Chapter XVII: The East Roman Empire

During the Middle Ages, Western statesmen and churchmen, Western thinkers and writers, took little note of the Eastern Empire which stubbornly held its ground at Constantinople down to ad 1453. Its claim to represent the ancient dominion of Rome was practically ignored. Its splendid efforts in the defence of civilization against the fierce tribes of the North, and the still more formidable Musulmans of the East, received slight recognition, and scarcely any support. Even in later times the part played by the people and rulers of New Rome was inadequately appreciated, and it is only in our own days that history has begun to atone for this long neglect.

The two imperial lines, which the revolt of Italy and the coronation of Charles the Great in ad 800 substituted for the one Roman Emperor whom Christian doctrine had required and continued to require, were, after that fateful year, always rivals and usually unfriendly rivals. But their direct relations either of negotiation or of armed hostility were infrequent. Each went its own way. Each had foes of its own to confront. Each affected the other much less than might have been expected, when it is remembered that each maintained its claim to be the heir of Rome, and to perpetuate the political and religious traditions of the early Christian Emperors. Yet few as the points of contact were, the history of the East Roman is a necessary complement to that of the West Roman Empire, for the course of events in each throws an instructive light upon the course of events in the other. As the divergences are worth noting, so too are the resemblances. Both Empires rested upon the memories of Rome. Both stood in a peculiar relation to the Christian Church. Both had to deal with the instreaming races of the North. But these conditions of life told differently upon the one and upon the other, and gave a different direction to their respective fortunes.

To sketch, even in outline, the long and chequered and romantic history of the Eastern Empire would be altogether outside the scope of this book. But from among the salient features that mark its annals I may single out for comment a few which specially serve to illustrate the parallel or divergent history of the West.

It has already been remarked (see p. 26 and p. 62, supra) that neither the extinction of the line of Emperors who reigned in the West down to ad 476, nor the establishment of a second imperial line at Old Rome by the coronation of Charles the Great in ad 800, was an event of critical significance in the history of the East Roman realm. By the event of ad 476 the Eastern monarch became the sole legal representative of Roman claims, claims still admitted in theory, to the lordship of the whole Western world. But the only practical result of this nominally enlarged authority was to induce, fifty years afterwards, Justinian’s reconquest of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, territories which added nothing to the effective strength of the Empire, and which were successively lost, Africa in the seventh, Sicily and Sardinia in the ninth, Italy partly in the eighth and partly in the eleventh century. By the event of ad 800 the right to represent Rome, carrying with it the headship of the whole Christian commonwealth, was withdrawn from the Eastern line, so far as the Roman Church and the Franks could withdraw it, so that such titular sovereignty, by this time shadowy, as still remained to the Roman Emperor over the world at large, became henceforth vested in those Western potentates, first Frankish, then Italian, ultimately German, who could obtain it from the hands of the Pope, or (in later days) by the election of the German princes. But this effort to transfer the claim to universal monarchy did not affect the legal rights of the Eastern sovereign in the countries which actually obeyed him, and affected but slightly the position he held towards the states that bordered on his own. Though he had lost Rome he continued to hold Southern Italy; nor did any of his nearer provinces in Thrace, or Greece, or Asia shew any signs of turning to his new Teutonic rivals. To the Westerns (other than the Southern Italians) he was already merely a name; so none of their peoples or cities, except Venice, thought of cleaving to him. To the Easterns he had been, and still remained, not only the national monarch of whom they were proud, but the legitimate heir of Old Rome; for the coronation of Charles in which the Pope, the citizens of Old Rome, and the Franks had joined, was in their eyes an outrageous usurpation. Thus the Eastern Empire was, for practical purposes, no more weakened by the incoming of Charles, and afterwards of Otto the Great, than it had been strengthened by the disappearance of Romulus Augustulus in ad 476. We may therefore cast our glance over its history as a whole, covering a thousand years from the accession of Arcadius in ad 395—the point at which the real political separation of East and West begins—to the taking of Constantinople by Mohammed the Second in ad 1453.

A long history! longer than that of any European monarchy, or indeed of any monarchy save those of China and Japan; and a history which amazes us by the power of recovery and rejuvenescence which this singular state displays. From the time of Justinian onwards, it had to support, against formidable enemies on either side, a veritable and unending struggle for life, longer and more perilous than the struggle which in earlier days Rome had for centuries maintained against the Samnites, against Carthage, and against the Italian allies.

On the north swarms of fierce savages poured down in succession upon it from the wilds of Scythia. First, about the beginning of the sixth century, came various Slavonic tribes. Then the Avars, established along the Theiss and the Middle Danube, 619 and 626. began a long series of desolating raids, and twice appeared before Constantinople. Then, early in the seventh century, the Bulgarians, a Finnish people, moved out of their old seats on the Volga and the Kama, occupied the region which now bears their name, laid waste and ultimately settled in the adjoining parts of Thrace (where they became blent with, and adopted the speech of the Slavic tribes), and threatened Constantinople itself. Further to the north-east, the Petchenegs, also a Finnic or Tatar race, having established themselves in the steppes of the Dnieper and the Don, frequently attacked the frontiers; and somewhat later, the Russians (perhaps led by chieftains of Scandinavian stock), descending the Dnieper in their light boats and crossing the Euxine, were twice repelled with difficulty from the walls of the capital. Of all these enemies the Bulgarians were the most dangerous because the nearest. The Emperor Basil II reduced them in the tenth century to nominal subjection, but they regained their freedom within less than a century, and continued to threaten the Empire until they fell before the rising power of the Ottoman Turks. While the greater part of Thrace had thus been overspread by the Bulgarians, the North-west provinces had passed to the Slavs, the power of whose leading kingdom culminated in the reign of the Servian Tsar Stephen Dushan in the thirteenth century. Thus, speaking broadly, it may be said that, from the middle of the sixth century onwards, the Empire was constantly at war with these Northern barbarians, and often seemed on the point of succumbing to their attacks.

Meantime it had to resist still more terrible foes advancing from the south. The first wave of Arab invasion tore away Syria and Egypt, rolled over Asia Minor, and carried a Musulman host to the shores of the Bosphorus (ad 673). After many long and fierce struggles the whole of Asia Minor was recovered, and in the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh century even Northern Syria (except Tyre and Damascus) and Armenia were reconquered by John Tzimiskes and Basil II. But in the middle of the eleventh the rise of the Seljukian Turks drove back the Romans from Syria, and by degrees forced them out of the eastern and central parts of Asia Minor. 1071. Armenia was lost for ever, and in the thirteenth century only a strip of country along the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora remained to Christianity. The ruin of Central and Southern Asia Minor, in earlier ages one of the most flourishing and populous regions of the world, dates from the devastating border wars in which Turks and Romans alternately harried it.

1204.Yet neither the Bulgarians, nor the Arabs, nor the Seljukian sultans inflicted so deadly a blow on the Empire as did those from whom enmity ought least of all to have been expected. The Normans, after winning South Italy, attacked the Eastern Roman territories in Epirus, and were with difficulty repelled by Manual Comnenus. In ad 1204 a powerful fleet of Latin Christians, French, German, and Venetian, setting out on the Fourth Crusade, turned aside from the professed aim of their expedition, besieged and took Constantinople, and set up a short-lived line of Latin Emperors there. 1204-1261. From this catastrophe the Empire never really recovered. After the fall of the Latin dynasty a vigorous prince of East Roman stock and Orthodox faith, already reigning at Nicaea, regained the throne, and his successors, ruling mere fragments of the old territory in Europe and Asia, held the throne till the Ottoman Turks, by that time masters of the whole of its dominions on the European continent, captured the city in 1453.

The record of these constant wars against two sets of enemies is a splendid record, for, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, the fortunes of the East Romans seemed often desperate. The admiration which their resistance excites becomes even greater when we reflect that the Empire had no natural frontiers easily defensible in war, and that it was frequently troubled by the struggles of rival aspirants for the crown. The causes of the strength it shewed for defence, and the source of the vitality which enabled it so often to recover from wounds apparently deadly, deserve to be examined.

High among those causes is to be placed the perpetuation of the name and traditions of the ancient Roman power. The thought that they were Romans, the heirs and representatives of the great ruling race which had brought the whole world under its sway, was the lifespring of this strangely mixed people, in whose veins there flowed scarcely any Italian blood, and very few of whom could speak the Roman tongue. The Western peoples called them Greeks, as modern Europe has been wont to do. But as they were not Greeks in race, for the descendants of the Greek colonies on the Aegean and the Propontis can have contributed but a slight infusion of Greek blood, so neither, though their art and letters were Hellenistic, did they shew many of the distinctive qualities which had marked the Greeks of the classical ages. Still less were they Romans by stock or by character, though they called themselves, and were called throughout the East, by that title, perpetuated in the names Roum and Roumelia given to their territories, and the name Romaic used to describe their language. But the old name and the old institutions, changed indeed in the course of ages, but changed by no sudden break, gave them a sense of superiority over all other peoples, a pride and self-confidence which supported them in many a dark hour. This made them a nation, and indeed a nation which, though local diversities and local forms of speech survived, was for defensive purposes closely welded together. Though we hear of many insurrections in the capital, many contests for the crown between rival claimants, there is scarcely ever a racial or provincial revolt, seldom any attempt of a magnate to set himself up as ruler of an independent realm. The Empire stood one and indivisible against all its foes. This sentiment of an imperial nationality, no longer universal, but national in the strictest sense, because bound into one not only by political ties, but also by those of language, ideas, and manners, became further intensified by the existence of one great centre of population. Constantinople gave strength to the Empire, through its incomparable position, all but impregnable to attack. It was an admirable centre for naval operations, since it touched both the Mediterranean and the Euxine, and could use the sea for expeditions to the distant points that were threatened. It was also a wonderful reservoir of national energy. Though the East Roman armies were mainly composed of the barbarian or semi-barbarian subjects who dwelt in the frontier provinces, the teeming population and the riches of the city intensified the spirit and pride of the whole people, and gave the Empire a heart whose pulsations were felt to the furthest extremities. In the tenth century, before the rise of the great Italian republics, Constantinople stood practically alone in the Christian world as a centre of commerce, wealth, and splendour, with a thousand inhabitants for every hundred that could be found in Old Rome or in the largest cities of Germany or Gaul. And Constantinople was also the centre of a well ordered administration such as existed nowhere else in the world. That highly organized civil service which ancient Rome had built up from the days of Julius Caesar to those of Diocletian had been preserved in full efficiency down into the twelfth century, in the end of and after which the signs of decay became more evident. It powerfully contributed to hold the provinces together, to provide the government, always pressed by costly wars, with a revenue, and to maintain the public order and public confidence which enable industry and commerce to flourish. One may almost say that, as Constantinople was the heart, so the civil service supplied the nerves and sinews of the monarchy. In this respect the East Roman Empire stood contrasted with its Romano-Germanic sister. Charles the Great attempted to govern his wide dominions by imperial officers sent forth to carry out his orders and correct and control the action of the local magnates. But he had nothing that could be called an administrative system. Neither had Otto the Great or his Saxon, Franconian, or Swabian successors. The only permanent organization their realm possessed was the intricate and cumbrous machinery of feudalism, hardly better fitted for war than it was for advancement in the arts of peaceful life. And none of the Teutonic monarchs had a city which could be called in any true sense a capital. Least of all did they find such a centre in Rome, the most disaffected spot in their dominions.

As an efficient civil administration helped to maintain the internal prosperity of the Empire, and enabled it to bear the cost of war, so the excellence of its military arrangements gave it strength for defence. The army was skilfully organized and carefully drilled: it had a system of scientific tactics: it drew recruits from outside the Empire as well as from the more warlike of the races that dwelt within. The fleet, efficiently appointed and trained, remained for a long time, perhaps down to the twelfth century, superior to any hostile navy it had to encounter. And the Easterns had at their disposal an extremely important implement of warfare in that mysterious ‘Romaic’ or ‘Greek’ Fire or ‘Sea Fire’ invented by Kallinikus in the seventh century—a liquid which they cast upon the vessels of an enemy, and which burnt or exploded where it fell. It often secured to them a victory, or covered them in retreat.

The East Roman monarchy was a pure despotism. After the accession of Claudius Caesar, the third successor of Augustus, no one seems ever to have thought either of restoring the shattered republican constitution or of creating any monarchical constitution whatever, that is to say, any set of institutions designed to associate the people with the conduct of government, or to determine the succession to the throne, or to limit the authority of its occupant. In the ancient world monarchy had come to mean autocracy. For more than a thousand years the very idea of a regular constitution, in the Greek sense or old Roman sense, as well as in that mediaeval sense which re-emerged with the rise of the Italian republics in the twelfth century, seemed to have utterly vanished. It was assumed that the Emperor must be an irresponsible ruler. It was left to chance to determine who should be Emperor. A body called the Senate continued to exist, as it continued to exist at Old Rome, and it submissively recognized the person who had already made himself master of the city. But the crown was the price of the strongest. No body of persons had an effective legal right to choose its wearer. A palace intrigue, the favour of a queen, a rising in the streets, the caprice of an army returning from the field, threw it into the hands of some aspirant perhaps hitherto unknown: and he became at once a sort of God upon earth, sometimes entitled ‘Equal to the Apostles,’ approached with slavish prostrations, sole legislator and supreme judge, virtual master of the lives and property of all his subjects. The crimes by which he might have risen did not diminish the sanctity which his person received from the office. Despotism was of course tempered, as it must always be, by various environing influences, by the sentiment of the Church, by public opinion, sometimes expressing itself in sedition or insurrection, by the views and interests of the noble families of the capital, and (in later days) of the great land-holders in the rural districts. But these factors acted practically, not through any legal channels. Thus the Eastern Empire has only a dynastic, an ecclesiastical, and a military history. It has no constitutional history. The Teutonic Empire, which, though an autocracy in theory, was never a despotism in fact, had in all its phases some sort of constitution, and what might be called a kind of political life. At several moments it became the theatre for a conflict of great principles. But the Eastern Empire had no political life whatever. In it no strife of principles arose. It was always substantially the same institution, which no one thought of changing—a monarchy not only above law but in so far outside law as that law had nothing to do with determining the person on whom it descended. In a state constantly at war this concentration of power in one hand had some advantages; just as the absence of regular rules of succession had the merit of giving to energy and ambition opportunities for displacing the incapable. Men of force came more readily to the top than they do in hereditary monarchies. There was of course a tendency for the throne to become settled in a family, for an Emperor usually tried to secure the succession for his son or some other relative either by publicly destining him for power, or by associating him as co-Emperor during his own life. Sometimes a woman of character was able to bestow the crown on successive husbands, who got in this way (perhaps by the aid of murder) a sort of title by affinity. But when the vigour of a reigning stock began to die out, the stock usually disappeared, and an upstart adventurer set up a new dynasty. Several times such a bold and strenuous man became the deliverer of the Empire from its foes. Heraclius, Leo the Isaurian, Basil the First, and the founder of the Comnenian line, were all men of conspicuous force and capacity. The advent of each marked a renewal of the aggressive power of the State.

But of all the causes which prolonged the existence of the Eastern Empire the most potent was its association, one might say its identification, with the Orthodox Church. Religion had for a time been in the East a disruptive force. The theological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries had contributed to bring about the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Musulmans in the seventh century, for the Monophysites of those regions, hostile to the doctrine settled by the Council of Chalcedon, which was then dominant at Constantinople, offered only a feeble resistance to the invader. So in later days the diffusion of the so-called heresies of the Bogomiles or Paulicians weakened the loyalty of the North-western provinces. But the Orthodox faith, once it had been defined and determined by the first six Councils, fixed itself deep in the people of the capital and of the districts which formed the solid nucleus of the Empire, and presently grew into a bond of incalculable strength. Side by side with the pride in the Roman name, it created a national feeling far more intense than the sentiment of common subjection to a world-embracing power which had sprung up and become a unifying force under the Antonines and their successors. Some historians of the eighteenth century thought that Christianity hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Rather may it be said that Christianity saved the Roman Empire. As it was the sense of one faith binding men into one commonwealth of the faithful that kept alive the imperial idea in the West, and enabled Charles and Otto to set up the ancient image on a new Teutonic pedestal, so it was the sense that they were the people chosen of God and Christ to defend that faith, a sense constantly stimulated by strife with heathen on the north and Musulmans on the south, that gave hope, courage, and unity to the East Romans all through the Dark and Middle Ages. Well would it have been for them if in the last fatal years and months they could have so far abated their devotion to the minutiae of the Orthodox creed and to the claims of their own spiritual chief as to have bought by prompter, franker, and fuller concessions the help of the Pope and of Latin arms.

When we pass to consider the points in which the Eastern Empire may profitably be compared with that of its Western sister, three will be found to deserve special examination: the relations of each power to the Northern invaders, its relations to the Church, its relations to the traditions and institutions of ancient Rome.

As from the fourth century onwards it was the mission and the glory of the Latin Church to convert and civilize the invading races of the North who descended upon the Western provinces, so too did the Eastern Church and Empire, when they found, somewhat later, swarms of Slav and Bulgarian heathen settling on their borders, begin after a time to impart their culture to these formidable neighbours. Both divisions of the Christian world had the same task: both in a manner fulfilled it. Yet there are striking differences. The West had to deal chiefly with Teutonic peoples, most of them already partially Christianized (though many were at first Arians), and most of them well advanced beyond mere barbarism. Much of its work was done before the revolt of North Italy in the eighth century severed East and West. The East received the attacks of Slavonic and Finnish tribes, all heathen, all rude and fierce, and therewithal, if not inferior in natural intelligence, yet in a far lower stage of culture. When, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Lombards settled in the Roman provinces the imperial power was dying. These intruding settlers scarcely deemed themselves its enemies; and most of them soon began to cherish such of its institutions as survived, and to bow themselves to the teachings of the Latin Church. They became easily blent with the Roman provincials. The Franks who stood out as the leading race presently became the defenders of the Popedom, took up the traditions of the old Empire, accepted the transference of its crown to their own sovereign, and kept it thenceforth in Teutonic hands. The Roman sceptre became their sceptre, and there remained no sense of antagonism between the children of the conquered and those of the conquerors. But in the East, though the Slavs who settled in Macedonia, Illyria, and Greece during the seventh and eighth centuries became Graecized and subjects, if somewhat unruly subjects, of the Emperor, the later Slavonic intruders, and still more the Finnish Bulgarians, came as savage pagan plunderers, destroyed such Roman civilization as they found and were thenceforth (with a few intervals of peace) deadly enemies. The Empire maintained a continual conflict with them. They were ultimately converted (the Bulgarians in ad 864, the Servians about the same time), and with their new faith they received the use of letters, the rudiments of law, and a certain measure of culture. Somewhat later, the same change passed upon the Russians, who, standing further away, came into less close and frequent contact with the East Romans, a contact sometimes of alliance and sometimes of warfare. Constantinople became to all these peoples the metropolis of religion and civilization, and the colour which their religion then received is still evident in all the churches of Eastern Europe. The peculiar spirit of Byzantine Christianity may be discerned to-day as well in the attitude of the Church of Russia to the Tsar as in the attitude of the Russian and Hellenic peoples to their clergy. But all these Danubian and trans-Danubian races, Serbs, Bulgars, Roumanians, and Russians, remained outside the circle of imperial traditions. They never imbibed the Roman spirit, never became absorbed into the secular civilization which New Rome had preserved. Still less did they so mingle with its population as to give to the East Roman realm that new life, that rich and varied developement of letters, thought, and art, which in Italy issued from the mingling of the Teutonic and Italic elements. There were occasional marriage alliances between the royal houses of these nations and the imperial houses. Not a few of the best generals of the Empire and some of its ablest sovereigns were of Slavonic, as still more were of Armenian blood. The pride of Constantinople might have refused to accept a barbarian king as Roman Emperor. Yet had it been possible for Simeon the mighty Bulgarian Tsar of the tenth century, himself, like the Gothic Theodorich, educated at Constantinople, or for Vladimir the Great who ruled the Russians eighty years later, to be crowned in St. Sophia as Charles had been crowned in St. Peter’s, the Eastern Empire might have widened its foundation, and have received an accession of strength sufficient to enable it to repel the Latin Crusaders in 1204 and to hold Asia Minor against the Seljukian Sultans. Simeon did indeed take the title of Basileus, and did obtain from Pope Nicholas I a grant of the imperial crown, as the price of his adhesion to the Latin Church: but nothing came of this brief alliance. Or, again, had the men of the Eastern Empire been strong enough to conquer, to incorporate and to assimilate the Balkanic peoples, such an infusion of new blood might have given it a fresh and long enduring life. That events took a different course, that the Empire, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians weakened one another by incessant strife, that the destroying Ottomans were thus, and by the apathy of Western Europe, permitted to overspread these vast provinces, and hold them in cruel bondage for many centuries, may well be deemed to be, like the extinction of the Ostrogothic race in Italy, one of the great and unredeemed catastrophes of history. Driven within ever narrowing limits, with a population that had now become slender and impoverished, the Eastern Empire perished. The peoples to the North—Bulgarians, Serbs of Servia and Bosnia, and Roumanians, crushed beneath the Ottoman yoke, were left far behind in the march of European civilization. Only within the last seventy or eighty years have they begun to add that new culture which the West has bestowed to the scanty relics of what they learned from Byzantium seven hundred years before.

The Church was the mainstay as well of the Eastern as of the Western Empire. In the latter it recalled the imperial title to life: in the former it kept that title alive through many troublous centuries. But here the resemblance ends. In the West, the Latin Church found itself free to grow and develope without interference from the secular power. No Emperor after Constantine dwelt in Rome, and from ad 476 to ad 800 there was no Emperor at all in Italy. The bishop of the imperial city had the field to himself. Even when strong men like Charles and Otto bore the sceptre, the head of the State was too distant and crossed the Alps too rarely to be able to impose a permanent restraint on the head of the Church. But in the East the Church sprang up under the shadow of the Empire, and remained thereafter, both ecclesiastically and spiritually, a stunted growth. In the days of Justinian, a high spirited African prelate remarked that the Greek bishops, having wealthy churches, were afraid to oppose the Emperor. Justinian, arrogating to himself the virtual control of the Church, kept the Patriarch of Constantinople bitted and bridled: and although the archbishop of the imperial city was always a personage to be reckoned with, capable of exerting a potent influence in ecclesiastical quarrels, and sometimes even in contests for the throne, he never disputed the civil supremacy of the Emperor, never, as did his brother at Old Rome, attempted to claim the right of selecting or deposing the successor of Constantine. Even when the loss of Syria and Egypt had practically removed from him the rivalry of the three ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, the ecclesiastical head of the Eastern hierarchy could not pretend to the authority that belonged to the Latin Patriarch, who held the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. In his chair of Constantinople no apostle had sat: of none of his predecessors had the fateful words been spoken, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church.’

After the days of Pope Gregory VII, the Church of Rome was at least the equal, and sometimes almost the mistress, of the Empire. The Eastern Church was always the handmaid of the Eastern State. The Teutonic Emperor was the shadow of the Pope, cast on the secular world. The Eastern Patriarch was the shadow of the Emperor, cast on the spiritual world. A truly National Church she was, and as a National Church she gave immense cohesion and vitality to the East Roman realm. She was less arrogant, less corrupted by wealth, perhaps less penetrated by political worldliness than the Western Church had in the thirteenth century become. The Emperors also gained by escaping those long and bitter struggles with the ecclesiastical power which lasted in the West from the middle of the eleventh to the middle of the fourteenth century. But the East Roman nation, both as a secular and a religious community, suffered by the subjection into which the Church had been brought. Its spirit was roused by no great conflict of principles like that which stirred and stimulated the thoughts and feelings of Italians and Germans, of Frenchmen and Englishmen, in the days of the mediaeval Popes, and which, never completely closed, found its later expression in the movement for religious reform which rent the Christian community in the sixteenth century. It had not the glorious exuberance of emotional as well as intellectual life which illumines the annals of the Western Church from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It could show no such names as those of St. Anselm, Peter Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, William of Ockham, John Wiclif, Gerson, Savonarola, Erasmus, Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Zwingli, Calvin. That the Orthodox Church of the East, whose fold contains more than a hundred millions of men, is to-day in all the countries that adhere to it, in Russia and Roumania, in Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece, so much less of an intellectual and spiritual factor in the life of the people than are the various branches of the Western Church, whether the Roman Catholic branch or the countless forms of Protestantism, is largely due to the heavy hand which the Eastern monarchs laid upon their Patriarch and their bishops.

Other causes no doubt there were for the decadence of Eastern Christianity. As in the mediaeval West the teachings of the Gospel and its appeal to the individual soul were overlaid, sometimes even obscured, by the conception of a Visible Church within which alone salvation can be found, because it is only by her ministers that the sacraments can be dispensed, so in the East the passionate theological controversies regarding the Trinity and the Incarnation which had filled the minds of laity as well as clergy, from the fourth to the seventh century, led to the exaltation of doctrinal orthodoxy as the central and vital element in the Christian life. The Eastern Church no doubt also valued itself upon its catholicity, as the Western Church valued itself upon its orthodoxy. But just as the sense of membership in one great body organized under one Vicar of God upon earth is the characteristic note of the one, so the full acceptance in the exactly right sense of all the dogmas enunciated by the Church is specially and pre-eminently distinctive of the other. This fettering of the mind by the decrees of ancient Councils, this concentration of attention on abstract and sometimes scarcely comprehensible propositions, is doubtless accountable not only for a deficient sense of the duty of the Church to enforce morality in conduct (a point better cared for in the Latin Church), but also for much of the glacial torpor which the history of Eastern Christianity sets before us. But the control of the civil power and the nationalizing of religion until religion seems to become a sort of ceremonial function of the State have also been paralyzing influences. Thus the Eastern rulers failed even more conspicuously than the Catholic West failed, and then Protestant kingdoms have also failed, to solve the problem of maintaining a religious community in dependence on, or in legal connection with, the civil government without at the same time injuring its spiritual freedom, and rendering it less responsive to the changing currents of thought and feeling among its members.

The enquiry which of the two rival imperial lines had, after ad 800, the better title to represent ancient Rome is one fitter to occupy the minds of controversialists in the tenth century than to be debated in the twentieth: nor is there much use in asking which of the two had preserved a more genuinely Roman character, for both States had, like all human institutions, whether ecclesiastical or civil, undergone changes which made them essentially different from the majestic predecessor whose name they bore. To us both seem almost equally unlike the heathen Empire, for both were Christian, and while the one was feudal the other had taken an Oriental colour. But it is worth while to examine the view which each took of itself, and the sense in which each deemed itself to represent the rights and the glories of the ancient World Power; for, however strange may seem to us the ideas that inspired the Teutonic and the Byzantine princes respectively, those ideas were potent factors in history.

The two lines were always rivals, since neither would or could admit the title of the other to the great inheritance. This made them enemies, and their enmity was intensified by the antagonism of what we may call, from the languages they used in worship, the Greek and Latin Churches. Disputes on points of doctrine and on points of ecclesiastical precedence had arisen in the sixth and seventh centuries. The mutual aversion of the Churches, embittered by the quarrel over the use of images in worship, was prolonged, after that source of strife had vanished, by the refusal of the Patriarchs at Constantinople to admit the supremacy of the chair of Peter, till in the ninth, and more definitely in the middle of the eleventh century, aversion passed into the schism which finally severed the two communions, that fatal schism, without which neither would the Crusaders of ad 1204 have attacked a Christian capital, nor would that capital, in its last hour of dire necessity two and a half centuries later, have been abandoned by the Western nations. Other causes for the alienation of the two Churches there were, but the chief one was a point of doctrine which, though subtle theologians may draw a chain of inferences from it, was and remains beyond the reach of ordinary human intelligence, the question whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone.

Each of the rival lines had much to allege on its behalf. The Easterns traced, from Constantine downwards, an unbroken succession of monarchs always reigning in the same city, preserving, along with the Roman name, the titles and ceremonies, the supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and the civil institutions which had existed in the days of the first Christian Emperor. No breach of continuity affected their title. In Eastern eyes the coronation of Charles the Great was an act of unholy rebellion: his successors barbarian intruders, ignorant of the laws and usages of the ancient State, and with no claim to be deemed Romans except that which the favour of an arrogant pontiff might confer. Standing all by themselves, a bright spot of civilization in a barbarian world, with wild Bulgarians to the north and Muslim sons of the desert to the south, they formed an extravagant conceit of their own importance, and plumed themselves all the more upon the incomparable lustre of their crown. Seldom, and only when sore need drove them to courtesy, did they recognize the titles used by the Frankish and German sovereigns. Basil the Macedonian reproached the Western Emperor Lewis the Second with presuming to use the name of Basileus; to which the Frank retorted that he was as much an Emperor as Basil, but that anyhow Basileus was only the Greek for ‘king,’ and need not mean ‘Emperor’ at all. Nicephorus Phocas refused to call Otto the Great anything but ‘King of the Lombards’: Conrad III was addressed by Kalo-Joannes as ‘amice imperii mei Rex’: Isaac Angelus, more insolently, styled Frederick the First ‘chief prince of Alemannia.’ The great Hohenstaufen, half resentful, half contemptuous, told the Eastern envoys that he was Romanorum Imperator, and bade their master call himself ‘Romaniorum,’ from the Thracian province of Romania. Once, at least, an Eastern sovereign attempted to extrude his Teutonic competitor from the lordship of the world. When Frederick the First was engaged in his struggle with Pope Alexander the Third and the cities of Lombardy, Manuel Comnenus, the most valiant and most aspiring of his line, while attempting to reconquer Southern Italy from the Norman kings, gave his support to the rebellious Lombards, helped the Milanese to rebuild their walls, sought to win over the nobles of Rome, and invited the Pope to deprive Frederick of the imperial crown and restore it to himself as the rightful claimant. The wary pontiff, however, though the request was accompanied by a promise to secure the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches, as well as by large gifts of money, could not see his way to so revolutionary a step as a reversal of that ‘Translation of the Empire,’ which had been effected by his predecessor three centuries and a half before. ‘These things,’ he said, ‘are too high for me and too complicated.’ He was wise. The chasm that divided the East from the West was already too wide to be thus bridged.

Against that legitimacy and continuity on which the East Romans relied, the Western monarchs had two things to set. With them was the City. With them was the Chair of the Apostle. The chroniclers who describe the coronation of Charles justly dwell upon the fact that ‘he held Rome, the mother of Empire, where the Caesars had always been wont to sit,’ and that it was the successor of Peter who placed the crown upon his brow. Rome and the Catholic Church, these were the two pillars of Empire: and with these the Germans and Italians were so well content that they scarcely felt the rival pretensions of Constantinople to be a flaw in the title of their Emperor. The Eastern Church was no doubt then, as she is now, a thorn in the side of the Papacy. But the Pope was the last person who could, in his quarrels with the Teutonic sovereigns, use the Eastern claim in any argument against them, because to have treated Constantinople as the equal of Rome would have been to lower his own see to the level of Constantinople, as well as to question the validity of the transference effected by Pope Leo III. Neither, however, did any other antagonists of the Teutonic Emperors—as for instance the writers who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries maintained the independence of the crown of France—lay stress upon the existence of an Empire in the East as evidence against the claim of the Germanic sovereign to oecumenical supremacy. The truth seems to be that the Western World, from the ninth century onwards, knew and cared comparatively little about the East. The intellectual and social unity of Europe was in those days maintained by the clergy and especially, after the middle of the thirteenth century, by the friars: and the clergy seldom passed outside the bounds of Latin Christendom. By land there was little intercourse, except when a crusading host passed through, for rude Slavonic tribes lay between, and such sea trade as went on between Italy and Constantinople—after the eleventh century it was chiefly in the hands of the Pisans, the Genoese, and the Venetians—did little to establish relations in the sphere of thought and literature, how little may be judged from the paucity of Greek MSS. in Western Europe. Even Dante could not read Greek and never saw a Greek copy of the Homeric poems. Thus the mass of the people scarcely remembered the existence of the Eastern Christians: and of those who did, the most part thought of them as Samaritans who refused to worship at Jerusalem, perverse rebels against the authority of the Apostolic See, who were little better than heretics or infidels. And although the few ecclesiastics of superior knowledge and insight could not treat the pretensions of communities which had been among the first to embrace Christianity, and had preserved so many of its ancient forms, with the scorn that was felt for Western sectaries, although the Roman Church has never questioned the validity of Eastern orders, nor deemed those who stand within the Eastern fold to be outside the bounds of covenanted salvation, still these leaders of opinion were so preoccupied by the established theory of the identity of the Roman Church and the Roman Empire, and so convinced of the right of Peter to choose whom he would as the temporal guardian of his flock, that they could not apprehend the weak points in their own position or the strength of their opponents’. Enthralled by the majesty of their own theory, a theory which existed outside the sphere of fact, they were not disturbed by a fact inconsistent with it.

They lived in a sort of cloudland, where the real truths seemed to be those grand ideas that shone upon them like stars through an encircling mist. Their preoccupation with the conception of a universal Christian commonwealth was a part of that imaginative vision and mystic sense which ennoble the Middle Ages, and which make it delightful and refreshing to turn back to those times from the garish day of a world ruled by the methods of physical science and the methods of historical criticism. This power it was which enabled them to bequeath to us so much on which our imagination still feeds, so much splendid poetry, so much myth and fancy and legend, matter fit for poetry, on which the creative genius of later centuries has worked.

The West was full of imaginative minds, not in Italy, Provence, and Germany only, but as far as remote Erin and still remoter Iceland. But the East Romans were not imaginative. They were a practical people, with their eyes fixed on the actual. Superstitious they were, and full of a reverence for the past which often ran into a fantastic antiquarianism. But they were neither poetical nor mythopoeic. Their Emperor was a living and familiar personage. He was, like the kings of other countries, king over a nation, the ruler of a realm which, once universal, had been narrowed to a nation, with a national language and a national character. He was indeed a far more resplendent sort of king than were the kings of the barbarians, being the successor of the Caesars of old, with a never abandoned claim to be the first of all potentates. But he was so essential to their particular state, so firmly rooted in all its traditions, that neither the disobedience of the Roman city nor the hostility of the Roman pontiff affected their confidence in his right and their right to represent the Roman dominion. The rivalry of the West had no doubt cost them Italy, and it detracted from their importance in the eyes of other nations. It was an odious fact, like the existence of the Bulgarians, who had robbed them of Thrace, and the existence of the Hagarenes, who had robbed them of Syria. But it never shook their self-confidence, and their sense of immeasureable superiority to the barbarians of Central and Western Europe. Even Latin had become to them what it had been to the Athenians ten centuries before, a barbarian language.

This difference of attitude illustrates the contrast between the people of the Western and those of the Eastern Empire in the sphere of thought and letters.

The Holy Empire, except in so far as it was united with the German kingdom, was a dream, a sublime conception, half theology and half poetry, of the unity of mankind, who are themselves the children of God, as realized in one Church, which is also a State, and in one State, which is also a Church. The East Roman Empire was a reality, a tangible fact in an actual world, drawing neither strength nor beauty from any theory, and not appearing to need any theory to support it. Why was this so? Why did not the same group of ideas which had kept alive the memory of Rome in the West down to the days of Charles the Great, and which in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries developed those ideas into that ordered form which they held in men’s minds in the time of Dante—why did not these ideas fill and sway men’s minds in the East also, and find due expression in their literature and their art? Why did not the Ideal array the Actual in those gorgeous hues which the great Westerns lavished on their two heads of Christendom, the Sun and the Moon of their ethereal firmament?

One reason may have been because the Emperor had in the East always been a tangible and permanent fact. The Easterns were reverent, and they were not less superstitious than the Westerns. Superstition goes with a profound belief in forms and ceremonies. But the constant presence of the successor of Constantine made him an object not so fit to be idealized as the Emperor of tradition had become in the West, and dispensed with the need for a philosophic theory. The autocrat of Constantinople required no doctrinal scheme to buttress his power: the Western did require it just because he was less able to stand by his own strength. So perhaps we may find another reason in the fact that the East had not in its capital a mystic Mother of Empire, such as was Old Rome, filled with the bones of martyrs, and had not, as its chief pastor, the Universal Bishop, the living representative on earth of the Divine Word in heaven. The Patriarch of Constantinople was only a primate, standing not greatly above other bishops. Constantinople was, moreover, an artificial creation, the work of one Emperor, suddenly raised into a capital out of a town previously famous only for its admirable site. It had neither the immemorial renown nor the hallowed associations of the elder city on the Tiber.

Yet perhaps we must seek a still deeper cause. The East was not steeped, as was the West, in the idea of a Church organized and administered like a State. Italy, which had stamped her type of practical intellect upon the whole Latin West, had achieved in earlier days two great things: she had created an Administration and a Law fitted for a world. The Hellenistic East, not Greek in the old classical sense, as we are too apt to assume, but a mixture of Hellenic and Asiatic elements, had shewn no gift for the creation of institutions, but had applied an amazing speculative and dialectic faculty to the abstract problems of theology. After the extinction of imperial rule in the West, the Latin Church, still permeated by the practical instincts of Rome, went on developing an ecclesiastical organization, modelled upon the civil administration which had perished, till her efforts culminated in the mediaeval hierarchy and the system of Canon Law. She could not think of the Christian people except in the form of a body of worshippers organized under a government, and a government with an autocratic head. Thus she created the Pope; and the Pope (as we have seen) re-created the Emperor. But to the Eastern Christians, occupied as they had been with determining the nature of God and of Christ, the Christian people appeared in the form of a body of worshippers professing exactly the same lifegiving dogmas. Doctrine, not organization, came first in their minds. As their civil administration had never been shattered, they had less need, even if they had possessed the capacity, to build up an ecclesiastical system like that of the West; nor would the secular power have permitted them to do so. Hence they did not turn their Patriarch into a Pope: and hence there was no Pope to create an Emperor in his own image. Herein may lie an explanation of the seeming paradox that the Eastern monarch, with far greater practical authority in ecclesiastical affairs than his Western rivals exercised, except perhaps in the days of Charles and again of Henry the Third, had not that ideal position in the world of politics, morals, and religion—three things which were virtually the same to these mediaeval thinkers—which Christian theory assigned to the Emperor in the West.

Let us note one more difference, affecting the conception of the imperial office, between the temper and mind of East and of West.

The intellect of the East Romans had ceased to be creative. Whether it was that they had not experienced that renewal of vital forces which the intermixture of Northern blood gave to the Italians, or that they lacked the freshness of vision and susceptibility to impressions which a new set of social conditions create, or that they were too much isolated, too little stirred by peaceful intercourse with other peoples (for their contact with their neighbours was almost always hostile), or whether they were oppressed by the stores of knowledge which had come down to them from the ancient world—whatever be the cause, they seemed to want intellectual initiative and that kind of constructive faculty which depends on imagination. Their talent and their industry—and there was plenty both of talent and of industry—ran to the piling up of knowledge, the recording of facts, the investigation of minute points in theology or in archaeology. The West had creative power without learning: the East had learning without creative power. This is perhaps the reason why the Eastern Empire lost, and may never regain, its hold upon the interest of mankind. Standing apart and unfriended, it has a splendid record of stubborn resistance to formidable enemies on every side, and of a patriotism which the bitterest internal discords never extinguished. Its annals are full of striking incidents and brilliant personalities. But these personalities, brilliant by their energy and their adventures, seldom touch the deepest springs of interest, for they are not associated with great principles, nor does any literary or artistic genius, rising to greatness among his fellow countrymen, cast his rays upon them. After Justinian’s days, the East Roman Empire produced, and has left us, little in the higher forms of art and nothing in institutions. It added nothing to the common store of thought and beauty in literature. It produced no speculative philosophy like that of the great Western schoolmen, no romantic figures in whom the gifts of thought and of action were united, like Bernard of Clairvaux and Arnold of Brescia, and least of all any poetry like that of mediaeval Provence and Italy.

Yet it has been a mighty factor in history, for it stemmed for centuries the tide of Asiatic invasion, and it kept alive a Church which has helped to create and maintain an intense national feeling among the largest and most swiftly growing of modern European peoples. The Russians, who are as much a religious as a political community, carry with them over the vast spaces of Northern and Central Asia the traditions of an Empire conterminous with a Church, an Empire which is at once the offspring and the guardian of the Orthodox Faith.