“The description of the church of S. Sophia as it now appears,” which forms one of the chapters in Gyllius’ († 1555) _Topography of Constantinople_, describes the church before the addition of these three last minarets. It is interesting to note that he remarks how little the building had been altered, “and it is despoiled of nothing, except a little of the metal work [mosaic?] which shows itself in great abundance through the whole church. The Sanctum Sanctorum, formerly holy and unpolluted, into which the priests only were suffered to enter, is still standing, though there is nothing remaining of the jewels and precious stones which adorned it, these having been plundered by its sacrilegious enemies.” This is later supported by Grelot,[219] who writes, “It is decorated with everything that human industry and skill could devise to render the work absolutely perfect.... I say nothing about the beautiful pictures, the faces of which have been destroyed by the Turks.” It is clear from Tournefort (1702) and Lady Mary Montagu (1717) that the mosaics were not wholly obliterated; the latter writes, “the figures were in no other way defaced but by the decays of time: for it is absolutely false that the Turks defaced all the images they found in the city.” On the other hand, an Italian MS. description of S. Sophia in the British Museum, written in 1611, says, “The Turks took away all the beautiful work and covered everything with whitewash.”[220] It is evident from Dr. Covel’s MS., quoted later, that much was destroyed, defaced, and plastered over. Dr. Walsh tells us that one of the smaller vaults fell in about 1820, scattering its mosaic over the floor. § 2. THE ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT. We must now examine the description of the church by the writer generally called the Anonymous of Combefis (otherwise of Banduri or Lambecius). Codinus, who is believed to have died soon after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, has so closely copied the Anonymous that the accounts differ only in a few minor particulars. Combefis says that the text of the Anonymous was collated by Lambecius, “who produced it from the royal archives” with the _Chronography of the Logothetae_, a tenth-century work to which the same account is added as a separate treatise. Labarte however considers that it was written in the eleventh century: Choisy assigns it to the fourteenth, a view with which we are inclined to agree; but in any case we cannot think it earlier than the twelfth century.