Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/215

 THE CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1200. 197 continually protected from the pirates Avho were already in- festing the neighboring seas. No city was regarded as so se- cure as Constantinople, and amid this security the wealthy man conld find rarer silks, finer linen, and purer dyed purple, richer furs, dishes of greater delicacy, and wines of more rare and costly vintage than in the provinces. Precious stones and jewelry of every kind, including those ropes of pearls which are yet to be seen in daily wear at Damascus and other remote cities of Turkey, and to the display of which the inhabitants of Eastern Europe, like those of Asia, have always attached great iniportance, might be more safely worn, could be shown to more people, and would be more highly appreciated than in the provincial towns. The Crusaders regarded the luxurious dresses of the Byzantines as marks of effeminacy, just as a Turcoman liorde clothed in sheepskin, marching upon Paris, would be sure to regard the luxury of the capital as a sign that the manliness had departed from the nation. The By- zantines looked on the rough and ill -dressed Crusaders as rude and uncouth barbarians, unskilled in science, ignorant of art and literature, and entire strangers to the luxuries of civilization. The Crusaders are never weary of calling atten- tion to the luxury and the wealth of the inhabitants of Con- stantinople, and Nicetas himself, the chief Byzantine historian of this period, tells several stories against his own countrymen of the fault found by the Crusaders with the effeminate char- acter of this luxury. We may be sure, however, that the Byzantine point of view was far different. All the pleasures of nature and of art were his. The climate was safe from the great heat of Smyrna or the cold of even a few miles farther north on the Black, that is, the rough, bleak. Sea. The Gold- en Horn, the Marmora, and the Bosphorus were bright dur- ing six or seven months of the year with gayly decked and graceful caiques, probably not much unlike their present rep- resentatives, except that they were higher in the stem and stern, and thus more graceful in form. Carefully trained oarsmen from the Greek islands or from the neighboring shores were to be had at a cheap rate, and each noble family had its own crews with gay distinctive badges. The ruins