The stones were actually supposed to be specifics for diseases by the Russian pilgrims and others. Clari the Knight of Amiens[234] (1200) speaks “of the Minster (_Moustier_) of S. Sophia, and the riches which were there.... There are vaults all round over the church, which are carried on large columns, very rich; for there is not a column but is of jasper, or porphyry, or some precious marble, and every column has a medicinal quality; some keep off _Mal des rains_, some _Mal du flanc_, and other diseases: and there is nothing in this minster such as a hinge (_gons_) or band (_verveles_) generally of iron, which is not of silver.” Codinus concludes his account of the church with a story, which may be classed with a large series, as “the gratitude of employers to their architects;” imprisoning and blinding them, or cutting off their hands. It is in a sense one of the truest of stories! The master workman of the great church, “Ignatius (_sic_), owing to the great favour which his work won for him from the people, was shut up by the emperor in his statue in the Augusteum.” To parallel other tales this must be the artist’s own work which is the instrument of his torture. Here he would have died of hunger had it not been for his faithful wife, who threw to him a rope besmeared with liquid pitch; afterwards fire destroyed all evidence of his flight. We have also the customary tales of statues found in the ground when the church was begun. Gyllius, quoting from Suidas, says that Justinian discovered more than seventy statues of the Greek deities, the figures of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and eighty statues of Christian princes and emperors. The travels that bear the name of Sir John Mandeville relate that once when an emperor made a grave in S. Sophia, “they found a body in the earth, and upon the body lay a plate of gold, that said thus in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, ‘Jesus Christ shall be born of the Virgin Mary, and I believe in Him.’ It was laid there 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, and is still preserved in the treasury of the church. And they say that it was Hermogenes, the wise man.” The legends were not forgotten after the taking of the church. Sandys, the English traveller, who was in Constantinople about 1610, tells us that “one of the doors was famed to be the ark of Noe, and is therefore left bare in some places to be kissed by the devoted people,” and “the total number of doors was said to be as many as the days of the year.”