A short time before the author’s arrival in the city of the Cæsars, the aged Manuel died (1425), and John, his son and successor, was forced to sign a treaty of peace with the Turks, the conditions being of the most onerous nature; for he was deprived of all his possessions with the exception of the capital, the appanages in the Morea of the Greek princes, and a few fortresses on the shores of the Black Sea (Zinkeisen, _Gesch. d. O. R._, i, 533); he also covenanted to pay the sultan an annual tribute of 300,000 aspres, and to make him numerous presents of great value as a mark of personal regard. In such circumstances the unfortunate monarch must have been under the necessity of laying hands upon all the gold he could come across, and Schiltberger’s _bon mot_ on the disappearance of the apple together with the emperor’s power, might be taken literally. Zosimus relates that the statue which held the apple was distant an arrow’s flight from the hippodrome, doubtlessly the “fine square for tilting”, now known as the Meïdan. The magnificent palace wherein receptions were held, and that excited the admiration of Schiltberger, must have been the Boukoleon and Daphna which adjoined the hippodrome (Dethier, _Der Bosphor und Constantinopel_, Wien, 1873, 22). This edifice was greatly neglected during the reigns of the last of the Palæologi, and after his conquest of Constantinople, Mahomet II. ordered its complete destruction. The other palace noticed was the Blackernes, in which Clavijo (_Hakluyt Soc. Publ._ 29) was received by the emperor Manuel. Near it, Bertrandon de la Brocquière found a “fausse braie d’un bon et haut mur en avant du fossé, qui était en glacis excepté dans un espace de deux cents pas à l’une de ses extrémités près du palais”. This must have been the place where Schiltberger saw a “getüll.”[1]—BRUUN. [1] See page 84.