Constantinople, early August 1438
They went on foot as far as the lower court at Blachernae and took horses there. The morning was already hot, and the grooms had the animals watered and saddled in the shade of the wall, where a dozen of the household guard stood at the inner gate with their helmets in the crooks of their arms. Constantine swung up. Filelfo, who rode well enough but did not enjoy it, took the second-best horse and arranged his cloak across the saddle so it would not snag on the cinch. Antonio di Pietro, in a plain dark traveling coat, took the third without comment.
They rode down through the Blachernae quarter at a walk, the guard following at a distance, and the city absorbed them as it absorbed all riders. The masons on the wall lifted their hands as the Emperor went past, and Constantine raised his own without slowing.
Antonio watched everything as they went, carts of stone coming the other way, a shopfront being re-shuttered, a pair of chancery clerks at a doorway with a tablet and a piece of chalk, making marks on the lintel. The numbering survey. Filelfo said something to him in Tuscan and he answered without looking around.
The Mese opened before them and the horses' hooves changed sound on the broader paving, two men in working clothes drawing back into the shade of a colonnade to let the riders through. Beyond the next bend the Hippodrome lay open below them, long and bright, and Antonio reined in without being told. He sat the horse a moment looking, then dismounted; Filelfo and Constantine dismounted with him, and an officer of the watch came forward for the reins.
The basin ran broad and long through the heart of the city, and the three monuments held the line down its spine — the Obelisk of Theodosius first, the Serpent Column lower and darker, green at the bends, and the Walled Obelisk furthest off, dim in the haze. A year ago this ground had been goats and lean-tos and cookfires and broken brick;
Now the middle was cleared and the cart tracks ran clean across it, and along the eastern arches there was work going on everywhere.
Antonio walked out onto the spine without looking at either of them. He paced ten steps along the long axis, stopped, and looked at the base of the Theodosian obelisk, then walked around it once, slowly, and put his palm flat against the porphyry plinth. Filelfo said something to him in Tuscan, low, and Antonio answered without taking his hand off the stone.
"He says it is plumb after a thousand years, and he would like to know who set it," Filelfo translated, mostly for politeness, since Constantine had not asked.
"Proclus of Constantinople, under Theodosius," Constantine said.
Antonio absorbed the names without comment. He took his hand from the stone, turned, and walked back to them; the Serpent Column down the spine he gave only a glance, and the Walled Obelisk he did not approach.
They turned off the spine and walked west, the basin falling away behind them, the slope rising ahead where the old palace ground had been cleared over the winter.
The university quarter lay along it. The law school stood finished on the south end, doors open, two clerks visible inside setting up benches for the September arrivals. Beyond it, a smaller hall with its plaster gone on and a roof tiled within the month — the mathematics school had moved up from the harbor rooms in the spring and was teaching there now. Further along, a longer single-storey building of the same modest pattern, intended for clerks and scribes' rooms, the doors not yet hung. A donkey-cart was being unloaded near its east end with sacks of lime.
The library stood further up the slope, the rectangle of it complete to its full height, the roof timbered and tiled, scaffolding still up along the south wall where the last of the exterior dressing was being finished. Two of Antonio's three Florentines were already at the corner, and the third stood at the door of the south transept with a roll of paper under his arm. They straightened when they saw their master coming up the slope but did not approach. Through the open doorway, men could be seen inside on a low scaffold, and the smell of fresh plaster came out into the morning. The interior was not yet finished, but the shell was done; by September there would be shelves in two of the three bays and the first books out of the Glarentza chests.
Beyond the library, the ground fell gently toward the cistern works. Nothing stood on it yet — this was where the larger building would go, the expansion Filelfo had been pressing for since his first days in the city, and the first piece of work Antonio had come east to take in hand.
Filelfo walked him through what was there. The current library had been the original conception, drawn the previous summer by the local masons from the brief Constantine and George Sphrantzes had given them, and the law school and the smaller halls had been done to the same pattern.
Antonio walked the library's south face once, hand passing along the wall, and looked up at the line of the roof. He stepped inside the south door, was gone a long minute, came back out, glanced at the smaller hall further up the slope without going to it, and came back to Constantine and Filelfo at the corner of the standing wall.
"The library is well built," he said, in the careful spare Latin he used when he wanted to be exact. "The men who drew this knew their work."
Filelfo's face cleared. "The local masons. The same hands that have been on the walls all year."
Antonio nodded once. Filelfo took it as encouragement and began to explain the larger version — the new building, the long addition along the south side of the existing library, the façade he had been writing about all winter to the scholars he was courting in Florence and Bologna and Bourges. Sculpture in three registers. A square in front of the whole, paved, with the law school closing the south end of it and the library standing the long northern side. Antonio listened without expression, watching Filelfo's hands and not his face, and when Filelfo had finished he inclined his head once and walked past the existing south wall, out onto the ground beyond.
He went some distance out, twenty paces past the line where the new building's northern wall was to stand, then turned and looked back at the library, then turned again and looked downslope toward the cistern works where men were running a line of timber along a trench. He came back and knelt.
The earth here was different. The library sat on firmer ground, with darker soil and the lines of the older palace foundations a hand below the surface, while this stretch was sandier, looser, with the pale color of ground that had not held water in a long time, and the slope ran away under the proposed line.
Antonio laid his palm flat. He sifted a little of the dust through his fingers, then took a small case from his belt — leather, scarred, with a measuring cord coiled inside it — and ran the cord out along the ground, marking the corners of the proposed footprint with sharpened wooden stakes from his own pouch. He paced the long axis once, and paced it again more slowly with his head down.
He turned to Filelfo and asked how to say water in Greek. Filelfo told him. Antonio repeated the word, the vowels rough in his mouth, and a workman came over with a flask of water. Antonio took it and carried it along the south line of the proposed footprint, stopping at three places, and at each of them he tipped the flask a finger's breadth and let a thin trickle of water out onto the dust. At the first place the water held a moment and then sank straight down; at the second it ran a short distance west and disappeared; at the third it ran further, fast, and was gone before it had traveled the length of his foot.
He stood, gave the flask back to the workman, and brushed his hands on the side of his coat. He said a short line to Filelfo in Tuscan and Filelfo went quiet.
Then, in Latin, to Constantine: "The library where it stands is well sited. The new building cannot sit where it is currently marked — the ground falls away under it, and foundations dug there will settle unevenly, more at the western end than the eastern. The building must be moved, further west or set at a different angle along the slope, so that its long axis runs with the firmer ground rather than across it. The stakes come up, the ground is opened, the trench cut deeper at the western end. Six weeks before any stone goes on it. Perhaps eight."
He waited.
Filelfo did not answer at once. He looked across the ground, and after a moment he said, "And what of the refectory, then? If the new building comes west, the kitchens will be under its windows."
Antonio followed his eye. Further along the slope, a set of pegs marked where the dining hall was to stand, the ground there not yet broken. He considered for a moment. "That building has not yet been started. If anything is to move, that one moves easiest — a small adjustment along its own line, a few paces north, so the kitchens face the lower wall and not the new building. I will mark it."
Constantine looked at the ground, then at Filelfo, then back at the marked-out line. "Better that than reading with the smell of onions in the room," he said, half to himself, in Greek.
Filelfo's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. He liked Constantine's idea from the start, that students should eat within the grounds of the university rather than in the lodgings and taverns of the town. What he had not liked was the kitchens being so close to the new building. The smoke and the smells did not belong near a façade like the one he was writing letters about. Antonio moving the refectory along the slope solved a thing he had not been ready to ask for. He inclined his head once, as if the kitchens were a practical question that had been answered.
"Mark it," Constantine said in Latin, "and we will look at it again when you have."
Antonio inclined his head and went back to the pegs. One of the Florentines came forward to him with the cord.
They walked the existing library once more before they left, Antonio's hand passing along the standing northern course as they came back to the corner and at the corner he stopped and turned to Constantine. "My men will start the new drawings within the week," he said. "Two of them are sound on a footing; the third can do the elevations after."
"Do it," Constantine said. "Keep it inside the figure we agreed, and tell me when you cannot."
Antonio inclined his head once. "Majesty," he said, the Greek rough in his mouth.
They rode again through the Mese at the hottest hour, the carts fewer now and the dust hanging lower over the paving. They passed a long warehouse on the seaward side with the number 11 painted in white on the gable — Filelfo glanced up at it and made some small remark in Tuscan to himself — and beyond it the scaffolding along the seawall stood pale against the water; and beyond that, when the wind shifted, came the smell of the Lycus foundry before they had seen it: charcoal smoke, hot iron, and the thin acrid edge of something being fluxed.
The yard opened off a lane between two old vaults. The half-built furnace stood at its center, the chimney still in scaffolding, the lower courses banded with iron and the brickwork above them rising clean and red. Two carts of charcoal were drawn up at the back of the yard, and the water-channel from the Lycus ran in along the south side, stone-lined, with a small wheel turning slowly at its lower end.
Petros the foundry master came forward to meet them.
"Majesty."
"Petros. How is the wheel running?"
"Slow but true. We are still adjusting the housing."
Beyond his shoulder, at the water-channel, Taccola was already crouched by the wheel with a workman beside him, running a finger along the joint where the stone housing met the timber, examining the way the two materials sat against each other. He did not look up when the Emperor came into the yard; the workman, who had seen Constantine come in, lifted his head and tried to rise, but Taccola put a hand on his arm and held him down, still without looking up, still pointing at the joint, still saying something quietly in a Tuscan the workman could not understand and was nodding to anyway.
Filelfo went forward and spoke to him in Tuscan. Taccola straightened, turned, saw Constantine, and made the formal greeting he was capable of — a half bow, the right words in his careful Latin — and then he forgot the formality almost at once, because there was a thing he wanted to show.
He had been on the site three days, and what he had to say, he told Constantine in Tuscan that Filelfo translated, was a first reading. The site was good; the water was good; the slope was right for what they wanted. The furnace as it stood was competent work — he turned briefly to Petros, and the small inclination of his head was a real courtesy, not a courtesy for the Emperor's sake — and he had small notes on it: the wheel housing could be set further upstream, where the channel ran deeper and the flow was steadier; the casting pits could take a different lining, a clay he had used in Siena that held heat longer than the local mix. But these were for later, details for when there was time.
He paused and looked at Constantine. The thing he had come to say was simpler. He would need space of his own — not at the furnace, adjacent to it — a warehouse, or a covered yard, or one of the old vaults that had been cleared in the winter. Somewhere with light, with large worktables, with room enough for assistants and for things that were larger than a man.
Constantine turned to Petros and asked in Greek which of the buildings in the yard could be given over to Taccola for his own work. If there was nothing here, they would find something nearby.
Petros named a roofed building two hundred paces south — an older warehouse, empty now, roof sound, walls dry, which he could have cleared in a day. Filelfo translated and Taccola looked toward the south end of the yard, where the building's gable showed over a low wall, and inclined his head.
Then he went back to the water-channel and crouched again, running his finger along the joint where the stone met the timber, saying something to himself, low, not for translation.
Constantine stood at the edge of the yard a moment longer, watching the bent shape of the older man at the channel, and then he turned to Petros and asked whether the Thracian charcoal was coming through on the schedule George had set.
Author note:
The two Italians Filelfo booked have arrived and are eager to work! Will be interesting to see how Italian architecture blends with the Roman tradition here what kind of mix Antonio ends up bringing.