the figures stand all in one plane, Justinian and his Court, Theodora and her ladies, long processions of Saints in blues and greens and scarlet, the colours put sharply against one another in broad, flat masses, sometimes covered with patterns and with black lines to outline the folds. Very rich and sumptuous, standing as calm and as stately as the palm trees between them, these figures still show the image of that court by the Bosphorus, where the Roman name still lingered, that was lifted above the new world our fathers were hewing out of its lost provinces by the unapproachable majesty of its memories. Byzantine jewellery and metal work, too, were famous throughout Europe all through the middle ages. To set rubies and sapphires in gold with glowing enamel and strings of pearls was work in which these artists revelled. When the Crusaders came from their grey castles to Constantinople, they were dazzled by the magnificence they saw at the Emperor's Court. They told, when they came back, almost fabulous tales of the wonders they had seen, the costly toys, golden lions that roared, trees of jewels where enamelled birds flapped their wings and sang, thrones of ivory and sheets of porphyry, and then the incredible cleverness of those "Romans" in the East. No wonder the plain-living Frankish knights were intoxicated with the sight of such splendour, and that all over Western Europe the distant Roman Court became a sort of fairy tale of half mythical sumptuousness.[1] And the influence of what the Franks had seen there, of the treasures they sometimes brought back, was felt during all the middle ages. Still the King of Hungary wears a gorgeous piece of Byzantine jewellery with Byzantine enamels as the crown of St. Stephen and the symbol of the Apostolic kingdom, and amid the fields of Essex you may go into Copford Church and see above the altar the figure of the Byzantine Christ in glory, with his court of Saints and the signs of the zodiac, who has come all this way from the Church of the Holy Wisdom.
- ↑ Jordanes the Goth († 560) wrote after he had seen Constantinople: "Now I see what I have often heard, but have never believed, the glory of so great a city. … The Emperor of this land is indeed a god upon earth, and if any man lift his hand against him, that man's blood be upon his own head."
