world had ever seen, but its position made it vulnerable to attack from numerous nomadic tribes, among them the Huns, Goths, Slavs, Gepids, Tartars, Avars, Turkic Bulgars, and the Pechenegs. They came down from the steppes of Asia, the forests of Russia, the Balkan mountains and the plains of Hungary. In 626, the city was attacked by Avars from the north while the Persians stormed the frontiers of the east; the Bulgars, another Turkic tribe, mounted sieges in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries; then there was Prince Igor the Russian, who came in 941, leaving a trail of devastation.
It was also engaged, in the seventh century, in a seemingly never-ending conflict with the Persian Empire. And almost unseen, a new threat emerged from the south, a nomadic tribe who emerged out of the desert with devastating momentum. The Arabs, united by a new religion brought to them by the prophet Muhammad, swiftly overran the ancient cities of Damascus, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, and even mighty Persia. In line with prophecy, they now had their sights on the mightiest of jewels—Constantinople. From 672, Arab ships secured the coast of Asia Minor and two years later they launched their attack on the Queen of Cities; against the onslaught of the most successful conquerors in history, its cause looked hopeless.
THE GREATEST CITY THAT EVER WAS OR WILL BE
Constantinople is obviously very similar to Qarth, one of the world’s great ports and filled with rich merchants trading in silks, spices, and other exotic goods from further east.6 Qarth’s harbor was “a riot of color and clamour and strange smells. Winesinks, warehouses, and gaming dens lined the streets, cheek by jowl with cheap brothels and temples of peculiar gods. Cutpurses, cutthroats, Spellsellers, and moneychangers mingled with every crowd. The waterfront was one great marketplace.”7 In the show it looks like Petra, the desert city in Jordan, but in every other way it resembles Constantinople,8 including its position on the Straits of Qarth connecting the Summer and Jade Seas.
Qarth’s Spice King is very wealthy, despite his grandfather being only a humble pepper salesman, and in real life spices were extremely lucrative in the Mediterranean and silk road trade between Europe, the Near East, and China. The Spice King is part of the Thirteen, a sort of city elite made up of traders; another member, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, is a merchant prince and also fantastically rich, owning eighty-four ships; he allows Daenerys to stay at his absurdly enormous palace, which makes Magister Illyrio’s manse in Pentos resemble “a swineherd’s hove,” and has gardens “full of fragrant lavender and mint, a marble bathing pool stocked with tiny golden fish, a scrying tower and warlock’s maze” and floors made of green marble and walls drapped with silk.9 While she is there he gives her perfume, monkeys, ancient scrolls from Valryia, a snake, a litter for her to be carried in, and two bullocks to pull it, as well as a thousand toy knights made of “jade and beryl and onyx and tourmaline, of amber and opal and amethyst,” covered with shining armor made of gold and silver. The point is that Qarth is a very, very rich place.
As the odd-looking warlock Pyat Pree says to Daenerys: “Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be. It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison.”10
Compare this with Fulcher of Chartres, a Frenchman who came to visit Constantinople in the eleventh century, and said:
O what a splendid city, how stately, how fair, how many monasteries therein, how many palaces raised by sheer labour in its broadways and streets, how many works of art, marvellous to behold: it would be wearisome to tell of the abundance of all good things; of gold and silver, garments of manifold fashion and such sacred relics. Ships are at all times putting in at this port, so that there is nothing that men want that is not brought hither.11
It was a golden metropolis that, in the words of historian of John Julius Norwich, conjured in the western mind “visions of gold and malachite and porphyry, of stately and solemn ceremonial, of brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, of sumptuous mosaics dimly glowing through halls cloudy with incense.”12
Since the early medieval period Byzantium inspired a lurid fascination among jealous, impoverished Latin Christians. Nothing in their world could compete with the Emperor Theophilius’s Triconchose, or Triple Shell, supported on pillars of porphyry and with huge slabs of colourful marble. Its silver doors opened to reveal a semi-circiular hall, lined with marble, in which the fountains flowed with wine. To the north was the Hall of the Pearl, “its white marble floor richly ornamented with mosaic, its roof resting on eight rose-pink marble columns.”13
Close to this was the Kamiles, “in which six columns of green Thessalian marble led the eye up to a field of mosaics depicting a fruit harvest and on to a roof glittering with gold.”14 To the north was the Palace of the Magnaura, built by Constantine, and where Theophilus installed mechanical birds by the imperial throne, around which were lions built of gold; at a given signal the birds would burst into song and the lions roar, after which a golden organ would sound.
In the center of Constantinople there stood the “Million,” marking the foundation of the city and consisting of four triumphal arches forming a square and supporting a rounded dome, above which stood a piece of the True Cross on which Jesus died.15 The equally grand Serpent Column was brought by Constantine from Delphi where it had been erected in the Temple of Apollo by thirty-one Greek cities in gratitude for victory against the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC.
More important than all of New Rome’s palaces were its walls, built of concrete, brick, and locally-quarried limestone. The first line was constructed in 413 under the Emperor Theodosius and was enough to put off Attila the Hun, “the scourge of God,” when he attacked the city in 447. That year the wall collapsed after a severe earthquake while Attila was in nearby Thrace, and sixteen thousand of the city’s citizens rebuilt the structure in record time, adding an outer wall with a series of towers and a brick-lined moat, the fosse. During its height the city was also protected by 192 towers, part of a defensive system that comprised five zones, each one a hundred feet high and two hundred feet apart, with sentinels scanning the horizon in al
l directions. The towers had chambers with siege engines capable of throwing rocks and the city’s infamous secret weapon, Greek Fire.
No army arriving from the land could break the city walls, and many had tried. The Avars had brought their sophisticated stone-throwing machines. The Bulgar khan Krum tried performing human sacrifices to aide his hoped-for conquest, all to no avail. Even Rome’s enemies suspected that God protected the city, and until the catastrophe of 1204, the walls were never scaled.
With its vast wealth, its palaces, its technology, and trade, the Great City awed a Latin world which had been plunged into darkness. It also disgusted them, becoming symbolic of duplicity; Italian bishop Liudprand of Cremona described Constantinople as “a city full of lies, tricks, perjury and greed, a city rapacious, avaricious and vainglorious.”16 For people from small towns and villages, such a large city with its court tensions and intrigues must have seemed poisonous—“Smoke, sweat, and shit. If you have a good nose you can smell the treachery too.”17 And perhaps nothing puzzled them more than its eunuchs.
A MAN MAY HAVE WITS, OR A BIT OF MEAT BETWEEN HIS LEGS, BUT NOT BOTH
Constantine had only established himself as undisputed ruler after having two rivals, Licinius and Martianus, killed, rather setting the tone for court politics in the city. Constantine also had his son Crispus arrested and then put to death by slow poison; a few days later he had his second wife Fausta suffocated by steaming in the bath-house, or calidaroim.18 Possibly she had falsely accused her stepson of trying to seduce her and when her husband realized the truth of her lies had her killed too; alternatively Crispus may have plotted the emperor’s overthrow. Afterwards both their names were eradicated from all records and inscriptions, a common Roman practice called the Damnatio memoriae, or “condemnation of memory.”
Constantine had legalized Christianity and eventually installed it as the official religion before converting on his deathbed when he could be fairly certain he wasn’t going to be killing anyone else. He planned his own modest grave to be built alongside twelve sarcophagi, sacred pillars to represent the twelve Apostles, in the center of which would be his. Constantine, not a man lacking in self-confidence, had even adopted the title “Equal of the Apostles,” which later emperors were to use.
He was succeeded by his second son Constantius, who lost little time in removing his rivals—first inventing a rumor that a scrap of parchment had been found in Constantine’s fist accusing his two half-brothers of poisoning him. They were soon brutally murdered, along with another leading figure, Julius Constantius, who was butchered alongside his eldest son, and likewise another rival, Delmatiuys, with both his sons.
This became a running theme throughout the empire, with figures such as Emperor Zeno, who died before long “by homosexual excesses and venereal disease.”19 Zeno became obsessed with a prophecy that he would be overthrown by one of the thirty picked officials in his entourage, and so for no particular reason picked on one, Pelagius, a popular figure who was immediately arrested and strangled.*
Eunuchs were often at the forefront of these court feuds. Emperor Arcadius, ruling from 395 to 408, was a weak figure dominated by a courtier called Rufinus, who wished to marry his daughter to the emperor. However, he had a rival in the “Superintendent of the Sacred Bedchamber” (Praepositus Sacre Cubiculi), an elderly eunuch named Eutropius.
Eutropius had an egg-bald head and wrinkled yellow face, was not an impressive figure to look at, and had worked first as a male prostitute and then pimped out younger boys for powerful officials, before entering the Imperial Household. But “he was intelligent, unscrupulous and ambitious; he too wished to control the Emperor, and to that end he was determined to thwart his enemy in every way he could.”20 To stop his rival, Eutropius had arranged an imperial marriage between Arcadius and a Frankish girl called Eudoxia.
“Beautiful, worldly and ambitious,” Eudoxia was rumored to have had enjoyed a number of lovers, one of whom may have been the father of her son, the Emperor Theodosius. She owed her position to the eunuch but had grown jealous of his influence over her husband and after four years, her marriage with Arcadius had descended into “mutual loathing.” In 399, Eutropius ended up consul, much to the outrage of the aristocracy who could not bear to see the prestigious title taken by a former male prostitute and eunuch. Later that year his enemies engineered his arrest and he was exiled to Cyprus and then beheaded.
However, his rival Rufinus ended up cut down by his own troops, his body mutilated beyond recognition and his head put on a stick and paraded through the streets. The men who once fought for him chopped off his right hand and walked around the city, having it open and shut to passers-by, calling out “Give to the insatiable.”
Constantinople was not the only city to employ eunuchs, who also appear at the courts of ancient Egypt, China, Japan, and the Umayyad Caliphate. Back in 210 BC, a eunuch called Zhao Gao had ruthlessly taken over the Chinese court after the death of the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. Zhao Gao forged documents suggesting the old man had wished for all of Gao’s court rivals to commit ritual suicide, before maneuvring to have his own protégée installed as emperor, and then later having him assassinated. He was eventually murdered, too, rather inevitably. In ancient Greece a eunuch called Hermias had become tyrant of Assos, off the coast of Turkey, and offered his sister Pythias’s hand in marriage to the philosopher Aristotle; he accepted, and they lived happily ever.
The Romans had used castration clamps, with which priests of the goddess Cybele would remove their own testicles in her honor. Some early Christians had gone in for self-mutilation, including the third century scholar and ascetic Origen, although he later regretted it—rather understandably. The Church was not keen and the council of Nicaea in 325 banned self-castration, although the Greek Orthodox church allowed castrated men to become priests and some rose high.
Eunuchs were highly prized, so that when in 949 the Italian king Berengar sent his emissary Liutprand to Byzantium, the latter brought four young eunuchs as a gift to the emperor, along with two silver gilt cauldrons and nine high quality armored breasplates. At the start of the tenth century an embassy from Tuscany to Baghdad brought the caliph some twenty Salvic eunuchs alongside beautiful slave girls, swords, shields and hunting dogs.21
Merchants brought slave boys and girls from across Europe to Constantinople and carried out castration on arrival. One Arabic author advised that if you took Slavic twins and castrated one he would become more skilful and “more lively in intelligence and conversation” than his brother, an interesting science experiment no longer available to academics today. Castration was belived to be good for the “Slavic mind” but supposedly had the opposite effect on black Africans. The Arabic word for eunuch—siqlabi—comes from their ethnic term for Slavs—saqalibi.22
The minority of eunuchs who had lost both testicles and penis, the carzimasia, were even more valuable, since the operation was very dangerous; the boy would only survive if covered with black pitch or hot sand immediately to cauterize the wound and stem the bleeding.
Castration of both kinds is common in Essos, and almost unknown in Westeros where, like in western Europe, the practice was considered immoral. Eunuchs were exotic, and carry a particular image in the modern mind, in the words of one historian “invariably a fat, sly, lazy, scheming, untrustworthy, cowardly, epicene and unmanly monstrosity”, like Varys. But in fact “in Byzantine days, they often proved themselves to be highly intelligent, brave, hard working, and as open and honest as any other human being.”23 Also like Varys, a eunuch, without family to promote, was far more dedicated to the state itself rather than individual faction of family, and his position could not become hereditary. Indeed, eight official positions in Constantinople were reserved for eunuchs, one of which was the parakoimomenos, a highly-trusted official who slept across the door of the emperor’s bedchamber.24
Eunuchs could become very powerful and influential, employed to guard the empress, and also as high officials in th
e state; Justinian II’s tax-collectors included Stephen of Persia, “a huge and hideous eunuch never seen without a whip in his hand.” They even became generals and high-ranking statesmen. With eunuchs so prized, many families willingly castrated a younger son in order to speed his career in the imperial service—although castration was also carried out as a punishment on the sons of disgraced emperors or rebels.
In the Known World, eunuchs comprise the most powerful of armies, the Unsullied, but in reality, they didn’t make very effective fighters because of reduced testosterone, the hormone responsible for aggression in male mammals—something understood in medieval times, even if the exact medical reasons were unknown. Eunuchs could lead armies, however, among them perhaps the most celebrated of all Byzantine generals, Narses (478–573), who fought the Goths in Italy and was said to be good at strategy “for a eunuch.” In fairness he did conquer Rome, although this was because he was good at logistics and administration, had self-discipline, and also didn’t drink to self-destruction, as with many army leaders.
Among the most famous of Chinese admirals, the fifteenth-century Zheng He was a eunuch (and, incidentally, a Muslim); and in the tenth century the castrated Peter Phokas headed the Byzantine imperial guard under Emperor Nikephoros II. Phokas was possessed of almost superhuman strength, and when challenged to single combat threw a lance at the Russian leader, splitting his body in two.
A WALL OF RED-HOT STEEL, BLAZING WOOD, AND SWIRLING GREEN FLAME
And so, in 677, after three years of grueling siege, it appeared that the prophecy would be proven true and the Arabs would take Rûm (Rome), as they called the Byzantine capital. The Saracen ships brought heavy siege engines and huge catapults to break the walls, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers who had experienced only victory in their rapid conquest of the Near East. But then, as the enemy ships closed in on the city, the Romans unleashed their secret weapon, a hellish stream of liquid fire. The flames landed on the water’s surface between the Arab ships, where to their horror they appeared to set fire to the sea. More flames shot out from the Roman towers, fire that seemed to shoot horizontally, and with the blaze came the deafening, terrifying noise, louder than thunder, and the smoke and gas. All around them the Arabs in their ships saw an inferno on the surface. The burning liquid shooting at them did not just engulf the water; it stuck to their ships, their masts and hulls, the wood burning like tinder and the flesh with it. The terrified crews were burned alive, screams filling the air as thousands died. The followers of the caliph Yazid had met a terrible fate, helpless against this bizarre, terrifying weapon, unlike anything they’d ever seen.
