Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/46

 28 THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. securit}' for life and property makes the people careless about producing more than is necessary for the supply of their scanty needs. Famine, in some districts, recurs periodical!}^, while there is abundance at no great distance. Everywhere the peo- ple are poverty-stricken and wretched. Large tracts of coun- try which were once thickly inhabited are now so feverish that they have been altogether abandoned. Cities likeEphesus, which were populous and contained a highly civilized com- munity, are absolutely and literally abandoned, or, like Kicasa, contain only a hundredth part of their former population, while the yellow faces and hollow cheeks of the unfortunate in- habitants show the continual presence of the devastating fever which Nature imposes as the penalty for allowing a city to fall away from civilization. But Asia Minor, at the time of the invasion of the Seljuk Turks, was a country full of cities and towns in the midst of flourishing provinces. Its mines, nearly all of which have gone to ruin, were producing large sums for the government and private individuals, and were making the byzants of the New Rome the most important medium of circulation even in Western Europe. Its rich soil brought forth a large supply of grain for expoi't to the capital. Every- where there were signs of a local life and local civilization which had retained the features which Greek cultivation had stamped upon it. Asia Minor has, as yet, been hardly ex- plored by the arch geologist, but the hasty examination of a number of travellers gives evidence of a widespread pros- perity in times not very remote. Out of the usual tracks taken by travellers in the interior of Asia Minor lie many ruins of what have evidently been important cities, the former names of which no traveller has yet been able to identify, and this although the labors of several modern travellers, from Millingen to Mr. Ramsay, have identified a great number of almost forgotten cities. So far as one can judge from the evidence of modern and Us former uicdiasval travellers and of Byzantine historians, conditiou. ^gj,j^ Minor, at the time of the Seljuk invasion of Alparslan, was thickly occupied by races who were industrious, intelligent, and civilized — races with a certain mixture of Greek