Such then, was the destiny that scattered the bones of those exiled princes in Tuscany, Cornwall, London, Barbados, Wapping, and Corunna; a strange and rather inappropriate story. And rather sad. For nothing, after all, could be more remote in distance, or in feeling more alien to this little coral island, than the waters of the Golden Horn: waters that once reflected the vanished palace of Blachernae, the home of the purple-born; or the cypresses of Mystra, whose Byzantine parapets look down from the Taygetus towards the plain of Sparta and the wide valley where the Eurotas meanders through the olive groves of Lacedaemon to the mountains of the Peloponnese.