Professor A. van Millingen, inv.
Emery Walker sc.]

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, A.D. 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 f