Of details that repay attention, the chief door into the mosque, typically eastern, stands out. The six minarets, seen from far, are the most graceful of all in the city. Ahmed in building six encroached on the unique dignity of Mecca. The sherif protested, and the Sultan added a seventh to the sacred shrine. His own mosque remains the only one with six. Within, the later history of the Turks invests the scene with a new interest. It was from the splendid marble pulpit that the _fetva_ decreeing the abolition of the Janissaries was read, while Mahmûd stood in his box. It was round the mosque that much of the fiercest fighting took place that day. Bodies were heaped up before the gate of the court, and from the great sycamore, still standing, and called "the tree of groans," hung corpses "like the black fruit of a tree in hell." These three are the most splendid of the mosques. Next to them ranks the mosque of Bayezid II. It was built between 1489 and 1497, and the architect was the son of Christodoulos, who built the mosque named after the Conqueror, Bayezid's father. The two sons designed to surpass their father. It cannot be said that they succeeded. The mosque itself has little interest. The fountain in the court does not equal those of Ahmed and Suleiman. But the place will always be visited for the name, which the travellers give it, of the Pigeons' Mosque. A poor widow, says the legend, offered a pair of pigeons to Bayezid for the mosque. These hundreds are their offspring, and they have always been held sacred. They fly about, settle everywhere on the roofs, walk over the floor, and surround in an instant everyone who takes up a handful of grain. They divide the honours of the court with the sellers of trivial ornaments, and the professional letter-writers, whom one may spend a merry half hour in watching, as they formally express the feelings which the lover, or the applicant for a post under government, is rightly supposed to possess, and is anxious to have set forth for him. The mosque of Bayezid owes something of its attraction to its position, looking on two sides upon a wide open space, with the wall and gate of the Seraskierat only a few yards away. To the east is the great garden, which contains the türbeh of Bayezid himself, with a catafalque thirteen feet long. Of the hundreds of mosques, each with its own characteristic design or adornment or history, stand out for a word of admiration, those of the Shahzadeh, of Selim I., of the Yeni Valideh, and that called the Tulip Mosque.