Constantinople, early August 1440
The university theatre stood between the law school and the library. Antonio had finished the roof in the spring, while the Emperor was away at Gallipoli. On the far side of the library, the scaffolding was still up in the square, and the ground beyond it was empty, ready for the next building. Inside, ten rows of chairs rose in steps from the floor to the back wall. There were two hundred chairs, all made of the same wood, and each one was nailed to the floor. The carpenters had asked Constantine twice whether he really wanted every chair fastened down.
At the front, a long table on a low dais faced the rows, and the whole end wall behind it was a map. The legion's map company had painted it over the winter from the census sheets: the Balkans from the Danube to the Morea, Anatolia as far as Trebizond, the sea at the bottom of the wall carried as far as Crete and Cyprus and the sea at the top as far as the Crimea. The new themes were drawn over the old country in thin red lines, each a week's ride across, with the names lettered beside them, Optimaton about Nicomedia, Thrakesion behind Smyrna, a tenth of the old Thrakesion, Thessaly with Larissa in the middle of it.
The graduates filled the first five rows by school. The Glarentza students sat on the left in the dark coats of the chancery, the law men of the City in the middle in their gowns, and on the right sixty lieutenants of the school at the Heptapyrgion in new coats with their hands on their knees, four days off a ship from Thessaloniki and still sitting as if the deck were under them. The rows behind them held the masters, the chancery, officers up from the depots, and some from the next classes, let in to watch. On the dais George had the roll. Philippos, his clerk, sat beside him with a fair copy of it and a tray of brooches and seals. Filelfo, Scholarios, and Captain Prokopios, who kept the school at the Heptapyrgion, sat along the table. A priest of the Patriarch's household stood at the end of it with a cross laid on a cloth.
Andreas had come up from Smyrna for it and sat in the front row with his cloak folded over his knees. Beyond the empty chair at his right the Patriarch sat with the staff of his office against his knee, a week into it, and beyond him Thomas, with his legs out.
Constantine entered by the side door with no one to announce him, and the hall stood in a noise of boots on the boards. He walked along the front of the dais to the chair next to Andreas and sat, and the noise took a while to settle behind him. Thomas looked along the row at him once and back at the table. Isidore rose, climbed the three steps with the staff, and blessed the room from behind the table, his hand raised over the ten rows with the map at his back, and came down again and sat.
George stood, and the hall was quiet before he had the roll open. He read the oath for the clerks and judges once, for all of them. It was short. They would keep the register true and the court open to anyone who came to it, take no gifts, and answer to the Emperor and to God for everything they put their seal on. The oath ended with Ieros Skopos, and the first five rows said it back to him. The sound of it went up the rows.
Philippos read from the fair copy.
"For the theme of Optimaton, seated at Nicomedia. For the register, Theodoros of Andravida, of the school at Glarentza. For the court, Nikolaos Chalkeopoulos, of the law school of this city."
They climbed the steps together. George pinned the brooch on each coat, a small eagle in gilt. Philippos gave each man his seal on a cord and a folded packet under the eagle, with his commission printed inside it, the register sheets of his theme, and the Law of the Road. The priest held the cross out on the cloth, and they kissed it one after the other and took the steps down and their chairs again.
"For the theme of Thrakesion, seated at Smyrna. For the register, Nikephoros Kavakes, of the school at Glarentza."
Constantine leaned an inch toward Andreas. "Plethon wrote that he was top of his class. That's why you got him."
"Can you find me ten more like him?" Andreas said. "I've got two clerks on that whole coast I can trust."
Kavakes was a thin man with his hair cut short for the heat. The judge who climbed with him, Eustathios Rhalles, was older, and had sat two years as a clerk in the City's courts before the school took him. They kissed the cross and sat.
"For the theme of Thessaly, seated at Larissa."
Larissa was still short of men to run it. Georgios Sgouros and Ioannes Boullotes took the eagle and the seal for it, and sat down again.
The rest went the same way, thirty pairs in all, with the same words from Philippos each time. It was a graduation. By the last pair the sun had come round to the south windows and laid four bars of light across the map.
Then George read the lieutenants' oath. It was even shorter. They would keep their roll true, keep their men fed and drilled, and answer to the Emperor and to God for every man on it. It ended with Ieros Skopos too, and the sixty on the right said it back together, louder than all five rows had been the first time.
Philippos read them single. Stylianos, of Serres, to the Second Legion. Basileios of Kastoria, to the garrison at Skopje. Prokopios came down the table and pinned the eagle on each coat himself, and Philippos gave the seal and the packet. The lieutenants took the cross quicker than the clerks had, and returned to their chairs by the shortest way.
Andreas counted the north's share under his breath and stopped at twenty.
"At least Aristos will stop writing to me," he said.
"For now. Better than the other way."
"Sixty helps." Andreas did not turn his head. "A legion needs a hundred, and the sooner the better. There's too much border now."
"Yes, next year, Andreas."
The Patriarch had been watching the cross go from mouth to mouth. He turned his head.
"Majesty, the priests need a school like this one. Classes, a roll, an oath, and men sent where the sees are empty."
"We have plenty of priests," Constantine said. "That was never the trouble."
He watched the next man take the cross.
"A school, though. All of them taught the same, under the eagle. In time there could be one here. Beside the law."
"Yes. Under the eagle," Isidore said, and went back to watching the cross.
The last name was read a little after the fourth hour. Constantine stood, and the hall came up with him. He went out by the door he had entered by, with Andreas and Thomas behind him and the Patriarch's people after them.
The passage was full of Avlita already. The galley had come in the day before, and the raid and the count of the dead were the talk of the town by the time the roll was read, so that the lieutenants had it before the oath. Filelfo's man with the wax tablet was stopping the new officers as they came through, one at a time, for a sentence for the Kyrix. The sentences he was getting were about Avlita, and he wrote them down as they were said. Past him three of the lieutenants had Prokopios stopped against the wall, asking for the north.
Blachernae Palace
The council room beyond the hall at Blachernae had its shutters open on the Horn, and the noise of the ferry oars came in off the water with the smell of pitch from the boatyards under the wall. The chart of the Euxine lay across the table, the peninsula drawn in at the top of it with the harbor marked. Three leaves lay on the chart, and George had the top one.
A Muslim village above Nicomedia had burned its count. The clerk had gone up with the surveyors and the printed sheets in June, and the headman had read the sheets as the tax that would follow them, and on the third night the sheets were in the well and the clerk on the road with a broken arm. The surveyors would go up again in September with a file of the garrison beside them. Andreas had the rest of it on a leaf of his own: more than a hundred villages between Nicomedia and Smyrna that had had no count yet and no visit, a good part of them of the same kind, and some small trouble in the Muslim quarter at Smyrna. It would be a season of visits, he said, a file of the garrison with every surveyor, and he wanted the new officers sitting at their seats for a month before the first of them went out.
The second leaf had come up from Avlita on the galley the night before. Captain Arethas had taken his tagma and eighty of the Company's men a morning's march up the coast at the end of July, against a raiders' camp on the Kacha meadows, and had burned it, and had found across the river a host that did not end. Forty-six dead on the walk home, fifty-one wounded, eight missing, and the Company eighteen dead of the eighty. Captain Markos had brought the harbor town up inside the fort, rung the bells, and sent the galley straight, and the Tatars were expected down the valley within the week.
Constantine had not sat down. He stood at the table's end with his hands flat on the chart, over the sea.
"The harbor and the ground the Company stands on," he said. "Not a step past it. Those were the words. My captain took four hundred muskets a morning's march up the coast to burn a camp, and came home with forty-six dead and the whole peninsula behind him." He took his hands off the chart. "Three months of letters about grain, and then this. Who counted three hundred horse? And who told Markos a camp on the Kacha was his to answer?"
"With respect, Majesty, they were raiding all the way to Avlita," Andreas said. "A dozen times over the summer. The camp was on his road, and he cleared it. I would have." He looked at the harbor on the chart. "And they will hold. They have the fort and the guns, and the river under them."
George laid it at Alexios's door. There was no khan's word on the peninsula; the beys at Solkhat collected for themselves. Alexios had paid them at Easter and not once since the tagmata landed, while Caffa and Cembalo paid. The crown had put two tagmata into the middle of that, he said, with an order written for a warehouse. Thomas added the lord who had doubled his dues in the same year his own castellan walked away from him.
"So his mess as much as ours," Constantine said. "It leaves us exposed all the same. The grain road is dead again, and I have two tagmata and a hundred of the Company's men sitting in a Goth's citadel waiting for the beys."
"We deal with Solkhat ourselves, as Caffa does, and not through a factor," George said.
Andreas put a finger on the chart where the peninsula was and made his offer again: give him the legion in the spring and the peninsula was one season's work, the valley, the lord's town, the passes.
"You would take it," Constantine said. "I do not see us holding it. We barely hold the coast of Anatolia."
"And the Pope has written," Thomas said.
Constantine let that lie on the chart with the rest. "Not the peninsula."
Andreas took his finger off the chart. For now, he said, Avlita needed support regardless, with whatever was lying at Gallipoli.
"Yes." Constantine straightened. "A ship today. Laskaris brings what he has into the Horn, and the City tagma nearest to strength goes aboard with powder for the Drakos. Less than a year ago it was a merchant's dues. It is two of my tagmata now, and I will not read another report like this one."
George said the Podestà would count the hulls going out, and Constantine said to let him count.
Thomas had been looking at the valley above the harbor the whole time, and let it alone.
"And somebody talks to Solkhat," he said.
George began to say that the chancery had a man for it, and got as far as the name.
"Izaoul," Thomas said.
George stopped, with the name still in his mouth, and looked at the Emperor.
"He did Buda," Thomas said. "He can do a bey. He will not mind the ride, and that is half of what they will like about him."
Constantine took a moment over it. "Izaoul then. He goes with the fleet.
Author's note:
Up to now Constantine has been running the empire with what he had: army officers doing governors' work, a village priest here, a council of elders there. There's no deep bench of nobility to draw on either. But the schools start to pay off. Clerks from Glarentza, judges from the law school in the City, lieutenants from Thessaloniki, sworn in together and sent out in pairs to help run the new themes within the current infrastructure. These are men who owe their seat to the system that trained them, not to a cousin's marriage.
Over on Patreon, the big battle of the next war arc lands today! If you'd like to read it early, Book III is 15 chapters ahead.