Page:Constantinople by Brodribb.djvu/53

 Rome's great safeguards against the barbarian tribes of Asia and Pontus. Against these Byzantium was both a defence and a place of refuge. This fact is noted by the historian who has described the siege and fall of the city, and it seems to have much impressed him. "I have seen," he says, "those walls in their ruined state, captured and destroyed, one would have thought, by others than Romans; and I had gazed on them when they were still standing." It was a cruel and disastrous work which the besiegers had wrought on the fair city.

After an interval of about a century, we again come to a period which Gibbon describes as one of civil war and confusion. Diocletian's well-meant attempt to organize the administration of an empire, which new forces beyond all human control were more and more tending to dissolve, ended, at the beginning of the fourth century, in the simultaneous rule, or rather misrule, of six emperors. The Goths meanwhile had been menacing the Roman frontiers, and the Euxine, the Bosporus, and the Ægean had felt the presence of their multitudinous war-ships. The Emperor Decius with his whole army had perished by their hands somewhere near the Balkan range in 251 A.D. Soon afterwards they plundered some of the chief cities in the north-west of Asia Minor, and even sacked Chalcedon. The Byzantines must have trembled, although by this time their fortifications may well have been strongly rebuilt. For awhile the barbarians, after having threatened Byzantium and advanced