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EVIDENCE OF DEVASTATION 191 It may safely be assumed that the Turks, who lived in the open air, and in the country rather than in towns, suffered less than the Christians. Though they are reported to have lost severely, the process of depopulation scarcely told against them. The places of those who died were taken by the ever-crowding press of immigrants flocking westward. The successors of the Greeks who perished were not Christians but Turks. In other words, while the Christians died out of the land, there were always at hand Turkish nomads to take their place. It is when contemplating the devastation produced by successive attacks of disease, one of which was sufficient to kill half the population of England, when remembering the weakening of the empire by the Latin occupation and the subsequent attempts to recapture the city, and when re- cognising that the empire was the bulwark against a great westward movement of the central Asiatic races which forced forward the Turk to find new pastures in Christian lands, that we can understand how the diminution of the Empire and of its population and its ultimate downfall came to be inevitable. Those who have travelled most in the Balkan peninsula Desolation and in Asia Minor recognise most completely how densely Softest populated and flourishing these countries once were, and how completely they have become a desolation. Everywhere the traveller is even now surprised at the sight of deserted and fertile plains and of ruined cities, of some of which the very names have been forgotten. From Baalbek to Nicomedia the ancient roads pass through or near places whose names recall populous and civilised towns which are but the ghastly shadows of their former prosperity. Ephesus, which when visited by Sir John Maundeville in 1322, after it had been captured by the Turks, was still ' a fair city,' is now absolutely deserted. Nicaea, the city which has given its name to the Creed of Christendom, was also at substance, * The city was almost in the hands of my father, and he would certainly have taken it by assault, if those of his own family in whom he had confidence had not worked secretly against him.' Crit. xxv.