INTRODUCTION TO PART III

In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Constantinople, which had once been one of the most glorious and populous urban centers of the Mediterranean world, was reduced politically and economically to a rather modest state of existence and was merely able to hold out against the Ottomans for another twenty-three years following the definitive conquest of Thessalonike. Constantinople shared with Thessalonike a more or less identical social structure during this period. In the earlier part of the fourteenth century its population was made up of three distinct social layers: a very rich aristocracy, which drew its wealth primarily from land; a rich “middle” class (the mesoi), including merchants, bankers, small property owners, and minor functionaries; and the poor, consisting of small artisans, manual laborers, small cultivators, as well as entirely destitute people at the lowest end of the social spectrum. After the middle of the fourteenth century, however, as more and more people from the first group, having lost their landed possessions to the Serbs and Ottomans, were compelled to channel their economic activities towards trade and banking, the social criteria separating them from rich middle-class merchants became less clearly distinguishable. Thereafter, as in Thessalonike, a bipartite social structure with the rich at one end and the poor at the other became typical in Constantinople.