__________________
* A letter from Julian to Basil would subsequently be forged, in which the emperor expressed his admiration for the recipient.
* The reliability of this particular story, which was written two centuries after the events it describes, is hard to gauge. For what it is worth, a contemporaneous account makes no mention of the contest between the men of Poitiers and Tours.
* Assuming, that is, that the dome which in the tenth century was reported to have ‘glittered in the sun like a mountain of gold’ had already been gilded by the sixth century.