ntius, who is responsible for the
identification, may have relied upon some tradition in favour of the
view he has made current.[306]

NOTE

Tafferner, chaplain to the embassy from Leopold I. of Austria to the
Ottoman Court, speaking of the patriarchal church in his day (the
present patriarchal church of S. George in the Phanar quarter), says,
'Aedes haec in patriarchatum erecta est, postquam Sultan Mehemet
basilicam Petri et Pauli exceptam Graecis in moscheam defoedavit'
(_Caesarea legatio_, p. 89, Vien. 1668). Probably by the church of SS.
Peter and Paul he means this church of SS. Peter and Mark. If so, the
traditional name of the building is carried back to the seventeenth
century. The church of SS. Peter and Mark, it is true, never served as
a patriarchal church. That honour belonged to the church of S.
Demetrius of Kanabos, which is in the immediate vicinity, and has
always remained a Christian sanctuary. Tafferner seems to have
confused the two churches owing to their proximity to each other. Or
his language may mean that the patriarchal seat was removed from S.
Demetrius when SS. Peter and Paul was converted into a mosque, because
too near a building which had become a Moslem place of worship.

The church of SS. Peter and Mark was founded, it is said, by two
patricians of Constantinople, named Galbius and Candidus, in 458, early
in the reign of Leo I. (457-474). But the present building cannot be so
old. It is a fair question to ask whether it may not be the church of S.
Anastasia referred to in a chrysoboullon of John Palaeologus (1342), and
mentioned by the Russian pilgrim who visited Constantinople in the
fifteenth century (1424-53).[307]

The church of SS. Peter and Mark was erected as a shrine for the
supposed tunic of the Theotokos, a relic which played an important part
in the fortunes of Constantinople on several occasions, as 'the
palladium of the city and the chaser away of all diseases and warlike
foes.' As often happened in the acquisition of relics, the garment had
been secured by a pious fraud--a fact which only enhanced the merit of
the purloiners, and gave to the achievement the colour of a romantic
adventure. In the course of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Galbius
and Candidus discovered, in the house of a devout Hebrew lady who
entertained them, a small room fitted up like a chapel, fragrant with
incense, illuminated with lamps, and crowded with worsh