Build the house of assembly long, with its head toward the east and rooms for the clergy on either side of the east end; seat the bishop in the middle of the head with his presbyters about him, and the people in order down its length.
Every trade in its place
Assign each guild its quarter: the silversmiths to work in their shops on the Mese in full view; the perfumers to keep their stalls between the Milion and the Chalke gate, so that their fragrance rises to the holy image over the gate and fills the palace porches; the livestock trades to the outer fora.
The Book of the Eparch regulates the guilds of Constantinople for the sake of honest dealing and public order, and location is one of its tools. Precious-metal work is to be done openly on the main street, where fraud is hard to hide; sweet-smelling trades are placed at the ceremonial approach to the palace and the icon of Christ over its gate; butchers and cattle dealers are sent to the fora further out.
The same book makes building contractors answerable for their work: a wall that falls within ten years, unless by earthquake, must be rebuilt at the builder’s own expense. The city it describes was organised less by a master plan than by such rules of place and responsibility.
Related rules
Repair the public buildings of the city before beginning new ones; and pull down the booths, sheds and houses that private people build into the public porticoes or against the walls of public buildings.
Leave at least twelve feet between a new house and its neighbour; build no balcony lower than fifteen feet from the ground or nearer than ten feet to the house opposite; do not block a neighbour’s view of the sea within a hundred feet; and keep the shops between the columns of the great porticoes small and faced with marble.
gap ≥ 12 ft (≈ 3.7 m) · balcony ≥ 15 ft up, ≥ 10 ft apart · sea view protected within 100 ft
Set ovens, baths, kilns, dyers, fullers, tanners and threshing floors at a fixed distance from their neighbours’ houses, and where the wind will not carry their smoke, smell or chaff into them.
Raise the principal church of the capital on its highest ground at the head of the city, so that it rises above the houses like a ship riding the waves and is seen from the sea on every side.
Before the palace gate make a square ringed by public buildings (the Great Church, the senate house, the palace vestibule), and set in it a column carrying the emperor, facing east toward the empire’s enemies.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Every trade in its place”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/eparch-trades. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.