At two in the afternoon, Vitus left the palace to inspect the Eastern Thrace Shipyard.
Constantinople was surrounded by the sea on three sides. Its northern coast facing the Golden Horn stretched for several kilometers, offering ample room for berths and numerous docks.
Shipbuilding was a pillar of Constantinople's economy, with three thousand registered shipyard workers.
Counting the suppliers who provided the docks with timber, iron, sailcloth, and other materials, nearly ten thousand people worked in shipbuilding-related jobs.
From the perspective of urban development, excessive dependence on a single industry was no good thing. But Constantinople had no large river nearby, making it difficult to develop highly profitable industries such as textiles and papermaking, which depended heavily on rivers. Shipbuilding was its best choice.
The Eastern Thrace Shipyard fell under the Admiralty's jurisdiction and built all kinds of military vessels. It occupied nearly five hundred paces of coastline and had ranked first in output for years.
In recent years, the shipyard had taken over development of the Triple-Deck Warship. Its persistent failure had brought an investigation into its accounts by the Audit Department, implicating more than a hundred people.
The shipyard was loud and bustling. As the party walked along its main road, they saw a long, narrow vessel moored at the northern wharf, where workers were unloading whole logs from its hold.
"Oak logs that long are probably intended for the keel of some battleship."
Vitus watched from a distance. As he remembered it, the keel was a sailing ship's "backbone" and had to be made from a single, intact tree of exceptional strength.
The long, narrow cargo vessel before him had been designed specifically to transport exceptionally long timber, with a special gate in its stern through which such logs could pass. An Admiralty official explained that this