192 DESTEUCTION OF THE GREEK EMPIRE the time of the Turkish occupation populous and flourish- ing. It now contains a hundred miserable houses within its still standing walls. Hierapolis and Laodicea are heaps of uninhabited ruins. A scholarly English traveller remarks that his search has been in vain for the sites of many cities once well known, and that he met ruins of many cities which he was unable to identify. 1 The same story of depopulation and of destruction was and is told by the condition of the Balkan peninsula. The observant traveller La Brocquiere, who made his journey through Asia Minor to Constantinople and thence to Budapest, noted that desolation was every- where. In the district between the capital and Adrianople he adds that ' the country is completely ruined, has but poor villages, and, though good and well watered, is thinly peopled.' He found Chorlou destroyed by the Turks.' He visited Trajanopolis and describes it as once ' very large, but now nothing is seen but ruins with a few inhabitants.' He found Vyra, to whose church three hundred canons had been formerly attached, a poor place with the choir of the church only remaining and used as a Turkish mosque. 2 All contemporaries bear witness to the depopulation and ruin of the country. From pestilence and the results of the Latin conquest it might have recovered, but when to these disasters was added that of conquest by successive hordes of barbarians whose work was always destructive, its ruin was complete. Population it is impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate of of Constan- . *■ tinopieon the population of the city on the accession of the last ofCon 1 - 011 Constantine. La Brocquiere, in 1433, describes Constan- stantme. tinople as formed of separate parts and containing open spaces of a greater extent than those built on. 3 This is one of many intimations that the population had largely decreased. 4 Some of the nobles as well as the common 1 Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, by Sir Charles Fellows. Professor Ramsay has also the same story to tell, though his own success in identifying lost cities has been exceptionally great. 2 La Brocquiere, 340-7. * Ibid. 337. 4 Compare this with Villehardouin's statement that in 1204 Constantinople had ten times as many people as there were in Paris.
