ISLAND OF PATMOS. 51 
EMPEROR ALEXIUS'. Nothing could be more CHAP. 
beautiful. As a singular circumstance, it may v - y . . 
also be mentioned, that we saw upon the same 
shelf, and by .the side of this, a Manuscript 
of the writings of Gregorys greatest admirer, 
ERASMUS. 
The Capudan Pashas letter enabled us to order 
bread from the island for our voyage; and this 
the monks promised to see provided, The 
inhabitants import wheat from the Black Sea; 
and they have twelve small vessels engaged in 
commerce, with which they trade to different 
ports in the Euxine and to the Adriatic, bringing 
corn for their own use, and also carrying it as 
far as Ancona in Italy. In Tournefort's time, there 
were hardly three hundred men upon the island, 
and at least twenty women to one man. The 
population remains nearly the same as it was 
(S) This MS. is noticed in the Patmos Catalogue (See the beginning of 
thisvolume,p. 21.); and the same circumstance is related of the hand- writing 
of the Emperor Alexius : it is there called, in modern Greek, " A work 
*f Gregory the Theologian, which is in the hand-writing of the Emperor 
Alexius Comnenus ; his own hand-writing:" Tftiyaflov rav OuXayau '? 
/S(A./r, T ocftTot titeci lyptx^ifin TOV fioc,n).iati 'AX/i rov Kifivntov <rw iai/tv 
yfi^ifut. There were, however, two Cn/ligrapliists of this name Alexius ; 
the one wrote the Lives of the Saints in 1292; the other, a MS. of 
Hippocrates in the fourteenth century. See Montfaucon, Pal. Gr. lib. i. 
p. 94. Par. 1708. 
