Constantinople: the Mese and the Great Church: After Zeno’s building law, Procopius, Julian of Ascalon and the Book of the Eparch

The buildings

Markets and shops

Public buildings

Temples and sacred buildings

Palaces

Houses

Works

The heart of the Byzantine capital around the year 1000: Hagia Sophia and the Augustaion, the walled Great Palace entered by the Chalke, the Hippodrome, and the Mese running west between its porticoes to the round Forum of Constantine, with courtyard houses, monasteries and parish churches behind.

Constantinople was not laid out on a single plan but governed by rules. Its main street, the Mese, ran from the Milion (the zero-mile arch by the Great Church) westward through a chain of fora, lined by porticoes with shops. Zeno’s law of the late fifth century, kept in Justinian’s Code, regulated what could be built: twelve feet between a new house and its neighbour, balconies only above fifteen feet, no new building to block a neighbour’s view of the sea within a hundred feet, and small, marble-faced shops between the columns of the porticoes. Julian of Ascalon’s rules, from the same age, kept ovens, baths, kilns, dyers and tanners away from houses and minded the wind.

The Book of the Eparch, issued under Leo VI in about 912, placed the trades: the silversmiths on the Mese in full view; the perfumers between the Milion and the Chalke so that their scent rose to the icon over the palace gate. Procopius, writing for Justinian, gives the monuments: the Great Church rising over the city, and in the Augustaion the bronze column with the emperor on horseback facing east.

This model is a schematic reconstruction, compressed to fit: the monuments stand in their true relation to one another, but the houses, lanes, monasteries and parish churches are typical rather than surveyed. The residential quarters thin out toward the Golden Horn into gardens and orchards, as they did in the middle Byzantine city, and the offensive trades stand by the southern shore.

How the town is laid out

Twelve feet between houses

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

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.

Smoke, smell and fire kept from houses

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.

The Great Church over the city

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.

The square before the palace

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.