Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

by Bettany Hughes

Herakleios had chosen a complicated ally. The fact that the Great Wall of China had been built higher, longer, stronger in part as a response to the raids of the Turks, 150 years before, should have worried the city of God on the edge of the Bosphorus. The Turks had been quietly getting stronger. Breeding the horses beloved of Indian and Chinese warrior leaders, never allowed to become irrelevant because of the Silk Road trade routes that abutted their territory and connected Constantinople in the West with Xian in the East across 4,000 miles, picking up some of the twenty or so languages spoken in the adjacent lands, exemplifying our desire as a species to communicate and to exchange, all forced this band of trader-warriors centre stage. Constantinople was nourishing a healthy trade between the Far East and the western reaches of Christendom, but in doing so she was also nourishing what would be a predatory enemy, an enemy who would eventually realise the nightmares of the Christian city.