Here lived the working population of the city—porters with calluses on their hands and padded coats, donkey drivers with shrill cries and quick, short steps like those that can be seen even today in many a city in the Balkans. Carpenters. Water carriers. Day laborers. Here too lived an even more wretched riffraff who lived off doles and charity, when they didn’t live off murder and crime. Here was the poor creature with sore eyes who sat with his wooden begging bowl in front of a church or on the sunny side of a square. Here was a one-eyed scoundrel who would cut throats for a copper obol. Yet sometimes they gathered together and formed a mob that marched to the Hippodrome and demanded a new emperor, and more than once they got what they wanted. This was what Constantinople was like in the late Middle Ages and for 600 years before that. But it was also much more than a seething pot of emperors and rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves. It was the capital of a very famous empire which took over the eastern half of the old Roman Empire and became known as the Byzantine Empire because it stood on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. In spite of all its enemies, this empire lasted 1,123 years and eighteen days. And at a time when half a dozen other empires crumbled, including ancient Persia and ancient Rome! [Illustration: THE EMPIRE UNDER JUSTINIAN 550 A.D. ] Sometimes it was a very big empire indeed. Under the mighty Justinian it ruled from the Euphrates, which flows into the distant Persian Gulf, to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Nile in one direction and the Crimea of South Russia in the other to Switzerland. It ruled all of Italy, and all of the Balkans, and all of Asia Minor, and all North Africa. Sometimes the empire was so small that it was little more than the city itself. But whether it was big or little, it was almost always the most important and the strongest nation west of China. Sometimes it was the only important one! How did it get that way? How was it able to keep strong when so much of the rest of the world was breaking into pieces? What did it do for the world? For it did a great deal. Why should you and I care about Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire? I will try to tell you. [Illustration: Four people] THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CONSTANTINOPLE The beginning o£ the story took place a long time ago, and not even in the same land.