Moreover, for thousands of years before the advent of the Osmanlis in western Asia there was at work an agency of destruction that is usually quite disregarded by those who are so propense to impute to the “Unspeakable Turk” the heaps of ruins which overspread a large part of the great Ottoman Empire--an agency whose power of annihilation is incomparably greater than ever was that of Hun or Mongol. This is the earthquake. From the dawn of history this irresistible power has been in action in nearly all the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and has, times without number, exhibited its relentless fury from Cilicia to Sicily and from Egypt to Dalmatia. In Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor,[224] and Greece whole cities were subverted. In the reign of Valens and Valentinian the greater part of the Roman world was shaken by seismic disturbances of the most appalling violence. Time and again the massive walls of Constantinople, its palaces, churches, and monasteries crumbled under the earth’s paroxysmal movements, and the extent of the disaster inflicted was beyond computation. At Cyzicus a temple which its builders fondly hoped would be as stable and as durable as the pyramids was, in an instant, leveled with the ground by one of those periodical earth shocks that have visited Asia Minor from time immemorial. In the destructive earthquake of 365 A. D., no fewer than fifty thousand persons lost their lives in Alexandria. But probably no city in the world has suffered more from seismic vibrations than Antioch, which is near the southern border of Cilicia. Here in the terrific earthquake of 526 A. D., the loss of life totaled a full quarter of a million people. During the celebration of a public festival in Greece, at which a vast multitude had assembled, “the whole population was swallowed up in the midst of the ceremonies.” It was during this period of widespread catastrophe in Greece that “the ravages of earthquakes began to figure in history as an important cause of the impoverished and declining condition of the country.”[225] The same causes that led to the economic and social decline of Greece operated with equally dire results in Asia Minor and Syria and Palestine. When, therefore, we contemplate the countless ruins of once famous cities, that are so conspicuous in a great part of Greece and Turkey in Asia, let us assign them to their real causes--not “the ravaging Turks,” but the devastating Huns and Goths, Tartars and Mongols, Persians and Saracens, and the blind and convulsive forces of nature.