Book II / Chapter 39: Is tin polin

Manolis the rope-seller slid the bolt and stepped into the autumn air that smelled of fish and wet stone. His wife had left a wedge of yesterday’s bread on the stool; he ate it walking, the crust rough in his throat, wishing for onions. The lane toward the Neorion was slick with dew between the cobbles. Fig leaves clung to the wall where they fell. Cats moved under the eaves. A breeze off the Horn brought tar through the alleys, and somewhere a presshouse gave off the faint sweetness of crushed grapes. Manolis pulled his patched cloak tight. It wasn’t winter yet, but the air was learning the way.

At the corner by the tanner’s arch he met Filaretos, who sold cheap knives and oath‑cheap whetstones and swore by saints no one else remembered. They fell into step the way men do who have walked the same street too many mornings.

“Will anyone buy today?” Manolis asked. “A coil or two, enough to pay the clerk and keep the oven hot?”

Filaretos snorted without heat. “They will buy from the damned Venetians. Bright cloth and sweet talk.” He spat and missed the puddle. “Worse every year.”

They came into the thin light by the harbor, where masts crowded the wharves and gulls argued above. Men were already at the stalls, laying out anchors with split hands and measuring salt fish with a look that said the scales lied. The air had that early clatter that passes for hope.

It was Filaretos who stopped first. “What’s this?”

On the lime‑washed wall that held up the far end of the customs shed, paper sheets had bloomed in the night, pasted with flour and water, edges still damp. Stencil work: a dark icon‑shape of a crowned man holding a blade that could be a cross, and under it, letters block‑straight.

Manolis sounded them out with his lips, embarrassed by how the shapes made him slow. “I—e—ros… sko‑pos.” The words had been in his mouth for days, but here they were shouted in paint. Beneath, in a strange scribe’s hand, smaller lines: Chosen of God to restore the Empire’s greatness. The true emperor, Constantine Palaiologos, victorious by the Cross.

Another sheet showed the same black silhouette with a halo ringed in ochre, flaring in the thin sun like a painted oath. A third had only words in even larger strokes: IEROS SKOPOS, and below that a scattering of promises that ran too fast for Manolis’s reading, justice, land, mercy, strength. The kind of promises that make you forget the price of grain for a breath or two.

“IEROS SKOPOS,” Filaretos said, not bothering to lower his voice. He stepped closer, smelling the paste, the damp wool of the wall. “Read me that line,” he said, pointing with his chin, as if poking with a finger would be a sin.

Manolis squinted. “Chosen… by God…” He felt the words hit him, sudden and blunt. He was no fool; he knew what words did when they were that straight. He took another step- a mailed fist came down on the top edge of the sheet and ripped. Two guards, city men with round caps and patch‑mended hauberks, were already tearing at another. The paste made wet strings between the paper and the wall.

“Move along,” the nearer one said, without anger. He looked tired. “Imperial order. No staring at lies.”

“Lies?” Filaretos said, too quickly.

The guard didn’t take his eyes off the next sheet. “Move along.”

Manolis felt Filaretos’s sleeve under his fingers and tugged once. He had a wife and a stall and a coil of rope to sell; the Empire could be great or small without his throat in it. They turned, and as they went he saw one torn scrap skid along the stones in the wind, IER— and below it, a sliver of a hand lifting a sword.

Behind them the gulls went on with their business. The city swallowed the sound of paper and paste. By noon the harbor smelled of ash and lime. Men walked past the torn sheets without speaking. A few looked once and then looked away. The city pretended nothing had happened.

The wind off the Horn carried the smell of tar. The great chain shifted in the current, each link knocking softly against the next. In Blachernae the lamps guttered once and steadied; the walls held the dark in silence.

A sergeant of the watch from the Neorion waited just inside the door, hat in his hands, paste still stringing his fingers. He held out a damp scrap of paper. On it a black, stenciled crown rode a faceless head; beneath, the letters were hard and upright: IEROS SKOPOS. A smaller hand had written under the shout: Chosen of God… the true emperor… Constantine Palaiologos…

Demetrios did not take the scrap at first. He looked at the man’s paste‑shining fingers and smelled flour, lampblack, and the sour of wet lime. “How many?” he asked.

“Hundreds, Emperor,” the sergeant said. “Customs wall, fish market, even by the Augusteion. We tore what we found. Men were reading. We” He stopped. The word reading hung in the room like smoke.

Demetrios took the scrap at last. The paste stuck to his thumb. The letters seemed hammered into the page. Heat rose up his neck, and beneath it a thin cold anger moved. He pressed his thumb to the sealing wax until it cut. The sting steadied him. He thought of Constantine in the streets, a name that gathered crowds.

He called for ink. Two clerks came. Orders followed, short and flat: tear, paste, cover, report. The room smelled of iron and sweat.

“No cudgels,” he said. His voice was steady, more than he expected. “Take them down quietly. Paste over them with the baker’s decree or last month’s customs tally. Let the streets look ordinary again. And find who did it.”

The sergeant bowed out, relieved and still afraid.

Demetrios stood a moment longer with the paper wrinkling in his fist. The chain in the Horn seemed to saw at the water. In his mouth the city’s two words moved of their own accord, Ieros skopos, but now they tasted of iron.

He dropped the scrap into the brazier and watched it burn. The smoke hung under the rafters. He didn’t sleep that night. He walked the length of Blachernae until the lamps went out, muttering his brother’s name under his breath like a curse.

By the next evening the word had spread through the streets despite the guard’s best efforts. Peddlers whispered it at their stalls, children chalked it on the paving stones. Ieros skopos. Constantine’s shadow was moving in the city without his army.

Council at Blachernae

Kantakouzenos entered first, his face unreadable as ever. Behind him came the megas doux Notaras, carrying the smell of the harbor and the habit of accounts. Last was the Patriarch, his beard ash-grey, his hands folded as if in prayer.

None of them spoke at once.

“Say it,” Demetrios said.

Kantakouzenos did not cough or sway. “The House of Osman is unsteady, and there might be a window of opportunity for us.” He had a way of laying facts like folded linen on a chest. “Edirne keeps the heir, Alaeddin Ali, threaded on the vizier’s fingers. The younger son, Mehmed, sits beside him, still in the nursery. In that house, God is asked to bless many accidents. The child will not see many winters..."

Demetrios’s tone was flat. “Few sons of Osman reach manhood.”

Kantakouzenos allowed the faintest shrug. “And yet the tale runs further. In the east, Amasya slips its nail; they already call its bey lord, and he answers to it. Karaman’s Ibrahim has put a ring around Ankara and named the seizure justice. Murad is gone. With him went the hand that kept the knives sheathed.”

“The quarrels have already begun, and Murad’s body is barely cold,” the Patriarch murmured.

Notaras’s expression did not change. “Quarrels there, unrest here,” he said. “The streets are full of talk about Constantine. Work slows to hear the stories. The guilds don’t love him yet, but the mood is shifting.”

The Patriarch glanced toward the cross by the brazier. “Call it awe if you like. I call it delusion. God does not crown a man who would sell His Church to Rome.”

Demetrios rubbed at a fleck of sealing wax until it nicked his thumb. He welcomed the sting; it proved the room was not all smoke. “Between my brother and the House of Osman, name me the bitter cup we can survive,” he said.

Kantakouzenos did not hesitate. “Orhan. For the moment, he may be an asset. We could send him to Edirne as a pledge of trust, let the vizier see our hand open instead of clenched. It would bind us to the heir."

Notaras shook his head. “Too soon to give him up. Better we keep him here, quiet and watched. If the Ottomans fracture further, his name may still have value.”

Demetrios pressed the cut until a bead of blood showed. “Coin or pledge, he is only a piece. What matters is the board. The best we can hope for is a steady Ottoman realm between us and my brother. If they splinter, Constantine walks on broken ground, and broken ground brings him to our gates by even next year.”

He let the quiet settle, felt the room take his measure.

“We keep Orhan here, for now. Let him eat, pray, live in comfort if he wants. When we see which way power turns — Edirne, Karaman, or Amasya — we’ll decide his use. Until then, he stays where we can watch him.”

He looked from Kantakouzenos to Notaras and at last to the Patriarch. “Begin the talks. Quiet feelers to all three. Edirne must see us ready to bind ourselves to the heir. Karaman must hear that we do not hinder his justice. And Amasya ”Demetrios’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile“ let him hear that Constantinople watches. A would-be lord grows cautious when he feels eyes on his back.”

His hand moved to the brazier where the last curl of blackened paper still smoldered. “And as for Constantine’s images, never again. Tear them before they dry. Find the hands that put them up, follow the paste to the pot, the coin to the mouth. Pay for tongues in Galata if you must, but bring me names. If he turns paper into a weapon, then we must smother it before it catches fire.”

The Patriarch inclined his head gravely. “Words are fire in dry timber,” he murmured.

Author’s note: Istanbul derives from the Greek phrase “εἰς τὴν Πόλιν” (“is tin polin”), meaning “to the city” or “in the city.” Over centuries, that phrase morphed phonetically in Turkish into “Istanbul.”

Author’s Note 2:

Demetrios is back! This one was hard to write, I had to force myself into his shoes and ask, what would he really do here? His position is awful: Constantine’s victories thunder through the streets, Murad is dead, and even paper on the walls feels like a siege. So he clings to Orhan as a bargaining chip, sends out quiet feelers to Edirne, Karaman, and Amasya, and tries to drown Constantine’s posters before they set the city alight. But if it were you, would you gamble on chaos, or grasp for stability? What would you do?