As the Byzantine Empire dwindled before the incursions of the Turks, the Greek province of Mistra assumed more importance in the eyes of the statesmen at Constantinople. In 1415 the Emperor Manuel II, with an energy which modern sovereigns of Greece would do well to imitate, resolved to see for himself how matters stood, and arrived in the Morea. He at once set to work to re-erect the six-mile rampart, or “Hexamilion,” across the Isthmus, which had been fortified by Xerxes, Valerian, Justinian, and, in recent times, by the last Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaiologos. Manuel’s wall followed the course of Justinian’s; and, in the incredibly short space of twenty-five days, forced labourers, working under the imperial eye, had erected a rampart strengthened by no less than 153 towers. But the Emperor saw that it was necessary to reform the Morea from within as well as to fortify it without. We have from the pen of a Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, who has written a _Dialogue of the Dead_ in the manner of Lucian, a curious, if somewhat highly-coloured account of the Moreotes as they were, or at any rate seemed to him to be, at this time[58]. In the Peloponnese, he tells us, are “Lacedæmonians, Italians, Peloponnesians (Greeks), Slavonians, Illyrians (Albanians), Egyptians (gypsies), and Jews, and among them are not a few half-castes.” He says that the Lakonians, who “are now called Tzakones,” have “become barbarians” in their language, of which he gives some specimens. He goes on to make the shrewd remark, true to-day of all Eastern countries where the Oriental assumes a veneer of Western civilisation, that “each race takes the worst features of the others,” the Greeks assimilating the turbulence of the Franks, and the Franks the cunning of the Greeks. So insecure was life and property that arms were worn night and day—a practice obsolete in the time of Thucydides. Of the Moreote _archontes_ he has nothing good to say; they are “men who ever delight in battles and disturbances, who are for ever breathing murder, who are full of deceit and craft, barbarous and pig-headed, unstable and perjured, faithless to both Emperor and Despots.” Yet a Venetian report—and the Venetians were keen observers—sent to the government a few years later, depicts the Morea as a valuable asset. It contained, writes the Venetian commissioner, 150 strong castles; the soil is rich in minerals; and it produces silk, honey, wax, corn, raisins, and poultry.