CAUSES LEADING TO DECAY OF EMPIRE: NOT DUE TO DEMORALISATION OF COURT; INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CAUSES; LATIN CONQUEST AND FORM OF GOVERNMENT HAD PRODUCED INTERNAL DISSENSIONS AND CHECKED ASSIMILATION OF HOSTILE RACES; METHOD OF TURKISH CONQUEST AND ITS FATAL CONSEQUENCES; RAVAGES OF BLACK DEATH; POPULATION OF CAPITAL IN 1453; ITS COMMERCE; RELATIONS OF PEOPLE WITH GOVERNMENT; RESEMBLANCE TO RUSSIA; DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING IDEA OF DOMESTIC LIFE.

As the later Roman empire is now drawing to a close, it is worth while endeavouring to realise what were the immediate causes of its weakness, and what was its actual condition immediately preceding the final siege.

The empire to which Constantine Dragases succeeded on the death of his brother John was over the city and a strip of land behind it which may be estimated roughly at about a hundred miles in length from its walls towards the north and west. To this and about half of the Peloponnesus still held by his brother had the realm of Theodosius been reduced.

It has often been stated that the fall of the Empire was due to, or at least largely contributed to by, the demoralisation of the Court, the nobles, and the citizens. This view had its origin largely, though not exclusively, in the religious animosity of Latin Churchmen. The Court has been described as given over to gorgeous displays, to meaningless ceremonies, to luxury, and to effeminacy; the nobles as partakers in such displays and themselves effeminate; the citizens as idle, delighting in spectacular shows, and asking only to be amused. I know of no evidence which supports any such conclusion and believe that, on the contrary, such evidence as exists is against it. The population of the city, nobles and people alike, were religious—given over to superstition, according to our modern view—but they were not luxurious or mere pleasure-seekers. Their superstition corresponded with that of their fellow Christians in the West. ‘I believe,’ says La Brocquière, who visited Constantinople in 1433, ‘that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than anything else.’164 But the same writer adds the qualification that ‘the Greeks have not the like devotion that we have for relics.’ Nor is this religious or superstitious spirit the necessary companion of either luxury or effeminacy. The effeminacy and the luxury associated with Constantinople, in so far as they existed, belong to the period before the Latin conquest. When any displays are recorded after the recapture of the city—as, for example, at coronations—they are merely the traditional ceremonies which survived as such observances do in the coronation of our own sovereigns or at great historical courts like the Austrian and papal. The trials and sufferings, the long struggles against external and internal enemies which had gone on for nearly two centuries, had divested nobles and people alike of any love for idle ceremonies or mere diversions. The miracle plays which the people crowded to see in Hagia Sophia do not show that they had degenerated. The writer just quoted saw a representation of the three youths cast by Nebuchadnezzar into the burning fiery furnace,165 which, while it may have served to increase the congregation’s trust in God, can hardly be regarded as a frivolous amusement.

The hippodrome was no longer used by the people for the shows which had pleased their ancestors at an early period. La Brocquière, indeed, records that he saw the emperor’s brother and a score of nobles amusing themselves on horseback within its walls, but they were training themselves for war by practising archery, and endeavouring to make themselves masters in it.166 He records also that he was present at a tournament which the emperor and empress witnessed. Neither in his account nor in that of any contemporary with which I am acquainted is there anything to show that the diminished population of the city were other than an industrious and sober people, to whom a question of religious dogma was of greater interest than any other, except perhaps those relating to the progress of their great enemy.

But though the demoralisation of the Court and people in the usual sense of the term ought not to be counted among the reasons for the decay of the empire, the attitude of mind in the Court, in the Church, and among the masses is indicative of decay. In any country, but especially in one under absolute monarchy, the poorer classes of the people know and care little about politics. Among them there was under the empire a general indifference as to what was likely to happen. They were heavily taxed, were called upon to send their sons to the wars, and if there were to be a change of masters, it did not much matter. Their attitude was, indeed, not unlike that which exists to-day among the poorer Turks. A change of rulers would be welcomed by many, perhaps by most, though at the last moment religious sentiment might and probably would come in to rouse opposition. Present evils are so burdensome that the hope of a change of rulers is constantly expressed.

There was also among the subjects of the empire, as among those of the sultan, an underlying sentiment that the inevitable was happening. Ἀνάγκη ἦν was the belief among the Greeks almost as firmly as the Turks of to-day hold that it is their kismet to be driven out of Europe.

The poorer classes may be disregarded when we are considering the public opinion of the empire. Such opinions as existed among them were a reflection of those of the nobles, and especially of the Churchmen. Both clergy and nobles were intensely conservative, and had become by habit averse to any change. The energy had gone out of the Church. There was no fervour of belief. The missionary spirit was absolutely extinct. No instances are recorded of abandonment of self-interest for the common good. The great body of idle monks contrast unfavourably with those of the West of the same period. The patriotism of the priest Hilarion and his small following had not been imitated. A dead level of contented mediocrity characterised the clergy. An enthusiasm for Christianity, if it could not have saved the empire, might at least have prolonged its existence. But enthusiasm was dead. It would be a relief to read of wild enthusiasts leading crowds into hopelessly impracticable schemes, for such things would at least indicate life. Nothing of the kind exists. The life of the Church was suspended, and it could only arouse itself to resist change. Even in the greatest religious question of the two centuries preceding 1453, that of the Union of the Churches, the Orthodox Church had to be stimulated into action by the emperors and nobles.

The nobles themselves were, however, hardly less conservative than the Churchmen. A lack of energy, an absence of vital force, is the distinguishing characteristic of both. Until the Latin conquest, their conservatism was that of a civilised and wealthy class, who had enjoyed for centuries the advantages of peace and of security. In the two centuries after the recovery of the city the nobles had regained much of their old influence, and up to the final conquest felt, in Constantinople, much of the same security as before and the contentment of acquired or inherited wealth. Commerce had largely passed into the hands of the Genoese and Venetians, but the loss hardly affected the nobles. To all appearance they remained as contented as ever. Even in presence of the enemy which had constantly been lessening their incomes and drawing an iron circle around the empire, they appear to have been hardly conscious of the life and death character of the struggle.

So long as the emperor and nobles could employ their own peasantry or could hire auxiliaries, they had resisted the Turks with a certain amount of success. From Dalmatia to Matapan, from Durazzo to the capital, as well as in Asia Minor, the progress of the enemy had been contested. The Greek armies were destroyed by overwhelming numbers rather than defeated by superior courage. When the capital was cut off from its supply of soldiers from the provinces, it was in grievous straits, and to this condition it had come on the accession of the last Constantine.

Priests and nobles appear to have gradually drifted into the belief that resistance was hopeless. Their acquiescence in what they believed to be the inevitable suggests the mediocrity of their leaders. Their merits and faults were alike negative. They were not given over to vice and profligacy; they were not cruel tyrants; they were not wanting in courage; but they were without ability or energy, incapable of initiating or executing any successful plan of campaign against the enemy or of making arrangements for securing efficient foreign aid.

It is, of course, easy to suggest after the event that the empire might have been saved, but it is difficult to believe that among the governing class there was not a lack of vitality which contributed to its fall. Looking across the centuries, we may, perhaps, conclude that the empire followed the natural course of evolution under despotic rule: struggle for existence, success, wealth, contentment to the point of stagnation, a general slackness and loss of energy and a reluctance to struggle of any kind. But whether such conclusion be justified or not, it cannot be doubted that weariness of strife and general enervation characterised all classes of society. In remembering this, it may be said that the morale of the empire was destroyed and its population demoralised.167

Three causes mainly contributed to the diminution and ultimate downfall of the empire: first, the establishment Causes of decay of empire. of the Latin empire, with which must be associated (a) the internal dissensions among the Greeks themselves, and (b) the increased difficulty in assimilating the races occupying the Balkan peninsula; second, the attacks, literally from every side, by hordes of Turkish invaders, who usually, beginning by raids upon their cattle, ended by expelling or exterminating the conquered people and taking possession of their lands; and, third, the depopulation of the Balkan peninsula and of the cities in Asia Minor held by the empire caused by Black Death or Plague.

The history of the empire subsequent to the Latin occupation bears evidence of the weakness which that occupation had caused. The whole framework of government administration had been broken up. The imperial system was in ruins. The ancient forms of administrative organisation were restored, but there never existed sufficient strength in the capital to put new life into them, and the old traditional spirit of municipal life and to a certain limited extent of self-government had during two generations of hostile rule and the subsequent series of attempts at the restoration of Latin rule been forgotten. The empire was, indeed, kept together by obedience to law, but it was rather a traditional obedience than one due to a strong administration. When a man defied law it was public opinion which he had to face rather than dread of the emperor. The Latin conquest and the growth of neighbouring states consequent upon such conquest made it impossible for the emperors ever to obtain a strong and sufficient hold over the territories which they recaptured.

The divisions among the Greeks themselves, especially those regarding the occupancy of the throne, led to civil wars and gave the Turks opportunities of entering the country and occupying it. They were due in the first place to the change in the succession when Michael the Eighth seized the imperial throne, and were therefore also directly caused or contributed to by the Latin conquest. Though the rules of succession had never been so strictly observed as in the West, his usurpation weakened the office of emperor and manifestly increased the power—not of a regularly constituted body like our House of Lords, or the American Senate, but—of an irresponsible body of nobles. In the next place, the dissensions may be attributed to the existing and traditional form of government.

It is a commonplace to say that uncontrolled autocracy is the best government if a succession of able men can be assured. The difficulty is that, if the ordinary rules of succession are observed, the successor of a Justinian or a Julius Caesar may be a fool. In Constantinople effective control over the appointment of an emperor was wanting. The senate or council of an absolute ruler, be he called emperor or sultan, is usually weak in proportion to the strength of the ruler, and if, in the customary order of succession, the heir to the throne is unsuited to the office, the ring of creatures, by whatever name it is called, which his predecessor has gathered round him is pretty sure to support the heir, irrespective of his merit or ability. Others acquiesce for the sake of peace, or are drawn to support a pretender. The nobles usually gained strength during the reign of a weak prince, and in the support they gave to rival claimants the empire bled.

Democratic government in the modern sense of the term had not yet been born. Sir Henry Maine claims that the modern doctrines of popular government based on democracy are essentially of late English origin. It is certain that nothing like them had existed in the Roman empire, either in the East or West. Any traditions of self-government which the Greeks had retained—a form of self-government which was never upon modern democratic lines—had been entirely overshadowed, not merely by the autocratic government of the emperors, but by that of the Church. The government was that of an absolute sovereign moderated by irresponsible nobles.

Without, however, seeking further to discover the reasons for the internal divisions and the consequent civil wars, their existence and baneful effects are the most manifest, though not the most important, of the evils which weakened the Empire.

The second fact associated with the mischief caused by the Latin conquest, which contributed to the decay of the empire, is that such conquest prevented the assimilation of the various peoples occupying the Balkan peninsula. Even at the best period of the empire that population had always been strangely diversified. Albanians and Slavs had been there from very early times, side by side with Greeks and the race known as Wallachs, each of the four races having a distinct language.

The influence of good administration and the strong hand of the central power kept these races in order. They had the usual tendency to hostility one towards the other, but until the Latin conquest good government and the Greek language, that of the Church and administration, were always a force tending to break down the boundaries between them and to incorporate isolated sections in the Greek-speaking community. But at all times their mutual jealousies constituted, as indeed they do now, the most difficult factor in the problem of the government of the Balkan peninsula.168

This difficulty had been enormously increased by the Latin conquest. The populations were harassed everywhere by native rebellions and by foreign invaders: Greek pretenders to the empire who refused to recognise the crusading kings: crusading knights who settled in Greece after the expulsion of Baldwin: adventurous soldiers of fortune from Italy: freebooters from the Catalan Grand Company: Venetians and Turks: and lastly by dissensions between the emperors themselves, the most hurtful of which were between Cantacuzenus and John.

The various invaders found their task easier from the hostility which existed between the various groups. Racial animosity was fostered by inducements held out by the newcomers to one group to join them in attacking another. These troubles destroyed the work of assimilation which had been going on for centuries. Communities now of Greeks, now of Slavs, were driven from the localities they had occupied for long periods, and the constant movement left the Balkan peninsula with its various races intermingled in strange confusion. To adopt chemical nomenclature, hundreds of villages were mechanically mixed with those of other races but never chemically combined. There were Slav villages in the neighbourhood of Athens itself, Albanians in Macedonia: Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians largely replaced the Latin race of that province, which in the times of the Crusades was known as Wallachia Proper. Language and race had taken the place of subjection to the empire as a bond of union, and as the Turks gradually pressed forward their advances into the interior, literally from every side, they found the conquest of these isolated and generally hostile communities greatly facilitated by the disunion existing among them.

Throughout Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, and Greece the boundaries were changed oftener even than allegiance, and though the Greek element predominated in the south and along the coast as far as Salonica and around the coasts of the Aegean and the Marmora, other communities were interspersed among them in great numbers.

The subjugation of the Macedonian Serbs and the South Bulgarians can be roughly stated as having been accomplished at the battle on the Maritza. The defeat of the Serbians and Bulgarians was a harder task. But Serbia and Bulgaria were the two portions of the Balkan peninsula where the people were almost all of the same race and could organise themselves for defence. No such organisation was possible south of their territory.

The second cause which had contributed to the diminution of the empire and of its population was the system of Turkish conquests. Large numbers of the Christian population were killed; larger numbers were driven away to wander houseless and homeless and either to die of starvation or find their way into the towns.

Conquest of a territory or capture of a city, forcible expulsion of the inhabitants or massacre of most of them and occupation of the captured places followed each other with wearisome regularity. The military occupation was that of nomads who replaced agriculturists. Everywhere the cattle of the Christians were raided. Arable lands became the wasteful sheep-walks of nomad Turks.169

Lastly, the depopulation caused by the terrible diseases which visited Europe in the century preceding the Moslem conquest aided greatly in destroying the empire. The prevalence of Black Death or Plague killed in the Balkan peninsula and especially in the towns hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of the population. In 1347 this scourge, probably the most deadly form of epidemic that has ever afflicted humanity, made its appearance in Eastern Europe. The cities of the empire contained large populations crowded together, and their normal population was increased by many fugitives. These crowded cities, with their defective sanitary arrangements and poverty-stricken inhabitants, offered a favourable soil for a rich harvest of death. The disease had followed the coasts from the Black Sea, where, says Cantacuzenus, it had carried off nearly all the inhabitants. At Constantinople it raged during two years, one of its first victims being the eldest son of Cantacuzenus himself.170 Rich as well as poor succumbed to it. What proportion of the inhabitants of the city died it is impossible to say, but, judging by what is known of its effect elsewhere, we should probably not be wrong in suggesting that half the people perished. But its ravages were not confined to the towns, and from one end of the Balkan peninsula to the other it swept the country in repeated visitations and probably carried off nearly the same proportion of inhabitants.171 Cantacuzenus, in a vivid description of the disease, adds that the saddest feature about it was the feeling of hopelessness and despair which it left behind.

The first visitation of the disease continued during two years in the capital. In 1348 it spread throughout the empire. We have seen that in 1352 the victorious Venetian and Spanish fleets dared not venture to attack Galata for fear that their crews would be attacked by the malady. It raged in Asia Minor as fiercely as in Europe. Trebizond was ruined. The Turks themselves suffered severely. Between its entrance into Europe and 1364 the Morea had three visitations, and what remained of the Greek population became panic-stricken. Further north, at Yanina its ravages were equally terrible. In 1368 so many men died that Thomas, governor of the city, forced their widows to marry Serbians whom he had induced or compelled to enter the city for that purpose. A further outbreak seven years later took place in the same city, and among its victims was Thomas’s own daughter. During the same period Arta, which adjoins the ancient Cyzicus, suffered severely. It is useless for our purpose to inquire whether Black Death and Plague were identical, but one or the other continued to depopulate town and country. We have seen it at Ferrara in 1438, but in the interval since it first made its appearance it had visited the capital on seven different occasions, the latest being in 1431 when the whole country from Constantinople to Cape Matapan suffered severely.172

It may safely be assumed that the Turks, who lived in the open air, and in the country rather than in towns, suffered less than the Christians. Though they are reported to have lost severely, the process of depopulation scarcely told against them. The places of those who died were taken by the ever-crowding press of immigrants flocking westward. The successors of the Greeks who perished were not Christians but Turks. In other words, while the Christians died out of the land, there were always at hand Turkish nomads to take their place.

It is when contemplating the devastation produced by successive attacks of disease, one of which was sufficient to kill half the population of England, when remembering the weakening of the empire by the Latin occupation and the subsequent attempts to recapture the city, and when recognizing that the empire was the bulwark against a great westward movement of the central Asiatic races which forced forward the Turk to find new pastures in Christian lands, that we can understand how the diminution of the Empire and of its population and its ultimate downfall came to be inevitable.

Those who have travelled most in the Balkan peninsula and in Asia Minor recognise most completely how densely populated and flourishing these countries once were, and how completely they have become a desolation. Everywhere the traveller is even now surprised at the sight of deserted and fertile plains and of ruined cities, of some of which the very names have been forgotten. From Baalbek to Nicomedia the ancient roads pass through or near places whose names recall populous and civilised towns which are but the ghastly shadows of their former prosperity. Ephesus, which when visited by Sir John Maundeville in 1322, after it had been captured by the Turks, was still ‘a fair city,’ is now absolutely deserted. Nicaea, the city which has given its name to the Creed of Christendom, was also at the time of the Turkish occupation populous and flourishing. It now contains a hundred miserable houses within its still standing walls. Hierapolis and Laodicea are heaps of uninhabited ruins. A scholarly English traveller remarks that his search has been in vain for the sites of many cities once well known, and that he met ruins of many cities which he was unable to identify.173 The same story of depopulation and of destruction was and is told by the condition of the Balkan peninsula. The observant traveller La Brocquière, who made his journey through Asia Minor to Constantinople and thence to Budapest, noted that desolation was everywhere. In the district between the capital and Adrianople he adds that ‘the country is completely ruined, has but poor villages, and, though good and well watered, is thinly peopled.’ He found Chorlou ‘destroyed by the Turks.’ He visited Trajanopolis and describes it as once ‘very large, but now nothing is seen but ruins with a few inhabitants.’ He found Vyra, to whose church three hundred canons had been formerly attached, a poor place with the choir of the church only remaining and used as a Turkish mosque.174 All contemporaries bear witness to the depopulation and ruin of the country. From pestilence and the results of the Latin conquest it might have recovered, but when to these disasters was added that of conquest by successive hordes of barbarians whose work was always destructive, its ruin was complete.

It is impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate of the population of the city on the accession of the last Constantine. La Brocquière, in 1433, describes Constantinople as formed of separate parts and containing open spaces of a greater extent than those built on.175 This is one of many intimations that the population had largely decreased.176 Some of the nobles as well as the common people had left the city as soon as they saw that a siege was probable.177 To make an estimate we must anticipate our narrative of the siege. Critobulus makes Mahomet appeal to the knowledge of his hearers in proposing to besiege the city when he states that the greater number of the inhabitants have abandoned it; that it is now only a city in name and contains tilled lands, trees, vineyards, and enclosures as well as ruined and destroyed houses, as they have all seen for themselves. As his hearers could see as well as he whether this statement was correct, there can be little doubt of its accuracy. He further declared that there were few men in the city and that these for the most part were without arms and unused to fighting, and that he had learned from deserters that there were only two or three men to defend each tower, so that each man had to guard three or four crenellations. Tetaldi states that there were in the city from twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand men178 and six to seven thousand combatants and not more.179 The actual census taken at the request of the emperor and recorded by Phrantzes gives under five thousand fighting men, exclusive of foreigners. Assuming the statement of the French soldier and eye-witness Tetaldi to be substantially correct, there would apparently be something like eighteen thousand monks and old men incapable of bearing arms. The only other indications which assist in forming an estimate of the population are furnished by the number of prisoners. These are probably exaggerated. Archbishop Leonard estimates them at above sixty thousand. Critobulus gives the number of slaves of all kinds, men, women, and children, as fifty thousand citizens and five hundred soldiers, estimating that during the siege and capture four thousand were killed.180 Probably all captives are included as having been reduced to slavery. The complete desolation of the city and the strenuous efforts made by the sultan to repeople it after the capture raise a strong presumption in favour of the existence of a comparatively small population at the time of the siege. Gibbon judged that ‘in her last decay Constantinople was still peopled with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants,’ forming his estimate mainly upon the declaration of the archbishop as to prisoners. I am myself disposed to think that this number is rather over- than under-estimated. Taking the prisoners to be fifty thousand, and allowing for the escape of ten thousand persons and another ten thousand for old men and women who were not worth reducing to slavery, probably eighty thousand would be about right.

Within the narrow limits of what had been possible, the citizens over whom the new emperor was called to rule had done their duty to the city itself. They had kept fourteen miles of walls the most formidable in Europe in good repair and they had preserved the wonderful aqueducts, the cisterns, the great baths and churches.

Commerce still continued to be the principal support of the inhabitants. This was now largely shared by the Genoese in Galata and by the Venetians who occupied a quarter in Constantinople itself. The familiarity of the Italian colonists with Western lands and their superiority in shipping, in which indeed at this time they led the world, enabled them to achieve a success in what was then long-voyage travelling which was denied to the Greeks; but the latter collected merchandise from the Black Sea ports and from the Azof which was either sold to the Frank merchants in Constantinople or transhipped on board their vessels.

It is difficult to realise what were the relations between the government and the governed during the two centuries before the last catastrophe. The empire was the continuator of the autocratic—or rather the aristocratic—form of government which had been derived from the elder Rome. Emperor and nobles governed the country. The nobles formed the senate. Like our own Privy Council, it met rarely and had ill-defined functions, but upon occasions of emergency it had to be consulted. Its co-operation gave to any measures edicted by the emperor an important sanction. When the decision of the senate was acquiesced in by or coincided with that of the Patriarch and his ecclesiastical council, the emperor may be said to have possessed all the approval that could be derived from public opinion.

Though the senate met rarely, its support was never altogether dispensed with. The emperors did not claim to reign by divine right, nor was any such pretext put forward on their behalf. The succession passed in the usual manner and the emperor reigned with almost autocratic powers so long as the nobles and the patriarch and ecclesiastics were content. In the period with which we are concerned the nobles sometimes preferred to associate a younger man with the occupant of the throne. Such association was usually, though not always, in accordance with the desire of the reigning emperor, and had the conspicuous advantage of allowing the elder to train his younger associate in statecraft. In some cases, as in those of young Andronicus and of John during the reign of his father, Manuel, it was imposed upon the emperor in order to bring about a change of policy.

No form of popular representation existed. The mass of the people had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them. So long as their lives and their property were protected and the laws fairly administered they were content.

So far as can be judged from the silence as well as from the writings of the Byzantine writers, there was little fault to find with the administration of law. When cases of the miscarriage of justice are mentioned they are generally brought forward to show the scandal they had produced or in some other connection which suggests that such cases were exceptional. It was not only that the keen subtlety of a long succession of Greek-speaking lawyers had preserved the traditions of their great ancestors of the time of Justinian and had guarded law in admirable forms, but the still better traditions of an honest administration of law had continued, and this with the result—simple as it may appear to Western readers; strange as it would have sounded to a Turkish subject at any time since the capture of Constantinople—that people believed that the decisions of the law courts were fairly given.

The inhabitants of the capital retained until the last days of its history as a Christian city their intense interest in religious questions. It is of less importance to qualify such interest as superstitious or fanatical than to try to understand it. That theological questions possessed a dominating influence over the people of Constantinople is one of the facts of history, and represents an important element in the education of the modern Western world.

An able modern writer says with justice that ‘religious sentiment was down to the fall of the empire as deep as it was powerful. It took the place of everything else.’181 Probably the exclusion of the great bulk of the inhabitants from all participation in government and the consequent want of general interest in political questions or those regarding social legislation helped to concentrate attention upon those relating to religion. The Greek intellect—and, though there were large sections of the population which were not Greek, the Greek element as well as the Greek language gave its tone to all the rest—was essentially active and philosophical. The investigation of theological questions was not conducted lightly. The same spirit which made scholars of Constantinople espouse the study of Plato as they had done for two centuries before 1453—a study which caused Pletho, on his visit with John at the Council of Florence, to be regarded as an authority to be eagerly sought after by those awakening to the new learning in Italy—had been applied to many questions of philosophy and theology. The examination of such questions was more speculative, thorough, and scientific than in the West.182

While it is true that Constantinople had for centuries produced few ideas and little of original value in literature, it had rendered great service to humanity by preserving the Greek classics. Its methods of thought, its civilisation as well as its literature, were on the model of classical antiquity, but these were all modified by Christianity. Part of the mission of the empire had been to save during upwards of a thousand years, amid the irruptions of Goths, Huns and Vandals, Persians and Arabs, Slavs and Turks, the traditions and the literary works of Greece. It had done this part of its work well. Amid the obscurity of the Middle Ages in the West, Constantinople had always possessed writers who threw light on the history of the empire in the East. No European people, remarks a recent writer, possesses an historical literature as rich as do the Greeks. From Herodotus to Chalcondylas the chain is not broken.183 The Greek historians of the period with which the present work is concerned, Pachymer, Cantacuzenus, Gregoras, Ducas, Critobulus, and Phrantzes are in literary merit far superior to the contemporary chroniclers of the West. Though their works are written in a style which aims at reproducing classical Greek and imitating classical models, they were not intended merely for Churchmen. Nor was Constantinople rich only in historians.

Though intellectual life was never wanting in the city, many of whose people possessed the quick, ingenious, and piercing intellect of the Greek race, the reader of the later historians feels that the civilisation amid which they lived was not that of modern times. It is difficult to realise what it was like. It has often been compared with that of Russia, and writers of reputation have spoken of that empire as preserving the succession of the political and religious systems of Byzantium as well as of its mission to the non-civilised nations of Asia.184 Allowing for the difference between the Greek and the Slav intellect, the analogy in a general sense holds fairly good, and is especially noticeable in two points, the religious spirit of both peoples and their contented exclusion from all active participation in the government.

It is, however, difficult to determine how far the conditions of existence in the first half of the fifteenth century among the citizens of the capital resembled those found in Russia. The difficulty arises, not merely from distance of time, but from the fact that in the empire manners, usages, the conception of life, and the influence of religion were neither Western nor modern. The people were governed much as Russia is governed now: but there were important differences due to race, tradition, and environment. Nevertheless, the condition of the empire reminds one of the Russia of fifty years ago. There were the same great distances between the capital and the provinces and the same difficulty of communication. News travelled slowly; public opinion hardly existed. There were in the country a mass of ignorant peasants tilling the ground and caring little for anything else, peasants who were in a condition of serfdom, thinking of the emperor as a demi-god and rendering unquestioning obedience to his representatives; thinking of the Church as a divine institution entrusted with miraculous powers to confer a life after death, but far too ignorant to trouble themselves about heresies or dogmas. Among these peasants probably only the priests and monks were able to read, although among a people naturally intelligent this would not necessarily imply a want of interest in what was going on around them. The analogy to Russia must not be pushed too far. Religion and language, a common form of Christianity and the traditional duty of submission to the rule of Constantinople were the bonds which held the empire together, but the Greek tendency to individualism and the political development of the empire which destroyed the belief that allegiance was necessarily due to the ruler in the capital had been for two centuries a disintegrating element which prevented the growth of the apathy on political and social questions, and the deadly contentment which has been a characteristic of the great Slavic race.

In the cities there was intellectual life: Salonica, Nicaea, Smyrna, and other centres of population had in times past vied with the capital in general culture and still retained something of their attachment to it. To the last hour of the empire there was, as we have seen, general and absorbing interest in the question of the Union of the Churches. But interest in other questions which had once kept religious thought from stagnation had largely died out. The more pressing questions of life interested the citizens. Moreover, the people believed that all questions of Christian belief had been settled. The Creed was final and had no more need of revision than the style of the Parthenon. The practices adopted from Paganism had become so generally accepted as to pass without dispute. Iconoclasts and Paulicians can hardly be said to have left any representatives. A Pagan Christianity with a Pantheism accepting holy springs, miraculous pictures, miracle-working relics, had become the accepted form of faith, a form which we of the twentieth century find it as difficult to understand as the earlier belief which had regarded the emperor as divinity.

One of the difficulties of the student of political and social history of the thirteenth and two following centuries is that of being unable to get glimpses of personal characteristics or domestic life. The men who figure in contemporary writings are too often little better than dummies who move and turn, but do not suggest vitality. An historical novel of the period written upon the lines of Scott or Dumas, of Kingsley or Charles Reade, or better still, anything corresponding to Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales,’ would be of priceless value in giving indications not merely of what was the environment of a Constantinopolitan but of the characteristics of an individual of the period. The writers on whom we have to depend are mostly Churchmen, who describe the persons of whom they write as if they felt bound to make them correspond with one of half a dozen approved models.

The absence of better indications may be accounted for. The subjects of the empire during the century and a half preceding 1453 lived in the midst of alarms. Its boundaries had been constantly changing and continually narrowing. Disaster followed disaster; usurpations, dynastic struggles, inroads of Genoese and Venetians; struggles with them and between them; ever encroaching Turks, battles, triumphs, defeats, hopes of final success, but territory still decreasing; hope of aid from the West or from Tamerlane; illusions all: finally the last siege and extinction. The writers in the midst of such times thought they had more important matter to deal with than the depiction of scenes of domestic character or delineations of prominent persons.