01 · The City Before the Sack

The shape of it

Amorium sits where the Anatolian plateau begins to climb, three days' ride south of the Sangarios. The land is brown in summer, green for six weeks in spring, and white in February. The city itself is two cities, awkwardly joined: an inner fortress — the kastron — perched on a low limestone hill, and a sprawling lower town that has grown around it over four centuries, swallowing the hill from below like wax around a wick.

The walls of the kastron are nine centuries old and have been patched in every century since. In places you can see the original Roman ashlar; in others, dressed blocks robbed from a temple of Cybele that no one alive remembers. The lower town has its own wall, lower and thinner, built in the seventh century when the Arabs first came over the Taurus. In two places it is being rebuilt right now. In three places, it isn't.

The population is somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand. No one has counted in living memory. There are forty-two churches — the number is kept exactly, because the bishop is proud of it — three monasteries, a Jewish quarter of perhaps two hundred families behind the eastern gate, and one small unmarked musalla — a household prayer room, not a true masjid — in the courtyard of a Syrian merchant called Yusuf ibn Salim who has lived here since he was a child.

What you hear

Greek, in the registers of the marketplace, the court, and the liturgy — three different Greeks, really, and a peasant from the high pastures may struggle with any of them. Armenian, spoken openly in the lower town, where a fifth of the population traces itself to families resettled here a hundred years ago. A creaking, half-Latinate language the older soldiers still use among themselves: a battlefield slang two centuries out of date. Arabic, quietly, in three or four houses. Slavonic, in the slave market on Thursdays.

Above all of it, at five times a day, the bells. The cathedral bell is the deepest in Anatolia outside Ankara, and it is rung not just for the hours but for births, fires, the arrival of imperial couriers, and — twice in living memory — for the sighting of an enemy army on the southern road. Players who hear it rung between the hours should look up.

What you smell

Wood smoke, always. Sheep. Sheep dung baked dry and burned in the houses of the poor. In the lower town: tanneries to the east of the river, leather and lime; cooking oil from the eateries on the Mese; horse, near the cavalry barracks. In the kastron: incense from the cathedral, stone-cold and old; the chalky smell of plastered cisterns; the very faint iron of the armoury.

What it costs to live here

A loaf of dark bread: a single follis. A jug of thin wine: two. A night in a respectable inn near the forum: forty folles, including stabling and the loud company of a Cappadocian wool merchant in the next room. A passable horse, sold honestly: forty nomismata — five months' wages for a frontier soldier. The same horse, sold dishonestly, the morning after a raid: eight.

A bribe to a junior clerk in the strategos's offices, to misplace a tax assessment: twelve nomismata, paid quietly, with a second twelve six months later when the assessment is found again. A bribe to a senior clerk: do not insult him by offering money; offer his cousin a marriage, or his enemy a problem.

Who runs it

Nominally: the strategos of the Anatolikon theme, an aging soldier named Aetios who is in Constantinople on business he will not name. In practice, while he is away: his deputy, the tourmarchēs Babutzikos, a competent man of forty who is having an affair with the wife of the tax-farmer and knows that everyone knows.

The Church: Bishop Eustratios, sixty-eight, learned, fragile, kind to beggars and merciless to heretics. He has feared the Paulicians more than the Arabs his entire adult life, and he is, in this, exactly wrong.

The money: the tax-farmer Theodosios, who holds the imperial concession for three of the four districts. The fourth — the Jewish and Armenian quarters — is farmed by a syndicate of three brothers, the Stoudiotai, who under-report their take by an estimated twenty percent and pay the difference back to Theodosios in gold once a year, in a chest carried at night.

The truth: a small woman named Anna, who runs the bakery at the corner of the Mese and the road to the cathedral. Everyone passes her shop. Everyone tells her things. The players will not work this out for at least two sessions, and should not.

What the players should feel, walking in for the first time

That this place is ordinary. That it has been here forever and will be here forever. That children play in the streets and old men play at dice in the shade of the cathedral, and that the bread is good and the wine is bad, and that the soldiers on the walls are bored.

The GM should hold this feeling for at least a full session. Maybe two. The point of this book is not the sack. The point of this book is what the players lose when the sack comes.