Our gaze is now transferred from Africa to Europe. As Alexander had given his name to the City on the delta of the Nile, so Constantine has given his to the City on the Bosphorus. Constantinople stood as the capital and metropolis of the East for a thousand years, or from 329 A. D. (the date at which he removed his throne thereunto) on until near the middle of the fifteenth century, when the proud City fell into the hands of the Mohammedans and became in consequence the seat of the Ottoman Empire. When Constantine removed the capital of the Empire from the West he took many elements of intellectual life which had been the proud boast of the City of Augustus with him unto Byzantium; and, in process of time, the pomp, power, and learning of Rome and Alexandria were transferred to Constantinople--supreme in beauty and convenience of location. Constantinople seemed to occupy for more than a millennium of years both a charming and a charmed position. While Rome--for centuries a center and source of literature, having, after the time of Augustus, numerous libraries--together with the capitols of provinces and countries of Europe had been successively occupied by contending armies, Constantinople had remained safe in her commanding position at the portal of two continents and had continued "unconquered and even unassailed." At the fall of the Capital in the East, however, Rome became again the head of the Empire, and its imperial Seat was transferred from the Bosphorus to the Tiber. Under the favor shown by Constantine at his accession to the ranks of the Christian faith, whatever his motive, distinctively Christian literature was given an honored place in the imperial library; and through his coöperation, at a time when books were relatively scarce and difficult to obtain, several thousand volumes were collected. This collection, made up largely it is claimed of Christian literature, was augmented under some of his successors to the dimensions of a hundred thousand volumes. Furthermore, an efficient librarian had charge of these archives and directed the staff of copyists which were employed therein somewhat as had been the distinction of the Alexandrian Library. A new impulse was added in collecting and copying books by the personal favor of the Emperor--he himself, ordering from Eusebius, the church historian of the time, fifty copies of the Scriptures to be written on "artificially wrought skins by skillful calligraphists" for the use of the churches in and about Constantinople. And it is deemed possible and even not improbable that the Sinaitic manuscript--one of the oldest and best of existing Greek manuscripts--may be a survivor of this number. The library at Constantinople, like all libraries, was exposed to the wastings of time and change but was replenished and renewed through that measure of intellectual vitality which survived in the city on the Bosphorus for a millennium of years.