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the landward side, the attacking armies beating themselves vainly against Theodosius’s tremendous walls. Dandolo knew that the weakest part of the defences was the sea-wall along the Golden Horn. The Horn was unbridged in those days, and on its northern bank, opposite Constantinople proper, was the foreign quarter of Galata, where the trading colonies were settled, and the envoys of the powers were all obliged to live. Halfway up its hill stood the massive Galata Tower, and from it ran the chain across the entrance to the Golden Horn: it was 1,500 feet long, with links the length of a man’s forearm, and it was suspended a few feet above the surface of the water.
    Once through this chain, and the Crusaders would be under the lee of the city on its weakest side. The walls along its northern shore were feeble compared to the others, without moats or enceintes , and made difficult to defend by the steep streets runningdirectly down the hills behind them. Dandolo, the tactician of the assault, accordingly ordered the first landing to be made on the Galata shore. There was no resistance. At the first sight of the Norman knights on their armoured horses, led by grooms out of the sally-ports of the assault craft, the Greek forces fled from the waterfront, and in no time a bridgehead was established. Next day they captured the Galata Tower, after a stiff fight, and winched down the chain across the Horn. In sailed the warships, led by the mighty Aquila , into the crowded waterway, storming and burning whatever ships they found there: and so by 6 July the flank of the city was turned, and they were ready to storm it.
    From the middle of the Ataturk Bridge, the higher of the two bridges that now span the Golden Horn, one may see almost exactly the view the soldiers saw, as they planned their assault from the decks of their warships. This is visibly the city’s soft side. It has none of the piled, phalanx look that characterizes Constantinople from the Sea of Marmara. Here all the muddled bazaars, speckled with small mosques and splashed here and there with green, give the place a rather helpless look, and the great buildings along the skyline, which look so forbidding from the sea, seem almost avuncular from the Golden Horn.
    Along the shoreline you can make out the remains of fortifications. It is a sleazy shore there, a slum of small warehouses and factories, old houses crumbled into squalor, small boatyards where the caiques are caulked, tanneries and tyre depots. Big ships do not moor here, only grubby coasters from the Anatolian islands, their masts shipped, their crews wearing cloth caps and eating fried fish sandwiches out of carrier bags. But not quite obliterated by the confusion, still just distinguishable against the warren of streets on the hillside behind, turrets stand shadowy, and city gates reveal themselves. In 1203 this line of walls was complete, and joined the Theodosian walls at the head of the Golden Horn. Its turrets were manned all along the water’s edge, and there was no way of turning it. This was the one place, though, where the defences of Constantinople might be broken – by the skills not of soldiers, who had invariably failed to take this city, but of sailors, who had never tried before.
    For it was the Venetians themselves who mounted the assault here, on 17 July 1203. The French decided to march to the head of the Horn, along its northern bank, and attack the Theodosian walls at the point where they joined the sea-wall on the waterfront. The Venetians resolved simply to hurl themselves across the Horn, a very Dandolan device. The point that they chose as the fulcrum of their attack can be identified. It is a rotted mass of masonry still called the Petrion Gate, immediately below the modest residence of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, the Pope of eastern Christendom, who still lives in somewhat prickly circumstances in this Muslim and less than philhellene city. If you run your eye along the line of