A Christian popular tradition relates that at the moment of the appearance of the Turks in St. Sophia the liturgy was being celebrated; when the priest who held the holy sacrament saw the Muslims rush into the church, the altar wall miraculously opened before him and he entered it and disappeared; when Constantinople passes again into the hands of the Christians, the priest will come out from the wall and continue the liturgy.

About forty years ago the local guides used to show tourists, in one of the remote places of Stamboul, a tomb purporting to be that of the last Byzantine Emperor, over which a simple oil lamp was burning. But of course this nameless tomb was not really that of Constantine; his burial place is unknown.

In 1895 E. A. Grosvenor wrote, "To-day, in the quarter of Abou Vefa in Stamboul, may be seen a lowly, nameless grave which the humble Greeks revere as that of Constantine. Timid devotion has strewn around it a few rustic ornaments. Candles were kept burning night and day at its side. Till eight years ago it was frequented, though secretly, as a place of prayer. Then the Ottoman Government interposed with severe penalties, and it has since been almost deserted. All this is but in keeping with the tales which delight the credulous or devout."208

It has usually been said that two days after the fall of Constantinople a Western relief fleet arrived in the Archipelago, and learning the tidings of the fall of the city immediately sailed back again. On the basis of some new evidence, at the present time, this fact is denied: neither papal vessels nor Genoese nor Aragonese sailed to the East in support of Constantinople.207

In 1456 Muhammed conquered Athens from the Franks; 208 shortly after all Greece with the Peloponnesus submitted to him. The ancient Parthenon, in the Middle Ages the church of the Holy Virgin, was, on the Sultan's order, turned into a mosque. In 1461 the far-off Trebizond, capital of the once independent

206 E. A. Grosvenor, Constantinople (Boston, 1895), I, 47.

207 See G. B. Picotti, "Sulle navi papali in Oriente al tempo della caduta di Costantinopoli", Nuovo Archivio Veneto, N. S., XXII (1911), 416, 436.

208 This is the correct date. Sometimes the year 1458 is given. See, for example, F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Athen, II, 381.

Empire, passed into the hands of the Turks. At the same time they took possession of the remnants of the Despotat of Epirus. The orthodox Byzantine Empire ceased to exist, and in its site there established itself and grew up the Muhammedan Ottoman (Othman) Empire; its capital was transferred from Hadrianople to Constantinople, which was called by the Turks Istamboul (Stamboul).209

Ducas, imitating the above mentioned "lamentation" of Nicetas Acominatus after the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, bewails the event of 1453. This is the beginning of his "lamentation": "O, city, city, head of all cities! O, city, city, center of the four quarters of the world! O city, city, pride of the Christians and ruin of the barbarians! O, city, city, second paradise planted in the West, including all sorts of plants bending under the burden of spiritual fruits! Where is thy beauty, o paradise? Where is the blessed strength of spirit and body of thy spiritual Graces? Where are the bodies of the Apostles of my Lord? Where are the relices of the saints, where are the relics of the martyrs? Where is the corpse of the great Constantine and other Emperors?"210 and so on.

A far-off Georgian chronicler remarks piously, "On the day when the Turks took Constantinople, the sun was darkened."211

The fall of Constantinople made a terrible impression upon Western Europe, which first of all was seized with dismay at the thought of the future advances of the Turks; of course, the ruin of one of the chief centers of Christianity, though from the point of view of the Catholic Church schismatic, aroused, among the faithful of the West, anger, horror, and zeal to repair the situa

200 The Arabian geographer al-Masudi, of the tenth century, says that the Greeks in his day spoke of their capital as Bulin (i. e., Greek word Polin), also as Istan-Bulin (Greek σry bλw, stinpolin), and did not use the name of Constantinople. See G. LeStrange, The lands of the eastern caliphate (Cambridge, 1905), p. 138, note. A. Andreadès, "De la population de Constantinople sous les empereurs byzantins", in the Italian periodical Metron (Rovigo, 1920), I, 69, n. 2. Thus Istamboul (Stamboul) is the Greek stinpolin-to the city.

210 Ducas, chap. XLI (p. 306). See nine texts, six in prose and three in verse, of different Monodies and Laments on the fall of Constantinople in Σπ. Λάμπρου, Μονωδίαι καὶ θρῆνοι ἐπὶ τῇ ἁλώσει τῆς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Νέος Ελληνομνήμων, V (1908), 190-269. 211 See M. Brosset, Histoire de la Géorgie (St. Petersburg, 1849), I, 683.

tion. Popes, sovereigns, bishops, princes, and knights have left us many epistles and letters portraying the whole horror of the situation and appealing for a crusade against victorious Islam and his representative, Muhammed II, this "precursor of Antichrist and second Sennacherib".212 In many letters the ruin of Constantinople is lamented as that of a center of culture. In his appeal to Pope Nicholas V the Western Emperor, Frederick III, calling the fall of Constantinople "a general disaster to the Christian faith", writes that Constantinople was "a real abode (velut domicilium proprium) of literature and studies of all humanity" 213 In one of his letters the Cardinal Bessarion, mourning the fall of the city, calls it "a school of the best arts" (gymnasium optimarum artium).214 The famous Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, calling to mind numberless books in Byzantium which were still unknown to the Latins, styles the conquest of the city by the Turks the second death of Homer and Plato.215 Some writers named the Turks Teucrians (Teucri), considering them the descendants of the old Trojans, and warned Europe of the Sultan's plans to attack Italy, which allured him "by its wealth and by the tombs of his Trojan ancestors".216 On one hand, various epistles of the fifth decade of the fifteenth century say that "the Sultan, like Julian the Apostate, will be finally forced to recognise the victory of Christ"; that Christianity, doubtless, is strong enough to have no fear of the Turks; that "a strong expedition" (valida expeditio) will be ready and the Christians will be able to defeat the Turks and "drive them out of Europe" (fugare extra Europam). But, on the other hand, we read in the same epistles of the great difficulties in the coming struggle with the Turks, and of the chief cause of these difficulties-the discord among the Christians themselves, "a spectacle which inspires the Sultan with courage".217 The above mentioned Enea Silvio Pic

212 See G. Voigt, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Berlin, 1862), II, 95.

213 Baronii-Raynaldi, Annales ecclesiastici (Barri-Ducis), 1874, vol. XXVIII, 598.

214 See Iorga, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs, II, 41.

215 Voigt, op. cit., II, 94.

216 Iorga, Notes et extraits, IV, 74.

217 Iorga, Notes et extraits, IV, 64, 76, 82, 84, 90.

colomini gives, in one of his letters, an excellent and true picture of the Christian interrelations in the West at that time; he writes: "I do not hope for what I want. Christianity has no longer a head: neither Pope nor Emperor is adequately esteemed or obeyed; they are treated as fictitious names and painted figures. Each city has a king of its own; there are as many princes as houses. How might one persuade the numberless Christian rulers to take up arms? Look upon Christianity! Italy, you say, is pacified. I do not know to what extent. The remains of war still exist between the King of Aragon and the Genoese. The Genoese will not fight the Turks: they are said to pay tribute to them! The Venetians have made a treaty with the Turks. If the Italians do not take part, we cannot hope for maritime war. In Spain, as you know, there are many kings of different power, different policy, different will, and different ideas; but these sovereigns who live in the far West can not be attracted to the East, especially when they are fighting with the Moors of Granada. The King of France has expelled his enemy from his kingdom; but he is still in trouble, and will not dare to send his knights beyond the borders of his kingdom for fear of a sudden landing of the English. As far as the English are concerned, they think only of taking revenge for their expulsion from France. Scotch, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, who live at the end of the world, seek nothing beyond their countries. The Germans are greatly divided and have nothing to unify them."218

Neither the appeals of Popes and sovereigns, nor the lofty impulse of individuals and groups, nor the consciousness of common danger before the Ottoman menace could weld disunited Western Europe for the struggle with Islam. The Turks continued to advance, and at the end of the seventeenth century they threatened Vienna. That was the climax of the might of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople, it is well known, even in our day is in the hands of the Turks.

218 Voigt, op. cit., II, 118-19.

II. THE INTERNAL SITUATION OF THE EMPIRE UNDER THE PALAEOLOGI

Ecclesiastical relations. The Union of Lyons. The Arsenites. The Hesychast movement. The Union of Rome. The Union of Florence. The question of the Council in St. Sophia in 1450. The Church under Turkish sway.-The ecclesiastical history of the time of the Palaeologi is extremely interesting both from the point of view of the relations between the Greek-Eastern Church and the Papal throne, and from the point of view of the religious movements in the internal life of the Empire. The relations with Rome which took the form of attempts to achieve the union with the Catholic Church, were, except the Union of Lyons, closely connected with the ever growing Turkish danger; for, in the opinion of the Byzantine Emperor, this danger could be prevented only by the intercession of the Pope and the West-European sovereigns. The readiness of the Pope to favor the proposition of the Eastern monarch very often depended on international conditions in the West.

The Popes of the second half of the thirteenth century, in their Eastern policy, wished no repetition of the Fourth Crusade, which had failed to solve the extremely important problem of the Greek schism, and merely served to postpone the other important question of a crusade to the Holy Land. Now it seemed desirable to the Popes to achieve a peaceful union with the Greeks, which would put an end to the old schism and give grounds to hope for the liberation of Jerusalem. The recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks in 1261 was a heavy blow to the Pope. Papal appeals to save what the Latins had accomplished in the East were sent to many sovereigns. But the papal attitude depended upon affairs in Italy: the Popes, for example, did not wish to act with the Hohenstaufen Manfred, whom they hated. Yet when Manfred's power in southern Italy was destroyed by Charles of Anjou, though the latter had been invited by the Pope, his aggressive policy against Byzantium found no favor with the Papacy. The Popes realized that the power of Charles, increased by the conquest of Byzantium, would be hardly less dangerous to the world position of the Papacy than the Hohenstaufen sway in Byzantium.