Byzantine Churches in Constantinople

fury of the intruders. The soldiers of Xenophon had, however, cut off all access to the fortress from within the city, so that Anaxibius was compelled to reach it by taking a fishing-boat in the harbour, and rowing round the head of the promontory to the side of the city opposite Chalcedon. From that point also he sent to Chalcedon for reinforcements.¹ These movements imply that the Acropolis was near the eastern end of the promontory.

In further support of this conclusion, it may be added that during the excavations made in 1871 for the construction of the Roumelian railroad, an ancient wall was unearthed at a short distance south of Seraglio Point. It ran from east to west, and was built of blocks measuring, in some cases, 7 feet in length, 3 feet 9 inches in width, and over 2 feet in thickness.² Judging from its position and character, the wall formed part of the fortifications around the Acropolis.

The second circuit of walls around Byzantium is that described by the Anonymus of the eleventh century and his follower Codinus.³ Starting from the Tower of the Acropolis at the apex of the promontory, the wall proceeded along the Golden Horn as far west as the Tower of Eugenius, which must have stood beside the gate of that name—the modern Yali Kiosk Kapoussi.⁴ There the wall left the shore and made for the Strategion and

¹ Anabasis, vii. c. I.
² Paspates, Byzantine Studies, p. 103. Mordtmann, Topographical Sketch of Constantinople, p. 5. All references to these writers, unless otherwise stated, are to the works here mentioned.
³ Lib. i. p. 2; Codinus, pp. 24, 25.

“The wall began, as it does even now, at Byzantium from the Tower of the Acropolis, and passed through to the Tower of Eugenius, and ascended as far as the Strategion, and went to the Baths of Achilles. The arch there, which is called that of Urbicius, was a land-gate of the Byzantines; and the wall ascended to the Chalcoprateia as far as the so-called Milion; there was also a land-gate of the Byzantines there; and it passed through to the braided columns of the Tzoucalarion, and descended to the Topoi, and bent back again through the Mangana and the Arcadianai to the Acropolis.”
⁴ See below, p. 227.