Its immediate site, too, was inviting. Enthroned upon magnificent hills, with the harbor of the Golden Horn as a safe refuge for its fleets, and a salubrious climate assured by the perpetual breeze from either of the great seas which lay at its feet, it was the especial abode of comfort and splendor. In its stately palaces, churches, and public squares was preserved the best art inherited from the ancient world, for which the temples of Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the isles of the Mediterranean had been rifled. Its merchants lived with the splendor of princes, dwelling in palatial homes, adorning themselves with most costly robes and rarest gems, and clothing even their horses with gold. To outrank their subjects in splendor, princes lived in houses whose columns and walls were sheathed in golden plates. The palaces of Blachern and Bucolion were furnished with incredible treasures. The Church of St. Sophia, says Benjamin of Tudela (1161), was richer than “all other places of worship in the world.” To its magnificence Ephesus had contributed eight pillars from the temple of Diana; Aurelian’s Roman temple of the sun, eight columns of porphyry; the temples of the Nile, twenty-four columns of polished granite. Its vestries contained “forty-two thousand robes embroidered with pearls and precious stones.” But St. Sophia was only one of many churches whose golden domes flashed over the Bosporus. Other structures vied with the temples. The hippodrome was nine hundred feet long, lined with tiers of white marble seats, from which the spectators, in the intervals of the races, admired the four horses in bronze which now surmount the entrance of St. Mark’s in Venice. Columns, statues, baths innumerable, feasted the eyes or invited the indulgence of the citizens. Even more tempting to the covetous piety of the western Europeans were the stores of sacred relics possessed by the churches and monasteries. It was believed that more than half the objects of veneration associated with dead saints throughout the world were in case or crypt within Constantinople; and the common faith attributed to the army of saints thus honored, and whose ghosts were presumably guarding their bones, the preservation of the city during so many generations. Most of these relics had been purchased at or stolen from their original resting-places in different parts of the East; but many undoubtedly were manufactured to gratify the credulity of the foreigners who thronged the bazaars.