Hadji Khalfa says that in the seventeenth century the walls of Nicaea were entirely ruined.[110] The condition of these walls to-day (for they have not been repaired in modern times) contradicts this statement. It has been the claim of the Osmanlis that Nicaea was reduced by fighting. If this were true the walls must have suffered. It is also the common belief[111] that Nicaea, at the time of the Ottoman conquest, and for some time after, was a prosperous city.[112] But Ibn Batutah, who visited Nicaea within five or six years after its change of ownership, wrote that its walls were intact, that the sole entrance to the city was by a road built up like a bridge and so narrow that horsemen could not pass on it, and that the walls were surrounded by a wide deep moat filled with water. One had to reach the gate by a pont-levis, which was in working order and used at the time of his visit. The city itself was in ruins and occupied only by a small number of men in the service of Orkhan. He was told that Orkhan had besieged the city ten years, and Osman before him twenty years. As the famous traveller was an honoured guest in the palace of Orkhan, where Orkhan’s wife was living at the time, and where the emir himself came for a few days during the forty days which Ibn Batutah spent in Nicaea, his testimony is certainly worthy of credence.[113] That Nicaea, while preserving its admirable fortifications, should have decreased so rapidly in importance and population during the seventy years between the return of the Byzantine emperors to Constantinople and the Ottoman occupation, is explainable only by three suppositions: that a majority of the inhabitants had died off, that they had emigrated, or that they had gradually joined their fortunes with the people of Osman. We find in Byzantine annals no record of a disastrous plague or of a large emigration of potters and porcelain workers and weavers to the capital or elsewhere from Nicaea. There was little fighting. The Osmanlis had not yet learned to massacre. What are we to believe, then, concerning the large population of this so recently flourishing city?