Almost within a stone’s throw of where I stood was the Golden Horn sprinkled with hundreds of delicate, pointed caiques and bearing on its sapphire bosom ships of all sizes and flying the flags of all nations. It was up this famous stream that Byzas, the reputed son of Neptune, steered his frail craft nearly seven centuries before our era. And it was on the southern bank of this sheltered haven that the daring navigator, with his doughty Megarans, laid the foundation of Byzantium--named after himself--which was to play such a remarkable rôle in the world’s great drama. A thousand years later--almost to a day--Constantine the Great abandons the city of Romulus and selects that of Byzas as the capital of the great Roman empire. On foot, with a lance in hand, the Emperor leads a solemn procession, and, under divine command--_jubente Deo_, as he phrased it--traces the boundary of the future metropolis. His assistants, astonished at the over-growing circumference of the destined capital, ventured to observe that the contemplated area of a great city had already been exceeded. “I shall continue to advance,” replied the Emperor, “until the Invisible Guide who precedes me bids me halt.” It was across the Golden Horn that “blind old Dandolo”--that marvelous doge of ninety-seven years--led the Venetian forces against Constantinople and awakened the degenerate Greeks from “a dream of nine centuries--from the vain presumption that the capital of the Roman Empire was impregnable to foreign arms.” The marble mausoleum of this remarkable man--whose physical and mental powers were vigorous to the last--occupied a place in Santa Sophia until it was transformed into a mosque, and, even to-day, one may see in one of the galleries of the venerable fane a marble slab bearing in almost illegible characters the name of Henricus Dandolo. And it was across the Golden Horn that Mohammed II passed when he entered the breached walls through New Rome as conqueror. But he was not able to effect an entrance into the ill-fated city without passing over the lifeless body of its noble defender, the valiant Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Byzantine Cæsars.[53]