Among the antiquities of the town, its names have been the subject of much research and confusion. Pera is a Romaic word meaning opposite or beyond, and first applied indiscriminately with Galata to the rural suburb on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This hill was also called Sykai, from the fig-trees that abounded there; and when the mortar-loving Justinian beautified and walled the suburb, he renamed it after himself. With regard to the word Galata there has been infinite dispute. I myself thought I had solved the question when I went to Genoa and saw steep little alleys, for all the world like those I knew in Genoese Galata, which were named _Calata_—a descent to the sea—and of which the local dialect made the _c_ a _g_. But the accent was different, and I lived to learn that the name, as that of a castle on the water’s edge, has been found in Byzantine MSS. dating from two hundred years earlier than the time Genoa founded her colony there. Villehardouin also speaks of the tower of “Galathas,” which the crusaders stormed as a preliminary to their capture of Constantinople. It apparently stood in the vicinity of the custom-house, and to it was attached the chain that padlocked the Golden Horn. I would like to believe that the name came from Brennus and his Gauls, or Galatians, who passed this way with fire and sword in the third century B. C. There is more certainty, however, with regard to its own derivatives. The Italian word _galetta_ is one of them, more or less familiar in English and very common in its French form of _galette_. Another French word, _galetas_, is also derived from Galata, meaning a high garret and hence a poor tenement. Belonging at first to the castle alone, the name seems to have spread to the whole surrounding settlement. It now applies to the lower part of the hill, formerly enclosed by the Genoese wall, while Pera is the newer town on top of the hill, “beyond” the old. The history of the town we know began in the Latin colonies that originally fringed the opposite shore of the Golden Horn. Constantinople has always been a cosmopolitan city. The emperors themselves were of many races and the empire they governed was as full of unassimilated elements as it is to-day. Then even from so far away as England and Denmark men came to trade in the great city that was named from a citizen of York. It was natural that Italians should come in the greatest number, though they felt less and less at home as the emperors became more and more Greek. The people of Amalfi and Ancona, the Florentines, the Genoese, the Lombards, the Pisans, and the Venetians, all had important colonies in Constantinople. And by the twelfth century four of them at least had their own settlements between Seraglio Point and the Azap Kapou Bridge. The easternmost were the Genoese, whose quarter was near the present railway station; next came the Pisans, then the men of Amalfi—not far from Yeni Jami—and last the Venetians.