[111] Many of the towers near the Golden Gate bear inscriptions showing that they were repaired during John’s reign. For the inscriptions see Paspates’ Βυζαντιναὶ Μελέται.
[112] Caramania was the Turkish state which remained longest outside Ottoman dominion. At one period it extended from the river Sangarius to Adana. Ordinarily its boundaries did not extend further north than Konia. See Stanley Lane-Poole’s Mohammedan Dynasties, p. 134.
[113] The island of Chios had for several years been held by a Commercial Company, mostly if not exclusively of Genoese, each of whose members was, apparently, known by the name of Justiniani.
[114] Gibbon suggests, on the authority of the Hist. Anonyme de St-Denys, that the French had murdered their Turkish prisoners on the eve of the engagement, and that the sultan was merely retaliating (Gibbon, vii. 37).
[115] Chalc. ii. 807.
[116] Chap. xv.
[117] The word timour is the same as the ordinary Turkish word for iron, demir.
[118] Leunclavius, 250.
[119] Leunclavius, pp. 250–1, Ven. edition, makes the conquest of Damascus in 1399; Chalcondylas and others, in 1402; the Turkish authors quoted by Von Hammer, in 1401. The statement of the hindrance due to locusts I take from Muralt, 772, who quotes as his authority ‘Bizar,’ a name unknown to me.
[120] The Crescent, which Gibbon and other writers assert to have only been employed by the Turks after the capture of Constantinople, had probably been used by them for many centuries previously. It is true that it had been made use of in Constantinople at an early period, and figures on several coins of Constantine, but I doubt whether it was used as the symbol of Constantinople in the later centuries of its history. The Crusades are not incorrectly described as wars between the Cross and the Crescent. The symbol is an ancient one and figures with the star on several coins belonging to about 200 B.C. The Abassid dynasty so used it. Professor Hilprecht considers it a remnant of moon-worship and connects it with the subsequent cult of Ashtaroth, Astarte, or Aphrodite.