The inner city area had been completely abandoned and all that was left were monasteries surrounded by vineyards, vegetable gardens and small woods. Thus the Arab traveller Ebulfidâ, who visited the city at the beginning of the 14th century, stated that he saw ploughed fields, gardens and a number of ruined houses within the city. In 1403 Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo. who had paid a brief visit to Istanbul on his journey to Samarkand as an envoy to Timur, also stated that he saw fields, gardens and small groups of houses in the middle of the city. He added that the area around the Golden Horn was lively but that most of the large buildings in the city were in a state of ruin. The sad state of Istanbul during the last years of Byzantine rule is in no way surprising for the city's financial plight was such that the emperor cannes V, who had gone to Europe to seek financial aid for Byzantium, was detained by the Venetians in Italy in 1370 due to his inability to pay his travelling expenses. in spite of the fact that he had mortgaged some of the precious stones in his crown and what is now Bozcaada (Bozca Island) to do so.

He was only able to return to his homeland because his son Manuel had collected money from the inhabitants of Salonika to secure his release. And although the annual income of the Galata customs, which was in the hands of the Genoese, was 200,000 hyperpyra in the 14th century. the Istanbul customs of the Byzantines could only realise an income of 30,000 hyperpyra per year. The hlagios Makios church inside the city was demolished in 1390 so that its stones could be used to repair the city walls. Information about the ruined state of the city may be obtained from the chronicles of Cristoforo Buondelmonti who saw Istanbul in about 1420. The harbours on the Marmara coast were by then unusable, being totally silted up,and it was only the banks of the Golden Horn that were a lively centre of commerce. A number of buildings, including the Church of the Twelve Apostles,, were in a state of delapidation. Places that had previously been harbours were vineyards . The oldest picture showing Istanbul in its present state was thework of Buondelmonti; in it we see that apart from certain important buildings the inside of the city was empty save for windmills. The original of this picture of Istanbul, which is in Buondelmonti's book about the Aegean islands, has never been found. However.there are more than twenty copies of this work in European libraries containing more or less detailed reproductions of the picture. In a work entitled 'Weltchronik' (World History) published in Number 9 in 1493 there is another woodcut.Although this picture which is in a book (and the book is one of the first examples of printing) written by a doctor named Hartmann Schedel who possessed an extremely large library was executed after the conquest it is obvious that the original was the work of somebody who was familiar with Istanbul and that it dates from the Byzantine period before the Ottoman conquest, and that Schedel based his work on this original.

Byzantine vine trellises can be seen on the city gates and the area inside the city walls is depicted as being completely empty; even windmills can be seen in the Sehremini-capa district of the city, It can also be seen that certain parts of the Church of the Twelve Apostles, the city's second biggest church after Ayasofia. are without a roof. In any case the Frenchman Bertrandon de Ia Broquiere, who spent the winter of 1432-1433 in Istanbul. states that the open spaces far exceeded the built-up areas; this gives us an idea of the state of Istanbul shortly before the Ottoman conquest and confirms the accuracy of the engraving. Recent research leads us to believe that the population of Istanbul just before the conquest was somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000.

The Genoese, who had succeeded in obtaining a number of privileges during the reign of Manuel Komnenos (1143-1180) , began, albeit in small numbers, to settle in Galata in about 1160. In 1261 Mikhael, who wanted to regain Istanbul from its Latin conquerors, had obtained a fleet of warships from the Genoese in return for which he allowed them to settle anywhere they wished in the city. The terms of this agreement were set out in the Treaty of Nyphaion (Nif is now known as Kemalpasa). A second decree issued in 1267 guaranteed the Genoese the right to settle in Galata. In order to prevent the Genoese, who were the most expansionist of all of the Italians, from acquiring the land on a permanent basis the Byzantine emperor had had the walls of Galata demolished but in spite of this,Galata, which had become a city in its own right, was already being ruled from Genoa. In 1303 a new decree defining the boundaries of their franchise was issued.