A plain, now overbuilt, stretched from the foot of these walls along the Golden Horn. Here Crum, the Bulgarian king, whose barbaric rites we witnessed at the Golden Gate, was asked to confer with the Emperor Leo, the Armenian. The monarchs agreed to meet unarmed, but Leo intended treachery, which Crum suspected, and he hastily withdrew; and though pursued by the arrows of the ambushed archers, he escaped, wounded in several places.
Another Bulgarian king, of whom mention has been made, met the Eastern Emperor on this plain when Simeon and Romanus Lecapenus concluded peace.
Now let us proceed on the last stage of our journey down by these walls of Manuel Comnenus into the plain. High and of enormous strength they are still, for they form here the single line of defence; the ground offered too many obstacles for the erection of an outer rampart, and the highest point of which we are leaving behind us not even a moat was possible. Some doubt exists as to whether the wall that leads down towards the Golden Horn is of a piece with that of Manuel Comnenus. It differs in construction, and bears many inscriptions relating to the repairs which it needed. Thus the money which Irene, wife of Andronicus II, left at her death, was devoted to these walls by the Emperor. John VII Palæologus is responsible for other repairs, according to an inscription, which reads as follows (being interpreted)—
John Palæologus
Faithful King
And Emperor of the Romans
in Christ, God,
on the second of the month of August
of the year 6949 (1441)
Perchance this was the last occasion on which the walls of Constantinople were repaired, until the final siege of the city, when Johannes Grant, a German engineer in the service of the Greeks, under cover of darkness directed his workers to secure the portions of the wall that had suffered most heavily under the fire of Turkish ordnance, by such devices as were known in his day, and by the best of all defensive methods, counter attack.
We reach the plain below, and find our attention
