records his repair of part of the sea wall; and he built many other gates and additional fortifications. It was indeed time. The eleventh century saw the position of the Empire and the safety of the imperial city continually threatened not only by active attacks but by internal dissensions; dissensions which, it has been well said, would have settled themselves a century before, but which now both weakened the city and made its weakness apparent to the world. How weak the city was, was seen in 1146, when a Norman fleet sailed up the Hellespont, and the admiral robbed the imperial gardens of fruit. Bulgars, Serbians, Turks, had all at different times threatened the city, and without success, but its internal weakness was made the more evident as the century went on by the division which was arising between the Emperor and his people. Manuel I. was believed to be at heart a Latin; his campaigns of the West, his marriages to Western wives, his neglect of the fleet, his encouragement of foreign settlers in the capital, all increased his unpopularity. Matters were not improved under the boy, Alexius II., when the struggle between his mother and the minister she favoured, and his sister, took place in the streets of the city, and in S. Sophia itself. The dynastic dispute was complicated, like all the disputes in Constantinople, by ecclesiastical interests, and the return of a patriarch who had been driven out was one of those picturesque scenes in which the people delighted, which showed their independence of the government, but revealed also, only too plainly, that there was now no union in Church or State. A few words may suffice to explain and date the events of the latter part of the twelfth century. Manuel up to his death in 1180 retained all the appearance of a victorious Emperor, though he suffered a severe defeat in 1176, at Myriokephalon in Phrygia, from the Seljukian Turks. Crusading princes, the Turkish Sultan Kilidji Arslan, and the Christian King, Amaury of Jerusalem, visited him at Constantinople, and were received with ostentatious splendour. Alexius II., his son and successor, was a boy of thirteen, and in two years the streets of the imperial city witnessed a desperate encounter between his supporters and those of his sister Maria, which swept up to the walls of S. Sophia. Then Andronicus, the cousin of the Emperor Manuel, was recalled from banishment, and he signalised his acquisition of power by a massacre of the Latins in the city. From this he proceeded to slay every one who stood in his way, till, in 1183, having murdered the young Alexius, he seated himself on the throne. For two years he continued a course of crimes greater than those that any sovereign ever committed, till a popular insurrection crowned a descendant of the great Alexius. Andronicus, though the vilest of men, had made a serious effort to reform the administration and reduce the influence of the nobles. His fall left the Empire to its fate.