front of the Palace of Blachernæ, was taken from the ruins of old churches. While for the construction of the citadel which John VI. Palæologus (1341-1391) built near the Golden Gate, material was taken from the remains of churches so noted in their day as the Church of All Saints, the Church of the Forty Martyrs, and the Church of S. Mokius. [Illustration: VIEW FROM AN OLD CEMETERY Close to the busy thoroughfare of Pera large tracts of land lie unoccupied save for a few mouldering old tombstones; they are the remains of old Turkish burying-grounds.] Upon the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, something indeed was done to repair the damage due to the occupation of the city, for some fifty-seven years, by barbarous and covetous strangers. But the last two centuries of the Empire were years of wars and civil broils, years of decline and poverty, and at length of despair, so that comparatively little could be undertaken to rebuild the sad ruins inherited from the past, or to arrest the decay whose withering touch was laid on the monuments that still survived more or less intact. Even the Imperial Palace beside the Hippodrome was allowed to fall into such neglect and desolation, that when the Turkish conqueror visited its empty halls they echoed to his ear the couplet of the Persian poet: “The spider has become the watchman of the royal abode, and has spread his curtain over its doorway.” The decay which had smitten the city impressed every visitor during the half-century preceding the Turkish Conquest. “Although the city is large,” says the Spanish envoy already cited, “and has a wide circuit, it is not thickly populated everywhere for it contains many hills and valleys occupied by cultivated fields and gardens, and where one sees houses such as are found in an outlying suburb and all this in the heart of the city.... There are still many very large buildings in the city, houses, churches, monasteries, but most of them are in ruins.” The great disproportion between the size of the city and the number of the population made a similar impression on Bondelmontius who came here from Florence in 1422. He speaks of vineyards flourishing within the city bounds, and adds, “There are innumerable churches and cisterns throughout the city, remarkably large and constructed with much labour, and found in ruin.” La Broquière, to cite one witness more, who was here in 1433, observes that the open spaces in the city were more extensive than the territory occupied by buildings. Times had indeed changed since the days of Themistius and Anthemius. Constantinople was therefore far from being a rich and splendid city when it fell into the hands of its Turkish conquerors in 1453, and the scarcity of the monuments of its former wealth and grandeur must not be ascribed wholly to the action of its new masters. The ravages of time, and the vandalism of the Latin Crusaders, had left little for other rude hands to destroy.