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 five feet in breadth, separated by an interval of thirty-two feet, and strengthened at numerous points by towers covered with a facing of lead. Approach to the outer wall was cut off by a wide and deep fosse. The inner wall was not in a thoroughly sound condition. It had been neglected, and what was worse, money intended for its repair had been misappropriated by the officials who had charge of the business. It might, it would seem, have been made an almost insuperable barrier against any enemy in the world. As it was, the walls were barely equal to sustaining the weight of the heavier pieces of ordnance which ought to have been mounted on them. Here was plain evidence of a neglect and apathy at such a time to the last degree base and criminal.

Had, however, the fortifications been perfect, there were not men in the city to garrison them. At the period of the Latin conquest the population was perhaps half a million; now it had dwindled down to a hundred thousand, and of those certainly not more than seven or eight thousand could have passed as able-bodied soldiers. The two last centuries had been centuries of a miserable decline in all respects, and the latter half of the fourteenth century in particular had been a time of very rapid decay. Of this the Greeks themselves were distinctly conscious, and, as is the way with declining nations, they adopted foreign fashions, and borrowed the manners of Italians, Genoese, Venetians, and even of Turks. What remnant of empire they still possessed was for the most part occupied by a thin and poverty