Page:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu/17

  A graceful granite column, still erect on the slope above the head of the promontory, commemorated the victory of Claudius Gothicus over the Goths at Nissa, 269. All this furniture of Byzantium was appropriated for the use of the new capital.

According to Zosimus, the line of the landward walls erected by Constantine to defend New Rome was drawn at a distance of nearly 2 m. (15 stadia) to the west of the limits of the old town. It therefore ran across the promontory from the vicinity of Un Kapan Kapusi (Porta Platea), at the Stamboul head of the Inner Bridge, to the neighbourhood of Daud Pasha Kapusi (Porta S. Aemiliani), on the Marmora, and thus added the 3rd and 4th hills and portions of the 5th and 7th hills to the territory of Byzantium. We have two indications of the course of these walls on the 7th hill. One is found in the name Isa Kapusi (the Gate of Jesus) attached to a mosque, formerly a Christian church, situated above the quarter of Psamatia. It perpetuates the memory of the beautiful gateway which formed the triumphal entrance into the city of Constantine, and which survived the original bounds of the new capital as late as 1508, when it was overthrown by an earthquake. The other indication is the name Alti Mermer (the six columns) given to a quarter in the same neighbourhood. The name is an ignorant translation of Exakionion, the corrupt form of the designation Exokionion, which belonged in Byzantine days to that quarter because marked by a column outside the city limits. Hence the Arians, upon their expulsion from the city by Theodosius I., were allowed to hold their religious services in the Exokionion, seeing that it was an extra-mural district. This explains the fact that Arians are sometimes styled Exokionitae by ecclesiastical historians. The Constantinian line of fortifications, therefore, ran a little to the east of the quarter of Alti Mermer. In addition to the territory enclosed within the limits just described, the suburb of Sycae or Galata, on the opposite side of the Golden Horn, and the suburb of Blachernae, on the 6th hill, were regarded as parts of the city, but stood within their own fortifications. It was to the ramparts of Constantine that the city owed its deliverance when attacked by the Goths, after the terrible defeat of Valens at Adrianople, 378.

In the opinion of his courtiers, the bounds assigned to New Rome by Constantine seemed, it is said, too wide, but after some eighty years they proved too narrow for the population that had gathered within the city. The barbarians had meantime also grown more formidable, and this made it necessary to have stronger fortifications for the capital. Accordingly, in 413, in the reign of Theodosius II., Anthemius, then praetorian prefect of the East and regent, enlarged and refortified the city by the erection of the wall which forms the innermost line of defence in the bulwarks whose picturesque ruins now stretch from the Sea of Marmora, on the south of Yedi Kuléh (the seven towers), northwards to the old Byzantine palace of the Porphyrogenitus (Tekfour Serai), above the quarter of Egri Kapu. There the new works joined the walls of the suburb of Blachernae, and thus 