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 APPENDIX II 439 of the fight. 1 His letter is an official report addressed to the pope within three months after the event, and therefore while its details were fresh in his memory and not like the account of Ducas, who was not present at the siege and only wrote years afterwards. His testimony, if he is to be believed — and I know no reason why he should even be doubted — is decisive. ' The King of the Trojans ' (as he calls the Turks throughout) looked on from Pera hill. 2 Le Beau, who took the view which I adopt, relied no doubt upon Leonard's narrative in describing the battle. Dr. Mordtmann remarks upon Le Beau's statement that no one standing upon the hillside at Pera could see a fight at sea beyond Seraglio Point. The observation is correct, and my deduction is that, when the ships were first attacked, they were abreast of Seraglio Point and not beyond or behind it. Dr. Mordtmann's is that the sultan could not have been at Pera, and this notwithstanding that the archbishop says that he was there and implies that he saw him there. The archbishop further mentioned that when the sultan ' blasphemed,' as he rode into the water and witnessed the loss his men were suffering, it was from a hill. 3 But the archbishop does not leave his readers in doubt as to what hill he means. A few sentences later in his narrative we are told that the sultan had concluded that he would be able from the eastern shore of the Galata hill either to sink the ships with his stone cannon-balls, or at least drive them back from the chain. 4 The rest of the passage shows unmistakably that the sultan, in Leonard's belief, was on the shore outside the Galata walls : that is, exactly where a spectator might be supposed to be who, having come from Diplo- kionion, wanted to see the most of a fight in or near the mouth of the Horn. Unless, therefore, within a short period after the capture of the city, the archbishop had become hopelessly muddled as to what he himself saw, we must conclude that the fight did not take place off Zeitin Bournou but in or near the mouth of the Golden Horn. Pusculus, another spectator, says the ships entered the Bosporus and that the wind dropped while they were under the walls of the Acropolis. The account given by this writer is clear and precise. He was in the city and relates what he witnessed, and although he wrote his poem some years afterwards, when safe 1 ' Intuentibus nobis,' p. 90. 2 4 Teucrorum rex ex colle Perensi proeonspicit,' p. 90. It must be remembered that all across the Horn was Pera, and that Galata is properly Galata of Pera. 3 ' Eex qui ex colle circumspicit,' p. 90. 4 ' Cogitavit itaque ex colle Galatae Orientali plaga vel eas lapidibus machinarum obruere vel a cathena repellere,' p. 91.