I should be afraid to guess how many such institutions are in Stamboul or how many thousand students attend them at the expense of their founders. They are a wonderful tribute to the philanthropy of another day—the day of the great schools of Bagdad and Cairo and Cordova, the day of the mediæval cloisters. Stamboul has needed bitter lessons to learn that that day is past. Indeed, a good part of old Stamboul has taken refuge in these courtyards, and would still be true to the old order which made the mosque the centre of the community and supposed all knowledge to be in the Koran. For the race of men that likes Stamboul there is a great charm in these places, with their picturesqueness and their air, part gravity, part melancholy, familiar to the East and particular to all places that have known change and ruin. There is tragedy in them, too, and menace. For they teach too many men too little. But there is also a germ in them of something that might conceivably save Stamboul in spite of herself. “Seek knowledge, even though it be in China,” is one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet, and he taught his followers that the greater holy war was against ignorance. Halil Bey and Van Berchem, in their monumental _Corps d’Inscriptions Arabes_, quote an epigraph to the same effect from a thirteenth-century _medresseh_ in Sîvas: “The pursuit of knowledge is an obligation imposed on every Moslem. The merit of science is greater than that of devotion.” And the _medresseh_ of Ali Pasha in Stamboul has this written above the gate: “Whoever taught me a single word, I was his slave.” If the spirit that made such utterances could once touch Islam again, would it not be enough? III OLD CONSTANTINOPLE _Now you may know that those who had never before seen Constantinople looked upon it very earnestly, for they never thought there could be in all the world so rich a city; and they marked the high walls and strong towers that enclosed it round about, and the rich palaces, and mighty churches—of which there were so many that no one would have believed it who had not seen it with his eyes—and the height and length of that city which above all others was sovereign. And be it known to you, that no man there was of such hardihood but his flesh trembled; and it was no wonder, for never was so great an enterprise undertaken by any people since the creation of the world._—Marzials’ G. DE VILLEHARDOUIN: “De la Conqueste de Constantinople.”