is owed to the weak." It is noted also that "besides the inevitable staff of public workmen, who, in a city like Byzantium, where fires were frequent and earthquakes not uncommon, had much to do beyond the repairs necessitated by the wear and tear of time, the State also supported multitudes of bakers"--for the State still followed the Roman rule and provided the poor with bread as well as public games--"and we are taught that the gardens, to which we sometimes meet casual references in the historians, were not the property of private citizens, but were parks for the people, kept up at the State's expense." Already we see that some of the features most prominent in the city to-day belonged to it in the early Middle Age. The great Dome of S. Sophia glittered upon the wayfarer as he sailed up towards the mouth of the Golden Horn, and the city as the soldier looked at it from the tower of Heraclius was a city set in bowers of perpetual green. Another feature as prominent, which the foreigner sees from the heights of Pera, owes its preservation to Constantine Copronymus. The aqueduct of Valens had been destroyed by the Avars in the reign of Heraclius, Constantine brought thousands of workmen together and repaired it, and the water flowed as of old into the capacious cisterns which were the work of the greatest of eastern architects. The ninth century began with the new and short-lived dynasty of Nicephorus. "His character," says Gibbon, "was stained with the three odious vices of hypocrisy, ingratitude and avarice; his want of virtue was not redeemed by any superior talents nor his want of talents by any pleasing qualifications." The historians, being ecclesiastics, resented his attempt to assert the most extreme claims of the iconoclastic emperors to rule the Church, and the people despised him for his treachery and his failures in war. He fell in 811 in battle against the Bulgarians. In six months his son, Stauricius, followed him to the tomb. Michael Rhangabe, who had married Procopia, the daughter of Nicephorus, then reigned for two years, but his weakness caused his deposition, and the people of Constantinople found a new sovereign, Leo the Armenian, forced upon them by the army. During his reign the imperial city was again besieged. Hadrianople was lost, and but for the death of the Bulgarian king it seems unlikely that Leo would have been able to drive back the forces which overran the peninsula. Yet Leo, conqueror though he was, was able to hold the crown but little longer than his predecessors. In 820 a conspiracy of his generals, which his own generosity had made possible, attacked him as he sang matins on Christmas Day, and slew him at the foot of the altar in the chapel. He did not reign without leaving a memorial of his rule which lasts to this day. The wall of Heraclius was not thought fully to defend the quarter of Blachernae. Leo determined to build another wall and dig a broad moat in front of the Heraclian wall.