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194 DESTRUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIRE to slavery. The complete desolation of the city and the strenuous efforts made by the sultan to repeople it after the capture raise a strong presumption in favour of the existence of a comparatively small population at the time of the siege. Gibbon judged that ' in her last decay Constantinople was still peopled with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants,' forming his estimate mainly upon the declaration of the archbishop as to prisoners. I am myself disposed to think that this number is rather over- than under-estimated. Tak- ing the prisoners to be fifty thousand, and allowing for the escape of ten thousand persons and another ten thousand for old men and women who were not worth reducing to slavery, probably eighty thousand would be about right. Within the narrow limits of what had been possible, the citizens over whom the new emperor was called to rule had done their duty to the city itself. They had kept fourteen miles of walls the most formidable in Europe in good repair and they had preserved the wonderful aqueducts, the cis- terns, the great baths and churches. Its com- Commerce still continued to be the principal support of merce. ^ e inhabitants. This was now largely shared by the Genoese in Galata and by the Venetians who occupied a quarter in Constantinople itself. The familiarity of the Italian colonists with Western lands and their superiority in shipping, in which indeed at this time they led the world, enabled them to achieve a success in what was then long- voyage travelling which was denied to the Greeks ; but the latter collected merchandise from the Black Sea ports and from the Azof which was either sold to the Frank merchants in Constantinople or transhipped on board their vessels. Emperor It is difficult to realise what were the relations between the government and the governed during the two centuries before the last catastrophe. The empire was the continua- tor of the autocratic — or rather the aristocratic — form of government which had been derived from the elder Eome. Emperor and nobles governed the country. The nobles formed the senate. Like our own Privy Council, it met rarely and had ill-defined functions, but upon occasions of