The Abyssinian Proof

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Isaak Metochites and his family set off through the unlit streets. His son, Michael, pulled the cart with their belongings, its wheels greased and padded to make no sound. His wife and seven-year-old daughter, cloaked in dark veils, followed behind. Constantinople lay about them in a black stupor, as close to sleep as death is to the afterlife.

The silence worried Isaak. For weeks, the Turks had kept up a fierce bombardment, along with a constant barrage of noise from trumpets and castanets, presumably to weaken the nerves of the city’s defenders. Only seven thousand armed men remained to defend the city, he thought, but they were not so easily rattled. It was rumored that the Turks planned a great attack the following day and the sudden silence seemed like a great ingathering of breath by the barbarian god of war.

The night smelled of wet charcoal and decay. Isaak thought he heard the Turkish army stirring on the other side of the city walls. He shook his head sadly at the thought that all that remained of the thousand-year-old civilization of Byzantium was this despairing city, the flat of the Muslim hand against its back, ready to tip it into oblivion. Over generations, the Turks had swallowed the outlying cities and provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the high plains, pastures, ports, and olive groves of Byzantium, until only the capital city remained, the city Constantine had named after himself in the year 330 and anointed the capital of Christendom. A triangle of precious civilization girded by its great walls and flanked on two sides by water.

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