Notwithstanding the rivalry of the Venetians, who in 1296 even seized upon Galata, or Pera as the colony was usually called by the Latins, and their frequent quarrels with the Greeks, the commercial prosperity of the Genoese settlement went on increasing until about the middle of the 14th century, when the Customs dues amounted to 200,000 hyperperes, those at Constantinople scarcely reaching the sum of 30,000 hyperperes (_Niceph. Greg._, ii, 842). This “State within a State”, no doubt excited the cupidity of the Turks after their assumption of power in Europe, and the removal of the sultan’s residence to Adrianople; but the Genoese succeeded for a time in averting the threatening danger by making numerous concessions, as appears by the treaty of commerce concluded by them in 1387 with Murad I., whose successor, Bajazet, lay siege to Constantinople. This monarch, however, was constrained to turn his arms against Timour, and the capital was spared the horrors of a longer siege. The battle of Angora, so fatal to the Ottoman power, delayed for a few decades only the fall of the Greek Empire and the disappearance of the Genoese.—BRUUN.
(2.) “caused two seas to flow into each other.”—“La formation et l’origine du Bosphore de Thrace,” says Vivien de Saint-Martin (_Desc. de l’A. M._, ii, 469), “ont donné lieu, chez les anciens comme chez les modernes, aux hypothèses les plus aventureuses, jeux hardis de l’imagination basés sur de vieilles traditions de convulsions et de cataclysmes; les observations de la géologie moderne sont venues anéantir ces systèmes d’époques moins rigoureuses, en démontrant que les terrains de nature différente qui constituent les deux côtés du détroit, n’ont jamais pu être produit par un déchirement, et qu’il existe de toute nécessité depuis l’origine même des choses.” Other authors, including some philologists (Menn, in _Jahresbericht über d. Gymn. u. d. Realschule zu Neuss_, 1854, 18), think otherwise, so that we need not be surprised if the sages at Constantinople also differed in opinion, or that the people there should have included the cutting of the strait among the exploits of Alexander.—BRUUN.
(3.) “Troya, on a fine plain, and one can still see where the city stood.”—The ruins of the city of Priam did not exist in Schiltberger’s time any more than they do now; but in the absence of the material vestiges that Lechevalier and other travellers, his successors, believed they found beneath the surface of the earth, there is Homer’s admirable description, precise as that of the most accurate geographer, and which restores to us the primitive map of the Trojan plain. I am here under the necessity of quoting at some length, a passage from Vivien de Saint-Martin’s _Description de l’Asie Mineur_, 489:—“Dès que l’on accepte le plateau de Bounar-Bachi” (a name, says this author, derived from two sources of the Scamander) “comme l’emplacement de la Troie homérique, les indications circonstanciées et si nombreuses que fournit le Poète sur les localités environnantes, viennent s’adapter d’elles-mêmes an terrain actuel.”