empire between what may roughly be called Ancient History and the Middle
Ages. There is no break at all between Constantine and Heraclius, though
the area, character, social life, and religion of the empire had been
greatly modified in the three hundred years that separated them. The new
order of things, which commenced when Constantine established his capital
on the Bosphorus, had a peaceable and orderly development. The first
prominent fact that strikes the eye in the history of the three centuries
is that the sceptre passed from sovereign to sovereign in quiet and
undisturbed devolution. From the death of Valens onward there is no
instance of a military usurper breaking the line of succession till the
crowning of Phocas in 602. The emperors were either designated by their
predecessors or—less frequently—chosen by the high officials and the
senate. The regularity of their sequence is all the more astonishing when
we realize that only in three cases in the whole period was father
succeeded by son. Saving Constantine himself, Theodosius I., and Arcadius,
not a single emperor left male issue; yet the hereditary instinct had
grown so strong in the empire that nephews, sons-in-law, and
brothers-in-law of sovereigns were gladly received as their legitimate
heirs. Considering this tendency, it is extraordinary to note that the
whole three hundred years did not produce a single unmitigated tyrant.
Constantius II. was gloomy and sometimes cruel, Valens was stupid and
avaricious, Arcadius utterly weak and inept, Justinian hard and thankless;
but the general average of the emperors were men of respectable ability,
and in moral character they will compare favourably with any list of
sovereigns of similar length that any country can produce.
The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the
empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which
were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual
de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing
classes and the masses of population. In the fourth century the Roman
impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually
spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the
administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are
habitually Latin, all titles of officers, all names of taxes and
institutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin
as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them.
Ammianus Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote
in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom. Moreover
there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of
Latin-speaking population—comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of
the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a
scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had
learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors.
By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing. It is
true that the Emperor was still hailed as the “Pius, Felix, Perpetuus,
Augustus”: it was not till about A.D. 800 that he dropped the old style
and called himself “Ἐν Χριστῷ πιστὸς βασιλεὺς τῶν Ῥωμαίων.” Nor were the
old Roman official titles yet disused: men were still tribunes and
patricians, counts and praetors, but little more than the names survived.
Already in the sixth century a knowledge of Latin was growing unusual even
among educated men. The author Johannes Lydus tells us that he owed his
rise in the civil service mainly to this rare accomplishment. Procopius,
the best writer of the day and a man of real merit and discernment, was
absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Latin, and blunders when he tries
to translate the simplest phrase. Justinian was the last emperor who spoke
Latin as his mother tongue, all his successors were better skilled in
Greek.
The gradual disuse of Latin has its origin in the practical—though not
formal—solution of the continuity between Rome and the East, which began
with the division of the empire between the sons of Constantine and became
more complete after Odoacer made himself King of Italy in 476. In the
course of a century and a half the Latin element in the East, cut off from
the Latin-speaking West, was bound to yield before the predominant Greek.
But the process would have been slower if the Eastern provinces which
spoke Latin had not been those which suffered most from the barbarians.
The Visigoths and Ostrogoths harassed and decimated the Thracians,
Illyrians, and Moesians, but the Slavs a century later almost exterminated
them. In A.D. 400 probably a quarter of the provincials east of the
Adriatic spoke Latin; in A.D. 620 not a tenth. The Romanized lands of the
Balkan peninsula had now become Slavonic principalities: only the
Dalmatian seaports and a few scattered survivors in the Balkans still used
the old tongue. The only districts where a considerable Latin-speaking
population obeyed the Emperor were Africa and the Italian Exarchate, now
reunited to Constantinople by the conquests of Justinian. But they seem to
have been too remote from the centre of life and government to have
exercised any influence or delayed the de-Romanizing of the East. The last
notable author, who being a subject of the empire wrote in Latin as his
native tongue, was the poet Flavius Corippus who addressed a long
panegyric to Justinus II.: as might have been expected, he was an African.
While the empire was losing its Roman characteristics, it was at the same
time growing more and more Christian at heart. Under Constantine and his
immediate successors the machinery of government was only just beginning
to be effected by the change of the emperor’s religion. Though the
sovereign personally was Christian, the system remained what it had been
before. Many of the high officials were still pagans, and the form and
spirit of all administrative and legal business was unaltered from what it
had been in the third century. It is not till forty years after
Constantine’s death that we find the Christian spirit fully penetrating
out of the spiritual into the material sphere of life. Attempts by the
State to suppress moral sin no less than legal crime begin with Theodosius
I., whose crusade against sexual immorality would have been
incomprehensible to even the best of the pagan emperors. The old
gladiatorial shows, one of the most characteristic and repulsive features
of Roman life, were abolished not long after. They survived for sixty
years at Rome, though Christian Constantinople never knew them. But this
was not the work of the State, but of a single individual. One day in A.D.
404 the games had begun, and the gladiators were about to engage, when the
monk Telemachus leapt down into the arena and threw himself between the
combatants, adjuring them not to slay their brethren. There was an angry
scuffle, and the good monk was slain. But his death had the effect that
his protests might have failed to bring about, and no gladiatorial show
was ever given again.
[Illustration]
General View Of St. Sophia. (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris,
Quantin, 1883._)
In other provinces of social life the work of Christianity was no less
marked. It put an end to the detestable practice of infanticide which
pervaded the ancient world, resting on the assumption that the father had
the right to decide whether or not he would rear the child he had
begotten. Constantine made the State assume the charge of feeding and
rearing the children of the destitute, lest their parents should be
tempted to cast them forth to perish in the old fashion, and Valentinian
I. in 374 assimilated infanticide to other forms of murder, and made it a
capital offence.
Slavery was also profoundly affected by the teaching of the Church. The
ancient world, save a few philosophers, had regarded the slave with such
contempt that he was hardly reckoned a moral being or conceived to have
rights or virtues. Christianity taught that he was a man with an immortal
soul, no less than his own master, and bade slaves and freemen meet on
terms of perfect equality around the baptismal font and before the sacred
table. It was from the first taught that the man who manumitted his slaves
earned the approval of heaven, and all occasions of rejoicing, public and
private, were fitly commemorated by the liberation of deserving
individuals. Though slavery was not extinguished for centuries, its evils
were immensely modified; Justinian’s legislation shows that by his time
public opinion had condemned the characteristic evils of ancient slavery:
he permitted the intermarriage of slaves and free persons, stipulating
only for the consent of the owner of the servile partner in the wedlock.
He declared the children of such mixed marriages free, and he made the
prostitution of a slave by a master a criminal offence. Hereditary slavery
became almost unknown, and the institution was only kept up by the
introduction of barbarian captives, heathens and enemies, whose position
did not appeal so keenly to the mind of their captors.
The improvement of the condition of all the unhappy classes of which we
have been speaking—women, infants, slaves, gladiators—can be directly
traced back to a single fundamental Christian truth. It was the belief in
the importance of the individual human soul in the eyes of God that led
the converted Roman to realize his responsibility, and change his attitude
towards the helpless beings whom he had before despised and neglected. It
is only fair to add that the realization of this central truth did not
always operate for good in the Roman world of the fifth and sixth
centuries. Some of the developments of the new idea were harmful and even
dangerous to the State. They took the form of laying such exclusive stress
on the relations between the individual soul and heaven, that the duties
of man to the State were half forgotten. Chief among these developments
was the ascetic monasticism which, starting from Egypt, spread rapidly all
over the empire, more especially over its eastern provinces. When men
retire from their duties as citizens, intent on nothing but on saving
their own souls, take up a position outside the State, and cease to be of
the slightest use to society, the result may be harmless so long as their
numbers are small. But at this time the monastic impulse was working on
such a large scale that its development was positively dangerous. It was
by thousands and ten thousands that the men who ought to have been bearing
the burdens of the State, stepped aside into the monastery or the hermit’s
cave. The ascetics of the fifth century had neither of the justifications
which made monasticism precious in a later age, they were neither
missionaries nor men of learning. The monastery did not devote itself
either to sending out preachers and teachers, or to storing up and
cherishing the literary treasures of the ancient world. The first abbot to
whom it occurred to turn the vast leisure of his monks to good account by
setting them systematically to work at copying manuscripts was
Cassiodorus, the ex-secretary to King Theodoric the Goth [A.D. 530-40].
Before his time monks and books had no special connection with each other.
When a State contains masses of men who devote their whole energies to a
repulsively selfish attempt to save their own individual souls, while
letting the world around them slide on as best it may, then the body
politic is diseased. The Roman Empire in its fight with the barbarians was
in no small degree hampered by this attitude of so many of its subjects.
The ascetic took the barbarian invasions as judgments from heaven rightly
inflicted upon a wicked world, and not as national calamities which called
on every citizen to join in the attempt to repel them. Many men
complacently interpreted the troubles of the fifth century as the
tribulations predicted in the Apocalypse, and watched them develop with
something like joy, since they must portend the close approach of the
Second Advent of our Lord.
This apathetic attitude of many Christians during the afflictions of the
empire was maddening to the heathen minority which still survived among
the educated classes. They roundly accused Christianity of being the ruin
of the State by its anti-social teaching which led men to neglect every
duty of the citizen. The Christian author Orosius felt himself compelled
to write a lengthy history to confute this view, aiming his work at the
pagan Symmachus whose book had been devoted to tracing all the calamities
of the world to the conversion of Constantine.
It was fortunate for the empire that its governing classes continued to
preserve the old traditions of Roman state-craft, and fought on doggedly
against all the ills of their time—barbarian invasion, famine, and
pestilence, instead of bowing to the yoke and recognizing in every
calamity the righteous judgment of heaven and the indication of the
approaching end of the world.
Paganism had practically disappeared by the end of the fifth century as an
active force; none save a few philosophers made an open profession of it,
and in 529 Justinian put a formal end to their teaching, by closing the
schools of Athens, the last refuge of the professors of the expiring
religion. But if open heathenism was dead, a large measure of
indifferentism prevailed among the educated classes: many men who in the
fifth century would have been pagans were Christians in name in the sixth,
but little affected by Christianity in their lives. This type was
extremely common among the literary and official classes. There are plenty
of sixth-century authors—Procopius may serve as an example—whose works
show no trace of Christian thought, though the writer was undoubtedly a
professing member of the Church. Similar examples could be quoted by the
dozen from among the administrators, lawyers, and statesmen of the day,
but all were now nominally Christian. As time went on, such men grew
rarer, and the old stern, non-religious Roman character passed away into
the emotional and superstitious mediæval type of mind. The survival of
pre-Christian feeling, which appeared as indifferentism among the educated
classes, took a very different shape among the lower strata of society. It
revealed itself in a crowd of gross superstitions connected with magic,
witchcraft, fortune-telling, charms, and trivial or obscene ceremonies
practised in secret. The State highly disapproved of such practices,
treated them as impious or heretical, and imposed punishment on those who
employed them: but nevertheless these contemptible survivals of heathenism
persisted down to the latest days of the empire.
It has been usual to include all the Eastern Romans of all the centuries
between Constantine I. and Constantine XIV. in one sweeping condemnation,
as cowardly, corrupt, and effete. The ordinary view of Byzantine life may
be summed up in Mr. Lecky’s irritating statement(18) that “the universal
verdict of history is that it constitutes the most base and despicable
form that civilization ever assumed, and that there has been no other
enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forms and
elements of greatness, none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so
emphatically applied. It is a monstrous story of the intrigues of priests,
eunuchs, and women; of poisoning, conspiracies, uniform ingratitude,
perpetual fratricide.” How Mr. Lecky obtained his universal verdict of
history, it is hard to see: certainly that verdict can not have been
arrived at after a study of the evidence bearing on the life of the
persons accused. It sounds like a cheap echo of the second-hand historians
of fifty years ago, whose staple commodity was Gibbon-and-water.
[Illustration]
Illuminated Initials. (_From Byzantine MSS._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par
C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
If we must sum up the characteristics of the East Romans and their
civilization, the conclusion at which we arrive will be very different. It
is only fair to acknowledge that they had their faults: what else could be
expected when we know that the foundations of the Eastern Empire were laid
upon the Oriental provinces of the old Roman world, among races that had
long been stigmatized by their masters as hopelessly effete and
corrupt—Syrians, Egyptians, and Hellenized Asiatics, whom even the
degenerate Romans of the third century had been wont to despise. The
Byzantine Empire displayed from its very cradle a taint of weakness
derived from this Oriental origin. It showed features particularly
obnoxious to the modern mind of the nineteenth century—such as the
practice of a degrading and grovelling court etiquette, full of
prostrations and genuflexions, the introduction of eunuchs and slaves into
high offices of State, the wholesale and deliberate use of treachery and
lying in matters of diplomacy.
But remembering its origins we shall, on the whole, wonder at the good
points in Byzantine civilization rather than at its faults. It may fairly
be said that Christianity raised the Roman East to a better moral position
than it had known for a thousand years. With all their faults the monks
and hermits of the fifth century are a good substitute for the priests of
Cybele and Mithras of the second. It was something that the Government and
the public opinion of the day had concurred to sweep away the orgies of
Daphne and Canopus. Church and State united in the reign of Justinian to
punish with spiritual and bodily death the unnatural crimes which had been
the open practice of emperors themselves in the first centuries of the
empire.
The vices of which the East Romans have most commonly been accused are
cowardice, frivolity, and treachery. On each of these points they have
been grossly wronged. Cowardice was certainly not the chief characteristic
of the centuries that produced emperors like Theodosius I. and Heraclius,
prelates like Athanasius and Chrysostom, public servants like Belisarius
and Priscus. It is not for cowardice that we note the Byzantine populace
which routed Gainas and his mercenaries, and raised the _Nika_ sedition,
but for turbulence. If military virtue was wanting to the East-Roman
armies, how came the Ostrogoth and Vandal to be conquered, the Persian and
the Hun to be driven off, how, above all, was the desperate struggle
against the fanatical Saracen protracted for four hundred years, till at
last the Caliphate broke up?
Frivolity and luxury are an accusation easy to bring against any age.
Every moralist, from Jeremiah to Juvenal, and from Juvenal to Mr. Ruskin,
has believed his own generation to be the most obnoxious and contemptible
in the world’s history. We have numerous tirades against the manners of
Constantinople preserved in Byzantine literature, and may judge from them
something of the faults of the time. It would seem that there was much of
the sort of luxury to which ascetic preachers take exception—much
splendour of raiment, much ostentatious display of plate and furniture, of
horses and chariots. Luxury and evil living often go together, but when we
examine all the enormities laid to the charge of the Byzantines, there is
less alleged than we might expect. When Chrysostom raged against the
contemporaries of Arcadius, his anathemas fell on such crimes as the use
of cosmetics and dyes by fashionable dames, on the gambling propensities
of their husbands, on the immoral tendencies of the theatre, on the
drunken orgies at popular festivals—accusations to which any age—our own
included—might plead guilty. The races of the Circus played a
disproportionate part in social life, and attracted the enthusiastic
attention of thousands of votaries; but it is surely hard that our own
age, with all its sporting and athletic interests, should cast a stone at
the sixth century. We have not to look far around us to discover classes
for whom horse-racing still presents an inexplicable attraction. When we
remember that the Constantinopolitans were excitable Orientals, and had no
other form of sport to distract their attention from the Circus, we can
easily realize the genesis of the famous riots of the Blues and Greens.
From the darker forms of vice great cities have never been free, and there
is no reason to think that Constantinople in the sixth century differed
from London in the nineteenth. It is fair to point out that Christian
public opinion and the Government strove their best to put down sexual
immorality. Theodosius and Justinian are recorded to have entered upon the
herculean task of endeavouring to suppress all disorderly houses: the
latter made exile the penalty for panders and procuresses, and inflicted
death on those guilty of the worst extremes of immorality. We must
remember, too, that if Constantinople showed much vice, it also displayed
shining examples of the social virtues. The Empress Flaccilla was wont to
frequent the hospitals, and tend the beds of the sick. Of the monastic
severity which the Empress Pulcheria displayed in the palace we have
spoken already.
After cowardice and light morals, it is treachery that is popularly cited
as the most prominent vice of the Eastern Empire. There have been other
states and epochs more given to plots and revolts, but it is still true
that there was too much intrigue at Constantinople. The reason is not far
to seek: the “_carrière ouverte aux talents_” practically existed there,
and the army and the civil service were full of poor, able, and ambitious
men of all races and classes mixed together. The converted Goth or the
renegade Persian, the half-civilized mountaineer from Isauria, the Copt
and Syrian and Armenian were all welcomed in the army or civil service, if
only they had ability. Both the bureaucracy and the army therefore had
elements which lacked patriotism, conscience, and stability, and were
prone to seek advancement either by intrigue or military revolt. This
being granted, it is perhaps astonishing to have to record that between
350 and 600 the empire never once saw its legitimate ruler dethroned,
either by palace intrigue or military revolt. The fact that all the
plots—and there were many in the period—failed hopelessly, is, on the
whole, a proof that if there was much treachery there was much loyalty
among the East Romans. There have certainly been periods in more recent
times which show a much worse record.(19) A single instance may
suffice—Mediæval Italy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century could
produce far more shocking examples of conscienceless and unjustifiable
plotting than the Byzantine Empire in the whole thousand years of its
existence.
XII. THE COMING OF THE SARACENS.
After the peace of 628 the Roman and the Persian Empires, drained of men
and money, and ravaged from end to end by each other’s marauding armies,
sank down in exhaustion to heal them of their deadly wounds. Never before
had either power dealt its neighbour such fearful blows as in this last
struggle: in previous wars the contest had been waged around border
fortresses, and the prize had been the conquest of some small slice of
marchland. But Chosroës and Heraclius had struck deadly blows at the heart
of each other’s empire, and harried the inmost provinces up to the gates
of each other’s capitals. The Persian had turned the wild hordes of the
Avars loose on Thrace, and the Roman had guided the yet wilder Chazars up
to the walls of Ctesiphon. Hence it came to pass that at the end of the
war the two powers were each weaker than they had ever been before. They
were bleeding at every pore, utterly wearied and exhausted, and desirous
of nothing but a long interval of peace to recover their lost strength.
Precisely at this moment a new and terrible enemy fell upon the two
war-worn combatants, and delivered an attack so vehement that it was
destined to destroy the ancient kingdom of Persia and to shear away half
the provinces of the Roman Empire.
The politics of Arabia had up to this time been of little moment either to
Roman or Persian. Each of them had allies among the Arab tribes, and had
sometimes sent an expedition or an embassy southward, into the land beyond
the Syrian desert. But neither of them dreamed that the scattered and
disunited tribes of Arabia would ever combine or become a serious danger.
But while Heraclius and Chosroës were harrying each other’s realms events
of world-wide importance had been taking place in the Arabian peninsula.
For the first and last time in history there had arisen among the Arabs
one of those world-compelling minds that are destined to turn aside the
current of events into new channels, and change the face of whole
continents.
Mahomet, that strangest of moral enigmas, prophet and seer, fanatic and
impostor, was developing his career all through the years of the Persian
war. By an extraordinary mixture of genuine enthusiasm and vulgar cunning,
of self-deception and deliberate imposture, of benevolence and cruelty, of
austerity and licence, he had worked himself and his creed to the front.
The turbulent polytheists of Arabia had by him been converted into a
compact band of fanatics, burning to carry all over the world by the force
of their swords their new war-cry, that “God was God, and Mahomet His
prophet.”