The Monkey inspects the workmanship of the land walls that made Constantinople what most historians consider the finest fortress of its day. These are a small part of the second set of walls, begun in the early 5th Century under Theodosius II (Constantine's earlier walls had already constrained the growth of the city and had to be replaced by the new set some 2 kilometers further from the center). The 6.5 kilometers of walls were destroyed by an earthquake in 447 and were rebuilt in only two months, just in time to repel Atilla and his Huns. Later, they repelled numerous other invasions, including one by the Persians, at least four by the medieval Bulgarians, and two by the Arabs.

The Fourth Crusade managed to conquer the city only by attacking the sea walls (not the land walls seen here) in 1204, but the Byzantines retook their capital under Emperor Michael Paleologos in 1267. And in large part due to the strength of these walls, Constantinople was one of the last shreds of Byzantium to fall to the Ottoman Turks. Repeated attempts to conquer the city had failed, until Sultan Mehmet II approached the walls with a new strategy in 1453. With 14 separate batteries of Hungarian-made cannons, the Turks bombarded the walls for over seven weeks. Emperor Constantine XI and his men defended the city bravely, repairing multiple breaches in the walls, but eventually the cannon barrage proved too powerful, and a section of the walls collapsed beyond repair. The Ottoman forces surged in, and Byzantium and Constantinople were no more.

The Monkey decided to end his visit to Istanbul with a look at one of the most lavish buildings of old Constantinople, the Bucoleon Palace. Only a few desolate ruins remain of the great old palace that was once the power nexus of the mighty Byzantine Empire. Commissioned by the 4th Century Emperor Constantine himself, the palace grew to include over 500 rooms, all decked out with the most luxurious finishings available. The palace fell into disuse by the 12th Century, long before the Ottoman Turks finally overran the Byzantine capital in 1453.

In fact, it was the Old Rome and its Crusaders that started to wear down the new one. After 1054 and the Great Schism between the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches, Constantinople faced marauding bands of Crusaders ostensibly bound for the Holy Land. In 1204, a combined force of Frankish and Venetian Crusaders began the sacking that left Bucoleon Palace and so many other Byzantine remnants of Constantinople so scarred, and consequently gave cities like Venice the (pilfered) raw materials to construct many of their most treasured monuments (see, for instance, the bronze horses adorning St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, looted from Constantinople). In the words of one participant, the Frankish Crusader Geoffrey of Villehardouin, "Never, since the world was created, had so much booty been won in any city."

A detail of the masonry of Theodosius II's land walls in Constantinople. Note that some of the stones may have been cannibalized from previous structures, or the text may be a "tag" from the work crews that built this section of the wall.

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