enemy who, in 1453, resisted the Sultan's attack upon the city;
secondly, because the inscription over the doorway leading to the
chamber expressly declares the chamber to be the resting-place of
Christ's apostles. Hence Mr. Siderides concludes that if the tradition
before us has any value, the tomb of the last Byzantine emperor was
placed in the chamber in the north-eastern pier, and finds confirmation
of that view in the absence of any respect for the remains deposited
there.

To enter into a minute criticism of this tradition and of the arguments
urged in its support would carry us far beyond our scope. Nor does such
criticism seem necessary. The fact that the last Constantine was buried
with royal honours affords no proof whatever that he was laid to rest in
the church of the Holy Apostles. If he was ever buried in S. Theodosia,
he may have been buried there from the first. The lateness of the date
when the tradition became public makes the whole story it tells
untrustworthy. Before a statement published in the early part of the
nineteenth century in regard to the interment of the last Byzantine
emperor can have any value, it must be shown to rest on information
furnished nearer the time at which the alleged event occurred. No
information of that kind has been produced. On the contrary, the only
contemporary historian of the siege of 1453 who refers to the site of
the emperor's grave informs us that the head of the last Constantine was
interred in S. Sophia, and his mutilated body in Galata.[289] The
patriarchal authorities of the sixteenth century, as Mr. Siderides
admits, while professing to point out the exact spot where Constantine
Palaeologus fell, were ignorant of the place where he was buried. In his
work on the mosques of the city, written in 1620, Evlia Effendi not only
knows nothing of the tradition we are considering, but says expressly
that the emperor was buried elsewhere--in the church of the monastery of
S. Mary Peribleptos, known by the Turks as Soulou Monastir, in the
quarter of Psamathia. In 1852 a story prevailed that the grave of the
last Constantine was in the quarter of Vefa Meidan.[290] From all these
discrepancies it is evident that in the confusion attending the Turkish
capture of the city, the real site of the imperial grave was soon
forgotten, and that all subsequent indications of its position are mere
conjectures, the offspring of the propensity to find in nameless graves
local habitat