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emperor’s city, protected as it was by the thaumaturgic body of Constantine (the city’s founder), by the venerated robe of the Mother of God, and by other sacred Christian relics; by walls, ramparts, and armies; and by cunning diplomacy that skillfully exacted peace from the “barbarians,” even at the cost of paying for it in gold.
    So chronicles of the time are full of stories of young men and even boys who left the fields and villages and set out with only a cloak ontheir shoulders and a few crackers in their sack. They would march for weeks down the ancient roads of the empire, drinking from wells, sleeping in caves or under the open sky, willing to face all kinds of danger on their way to the city. Nor were they the only itinerants in those remote rural landscapes. Other men scoured the land instead of heading for the city, but they were neither imperial tax inspectors nor land-register surveyors: these men sought only the poorest of young girls. To the girls and their barefoot families dressed in sackcloth, they offered garments and footwear, though not out of charity. They were interested in taking the girls to the city on the basis of vague contracts in which nothing was clearly defined except the services that the girls would be required to perform.
    Infants and children needing more food than a family could expect to supply were often cast off in the hope that they might be found and delivered to a church or a convent; or that they might die quickly in the peace of the Lord. This was the fate of girl babies especially, just as it is today in some parts of Asia.
    Immigrants descended upon the city from the West, from Thrace and Illyria in particular. They spoke their native dialects but little standard Latin and no Greek. Greek was the language not only of Theodora’s family, but of the whole loquacious capital (an early father of the Church had written that “the populace argued furiously about impenetrable issues, and even the baker, when you asked him for the price of bread, replied that in the Trinity the Father is greater than the Son”). 3
    Other immigrants came from the Asiatic East, which had been better protected from the fourth- and fifth-century “barbarian” migrations, and was more strongly woven into the ancient web of cities and commercial networks of the classical and Hellenistic tradition. They hailed from Anatolia, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Paphlagonia, but also from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. In addition to their native dialects they knew some rudimentary Greek—which they had heard in the more prestigious of the ancient cities, the
poleis
, but they also knew that the official establishment tongue was still Latin, and they were intimidated by it.
    All these strands made up the urban mass of Constantinople. These newcomers didn’t come for the ancient artistic wonders that the emperors had selectively pilfered to beautify the city’s squares—the ancient Egyptian obelisks, or Leysippus’s celebrated team of four bronze horses now crowning Saint Mark’s basilica in Venice (the seafaring capital that owes so much to Constantinople). Nor were they interested in the city’s precious manuscripts, their pages saturated with purple dye and embellished with decorative initials, miniatures of allegorical figures, and representations of exquisite classical and Christian virtues.
    What they sought was a promise of future salvation granted by the Christian relics that abounded in the city. And, first and foremost, they sought work, because the young imperial capital needed hard manual labor: men to unload the goods in the wholesale markets that supplied the butchers and greengrocers and fishmongers, and workers for the iron smithies and the silversmith shops located in the Bosphorus and Golden Horn districts. It needed smelters for the imperial mint that manufactured the most famous of all coins, the pure gold imperial solidus. (The root of this term has survived in many European