I do not know whether any one, in discussing this matter, has drawn attention to so small a detail as a certain checkered border of disconcerting similarity in the two series. Therefore I, who am nothing of an expert in these questions, will pass it by. But I cannot pass Kahrieh Jami by without pointing out, from the depth of my inexpertness, how unlikely it was that Theodore Metochites, the lover of all things Greek, should send, at the end of the thirteenth century, for one of those hated Latins who had just been driven out of Constantinople, to decorate the church they had left a ruin. Even if it should be proved that the designer of these mosaics was an Italian, however, or that he had watched Giotto in the house of the Scrovegni, it would not alter the fact that the trend of influence was all the other way. Constantinople had for the young Italian cities, down to 1453, an immense artistic prestige. Indeed, the church of the Salute, recalling as it does the lines of a mosque, seems to suggest that in Venice, at least, this influence did not cease with the coming of the Turks. Greek masters of mosaic were invited time and again to decorate Italian interiors. The primitive Italian painters drew Byzantine madonnas on gold backgrounds exactly like mosaicists working in a new—and possibly a cheaper—medium. Giotto himself, like his master Cimabue, made pictures with little cubes of coloured glass. I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. Need it dim the glamour of the Renaissance to look upon it as something less of an immaculate conception? If the Renaissance was a reflowering, it was of a plant that had silently grown in another soil. And Kahrieh Jami is the last flower of that plant in its own Byzantine ground.

From Kahrieh Jami to the walls is but a step—in more ways than one. They are the part of old Constantinople that is most visible. They still form an almost complete circuit, of some thirteen miles, around Stamboul. Where the circuit is most broken is along the Golden Horn, though even there large sections of the wall remain. On the land side only one breach has been made, for the railway that leads to Bulgaria and the west. Whether other breaches will follow remains to be seen. For the walls lie under sentence of death. In 1909 a bill passed Parliament and was signed by the Sultan, providing that the walls be pulled down and their materials sold for the public profit. In spite of the disdain under which Constantinople generally lies, I am happy to say that so loud a protest immediately rose to heaven as to dissuade the astonished Young Turks from carrying out their law. I can quite understand that that old rampart of Christendom represents to them merely so much brick and stone in a very bad state of preservation, which they began to demolish five hundred years ago and since have left to encumber the earth. Moreover, they have been to Vienna, they have been to Paris, they have been to all sorts of places. They have seen fine boulevards laid out on the site of ancient fortifications, and they ask themselves: If the Europeans do it, why do they make such a fuss when we propose to? I would rather like to tell them, for Turkey is not the only place where Young Turks grow. However, as none of them will ever read this obscure page I will content myself with saying that I shall never object to the sea-walls being pulled down—provided the railway be made to subside into a tunnel, and the gateways along the Golden Horn be preserved like those of Florence to ornament the city. As for the land walls, they are too great an asset ever to be disposed of except under direst stress of over-population, which now seems remote enough. Only in that case, dear Young Turks, you will also have to cut down your cemetery cypresses outside the walls. And then will double stars be scratched out of many travellers’ handbooks!

Constantinople has long been famous for her walls. About the rocky headland of Seraglio Point, which was the acropolis of the first settlers from Megara, may still lie some blocks of the fortifications built by Pausanias after the battle of Platæa, when he drove the Persians out of Byzantium and made it one of the strongest cities of the ancient world. This wall lasted until it was destroyed in 196 by the emperor Septimius Severus, in revenge upon the Byzantines for having taken the part of his rival Pescennius Niger. He also changed the name of the city to Antonina and made it subject to Perinthos, now a sleepy hamlet of the Marmora called Eregli. But he later refortified the town, on the advice of his son Caracalla. The Byzantium thus enlarged extended into the Golden Horn not quite so far as Yeni Jami, and into the Marmora no farther than the lighthouse of Seraglio Point. When in 328 Constantine the Great decided to turn Byzantium into New Rome, he carried the walls to the vicinity of the Oun Kapan-Azap Kapou bridge on one side, and on the other to the gate of Daoud Pasha, in the Psamatia quarter. He set the forum bearing his name, marked to-day by the so-called Burnt Column, at the place where the city gate of Septimius Severus opened on to the Via Egnatia. His own city gate opened on to that road at the point now called Issa Kapoussou—the Gate of Jesus. The charming little mosque of Ramazan Effendi stands on the street which follows the line of the wall for a short distance to the north. Of the wall itself nothing that can be identified as such remains visible. It was the emperor Theodosius II, he who first brought to Constantinople those much-travelled bronze horses long since naturalised in Venice, who gave the walls their present extension. The inner of the two lines of land walls he built in 413, the outer wall and the moat being added while Attila was ravaging the Balkan peninsula in 447. Two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in Greek, still record this achievement over the gate now called after the Yeni Mevlevi Haneh. Later emperors did no more than repair the work of Theodosius, except at that northwestern corner of the city where the growing importance of the Blacherne quarter necessitated fresh enlargements or defences. Since the Turkish conquest more or less extensive repairs have been carried out by Mehmed II, Mourad IV (1635), and Ahmed III (1721).

An infinite variety of interest attaches to these walls—from the gates that pierce them, the towers that flank them at intervals of some sixty feet, the devices, monograms, and inscriptions of every period they contain, the associations they have had so much time to accumulate. Two points, however, have a special interest for expert and layman alike. I have already spoken of Tekfour Seraï, where the Theodosian wall merges into later additions, and of the imperial quarter of Blacherne. I have yet to speak, even more cursorily, of the Golden Gate. This great triple portal and the marble towers flanking it existed before the walls themselves, having been built as a triumphal arch over the Egnatian Way by Theodosius the Great, after his defeat of Maximus in 388. The statue of the emperor and the other sculptures that adorned it once are gone, but you can still see over the central arch the rivet holes of the original inscription:

HAEC LOCA THEVDOSIVS DECORAT POST FATA TYRANNI
AVREA SÆCLO GERIT QVI PORTAM CONSTRVIT AVRO

When the younger Theodosius extended the walls he made the Golden Gate a part of them, but kept it as the state entrance to the city. Distinguished guests were met there—ambassadors, visiting princes, at least one Pope. Holy processions burned their incense under that archway. Through it passed emperors in splendour when they came to the purple, or when they returned victorious from war. No gateway in Europe can have seen so much of the pomp and glory of the world. Now the arches are blind, save for one small postern in the centre, and that was nearly choked by an earthquake in 1912. One Roman eagle still looks down from a high marble cornice upon the moat, empty of all but garden green, and upon a colony of Turkish gravestones that stand among cypresses where the Via Egnatia started away for the Adriatic.

On the other side lies a silent enclosure whose own day has come and gone since the last emperor passed through the Golden Gate. This is the fortress of the Seven Towers—three of which were built by the Turkish conqueror and connected by curtains with the city wall. In the towers are passages and cells as black as the subterranean maze of Blacherne, and they were used for the same purpose. Many are the stories of captivity in this high-walled place that have been told and remain to be told. One of them is briefly legible, in Latin, in a stone of the southeast tower, where it was cut by a Venetian in the seventeenth century. It used even to be the fashion to clap an ambassador into prison there when war broke out between his country and the Porte. Turkish state prisoners, of course, perished there without number. And one sultan, Osman II, when he was no more than eighteen, was barbarously put to death there in 1622. And all that blood and bitterness, which was so desperately the whole of reality for so many breathing men, is now but a pleasant quickening of romance for the visitor who follows a lantern through the darkness of the towers or who explores the battlements of the wall, grassy and anemone-grown in the spring, from which a magnificent view stretches of the sea and the city and the long line of ruined turrets marching up the hill.

If every ended drama of human greatness must come at last to a view, the road around the land walls of Constantinople can do more for the man who walks it than any such road I know. Other cities have walls, it is true. Other walls have moats. Some of their moats contain water, too, while this moat contains only water-wheels and vegetable-gardens. And how much more greenly do the vegetables grow, I wonder, because of all the dead men that have fallen under the ramparts? Other ramparts wear as picturesque a verdure, and blossoming fruit-trees have the same trick of setting them off in the spring. And cypresses are no monopoly of Constantinople. But no such army of cypresses faces other walls, from such a camp of strange grey stones. Nor in any Eternal City does water play so magical a part of background. The landscape is most dramatically accidented where you look past the high terraces of Blacherne toward the landlocked brightness of the Golden Horn. A view is also to be admired down the valley of the Lycus, of the whole city stretching to the sea. But the noblest perspective is the simpler one where the road, avenue-like between the moat and the cypresses, dips and rises and dips again toward the Golden Gate and the Marmora, till a last marble tower stands superbly out of the blue. The contrast of sea and cypresses and tawny stones, always perfect, here takes an insensible colour, I suppose, from the thought of the sentinels who called from tower to tower in old Byzantine nights; and of all the horsemen and banners that have ridden against those walls; and of what they did for the other end of Europe—the walls—till civilisation was safely planted there; and of something yet more intangible, that is deepest and strangest in human fate.