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There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924005774702 BYZANTINE HISTORY IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ,3^Zi.^-*^ ^ BYZANTINE HISTORY IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES THE REDE LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE SENATE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE JUNE 12, 1900 BY FREDERIC .HARRISON, M.A. HONORARY FELLOW, WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1900 3 '/ A/ BYZANTINE HISTOEY IN THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES In one of the most suggestive of his essays, Professor Freeman calls the Eoman Empire on the Bosphorus "the surest witness to the unity of history."^ And Professor Bury, whose great work has done so much to develop that truth, insists that the old Roman Empire did not cease to exist until the year 1453, when Mohammed the Conqueror stormed Constantinople. The line of Eoman emperors, he says, "continued in unbroken succession from Octavius Augustus to Con- stantine Palaeologus." ^ Since George Finlay, nearly fifty years ago, first urged this truth on public atten- tion, all competent historians have recognised the continuity of the civilisation which Constantine seated on the Golden Horn ; and they have done justice to its many services to the West as well as to the East.^ But the nature of that continuity, the extent of these services, are still but dimly understood by the general public. Prejudice, bigotry, and rhetoric have done much to warp the popular conception of one of the chief keys to general history. In spite of all that scholars have said, the old sophism lingers on that 6 BYZANTINE HISTORY the empire and civilisation of Eome ended with Eomulus Augustulus in 476, until, in a sense, it was revived by the great Charles ; that, in the meanwhile, a vicious and decaying parody of the Empire eked out its contemptible life on the Bosphorus. Such was the language of the popular writers of the last century, and Gibbon himself did something to encourage this view. When, in his 48th chapter, he talked of Byzantine annals as " a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery," and saw that he still had more than eight centuries of the history of the world to compress into his last two volumes, we suspect that the great master of description was beginning to feel exhausted by his gigantic task.* In any case, his undervaluing Byzantine history as a whole is the main philosophical weakness of his magnificent work of art. The phrases of Voltaire, Le Beau, and of papal contro- versialists still linger in the public mind ; ^ and in the meantime there exists no adequate history in English of the whole course of the Eoman Empire on the Bosphorus. This still forms the great lacuna in our historical literature. Modern historians continually warn their readers to cast off the obsolete fallacy that a gulf of so-called dark ages separates ancient from modern history; that ancient history closes with the settlement of the Goths in Rome, whilst modern history mysteriously emerges somewhere in the ninth or the tenth century. We all know now that, when the northern races settled in Western Europe, they assimilated much that they inherited from Eome. In truth, the Eoman Empire, BYZANTINE HISTORY 7 transplanted on to the Bosphorus, maintained for many centuries an unbroken sequence of imperial life ; re- taining, transforming, and in part even developing, the administrative system, the law, the literature, the arts of war, the industry, the commerce, which had once been concentrated by the Caesars in Italy. After all the researches of Finlay, Freeman, Bryce, Hodgkin, Bury, Fisher, Oman, Dill, to say nothing of a crowd of French, German, Italian, and Russian specialists, we must regard these facts as amongst the truisms of general history. The continuity of government and civilisation in the Empire of New Rome was far more real than it was in Western Europe. New Rome never suffered such abrupt breaks, dislocations, such changes of local seat, of titular and oflScial form, of language, race, law, and manners, as marked the re -settlement of Western Europe. For eleven centuries Constantinople remained the continuous seat of an imperial Christian govern- ment, during nine centuries of which its administrative sequence was hardly broken. For nine centuries, until the piratical raid of the Crusaders, Constantinople preserved Christendom, industry, the machinery of government, and civilisation, from successive torrents of barbarians. For seven centuries it protected Europe from the premature invasions of the Crescent ; giving very much in the meantime to the East, receiving very much from the East, and acting as the intellectual and industrial clearing-house between Europe and Asia. For at least five centuries, from the age of Justinian, it was the nurse of the arts, of manufacture, commerce, 8 BYZANTINE HISTORY and literature, to Western Europe, where all these were still in the making. And it was the direct and im- mediate source of civilisation, whether secular or re- ligious, to the whole of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Ionian Sea. In picturesque and impressive incidents, in memor- able events and dominant characters, in martial achievement and in heroic endurance, perhaps even in sociologic lessons, Byzantine history from the first Constantine to the last is as rich as the contemporary history either of the West or of the East. It would be a paradox to compare the great Charles, or the great Otto, or our own blameless Alfred, with even the best of the Byzantine rulers of their age, or to place such men as Gregory the Great, or Popes Silvester or Hildebrand, below even the best of the Patriarchs of the Holy Wisdom. Nor have the Orthodox Church or the Eastern Komans such claims on the gratitude of mankind as are due to the Church Catholic and the Teutonic heroes who founded modern Europe. But the three centuries of Byzantine history from the rise of the Isaurian dynasty in 717 down to the last of the Basilian emperors in 1028, will be found as well worthy of study as the same three centuries in Western Europe, i.e. from the age of Charles Martel to that of Henry the Saint. During those three centuries at least, the eighth, ninth, and tenth, the Emperors of New Eome ruled over a settled State which, if not as powerful in arms, was far more rich in various resources, more cultured, more truly modern, than any other in Western Europe. I BYZANTINE HISTORY 9 am not about to attempt, in the short space at my dis- posal, even a brief sketch of these three centuries of crowded story. I purpose only to touch on some of the special features of its civilisation and culture, which, for the three centuries so often called the darkest ages of Europe, made Constantinople the wonder and envy of the world. Byzantine history has its epochs of ebb and flow, of decay, convulsion, anarchy, and recovery, as had the empire at Old Eome. This Eoman Empire was the most continuous institution in Europe, next after the Catholic Church ; and, like the Church, it had the same marvellous recuperative energy. It is true that it had none of the latent power of growth which Frank, Lombard, Burgundian, and Saxon possessed. It was from first to last a conservative, tenacious, and more or less stationary force. But it kept alive the principles of order, stability, and continuity, in things material and ia things intellectual, when all around it, on the east and on the west, was racked with the throes of new birth or tossed in a weltering chaos. Byzantine story is stained red with blood, is black with vice, is disfigured with accumulated waste and horror — but what story of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries is not so disfigured and stained ? And even the atrocities of Constantinople may be matched in the history of the Papacy in these very ages, and in the intrigues and conspiracies which raged around the thrones of Frank, Lombard, Burgundian, and Goth. Strangely enough, the inner life of this Byzantine history has yet to be opened to the English reader. For these three centuries that I am treating, Finlay has 10 BYZANTINE HISTOKY given us about 400 pages ; ^ and Finlay, alas, is no longer abreast of modern authorities, and was writing, let us remember, the history of Greece. Mr. Bury's fine history stops short as yet with Irene at the end of the eighth century, and Dr. Hodgkin has drawn rein at the same date. For the period I am treating, we have but a hundred pages or so in Mr. Bury's second volume, and the mordant epigrams of Gibbon are about of equal bulk.'^ For the law, the literature, the economics, the administration, the ceremonial, the art, the trade, the manners, the theology of this epoch we have to depend on a mass of foreign monographs, — French, German, Greek, and now Eussian and American, — on Eambaud, Schlumberger, Labarte, Bayet, Zachariae, Krumbacher, Heimbach, Krause, Neander, Salzenberg, Huebsch, Kondakov, De Vogii^, Bordier, Texier, Hergenrother, Heyd, Fr. Michel, SUvestre, Didron, Mortreuil, Duchesne, Paspates, Buzantios, Van Millingen, Frothingham.^ So far as I know, we have not a single English study on the special developments of civilisa- tion on the Bosphorus from the fourth to the twelfth century. Here are a score of monographs open to the research of English historians. Current misconceptions of Byzantine history mainly arise from inattention to the enormous period it covers, and to the wide diflferences which mark the various epochs and dynasties. The whole period from the first Constantine to the last is about equal to the period from Komulus to Theodosius. The Crusaders' raid, in 1204, utterly ruined Constantinople, and from that time till the capture by the Turks it was a feeble BYZANTINE HISTORY 11 wreck.^ Even at the date of the First Crusade, about a century earlier, the Empire had been broken by the campaign of Manzikert ; so that the lively pictures of the First Crusade by Scott and Gibbon present us with the State in an age of decadence." The epoch when Byzantium was in the van of civilisation, civil, military, and intellectual, stretches from the reign of Justinian (527) to the death of Constantine VIII. (1028), a period of exactly five centuries — more than the whole period of the Roman Republic. During those five centuries there were a series of alternate periods of splendour, decline, revival, expansion, and final dissolution. The rulers differ from each other as widely as Trajan differs from Nero or Honorius ; the times differ as widely as the age of Augustus differs from the ages of Cato or of Theodoric. There were ages of marvellous recovery under Justinian, again under Heraclius, again under Leo the Isaurian, then under Basil of Macedon, next under Nicephorus Phocas, and lastly under Basil II., the slayer of the Bulgarians. There were ages of decay and confusion under the successors of Heraclius, and under those of Irene, and again those of Constantine VIII. But the period to , which I desire to fix attention is that from the rise of the Isaurian dynasty (717) to the death of Basil II. (1025), > rather more than three centuries. During the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus was far the most stable and cultured power in the world, and on its existence hung the future of civilisation. Its power was due to this — that for some five 12 BYZANTINE HISTORY centuries of the early Middle Ages which form the transition from polytheism to fe udalism, the main inheritance of civilisation, practical and intellectual, was kept in continuous and undisturbed vitality in the empire centred round the Propontis — that during all this epoch, elsewhere one of continual subversion and confusion, the southern and eastern coast of Italy, Greece and its islands, Thrace, Macedonia, and Asia Minor as far as the Upper Euphrates, were practically safe and peaceful. This great tract, then the most populous, industrious, and civilised of the world, was able to give itself to wealth, art, and thought, whilst East and "West were swept with wars of barbarous invaders. The administration of the Empire, its military and civil organisation, remained continuous and eflfective in the same seat, under the same law, language, and religion, during the whole period ; and the official system worked under all changes of dynasty as a single organic machine. It was thus able to accumulate enormous resources of money and material, and to equip and discipline great regular armies from the martial races of its complex realm, such as were wholly beyond the means of the transitory and ever shifting kingdoms in the rest of Europe and Asia." Western Europe, no doubt, bore within its bosom the seeds of a far greater world to come, a more virile youth, greater heroes and chiefs. But wealth, organisa- tion, knowledge, for the time were safeguarded behind the walls of Byzantium — to speak roughly, from the age of Justinian to that of the Crusades. Not only did this empire of New Eome possess the wealth, industry, BYZANTINE HISTOBY 13 and knowledge, but it had almost exclusive control of Mediterranean commerce, undisputed supremacy of the seas, paramount financial power, and the monopoly of all the more refined manufactures and arts. In the middle of the tenth century, the contrast between the kingdom of Otto the Great and the empire of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was as great as that between Eussia under Peter the Great and France in the days of the Orleans Regency. ^^ From the seventh to the thirteenth century Con- stantinople was far the largest, wealthiest, most splendid city in Europe. It was in every sense a new Rome. And, if it were at all inferior as a whole to what its mother was in the palmy age of Trajan and Hadrian, it far surpassed the old Eome in its exquisite situation, in its mighty fortifications, and in the beauty of its central palace and church.''^ A long succession of poets and topographers have recounted the glories of the great city — its churches, palaces, baths, forum, hippo- drome, columns, porticoes, statues, theatres, hospitals, reservoirs, aqueducts, monasteries, and cemeteries." All accounts of early travellers from the West relate with wonder the splendour and wealth of the imperial city. "These riches and buildings were equalled nowhere in the world," says the Jew Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century. " Over all the land there are burghs, castles, and country towns, the one upon the other without interval," says the Saga of King Sigurd, fifty years earlier. The Crusaders, who despised the Greeks of the now decayed empire, were awed at the sight of their city ; and as the pirates of 14 BYZANTINE HISTORY the Fifth Crusade sailed up the Propontis they began to "wonder at their own temerity in attacking so vast a fortress. -"^ The dominant note of all observers who reached Constantinople from the North or the West, at least down to the eleventh century, even when they most despised the effeminacy and servility of its Greek inhabitants, was this : they felt themselves in presence of a civilisation more complex and organised than any extant. It was akin to the awe felt by Goths and Franks when they first fell under the spell of Eome. At the close of the sixth century, as Dr. Hodgkin notes of Chndebert's fourth invasion of Italy, " mighty were a few courteous words from the great Koman Emperor to the barbarian king" — the king whom Meiurice the "Imperator semper Augustus" condescends to address as "vir gloriosus." ^^ And this idea that New Eome was the centre of the civilised world, that Western sovereigns were not their equals, lasted down to the age of Charles, When the Caroline Empire was decaying and convulsed, the same idea took fresh force. And the sense that the Byzantiae world had a fulness and a culture which they had not, persisted untU the Crusades effectually broke the spell." This sentiment was based on two very real facts. The first was that New Eome prolonged no little of the tradition, civil and military organisation, wealth, art, and literature of the older Eome, indeed far more than remained west of the Adriatic. The second, the more important, and the only one on which I now desire to enlarge, was that, in many essentials of civilisation, it BYZANTINE HISTORY 15 was more modern than the nascent nations of the West. Throughout the early centuries of the Middle Ages — we may say from the age of Justinian to that of Hildebrand — the empire on the Bosphorus perfected an administrative service, a hierarchy of dignities and offices, a monetary and fiscal system, a code of diplo- matic formulas, a scientific body of civil law, an imperial fleet, engines of war, fortifications, and resources of maritime mobilisation, such as were not to be seen in Western kingdoms till the close of the Middle Ages, and which were gradually adopted or imitated in the West. At a time when Charles, or Capet, or Otto were welding into order their rude peoples, the traveller who reached the Bosphorus found most of the institutions and habits of life such as we associate with the great cities of much later epochs. He would find a regular city police, organised bodies of municipal workmen, public parks, hospitals, orphanages, schools of law, science, and medicine, theatrical and spectacular amusements, im- mense factories, sumptuous palaces, and a life which recalls the Cinque Cento in Italy. ^^ It is quite true that this imperial administration was despotic, that much of the art was lifeless and all the literature jejune; that cruelty, vice, corruption, and superstition were flagrant and constant, just as the European Kenascence had cruelty, vice, and corruption at the very heart of its culture. The older historians are too fond of comparing the Leos and Constantines with the Scipios and the Antonines, instead of com- paring them with the Lombard, Frank, or Bulgarian chiefs of their own times. And we are all too much 16 BYZANTINE HISTORY given to judge the Byzantines of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries by the moral standards of our own age ; to denounce their pompous ceremonials, their servile etiquette, their frigid compositions, and their savage executions. We forget that for many centuries Western chiefs vied with each other in copying and parading the external paraphernalia of the Eoman emperors in their Byzantine ceremonial : their crowns, sceptres, coins, titles, palaces, international usages, golden bulls, pragmatic sanctions, and court officialdom. There is hardly a single symbol or form or office dear to the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe of which the original model was not elaborated in the Sacred Palace beside the Golden Horn. And most of these symbols and offices are still amongst the most venerable insignia to-day at the State functions of Tsar, Kaiser, Pope, and King.^^ The cohesive force of the Byzantine monarchy resided in its elaborate administration, civil and military. It formed a colossal bureaucracy centred round the sacred person of the Sovereign Lord of so many races, such diverse provinces, such populous towns, united by nothing but one supreme tie of allegiance. No doubt it was semi-Oriental, it was absolutist, it was oppressive, it was theocratic. But for some seven centuries it held together a vast and thriving empire, and for four centuries more it kept in being the image and memory of empire. And with all its evils and tyranny, it was closely copied by every bureaucratic absolutism in modern Europe. And even to-day the chinovnik of Eussia, the Beamten of Prussia, and the administration BYZANTINE HISTORY 17 of France trace their offices and even their titles to the types of the Byzantine official hierarchy. Much more is this true of ceremonial, titles, and places of dignity. We may say that the entire nomen- clature of monarchic courts and honours is derived direct from Byzantine originals, ever since Clovis was proud to call himself Consul and Augustus, and to receive a diadem from Anastasius, and ever since Charles accepted the style of Emperor and Augustus, pacific, crowned of God in the Basilica of S. Peter on Christmas Day, 800 ; when the Eoman people shouted "Life and Victory," just as the Byzantines used to do,^" When in the tenth century our Edward the elder was styled Rex invictissimus and Athelstan called himself Basileus of the English, they simply borrowed the Greek formulas of supreme rank. We are amused and bewildered, as we read Constantino the seventh on the Ceremonies of the Court, by the endless succession of officials, obeisances, compliments, gesticulations, and robings which he so solemnly describes : with his great chamberlain, his high steward, his chief butler, his privy seal, his gold stick, his master of the horse, lords and ladies in waiting, right honourables, ushers, grooms, and gentlemen of the guard. But we usually forget that the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, HohenzoUerns, and Eomanoffs have maintained these very forms and dignities for centuries. Indeed, it might be amusing to take the Purple King's ^aaCkeia rd^i'; to a court draw- ing-room, and check off the offices and forms which still survive after a thousand years. Michael Pselloa, in the eleventh century, speaks of his ^\to? /Sao-t\eu? — the B 18 BYZANTINE HISTORY exact equivalent of Louis' Roi-Soleil. The oflicialdom and ceremonial of Byzantium was rotten and absurd enough ; but it is not for the courtiers of Europe to scoff at it. It was an anticipation by many centuries of much that we still call civilisation. And it would be quite wrong to assume that the organisation of the Empire was a rigid and unchanging system. On the contrary, it steadily developed and was recast according to the necessities of the case. In the main, these necessities were the shrinkage of the boundaries, the loss of rich provinces, and, above all, the pressure of Oriental invaders together with the growth of the western kingdoms and empire. Nor was there anything casual or arbitrary in these changes. The process of Orientation and of Autocracy which Aurelian and Diocletian had begun in the third century had been developed into a system by Constantine when he planted the Empire on the Bosphorus and founded an administrative and social hierarchy in the fourth century. Justinian in the sixth century introduced changes which gave the empire a more military and more centralised form to meet the enemies by which it was surrounded. Heraclius and his dynasty in the seventh century carried this process still further under the tremendous strain to which their rule was exposed. They instituted the system of Themes, military governor- ships under a general having plenary authority both in peace and war; and the system of Themes was developed, in the eighth and ninth century, until in the tenth they are classified by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who mentions about thirty. During the whole period. BYZANTINE HISTORY 19 from the seventh to the eleventh centuries inclusive, the organisation was continually developed or varied, not violently or improvidently, but to meet the needs of the time. There is reason to believe these develop- ments to have been systematic, continuous, and judicious. If we compare them with the convulsions, anarchy, racial and political revolutions which shook Western Europe during the same epoch, we cannot deny that the tyrannies and formalities of the Byzantine Court were compatible with high aptitude for Imperial government, order, and defence. ^^ Alone amongst the nations of the world, the Empire maintained a systematic finance and exchequer, a pure standard coinage, and a regular commercial marine. For the historian, the point of interest in this Byzantine administration is that, with aU its crimes and pomposities, it was systematic and continuous. It never suffered the administrative and financial chaos which afflicted the West in the fifth century, or in the ninth century after the decay of the Carlings, and so on down to the revival of the Holy Soman Empire by Otto the Great. It is difficult to overrate the ultimate importance of the acceptance by Charles of the title of Emperor, or of its revival by Otto ; and history has taken a new life since the modern school has worked out all that these meant to the West. But we must be careful not to fall into the opposite pitfall, as if the Roman Empire had been translated back again to the West, as some clerical enthusiasts pretended, as if the Empire of Charles was a continuous and growing organism from the time of Charles down to Rudolph of 20 BYZANTINE HISTORY Hapsburg, or as if the coronation of Charles or of Otto at Eome broke the continuity of Empire at the Bosphorus, or even greatly diminished its authority and prestige. On the contrary, these Western ceremonies affected it only for a season, and from time to time, and affected its temper more than its power. The Western Empire, for all the strong men who at times wielded its sceptre, and for the fitful bursts of force it displayed, was long before it quite recognised its own dignity and might ; it was very vaguely and variously understood at first by its composite parts ; and for the earlier centuries was a loose, troubled, and migratory symbol of rank rather than a fixed and re- cognised system of government. All this time the Emperors in the vermilion buskins were regularly crowned in the Holy Wisdom ; they all worshipped there, and aU lived and ruled under its shadow. Their palaces by the Bosphorus maintained, under every dynasty and through every century, the same vast bureaucratic machine, and organised from the same centre the same armies and fleets ; they supported the same churches, libraries, monasteries, schools, and spectacles, without the break of a day, however much Muslim invaders plundered or occupied their Asiatic provinces, and although the rulers of Franks or Saxons defied their authority or borrowed their titles. The Empire of Franks and Teutons was not a systematic government and had no local seat. That of the Greeks, as they were called, had aU the characters of a fixed capital and of a continuous State system. There is nothing in all history more astonishing and BYZANTINE HISTOEY 21 more worthy of study than the continual rallies of this Roman Empire. There is an alternate ebb and flow in the extent and power of the Empire most fascinating to observe. The wonderful revival under Justinian, and again that under Heraclius in the sixth and seventh centuries, are familiar enough even to the general reader, as well as the troubles which supervened under their respective successors. The more splendid and more permanent rally under the Isaurian dynasty and again under the Basilian dynasty, the whole period from 717 for three centuries, to the last of the BasUian Emperors, in 1028, is less familiar to English readers, and yet is rich with incidents as well as lessons. The anarchy which followed the fall of the miserable tyrant Justinian II. seemed certain to ruin the whole Empire. From this fate it was saved by the Isaurian (or Syrian), Leo III. and his descendants and successors ; and again order and empire were saved by Basil I. of Macedon and his descendants, who ruled for 160 years. The onward sweep of the conquering Muslims had roused the whole Empire to defend its existence. And all through the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries it found a suc- cession of statesmen and warriors from Asia Minor and Thrace whose policy and exploits at least equal any recorded in the same age either in the East or the West. And it is to be noted that these two glorious periods of the Byzantine power coincided with the great revival of the Franks under Pippin and his dynasty, and that of the Saxons under Henry the Fowler and the dynasty of Ottos. Nothing could have saved the Empire but its 22 BYZANTINE HISTORY superiority in war — at least in defence. And tlus superiority it possessed from the sixth to the eleventh century. It was a strange error of the older historians, into which Gibbon himself fell, that the Byzantine armies were wanting in courage, discipline, and organisa- tion. On the contrary, during all the early Middle Ages they were the only really scientific army in the world. They revolutionised the art of war, both in theory and practice, and in some points brought it to a stage which was only reached in quite modern times, as for instance in mobilisation and in providing ambu- lance corps. They quite recast the old Roman methods and armies, whilst retaining the discipline, spirit, and thoroughness of Eome. The great changes were four- fold: (1) they made it as of old a native army of Eoman subjects, not of foreign allies or mercenaries ; (2) they made its main force cavalry, in lieu of infantry ; (3) they changed the weapons to bow and lance instead of sword and javelin — and greatly developed body armour; (4) they substituted a composite and flexible army-corps for the old legion. Men of all races were enlisted, save Greeks and Latins. The main strength came from the races of the highlands of Anatolia and Armenia — ^the races which defended Plevna. When, towards the close of the fourth century, the battle of Adrianople rang the knell of Eoman infantry, the Byzantine warriors organised an army of mounted bowmen. Belisarius and Narses won their victories with iinroTo^oTai. The cataphracti, or maU-clad horse- men, armed with bow, broadsword, and lance, who formed nearly half the Byzantine armies, were im- BYZANTINE HISTORY 23 mensely superior both in mobility, in range, and in force to any troops of old Rome, and they were more than a match for any similar troopers that Asia or Europe could put into the field. From the sixth to the tenth centuries we have still extant scientific treatises on the art of war under the names of Maurice, Leo, and Nicephorus. When to this we take into account the massive system of fortification developed at Constanti- nople, the various forms of Greek fire, their engines to project combustible liquids, and one form that seems the basis of gunpowder, and last of all the command of the sea, and a powerful service of transports and ships of war, we need not doubt Mr. Oman's conclusion that the Byzantine Empire had the most efl&cient forces then extant, nor need we wonder how it was that for eight centuries it kept at bay such a host of dangerous foes,^^ The sea-power of the Empire came later, for the control of the Mediterranean was not challenged until the Saracens took to the sea. But from the seventh to the eleventh centuries (and mainly in the ninth and tenth) the Empire developed a powerful marine of war galleys, cruisers, and transports. The war galleys or dromonds, with two banks of oars, carried 300 men each, the cruisers 100, and many of them were fitted with fighting towers and machines for hurling explosives and liquid combustibles. Hand grenades, and appar- ently guns whence gunpowder shot forth fire-balls but not bullets, were their armament. When Nicephorus Phocas recovered Crete from the Saracens, we are told that his expedition numbered 3300 ships of war and transports, and carried infantry, bowmen, and cavalry, 24 BYZANTINE HISTORY a siege train, and engines, in all amounting to 40,000 or 50,000 men.^° Nothing in the tenth century could rival such a sea power. He might fairly boast as Emperor to the envoy of Otto that he could lay any coast town of Italy in ashes. Such was the maritime ascendency of Byzantium, until it passed in the eleventh century to the Italian republics.^* The most signal evidence of the superior civilisation of Byzantium down to the tenth century, is found in the fact that alone of all states it maintained a con- tinuous, scientific, and even progressive system of law. Whilst the Corpus Juris died down in the West under the successive invasions of the Northern nations, at least so far as governments and ofl&cial study was con- cerned, it continued under the Emperors in the East to be the law of the State, to be expounded in translations, commentaries, and handbooks, to be regularly taught in schools of law, and still more to be developed in a Christian and modern sense. ^° It was the brilliant proof of Savigny that Eoman law was never utterly extinct in Europe, and then rediscovered in the twelfth century. As he showed, it lingered on without official recognition amongst Latin subject races in a casual way, until what Savigny himself calls the Revival of the Civil Law at Bologna in the twelfth century. ^^ But for official and practical purposes, the Corpus Juris of Justinian was superseded for six centuries by the various laws of the Teutonic conquerors. These laws, whatever their interest, were rude prescriptions to serve the time, without order, method, or permanence, the sure evidence of a low civilisation — as Paulus Diaconus BYZANTINE HISTORY 25 said tempora fuere harbarica. If we take the Code of Rothari the Lombard, in the seventh century, or the Capitularies of the Carolines, or Saxon Dooms, or the Idber Papiensis of the eleventh century, civil law in any systematic sense was unknown in Western Europe, and the Corpus Juris was obsolete,^' Now, there was no revival of Eoman Law in Byzan- tium, because there it never was extinct. Justinian's later legislation was promulgated in Grreek, and his Corpus Juris was at once translated, summarised, and abridged in the East. Although schools of law existed in Constantinople and elsewhere, the seventh century, in its disasters and confusion, let the civil law fall to a low ebb. But the Isaurian dynasty, in the age of the Frank King Pippin, made efforts to restore and to develop the law. The Ecloga of Leo IIL and Con- stantino V. was promulgated to revise the law of persons in a Christian sense. It was part of the attempt of the Iconoclasts to form a moral reform in a Puritan spirit. This was followed by three special codes — (1) A mari- time code, of the Ehodian law, as to loss at sea and commercial risks ; (2) a military code or law martial ; (3) a rural code to regulate the police of country popu- lations. And a register of births for males was instituted throughout the Empire at the same time. In the ninth century the Basilian dynasty issued a new legislation which, whilst professing to restore the Corpus Juris of Justinian, practically accepted much of the moral reforms of the Isaurians. The Procheiron was a manual designed to give a general knowledge of the entire Corpus Juris of Justinian. It was followed 26 BYZANTINE HISTORY by the Epanagoge, a revision of the Procheiron, which was partly the work of that prodigy of learning, the Patriarch Photius. We have other institutional works and a Peira or manual of practice, or the application of law to life. But the great work of the Basilian dynasty was the Basilica, in sixty books, of Basil I. and Leo VI., the Philosopher, about 890, an epoch that Mr. Bryce justly calls "the nadir of order and civilisation" in the West, at the time when the Carolines ended with Charles the Fat and Lewis the Child. The Basilica, which fill six quarto volumes, stood on a par with the Corpus Juris of Justinian. It was a systematic attempt to compile a complete code of law, based on the Roman law, but largely reforming it from the influences of Christianity, humanity, and the advancing habits of a new society. We thus have in Greek a new Corpus Juris, a long series of institutions, amendments, text-books, scholiasts, and glosses, down to the foundation at Constantinople of a new school of law by Constantine Monomachus in the middle of the eleventh century, so that the con- tinuity of civil law from Tribonian to Photius and Theo- philus the Younger is complete. As Mr. Eoby has pointed out (Int. p. ccliii.), these Greek translations and comments are of great value in determining the texts of the Latin originals. The Basilica, indeed, was as permanent as the Corpus Juris, and has formed the basis of civil law to the Christian communities of the East, as it is to this day of the Greeks. Nor is it worthy of attention only for its continuity and its permanence. It is a real advance on the old law of Eome from a Christian and BYZANTINE HISTORY 27 modern sense. The Basilica opens with a fine proem, which is an admirable and just criticism of the Corpus Juris. " Justinian," says Basil, " had four codes. We combine the whole law in one. We omit and amend as we go on, and have collected the whole in sixty books." ^^ The influence of Christianity and its working on personal law was feeble enough in the code of Justinian. The Isaurian and Basilian laws are deeply marked by the great change. They proclaim the principle and work it out to its conclusions — that " there is no half measure between marriage and celibacy." Concubinage disappears and immoral unions become penal. The marriage of slaves is gradually recognised, and the public evidence of marriage is steadily defined. The law of divorce is put very much on the basis of our existing conditions. The wife is gradually raised to equality of rights. She becomes the guardian of her children ; women can legally adopt ; there can be no tutelage of minors during the life of either parent. The property of husband and wife is placed under just conditions, the patria potestas is abolished in the old Roman sense, and the succession on death of either spouse is subject to new regulations. The cumbrous number of witnesses to a testament is re- duced ; the old formal distinctions between personal and real property are abolished, and a scheme of liquidated damages is introduced. There is no feudal system of any kind. There is a systematic effort to protect the peasant from the Swaroi, to give the cultivator " fixity of tenure." Here, then, we have proof that the grand scheme of Eoman law, which was officially ignored and forgotten 28 BYZANTINE HISTORY in the whole West for six centuries, was continuously studied, taught, and developed by Byzantines without a single interruption, until it was moulded by Christian morality and modern sentiment to approach the form in which the civil law is now in use in Europe. No higher evidence could be found to show that civilisation, morality, and learning were carried on for those troubled times in the Greek world with a vigour and a continuity that have no counterpart in Latin and Teutonic Europe. Strangely enough, this striking fact was ignored till lately by civilians, and is still ignored by our English jurists. The learning on the Graeco-Eoman law between Justinian and the school of Bologna is entirely confined to foreign scholars ; and I have not noticed anything but brief incidental notices of their labours in the works of any English lawyer. It is a virgin soil that lies open to the plough of any inquiring student of law. Turn to the history of Art. Here, again, it must be said that from the fifth to the eleventh century the Byzantine and Eastern world preserved the traditions, and led the development of art in all its modes. We are now free of the ancient fallacy that Art was drowned beneath the waves of the Teutonic invaders, until many centuries later it slowly came to life in Italy and then north of the Alps. The truth is that the noblest and most essential of the arts — that of buUding — some of the minor arts of decoration and ornament, and the art of music, down to the invention of Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, lived on and made new departuries, whilst most of the arts of form died down under the combined forces of barbarian convulsions and religious BYZANTINE HISTORY 29 asceticism. And it was Byzantium which was the centre of the new architecture and the new decoration, whilst it kept alive such seeds of the arts of form as could be saved through the rudeness and the fanaticism of the early Middle Ages. To the age of Justinian we owe one of the greatest steps ever taken by man in the art of building. The great Church of the Holy Wisdom exerted over architecture a wider influence than can be positively claimed for any single edifice in the history of the arts. We trace enormous ramifications of its example in the whole East and the whole of the West, at Eavenna, Kief, Venice, Aachen, Palermo, Thessalonica, Cairo, Syria, Persia, and Delhi. And with aU the enthusiasm we must feel for the Parthenon and the Pantheon, for Amiens and Chartres, I must profess my personal conviction that the interior of Agia Sophia is the grandest in the world, and certainly that one which offers the soundest basis for the architecture of the future. ^^ The great impulse given to aU subsequent building by Anthemius and Isodorus lay in the perfect combination of the dome on the grandest scale with massive tiers of arches rising from colossal columns — the union of unrivalled engineering skill with exquisite ornament, the whole being a masterpiece of subtlety, sublimity, harmony, and reserve. It is true that the Pantheon, which we now know to be of the age of Hadrian, not of Augustus, and the vast caldaria of the Thermae, had given the earliest type of the true dome.^" It is true that the wonderful artifice of crowning the column with the arch in lieu of architrave was invented some centuries 30 BYZANTINE HISTORY earlier. But the union of dome, on the grandest scale and in infinite variety, with arched ranges of columns in rows and in tiers — this was the unique triumph of Byzantine art, and nothing in the history of building has borne a fruit so rich, Kavenna, Torcello, St. Mark's, and Monreale are copies of Byzantine churches. Aachen, as Freeman recognises, is a direct copy of Eavenna, from whence Charles obtained ornaments for his palace chapel. And on both sides of the Ehine were constant copies from the city of the great Charles. It is quite true that French, Ehenish, Eussian, Moorish, and Saracen architects developed, and in their fagades, towers, and exteriors, much improved on the Byzantine type, which, except in Italy, was not directly copied. But the type, the original conception, was in aU cases derived from the Bosphorus. Without entering on the vexed problem of the mode and extent of the direct imitation of Byzantine architecture either in the East or the West, we must conclude, if we carefully examine the buildings in Grreece and the Levant, in Armenia and Syria, and on the shores of Italy, that the Bosphorus became the nidus of a building art which had a profound influence on Asia and Europe from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. And when justice is done to its constructive science, to its versatility, and at the same time to its severe taste and dignity, this Byzantine type is one of the most masculine and generative forms of art ever produced by human genius. The Holy Wisdom is twice the age of the Gothic cathedrals, and it will long outlive them. In beauty of material it far surpasses them, and if it has BYZANTINE HISTORY 31 been outvied in mass by the mightj temples of the Eenaissance, it far exceeds these in richness, in subtlety, and in refinement.*^ The people who evolved a noble and creative type of architecture could not be dead to art. But even in the arts of form we rate the Byzantines too low. From the sixth to the eleventh century Western Europe drew from Byzantium its type of ornament in every kind. This was often indirectly and perhaps unconsciously done, and usually with great modifications. But all careful study of the mosaics, the metal work, the ivories, the embroideries, the carvings, the coins, the paintings, and the manuscripts of these ages establishes the priority and the originality of the Byzantine arts of decoration.*^ It is undoubted that the art of mosaic ornament had its source there. Mosaic, with its Greek name, was intro- duced into the ancient world from the East by Greece. But the exquisite art of wall decoration by glass mosaic which we are now reviving was a strictly Byzantine art, and from the fifth to the twelfth century was carried into Europe by the direct assistance of the Byzantine school. The rigid conservatism of the Church, and the gradual decline of taste, stereotyped and at last destroyed the art ; but there stUl exist in Constantinople and in Greece glass mosaic figures as grand as anything in the decorative art of any age.** In the end superstition and immobility more or less stifled the growth of all the minor arts at Byzantium, as confusion and barbarism submerged them in the West. What remnants remained between the age of Justinian and the age of the Normans were nursed beside the 32 BYZANTINE HISTOEY Bosphorus. The art of carving ivory certainly survived, and in the plaques and caskets which are spared we can trace from time to time a skill which, if it have wholly degenerated from Grrseco-Roman art, was superior to any we can discover in the West till the rise of the Pisan school. The noble Angel of our own museum, the Veroli casket of South Kensington, and some plaques, diptychs, oliphants, vases, and book -covers, remain to prove that all through these early times Byzantine decoration donainated in Europe, and occasionally could produce a piece which seemed to anticipate good Gothic and Renaissance work.'* It is the same in the art of illuminating manuscripts. Painting, no doubt, declined more rapidly than any other art under the combined forces of barbarism and the gospel. But from the fifth to the eleventh century the paintings in Greek manuscripts are far superior to those of Western Europe. The Irish and Caroline schools developed a style of fine calligraphy and ingenious borders and initials. But their figures are curiously inferior to those of the Byzantine painters, who evidently kept their borderings subdued so as not to interfere with their figures. Conservatism and superstition smothered and eventually killed the art of painting, as it did the art of sculpture, in the East. But there are a few rare manu- scripts in Venice, in the Vatican, the French Bibliothfeque Nationale — aU certainly executed for Basil I., Nicephorus, and Basil II. in the ninth and tenth centuries — which in drawing, even of the nude, in composition, in expression, in grandeur of colour and effect, are not equalled until we reach the fourteenth century in Europe. The Vatican, BYZANTINE HISTORY 33 the Venice, and the Paris examples, in my opinion, have never been surpassed.^^ The manufacture of silks and embroidered satins was almost a Greek monopoly all through the Middle Ages. Mediaeval literature is full of the splendid silks of Con- stantinople, of the robes and exquisite brocades which kings and princes were eager to obtain. We hear of the robe of a Greek senator which had 600 figures picturing the entire life of Christ. Costly stuffs and utensils bore Greek names and lettering down to the middle of the fifteenth century. Samite is Greek for six-threaded stufi". Cendal is aivhoav, a kind of muslin or taffetas. And some exquisite fragments of embroidered robes of Greek work are preserved in the Vatican and many Northern museums and sacristies. The diadems, sceptres, thrones, robes, coins, and jewels of the early Mediaeval princes were all Greek in type, and usually Byzantine in origin. So that Mr. Frothingham, in the American Journal of ArchcBology (1894), does not hesitate to write : " The debt to Byzantium is undoubt- edly immense ; the difficulty consists in ascertaining what amount of originality can properly be claimed for the Western arts, industries, and institutions during the early Middle Ages." '^ We err also if we have nothing but contempt for the Byzantine intellectual movement in the early Middle Ages. It is disparaged for two reasons — first, that we do not take account of the only period when it was in- valuable, from the eighth to the eleventh centuries ; and, secondly, because the Greek in which it was expressed falls off so cruelly from the classical tongue 34 BYZANTINE HISTORY we love. But review the priceless services of this semi- barbarous literature when literature was dormant in the West. How much poetry, philosophy, or science was there in Western Europe between Gregory the Great and Lanfranc? A few ballads, annals, and homilies of merit, but quite limited to their narrow localities. For the preservation of the language, literature, philosophy, and science of Greece mankind were dependent on the Eoman Empire in the East, untU the Saracens and Persians received and transmitted the inheritance. From the time of Proclus in the fifth century, there had never been wanting a succession of students of the philosophers of Greece ; and it is certain that for some centuries the books and the tradition of Plato and Aristotle were preserved to the world in the schools of Alexandria, Athens, and then of Byzantium. Of the study and development of the civil law we have already spoken. And the same succession was maintained in physical science. Both geometry and astronomy were kept alive, though not advanced. The immortal archi- tects of the Holy Wisdom were scientific mathema- ticians, and wrote works on Mechanics. The mathema- tician Leo, in the middle of the ninth century, lectured on Geometry in the Church of the Forty Martyrs at Constantinople, and he wrote an essay on Euclid, when there was little demand for science in the West, in the age of Lewis the Pious and the descendants of Ecgbert. In the tenth century we have an essay on a treatise of Hero on practical geometry. And Michael PseUus in the eleventh century, the " Prince of Philosophers," BYZANTINE HISTORY 35 wrote, amongst other things, on mathematics and astro- nomy. From the fourth to the eleventh century we have a regular series of writers on medicine, and sys- tematic treatises on the healing art. On other physical sciences — Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, and Geography — a series of Greek writers and treatises are recorded which partly survive in text or in summaries. I need hardly add that I do not pre- tend to have studied these works, nor do I suppose that they are worth study, or of any present value whatever. I am relying on the learned historian of Byzantine literature, Krumbacher, who has devoted 1200 pages of close print to these middle Greek authors, and on other biographical and literary histories. The point of in- terest to the historian is not the absolute value of these forgotten books. It is the fact that down to the age of the Crusades a real, even if feeble, sequence of thinkers was maintained in the Eastern Empire to keep alive the thought and knowledge of the ancient world whUst the Western nations were submerged in revolution and struggles of life or death. Our tendency is to confine to too special and definite an era the influence of Greek on European thought, if we limit it to what is called the Renascence after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. In truth, from the fifth century to the fifteenth there was a gradual Renascence, or rather an infiltration of ideas, knowledge, and art, from the Grecised Empire into Western Europe. It was never quite inactive, and was fitful and irregular, but in a real way continuous. Its effect was concealed and misrepresented by national antipathies, commercial rivalries, and the bitter jealousies 36 BYZANTINE HISTORY of the two Empires and the two Churches. The main occasions of this infiltration from East to West were undoubtedly — first, the Iconoclast persecutions, then the Crusades, and finally the capture of the City by Mohammed the Conqueror. The latter, which we call the Renascence, may have been the more important of the three, but we must not ignore the real effect of the other two, nor the constant influence of a more advanced and more settled civilisation upon a civilisation which was passing out of barbarism through convulsions into order and life.^^ The peculiar, indispensable service of Byzantine literature was the preservation of the language, philology, and archaeology of Greece. It is impossible to see how our knowledge of ancient literature or civilisation could have been recovered if Constantinople had not nursed through the early Middle Ages the vast accumulations of Greek learning in the schools of Alexandria, Athens, and Asia Minor ; if Photius, Suidas, Eustathius, Tzetzes, and the Scholiasts had not poured out their lexicons, anecdotes, and commentaries ; if the Corpus Scriptorum historiae Byzantinae had never been compiled ; if inde- fatigable copyists had not toiled in multiplying the texts of ancient Greece. Pedantic, dull, blundering as they are too often, they are indispensable. We pick precious truths and knowledge out of their garrulities and stupid- ities, for they preserve what otherwise would have been lost for ever. It is no paradox that their very merit to us is that they were never either original or brilliant. Their genius, indeed, would have been our loss. Dunces and pedants as they were, they servilely repeated the BYZANTINE HISTORY 37 words of the immortals. Had they not done so, the immortals would have died long ago.^^ Of the vast product of the theology of the East it is impossible here to speak. As in the West, and even more than in the West, the intellect of the age was absorbed in spiritual problems and divine mysteries. The amount of its intellectual energy and its moral enthusiasm was as great in the East as in the West ; and if the general result is so inferior, the reason is to be found not in less subtlety or industry in the Greek- speaking divines, but rather in the lower social condi- tions and the rigid absolutism under which they worked. From the first, the Greek Church was half Oriental, pro- foundly mystical and metaphysical. But we can never depreciate that Orthodox Church which had its Chrysos- tom, its Cyril and Methodius, the Patriarch Photius, and Gregory of Nazianzus, with crowds of preachers, martyrs, and saints ; which, in any case, was the elder brother, guide, and teacher for ages of the Church Catholic ; which avoided some of the worst errors, most furious conflicts, the grossest scandals of the Papacy; and which brought within its fold those vast peoples of Eastern Europe which the Roman communion failed to reach. ^^ The Greek Church, which never attained the cen- tralisation of the Church of Rome, was spared some of those sources of despotism and corruption which ultimately tore the Western Church in twain. And, if it never became so potent a spiritual force as was Rome at its highest, in the Greek Church permanent conflict with the Empire and struggles for temporal dominion 38 BYZANTINE HISTORY were unknown. The Greek Church, however, had its own desperate convulsions in the long and fierce battle between Iconoclasts and Iconodules. It would be a fatal error to undervalue this great and significant schism as if it were a mere affair of the use of images in worship. Iconoclasm was one of the great religious movements in the world's history — akin to Arianism, to the Albigensian heresies of the thirteenth century, akin to Mahometanism, akin to Lutheranism, akin to some forms of Puritanism, though quite distinct from all of these. It was evidently a bold and enthusiastic effort of Asiatic Christians to free the European Christians of the common Empire from the fetichism, idol-worship, and monkery in which their life was being stifled. The Isaurian chiefs had the support of the great magnates of Asia Minor, of the mountaineers of Anatolia, and the bulk of the hardy veterans of the camp. Their zeal to force on a superstitious populace and on swarms of endowed orders of ecclesiastics a moral and spiritual reformation towards a simpler and more abstract Theism — to purge Christianity, in fact, of its grosser anthropo- morphism — this is one of the most interesting problems in all history. And all the more that it was a moral and spiritual reform attempted, not by poor zealots from the depths of the popular conscience, but by absolute sovereigns and unflinching governments, which united something of the creed of the Waldenses to the cruel passions of Simon de Montfort. The movement showed how ready was the Asiatic portion of the Empire to accept some form of Islam ; and we can well conceive how it came that Leo III. was called a-apaKr]v6peov, " imbued BYZANTINE HISTORY 39 with the temperament of an Arab." The whole story- has been shamelessly perverted by religious bigotry, and we know little of Iconoclasm, except in the satires of their enemies the Iconodules. One of the greatest rulers of the Empire has been stamped with a disgusting nickname, and it is difficult now to discover what is the truth about the entire dynasty and movement. Mr. Bury has given us an admirable chapter on this remark- able reformation of faith and manners. But we need a full history of a very obscure and obstinate conflict which for a century and a half shook the Empire to its foundations, severed the Orthodox Church from the Church Catholic, and yet greatly stimulated the inter- course of ideas and arts between the East and the West.*" In pleading for a more systematic study of Byzantine history and civilisation in the early Middle Ages, I am far from pretending that it can enter into rivalry with that of Western Europe. I do not doubt that it was a lower type ; that neither in State nor in Church, neither in policy nor in arms, in morals, in literature, or in art, did it in the sum equal or even approach the Catholic Feudalism of the West. And assuredly, as the West from the time of Charles and Otto onwards rose into modern life, Eastern Christendom sank slowly down into decay and ruin. My point is simply that this Byzantine history and civilisation have been unduly depreciated and unfairly neglected. And this is especially true of English scholars, who have done little indeed of late in a field wherein foreign scholars have done much. It is a field where much remains to be done in order to redress the prejudices and the ignorance of 40 BYZANTINE HISTORY ages, multiplied by clerical bigotry, race insolence, and the unscrupulous avarice of trade. Hardly any other field of history has been so widely distorted and so ignorantly disparaged. Let me also add that it is for a quite limited period of the thousand years of Byzantine history that I find its peculiar importance. The Justinian and Heraclian periods have brilliant episodes and some great men. But the truly fertUe period of Byzantine history, in its contrast with and reaction upon the West, lies in the period from the rise of the Isaurian to the close of the Basilian dynasty — roughly speaking, for the eighth, ninth, tenth, and first half of the eleventh centuries. The Isaurian dynasty undoubtedly opened a new era in the Empire ; and in some respects the Basilian dynasty did the same. If we limit our field further, we might take the Macedonian period, where our authorities are fuller, from the accession of Basil I. to the death of Basil II. This century and a half may fairly be compared with the same epoch in the East or in the West. By the. middle of the eleventh century, when the Basilian dynasty ended, great changes were setting in, both in the East and the West. The rise of the Seljuks and of the Normans, the growth of Italian commerce, the decay of the Eastern Empire, the struggles of the Papacy and the Western Empire, and finally the Crusades, introduce a new World. It is the point at which Byzantine history loses all its special value for the problems of historical continuity and comparison. And yet it is the point at which a new colour and piquancy is too often given to Byzantine annals. BYZANTINE HISTOEY 41 In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries we may trace a civilisation around the Bosphorus which, with all its evils and the seeds of disease within it, was in one sense far older than any other in Europe, in another sense, was far more modern ; which preserved things of priceless value to the human race; which finally disproved the fallacy that there had ever been any prolonged break in human evolution ; which was the mother and the model of secular churches and mighty kingdoms in Eastern Europe, churches and kingdoms which are still not willing to allow any superiority to the West, either in the region of State organisation or of spiritual faith.*^ NOTES NOTES ^ Freeman, Historical Essays, third series, 1879, p. 241. — This essay was a composite embodiment of a series of reviews, beginning with one in 1855 on Finlay's earlier volumes, and incorporating much later matter. It is one of the most eloquent and impressive of all Professor Freeman's writings, and has exercised a deserved influence over English historical thought. It is entitled "The Byzantine Empire," to which name Mr. Bury has shown very valid objections. Mr. Bury's own style, "The Later Eoman Empire," serves his purpose in his work, the period of which is from Arcadius and Honorius to Irene, i.e. from A.D. 395 to 802. But it is not adequate as a description of the Empire from the foundation of Constantinople to its capture by the Turks. The only accurate name for this is the "Empire of New Eome," which covers the eleven centuries from the first Constantine to the last. Whilst prejudice remains so strong it may be as well to avoid the term " Byzantine Empire," though Mr. Oman has not hesitated to use it as his title. But it is inevitable to speak of Byzantine history, or art, or civilisation, when we refer to that which had its seat on the Bosphorus. ^ J. B. Bury, The Later Roman Empire, vol. i. preface, p. 5. — This masterly work is the most important history of the Eastern Empire from the fifth to the opening of the ninth century that has appeared since Gibbon, and is more full and more modern than the corresponding part of Finlay's work. Mr. Bury has had the great advantage of access to all that has been done in the last fifty years by German, French, Eussian, Hungarian, Greek, and Oriental scholars, who have added so greatly to the materials possessed by Gibbon, or even by Finlay. It is to be hoped that Mr. Bury will 46 BYZANTINE HISTORY be induced to continue his work at least down to the Crusades. He has already thrown light on the period in his notes and appendices to his edition of Gibbon's Decline cmd Fall (7 vols., Methuen), now happily at last complete. And in the English Historical Review, vol. iv. 1889, he has given us a valuable sketch of the eleventh-century emperors. It is unfortunate that, as his work rests at present, Mr. Bury has not treated the Basilian dynasty, A.D. 867-1057, the two centuries when the Empire was at the height of its brilliancy and fame — the period when it was most deserving of study. ^ George Finlay's History of Greece from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864, first began in 1843, completed by the author and revised by him in 1863, was finally edited by H. F. Tozer, in seven volumes, for the Clarendon Press, 1877. In speaking of this fine work, one must use the hackneyed and misused word that it created an epoch, at least for English readers. But it has to be borne in mind that Byzantine history was not the direct subject of Finlay's labours, and that the Empire of New Rome occupies at most the first three of Finlay's seven volumes, or about one hundred pages to a century. And the parts of Gibbon directly occupied with Constantinople and its rulers form no larger proportion of the whole work. Yet Gibbon and Finlay stUl remain the only English historians who have treated systematically the continuous story of the eleven centuries from the first Constantine to the last. The general reader may get some notion of this period from Mr. Oman's pleasant summary in the " Story of the Nations " series — The Byzcmtine Empire (Ksher Unwin, 1892). * Gibbon's Decline and, Fall, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. v. pp. 169-174. [Mr. Bury's new edition of Gibbon is quoted in these notes.] * Voltaire's famous remark about Byzantine history as "a worthless repertory of declamation and miracles, disgraceful to the human mind," has drawn down the indignation of Finlay, vol. ii. p. 8, and of Bury, vol. i. p. 6. How often, indeed, did Voltaire himself find the same faults in the annals of the West and of Christian Eome ! Mr. Lecky would no doubt hardly now write of the "universal verdict of history," what he incidentally dropped out more than thirty years ago in his History of European Morals, ii. p. 13. Lebeau's Histoire du Bas-Empire, 1756-79, 22 vols., which NOTES 47 nobody now reads, has given the Empire of New Eome a label which modern learning has not yet been able to scrape ofif. It is one of those unlucky books of which nothing survives but the title, and that is a blunder and a libel. Lebeau did for the Roman Empire of the Bosphorus what Iconodules did for Constantine V. He gave it an ugly nickname — which sticks. As to the bitter contests between the theologians of Old and of New Eome, good summaries may be found in Neander's Chwch History, third period, sect. iv. 2, 3 ; fourth period, sect. 2, 3, 4 ; and also in Milman's Latin Christianity, vol. ii. bk. iv. cL 6, 7, 8, 9, 12; vol. iii. bk. vii. ch. 6; see also Neale, Eev. J. M., Eoly Eastern Chnvrch. ® Gibbon's ch. xlviii. sketches Byzantine history from A.D. 641 to 1185, i.e. five centuries (in 70 pp. of the new edition by Bury, vol. v.) In ch. xlix. he treats Iconoclasm; and in ch. liii. he returns to the tenth century for some general reflections. J. B. Bury's Later Roman Empire, vol. ii. bk. vi., deals with the eighth century. His work closes with the fall of Irene, 802. Dr. Hodgkin, Italy amd Her Invaders, vol. viii., closes the work with the coronation of Charles as Emperor in 800, and a short account of the close of his reign. ^ Finlay, for the entire period down to the capture by the Turks, and Bury down to the end of the seventh century, have incidentally treated of the economics, art, manners, and literature of the Byzantine world. Mr. Bury also in his notes and appendices to his edition of Gibbon has given most valuable special summaries and references to later authorities. Mr. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire ; Mr. Herbert Fisher's Medimml Empire, 2 vols. 1898; Mr. Tout's Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273, have very useful notices of Byzantine history, and Mr. Charles Oman's History of the Art of War, 1898, has valuable chapters, bk. iv., on the Byzantine warfare from A.D. 579 to 1204. 8 As to recent monographs on special features of Byzantine history, the following may be consulted : — I. Administbation and Economics T. H. Krause, Die Byxantiner des Mittelalters in ihrem Stoats-, Hof- und Privatlehen, 1869. — A review of the military, civil, social, and religious 48 BYZANTINE HISTORY organisation of the Empire from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries from Byzantine sources. Kambaud, L' Empire Oree au X"^ Si&le, 1870. — The life and reign of Oonatantine Porphyrogenitus. HuTD (WUhelm von), Ristoire du Gorrvmerce du Levant au Moyen Age, ed. Fr. 1885. ScHLUMBERGBR, Un Empereur Byzantin, Nicephorus Phocas, 1890 ; L'EpopSe Byzantine, Basil II., 1896 ; Sigillographie de I'Empire Byzantin, 1884. Sabatiee, MonTMies Byzantines, 1862. II. Law Zaohabiae von Linqbnthal (C.E.), Collectio Librorum Juris Graeco- Bomam ineditorwm,, etc., Leipsic, 1852 ; Jus Graeco-Bomanum, 1856 ; Histoire du Droit Graeco-Bomain, translated by E. Lauth, Paris, 1870. MoETREUiL (Jean A. B.), Histoire du droit Byzantin, 2 vols., Paris, 1843. MoNPEERATlTS (A. G.), Ecloga Leonis III. et Gonstantini, 1889. Heimbach, Basilicorum Libri LX., 1833-70, ed. by Zachariae von Lingenthal, 6 vols. 4to. HAnBOLD, C. G., Manuale BasiUcorwm, 1819. 4to. III. Literature Krumbacher, Carl, Geschichte der Byzantinischen Literatu/r, 1897. Herqbneotter (Cardinal), Photius, 1867-69, 3 vols. 8vo. IV. Art Batet (Ch.), L'Art Byzantin, new edition, 1892. CoREOTER (Edouard), L' Architecture Bomaine. Fbequson, History of Architecture, 1874. Tbxibe, Asie Mineure. Texier and PnLLAN, Byzantine Architecture, 1860. Db VoaiJ^ Les Eglises de Terre Sainte, 1860; Architecture Givile et Beligieuse de la Syrie, Paris, 1866-77. Hdebsch (trad. Guerber), Monwnents de I' Architecture Ghretienne, Paris, 1866. V. Antiquities DiDRON, Annales Arche'ologiques, 1844-81 ; Iconographie Ghritierme, 1843, 4to ; Manuel d' Iconographie Ghretienne, 1845. NOTES 49 Labarte, Histoire des Arts IndjustrieU av, Moyen Age, 1864 ; Le Palais Imperial de Constantinople, 1861, 4to. Salzenberg, Alt-christUche Baudenkmale, 1854, fol. Paspates, Bv^avTiva'AvaKTOpa, 1885; Bv^avTival Mekerai, 1877. AamoouRT (J. Seroux de), Histoire de I' Art par lea Monuments, 6 vols, fol. 1822. Rtjskin, Stones of Venice. DiEHL (Charles), L'Art Byzantin dans I' Italic Meridionale, ¥3.118, 1894 ; Mudes d'ArchSlogie Bynantine, 1877. DuBAND (Julien), Tre'sor de San Marc, Paris, 1862. KoNDAKOV (Nic. Partovioh), Histoire de I' Art Byzamtin, Paris, 1886. Michel (Francisque), Becherches sur la commerce des etoffes de soie, etc., Paris, 1862. SiLVBSTRB, PaUographie Universelle, Paris, 1841. SiLVESTBE ET Ohampollion, Universal Palxography. Westwood, PalxograpMa Sacra Pictoria. N. Humphreys, Illuminated Boohs of the Middle Ages. W. Maskell, Ivories in South Kensington Museum ; Russian Art in South Kensington Musev/m. Prof. A. van Millin&en, Byzantine Gonstamtinople, its Walls and Sites, 1899. A. L. Frothingham, Byzantine Artists in Italy, American Journal of Archaeology, 1894-95. * The story is well told in the excellent volume by Mr. Pears, a barrister resident in Constantinople and practising in the local courts. The Fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, by Edwin Pears, LL.D., 1885. See also Riant, Exuvice sacrce Constantin., 1887 ; Hopf, Chroniques Orico-Romavnes inMites. The Crusaders' raid and the sack of Constantinople was one of the most wanton crimes of the Middle Ages, and remains the great opprobrium of the thirteenth century and of Innocent III. Par more destruction was caused to the antiquities of the city by these pre- tended Crusaders than by the Turks at their conquest. Invaluable records of the ancient world perished therein. "> Mr. Oman, in his Jrt of War in the Middle Ages, 1898, bk. iv. ch. iv., ''Decline of the Byzantine Army (a.d. 1071-1204)," has well explained the collapse of the Empire consequent on the battle of Manzikert, 1071, when Alp-Arslan, at the head of the D 50 BYZANTINE HISTORY Seljuks, defeated Eomanus Diogenes. Manzikert was the Cannse, or rather the Zama of the Empire, and if any battle deserves so to be called, was one of the decisive battles of the world. It is singular how many great revolutions in the history of the world were collected close around that date of 1071. As Mr. Bury truly says : "The eleventh century was the turning-point of the Middle Ages" (English Historical Beview, iv. 41, 1889). 11 Mr. Bury, in his Later Roman Empire, and in the Appendices to his Gibbon, has given us most valuable pictures of the mighty bureaucracy which was the real source of strength of the Byzantine government, both civil and military. Finlay's second volume teUs the same story. Consult also Eambaud's L'Empire Grk au X^ Siicle, which gives an elaborate picture of the administration ; also Krause's Byzantiner des Mittelalters ; Oman's Art of War (bk. iv.) and Schlumberger's various works u.s. It must be remembered that the organisation of the empire was not at all immutable, but was frequently modified under new conditions. But it was organic, i.e., invariably centred round the one head permanently seated in Constantinople, and it was practically continuous under all changes of dynasty and palace revolutions. This from the seventh to the tenth centuries made almost the difference between a civilised state and tribes in process of settlement. ^ Consult Bury, Appendix 5 to Gibbon, vol. vi. p. 538, on the Byzantine Navy ; also Schlumberger's Nicephorus Phocas, ch. ii. ; Krause u.s., 265-274 ; and Gfrorer, Bysantinische Seewesen, ch. xxii. vol. ii. ; Heyd, Commerce du Levant, etc. Surely Mr. Herbert Fisher in his Medimval Empire, vol. ii. p. 273, in making the contrast between Constantinople and Tribur as great as that between Versailles and the home of Fergus MTvor, somewhat exaggerates the difference. The second Theophano would hardly have endured a mere Highland clansman's lair. When Theophano arrived in Germany to be the bride of Otto II. — cwm innumeris thesaurorum divitiis — she was regarded as ruining German simplicity by luxury and dress (see Schlumberger, £ IL). 1* Banduri, Imperium Orientate, 1711, and Ducange, Consta/nti- nopolis Ghristiama, Gyllius, and Busbecq, give us some idea of Con- NOTES 5 1 stantinople in its wreck after the sack of the Latins. Labarte's elaborate ■work, Le Palais Iw/pirial, gives a wonderful picture of the extent and splendour of the Sacred Palace, and see Paspates' Palaces, now translated by Dr. Metcalfe (1893). Gibbon's description of the city was an astonishing act ^of imagination in one who could only consult books, and those anti- quated and imperfect. Those who have never beheld Constanti- nople should study Salzenberg's grand work on S. Sophia and other churches, and the new account of the Walls of Constantinople in Prof, van Millingen's recent work. ^* Corpus Scriptorum Historic^ Byzantinm ; Codinus, De ^difidis Con. de Signis ; Paulus Silentiarius, Desoriptio 8. Sophice, translated in Salzenberg. See Bury's Gibbon ii. App. v. p. 546, and consult van Millingen's Walls, and his introduction to Murray's Handbook ^ Emly Travels in Palestine. T. Wright. 1868. And see Gibbon, ch. Ix. vi. 393. "As they passed along, they gazed with admiration on the capital of the East, or as it should seem, of the earth, rising from her seven hiUs and towering over the continents of Europe and Asia. The swelling domes and lofty spires of 500 palaces and churches were gilded by the sun and reflected in the waters ; the walls were crowded with soldiers and spectators, whose numbers they beheld, of whose temper they were ignorant ; and each heart was chiUed by the reflection that, since the beginning of the world, such an enterprise had never been undertaken by such a handful of warriors " (see Villehardouin, Histoire de la Gonguite). All this was true enough in the thirteenth century. In the tenth or even in the eleventh it would have proved a very difi'erent adventure. ^* Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, v. 267. Bury, Later Roman Empire, ii. 313. Dr. Hodgkin's exhaustive work bears frequent witness to this truth. See his accounts of the immense superiority of the armies of Belisarius and of Narses, iv. 5-7, v. 40, 166. Also the various proposals for matrimonial alliances between Charles and the Im- perial family, viii. 12, 210, and the embassies to and from Aachen and Byzantium, viii. 245. 52 BYZANTINE HISTORY 1' The persistence of Otto the Great in demanding a Byzantine alliance, in spite of rebuffs and difficulties, was a striking fact. It is clear that he regarded it as of great importance to have formal recognition of his claim to empire. Looked at from the point of view of Byzantine history, the coronation of Charles in 800 was an event of local interest which did not vitally concern the Empire of the Bosphorus. Neither its subjects nor the Orthodox Church were at all shaken or troubled by it. The establishment of the Holy Eoman Empire by Otto and his dynasty in the tenth century was a much more decisive change. It notified to the world that there were two co-exdstent and per- manent empires, one of which was Greek, and only Roman by courtesy. ^* These various forms of modern civilisation are brought out in Eambaud's U empire Grec, Krause's Byzomtiner des Mittelalters, and Schlumberger's Empereur Byzantin. See also Bayet and Heyd. Perhaps the most curiously modern effect in all the contem- porary Byzantine authors is to be found in Constantine Porphyro- genitus' own work, De Ceremoniis. His tone is that of a James I., or a Louis XIV. (in his dotage) explaining the niceties of Court etiquette to crowds of obsequious functionaries with all the absolute serenity of supreme power. The modern character of Constantinople comes out in Sir Henry Pottinger's picturesque romance, -Bte and Green, 1879, a tale of old Constantinople in the age of Justinian. The Court of Theo- philus or Monomachus was far more modern stiU. ^8 Compare the European coinage of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries with the Byzantine as given by Schlumberger and Sabatier. All the emblems of sovereignty are borrowed and paraded. The eternal ball and cross of western sovereignty may be seen in the right hand of the Archangel in the noble Ivory of our British Museum of the early Byzantine epoch, with its Greek epigraph, "Lord receive thy servant, though thou knowest his transgressions." Compare the sovereigns and emperors on Byzan- tine and in Teutonic illuminations. Mr. Freeman in his Normcm Conquest, vol. i., 62-70, and Appendix C, has some interesting remarks on the " Imperial supremacy of the West Saxon Kings." He inclines to think that their use of NOTES 53 imperial forms and titles was only in part imitative, and was a bona fide claim to rank above kingship. That may be true of such terms as Basileus, Ccesar, imperator, monarchus. But when we find Saxon princelets calling themselves primicerius, archon, pacifieus, invictissimus, gloriosus, and so forth, it is plain that they were borrow- ing grandiloquent titles. Charles's formal style, " serenissimus Augustus, crowned of God, great and pacific emperor,'' and the like, was identical with the Byzantine style. There is something sublime in Charlemagne calling himself pacific. ^^ As we read in Hodgkin's Italy, viii. ch. v., and Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, ch. iv., Dr. Hodgkin's view of the assumption of the Imperial Crown by Charles, that it was almost forced on him by the Pope, has every evidence in its favour. The empire of Charles had at first more of an ecclesiastical than a purely tem- poral character. Neither Charles nor his agents saw, or could see, all that the empire became with Hohenstauffens and Hapsburgs. Mr. Fisher has well pointed out in his opening chapter that the Western Empire was very loosely and differently understood down to the coronation of Otto I. in 962. 21 The modifications in the organisation of the Empire have been thoroughly worked out by Mr. Bury in his two volumes ; and he has summarised the results in Appendices to his Gibbon, vi. 3, 4, and 5. There is no example of equal method and adaptation to changed conditions in the organisation of the Western Empire, either in its early Latin or later Teutonic form. The Byzantine Empire was a real government, and did not become a title until the very end. 22 The whole of Mr. Oman's chapter on Byzcmtine Armies, bk. iv. A.D. 579-1204, should be studied. He concludes (p. 201) ; — "The art of war as it was understood at Constantinople in the tenth century was the only system of real merit existing in the world ; no Western nation could have afforded such a training to its oflficers till the sixteenth, or we may even say the seventeenth century." He goes on to analyse the Tactics of Nicephorus Phocas in the tenth century : " it might be used on the Indian north-west frontier to-day, so practical is it." 54 BYZANTINE HISTORY 2^ Bury's Gibbon, vi. App. 5. Schlumberger's NicepJiorus Phocas, ch. ii. p. 32. Of this wonderful expedition and conquest of Crete we have the contemporary account of Leo Diaconus in Corp. Byzant. JSistor., and the poem of Theodosius the Deacon, in the same volume. ^* So Luitprand reports in his amusing Legatio. Of course we must take much of the witty Bishop's report to be gross exaggera- tion and flattery of his imperial master. If Otto the Great had believed all the Bishop reported of the barbarism of Byzantium, why did he again risk a rebuff and ultimately win for his son the imperial princess " born in the Purple " ? Luitprand tells us what the words of Nicephorus were as to the sea-power of his empire compared with that of Otto — " nee est in mari domino tuo classium numerus. Navigantium fortitude mihi soli inest, qui cum classibus aggrediar bello, maritimas eius civitates demoliar, et quae fluminibus sunt vicina, redigam in favillam." Nor was this an empty boast. It reminds one of Cromwell's threat to the Italian princes. The famous " Greek fire " has been fully discussed by Schlum- berger, Phocas, ch. ii., and by Bury, ii. 311, 319, and see his Gibbon, vi. App. 5. He explains the great varieties of these combustible and explosive compounds, and the modes of using them. One method seems to have been a form of gunpowder ignited to dis- charge liquid combustibles through some sort of gun. Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his work Be administrando Imperio, ch. xlviii., calls this T& Sta TtUv (TK^uvwv eKep6iJ,evov irvp vypov, and says it was invented by Callinicus of Heliopolis in the time of Constantine Pogonatus (i.e. seventh century). The Byzantines seem to have reached the point of inventing (1) gunpowder, (2) using its explosion to drive missiles, (3) applying the gunpowder to guns (crt(^o)V£s). Why did they get no farther 1 Perhaps they were unable to use hard or solid missiles, or to expel the charge beyond a short distance, be- cause they could not make guns strong enough to resist a powerful charge. Their o-icjxavei were in fact " Eoman candles " and other fireworks. They do not seem to have been effective except at close quarters, to defend walls and on board ships. For these purposes, the " Greek fire " seems to have been quite crushing ; and from the seventh to the tenth century, it gave the Byzantine garrisons and warships some such superiority over Saracens and Scythians that NOTES 55 gunpowder in modern times gives to civilised nations against bar- barians. Consult Oman, Art of War, 545-48. ^^ A series of German scholars have collected and edited the post- Justinian Law of the Roman Empire. Zachariae von Lingenthal has published CoUectio Librorum Juris Graeco-Eomani ineditorwm, etc., Leipzig, 1852, in which the Isaurian codes and institutes are collected. His Jus Graeco-Romanum, Leipzig, 1856, has been translated into French by E. Louth as Histoire du droit Grico- Romain, Paris, 1870. And Montreuil has published Histoire du droit Byzantin, 2 vols., Paris, 1843. The immense collection of the Basilica were published by Heimbach, and edited by Zachariae : Basilicorum IMri LX Gr. et Lat., 6 tom., 4to, Leipzig, 1833-70. Also Haubold, Manuale Basilicorum, 1819, a collation of Justinian with the later law. Mr. Bury has treated the post-Justinian law in his chapter on Leo III., ii. 411-420, but his Laier Roman Empire has not reached the Basilian era. He treats it also in his Gibbon, v. App. 11, p. 525, but mainly from the point of view of criminal law. Mr. Roby, in his Introduction to the Study of Justinian's Digest, 1 884, pp. ccxli.-ccliv., has touched on this Greco-Roman law. Other- wise English civilians do not seem to have concerned themselves with a branch of Roman law on which foreign jurists have worked for more than two generations. ^® Savigny's History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages (1815- 31) was written before the publications of Heimbach and Zachariae, and he does not seem to have paid any attention to the persistence and development of Roman law in the East. He triumphantly proved in his famous work that the Roman law was not absolutely extinct, and he found traces of it in Rome, Ravenna, amongst Lombards, Burgundians, Franks, and Goths. But he is not able to show anything like a Corpus Juris, schools of Justinian law, or any systematic treatises down to the rise of the Bolognese school early in the twelfth century. He suggests as a reason for the revival of civil law in Bologna that it was near to Ravenna, which did not cease to belong to the Empire until 751. We may remember that Amalfi and some other Italian seaports remained in Byzantine hands much later, and Byzantine influence in Calabria continued down to the Norman conquest. 56 BYZANTDfE HISTOEY ^' Mr. Hodgkin, in his Italy