At the latter point the new bulwarks joined the walls which guarded the outlying 14th ward, the suburb of Blachernæ, and thus enclosed the city down to the Golden Horn. By this change the area of Constantinople was almost doubled, and reached its final size. Any additions to the dimensions of the city after 413, as in the 7th century when the tract now occupied by the quarter of Aivan Serai was enclosed, or again in the 11th century when the Palace of Blachernæ was protected by new ramparts, were extremely insignificant additions, and were made not for the sake of obtaining more room but for strategic reasons. [Illustration: FLOWER-SELLERS Some of the gypsies wear garments rivalling in brilliancy the flowers they sell.] This extension of the city’s limits involved, of course, the erection of new fortifications. Indeed the demand to make the capital of the East a mightier stronghold was not less urgent than the necessity to enlarge its borders. No statesman of the 5th century of our era could fail to realise the formidable character of the barbarian peril which then lowered over the Empire. A period in which an Alaric, an Attila, a Genseric, insulted the majesty of the Roman name, and trampled upon Roman strength, a period in which the Eternal City was captured and sacked, in which Carthage was lost, and the original fabric of the Empire in the West was levelled to the ground, must have been a time when the minds of serious men were troubled by fears and anxieties. These disasters necessarily cast, ere they came, long and dark shadows before them.