NOTE.

Two or three additional passages which bear upon the question under discussion may be noticed, notwithstanding their vagueness.

The statement of Phrantzes (p. 252), among others, that in the siege of 1453 the charge of the palace and all about it was entrusted to Minotto, the Baillus of the Venetian colony, might be employed in favour of the view that the “turres Avenides” which Leonard of Scio associates with the Xylo Porta, and assigns to Jerome and Leonardus de Langasco, could not be the towers S and N, but the towers of the Heraclian Wall. For the towers S and N, being attached to the Palace of Blachernæ, would fall under the care of Minotto. There is force in the argument. But it is weakened by statements of Pusculus (iv. 173) and Zorzo Dolfin (s. 55), which imply that the palace defended by Minotto was the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus. For both of these writers place the Gate of the Palace (see above, p. 47) between the Gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapoussi) and the Gate of the Kaligaria (Egri Kapou), and Pusculus describes the palace concerned as “Regia celsa,” an apt description of a building seated, like Tekfour Serai, upon the walls.

The references made to the Tower of Anemas, though not under its name, by the Spanish ambassador Clavijo, who visited the Byzantine Court in 1403, should not be overlooked (see Constantinople, ses Sanctuaires et ses Reliques, translated into French by Ph. Bruun, Odessa). Speaking of the Church of Blachernæ (p. 15), he describes it as “située dans la ville près d’un châteaufort, servant de demeure aux empereurs; ce fort a été démoli par un empereur, parce qu’il y avait été enfermé par son fils.” The fact that Clavijo identifies the Church of Blachernæ by its vicinity to the Tower of Anemas may be pressed into the service of the opinion that the tower in question stood in the Wall of Heraclius. For there is no more appropriate way of indicating the situation of that church than by saying that it stands a little to the rear of the Heraclian Wall. So appropriate is that mode of identification, that the Patriarch Constantius has recourse to it when, conversely, he indicates the situation of the Tower of Anemas (which he considered to be the southernmost Heraclian tower): “The Tower of Anemas still exists,” he says. “On its side facing the Holy Well of Blachernæ it has a large window, with a smaller one above” (see above, p. 150). But, unfortunately, to describe one building as “near” another is often the most tantalizing aid to its discovery that can be offered. The towers S and N cannot be said to be far from the Church of Blachernæ. Perhaps some injury to one of the Heraclian towers might explain the statement of Clavijo, that the Tower of Anemas had been destroyed; but could he have mistaken the citadel formed by the Walls of Heraclius and Leo for an Imperial residence? Such language suggests rather the towers S and N.

Again, the declaration of the Spanish envoy that the tower (“une prison très profonde et obscure”) had been demolished by the Emperor John VI. Palæologus (“L’empereur s’empressa de démolir la tour où il avait été enferme,” pp. 19, 20) might seem to imply that the tower has disappeared, and thus to relieve us from all the labour involved in the effort to identify it. But the statement of Leonard of Scio that the “turres Avenides” were repaired by Cardinal Isidore (“impensis cardinalis reparatas”), while it confirms the declaration of Clavijo to some extent, is opposed to the idea of the total destruction and disappearance of the famous prison-tower.

Or, the statement that the Tower of Anemas was demolished, when combined with the statement that it was repaired, might seem to open a way out of the difficulties involved in regarding the tower S as the Tower of Anemas, although more recent than the tower N. May not the tower S be, in its present form, a reconstruction, after the reign of Isaac Angelus, of a tower originally older than that emperor’s day, and be thus at once more ancient and more modern than the tower N? But this solution of the puzzle cannot be allowed; there is the fatal objection that the common wall II belonged first to the tower N.

Finally, in the Venetian account of the attempt made by Carlo Zen to liberate John VI. Palæologus from the Tower of Anemas, Zen is represented as reaching the foot of the tower in a boat, and clambering up to the window of the prison by means of a rope. This would exclude the claim of a Heraclian tower to be the Tower of Anemas, for that wall could not be reached by boat. One might approach the towers S and N in that way, if the moat before Leo’s Wall extended from the Golden Horn to the Wall of Manuel Comnenus, and was full of water. But this is an extremely improbable supposition, when we hear nothing of the sort in the history of the attack upon this side of the city by the Crusaders in 1203, notwithstanding the minute description of the territory from the pen of Nicetas Choniates and other historians of that time. Nor is such a thing mentioned in the history of the last siege, when the moat before the Wall of Leo was reconstructed. The whole story of Carlo Zen’s efforts to deliver John Palæologus savours too much of romance to have any topographical value. The story may be read in Le Beau’s Histoire du Bas-Empire, vol. xii. pp. 174-179.