Water, Domes and a Silver Dish: A Historian's Byzantine Field Notes

Field Notes: In the Footsteps of Justinian

1Day 1, flight to Istanbul. Background: In 476 the last emperor in the west lost his throne, and the western lands broke into Germanic kingdoms. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople (today Istanbul), lasted almost a thousand more years. Historians call it the Byzantine Empire, but its people called themselves Romans. Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565 with his wife Theodora, sent armies that retook Italy and North Africa, and he had scholars gather centuries of Roman laws into one code.

2Day 2, the Basilica Cistern. I walked down stone steps into a huge underground water tank built under Justinian, probably in 532. Its roof rests on 336 marble columns in long rows. The columns do not match; many were taken from older buildings. Constantinople had little fresh water of its own, so aqueducts carried water from hills outside the walls, and cisterns like this stored it.

3Day 3, Hagia Sophia. After rioters burned the older church in 532, Justinian had this one built in less than six years; it was finished in 537. Its builders, Anthemius and Isidore, were trained in mathematics. The first dome fell after earthquakes in 558, and a taller one was finished in 562. The marble walls and columns date from Justinian's time. The four minarets outside and the huge round panels with Arabic writing inside were added after 1453, when the Ottomans captured the city and made the church a mosque.

4Day 6, St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai Desert, Egypt. Justinian ordered thick stone walls built around this monastery in the 500s, near the far southern edge of his empire. Monks still live and pray here today, as monks have for more than 1,400 years. Its library keeps some of the oldest Christian manuscripts in the world, written in Greek, Syriac, Arabic and other languages.

5Day 9, Sutton Hoo, England. Grassy mounds above a river. In 1939, diggers here found the outline of a ship buried about 625, probably for a king of East Anglia. Among the treasures were silver bowls made in the eastern Mediterranean and a large silver dish stamped with the marks of Emperor Anastasius, who ruled in Constantinople from 491 to 518. No one knows how they reached England: as gifts, as trade goods or passed from hand to hand.

6Day 10, notes on trade. Constantinople sat where ships passed between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and the government taxed the goods. Its gold coin, the solidus, was trusted far beyond the empire. In 1082 Emperor Alexius I let Venetian merchants trade in the empire without paying the usual taxes, in return for help from Venice's warships against Norman invaders.