On that hot July day when the crusaders and Venetians at last forced their way with young Alexius into Constantinople, it was neither as rich nor as powerful as it had been when the earlier Alexius let the leaders of the First Crusade cool their heels outside its gates more than a hundred years before. But if you wanted to find a more fabulous city, you would have had to go all the way across Asia to distant Cathay. There, of course, was Khansa (modern Hangchow), which was so enormous that it took one medieval traveler three days merely to cross from one side of it to the other. There, too, was Khan Baliq (modern Peking) where “twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round” just to make a playground for the Chinese Son of Heaven, or emperor. But since Marco Polo would not even be born for another fifty years, most of the crusaders knew very little about Cathay, that is, if they had even heard of it at all! Their idea of a big city was London with its gloomy smoke-blackened houses, and in those days London was really a little town. Even Westminster Abbey was a mile in the country and surrounded by green fields. Or Paris with its streets so narrow that you could hardly see the sky between overhanging gables, and with the great Cathedral of Notre Dame not yet finished. Paris hardly extended a mile in any direction. Or Bruges with its bent and wizened wool merchants and the damp smell of its canals. Even Rome, the most famous city in the West, could not have had much more than 30,000 inhabitants. Most of these were ruffians and bandits who robbed pilgrims, fought each other, and even battled the Pope from castles made of marble stolen from the ancient monuments. But Constantinople, at the crossroads of the world, gleamed in the sun and was proud and mighty. Even then it had a population of at least 800,000. Possibly a million people lived there. They were of every kind and race, for like modern New York, the Byzantine city was a melting pot. Swarthy Armenians looking for the fortune that had enabled more than one of their number to mount the Byzantine throne. Intellectual Greek scholars moving toward the lecture room with a precious copy of Plato or Aristotle under their arms. Blond-haired Anglo-Saxons, described by one who saw them to be “tall as palm trees.” Ever since William the Conqueror had ruled in England, they had come in growing numbers to join the famous Varangians, or imperial bodyguard. Russian traders bursting out of their own Saint Mamas quarter in the city to drink the unfamiliar Greek wine which made them quarrel and brawl. Strikingly handsome Asbagians from Colchis, the land of the legendary Golden Fleece, and probably of rich placer gold mines almost like the ones in California.