I do not pretend to set up Constantinople against Rome or Athens. Without them, of course, she would not have been—what she was. But I do maintain that her history was as long, that she played a rôle no less important in her later day, and that without her our modern world could never have been quite what it is. We are unjustly inclined to forget that link in the chain. Different from Rome and Athens, as they differed from each other, Constantinople fused in her own crucible, with others of Oriental origin, the elements of civilisation which they furnished. Out of these elements she formulated a new religion, created the architecture to embody it, codified a system of law. Having thus collected and enriched the learning of antiquity, she bequeathed it to the adolescent Europe of the Renaissance. We are accustomed to speak of the dark ages that followed the fall of Rome. There was, properly speaking, no darker age than had been. The centre of light had merely moved eastward, and such miserable frontier villages as London, Paris, and Vienna were merely, for the time being, the darker. To them Constantinople was what Paris is to us, the _ville lumière_, and far more. She was the centre of a civilisation whose splendour and refinement were the legend of the West. She contained such treasures of ancient art as are now scattered in a thousand museums. Under her shadow Athens became a sort of present-day Oxford or Venice and Rome not much more than a vociferous Berlin. Entirely new races—Slavs, Huns, Turks—began to be drawn into her orbit, as the Gauls, the Britons, and the Teutons had been drawn by Rome. If the far-away cities of Bagdad and Cordova felt her influence, how much more was it so in countries with which she had more immediate relations? Italy in particular, and Venice above all other Italian towns, owe more to Constantinople than has ever been appraised. Venice would always have been Venice, but a Venice without the St. Mark’s we know, without the stolen horses of bronze, without the pillars of the _Piazzetta_, without many of the palaces of the Grand Canal, without the lion, even, which is as Byzantine as Byzantine can be. Several other Italian cities contain notable examples of Byzantine architecture or decoration, while in half the collections of Europe are ivories, reliquaries, bits of painting and mosaic and goldsmiths’ work that came out of Byzantium. That jewel of Paris, the _Sainte-Chapelle_, is not Byzantine, but it was built to house the church treasures from Constantinople which were a part of the loot of the fourth crusade, and some of them may still be seen in _Notre Dame_. In indirect ways the account is harder to reckon. Some authorities find a Byzantine origin for so remote an architectural language as Romanesque building, while few now deny that the Italian school of painting was derived directly from the mosaics of Constantinople. All admit, at any rate, that the prodigious movement of the Renaissance was fed by the