The Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about the middle of the tenth century, has left us a favourable sketch of the Peloponnese as it was in his day. Forty cities were to be found in that Theme, and some idea of its resources may be formed from the statement that the Peloponnesians excused themselves from personal service in an Italian campaign by the payment of 7200 pieces of gold and the presentation of 1000 horses all equipped[41]. The purple, parchment, and silk industries, as well as the shipping trade, must have yielded considerable profits to those who carried them on, and the presence of many Jews at Sparta in the time of St Nikon, who tried to expel them, shows that there was money to be made there. His biography represents that city—of which the contemporary Empress, Theophano, wife of Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas, was perhaps a native[42]—as possessing a powerful aristocracy, and as having commercial relations with Venice. The reconquest of Crete, by freeing the coast-towns from the depredations of pirates, naturally increased the prosperity of Greece. Schools rose again at Athens and Corinth, and from that time down to the beginning of the thirteenth century the country improved, in spite of occasional invasions. Thus, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel captured Larissa and carried off many of its inhabitants, as well as the remains of the Thessalian Archbishop, St Achilleios, which had long been the chief relic of the place. His standards were twice seen south of the Isthmus, and Attica was ravaged by his forces. To this period we may refer the statement above quoted that “all Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were occupied by Scythian Slavs.” But when they arrived at the river Spercheios on their return march, they were surprised by a Byzantine army and utterly defeated. The Emperor Basil II, surnamed “the Bulgar-slayer,” completed the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, and on his triumphal progress through Northern and Central Greece in 1019 found the bones of the slain still bleaching on the banks of the Spercheios. After inspecting the fortifications of Thermopylæ, he proceeded to Athens, which no Byzantine Emperor had visited since the days of Constans II. The visit was an appropriate sequel to the campaign. For the first time for centuries the Byzantine dominions extended from the Bosporos to the Danube, and the Balkan peninsula once again was under Greek domination. In the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the very centre and shrine of the old Hellenic life in bygone days, the victorious Emperor offered up thanks to Almighty God for his successes, and showed his gratitude by rich offerings to the church out of the spoil which he had taken. The beauty of the building, which he seems to have enhanced by a series of frescoes, traces of which are still visible, was justly celebrated in the next generation, and one curiosity of that holy spot,