Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/213

 THE CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1200. 195 ance which could be offered by their defenders at a time wlicn cannon were unknown, and constitute perhaps the most su- perb mass of ruins in Europe. To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storajre of water which Cisterns. ... . are still magnincent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. "These cisterns," says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, " resemble lakes, or even seas." Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees.^ xt ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emper- ors Yalens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul. Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora. There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While _ „., the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital Dwellings of • t i i i ^ the poorer occupicd marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel re- marks, to stench and darkness.' The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Pal- aces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantino- ple, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were fa- 1 Eleven large cistcrus are enumerated by Constantius ; the best known now is that called the Thousand and One Columns. 2 Odon de Deuil.