"Their chief contribution consisted, it seems, of much-needed buttresses to support the western end of the building. [...] It was also, with reasonable certainty, the Latins who, finding no church bells in Hagia Sophia, erected a belfry supported by buttress-piers in the center of the west façade. That high rectangular tower has vanished, but according to eyewitness accounts, it was standing in the seventeenth century after the Turks had melted down its bells to make cannons."
