Chapter 3 to the Latin Conquest.

In 565 Justinian died, and the glory of his reign set in a dull glow that heralded storms. Justin II., his nephew, was a tyrant and a madman, but it was power which brought out his tyranny and his madness. When he came to the throne he spoke mildly and well. He made profession of orthodoxy in S. Sophia; he was raised on the imperial shield in the palace; he promised in the Hippodrome to pay the debts of the dead Emperor.

They were strange scenes, such as the people of Byzantium often saw, and strangest of all to our minds is that which shows the citizens in the place of public games clamouring before the imperial throne for the payment of debts of Justinian.

Constantinople is still the same. Even when it looks cowed, it has still its impudence and its determination to criticise. Justin's doings were watched and mocked at, as if he had been the humblest tradesman, by the city jesters. He built a golden chamber in the palace by the sea: he set up a pillar to record his virtues, and then some one affixed a tablet on it:

Build, build aloft thy pillar,

And raise it vast and high;

Then mount and stand upon it,

Soar proudly in the sky;

East, south and north, and westward,

Wherever thou shalt gaze,

Nought shalt thou see but ruins,

The work of thine own days.

Meanwhile the barbarians were coming nearer to the Empire. The Avars demanded tribute, and the Turks, a name that was so soon to be a familiar terror, sent envoys to the C?sar's court. The enemies, it might seem, were already closing in when Justin became a lunatic, bursting into mad fits of rage, and drawn about the palace in a toy cart, while the "whole senate and city" knew of the sad fate of their Emperor. Sophia, his wife, had all the masterful genius of her aunt Theodora. It was she who gave the rule to Tiberius II., under whom the empire steadily decayed. Maurice, his successor, was a severe ruler, whom the people learned to hate. When at last his reign ended in a revolution and a flight, it was the people of Constantinople, the demes and the factions of the Circus, who gave him to death, and placed the imperial crown on the head of Phocas, his successor.

While Constantinople thus dethroned and set up the civil rulers of the Empire, it was claiming for its patriarch the highest position in the Church. When at the beginning of the sixth century the patriarch John had signed the formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas, he repudiated any claim to superiority on the part of the old Rome: the two cities and the two Sees he declared were one. As early as 518 the patriarch of Constantinople called himself "universal bishop": in 595 the great Pope Gregory, who had himself, as a papal envoy, seen the greatness of the Eastern See, vigorously protested, to the Emperor Maurice, against the assumption to the title. But while the patriarchs used the title in no exclusive sense, they were determined, as they are determined to-day, to assert the independence of their See and its equality with that of Rome.

Ecclesiastical independence did not preserve the Empire from political weakness. Phocas was soon seen to be worse than Maurice, and one conspiracy after another was begun in the Hippodrome and ended by a massacre in the streets. The Green faction in the Circus called the Emperor a drunkard and a madman to his face. Famine and pestilence ravaged the crowded city, and when Heraclius, already a renowned general, brought his fleet up the Hellespont and anchored at the Golden Horn the collapse of the power of Phocas was immediate, and a new Emperor was crowned in the great church of the "Capital of the World." The reign of Heraclius, gallant man though he was, began in almost unbroken disaster, and when in 615 Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians it seemed that the end was at hand. In the next year, as had already happened under Phocas, a Persian army encamped at Chalcedon. When negotiations were in vain, when Heraclius had even formed the idea of transferring the seat of Empire from Constantinople to Carthage, and had only abandoned it after his preparations were far advanced, when the terror and indignation of the people forced him to take oath before the patriarch in S. Sophia that he would never leave "the Queen of Cities," at length the courage of the empire awoke, the nobles sacrificed their wealth and the churches their treasures, the fleet utterly destroyed that of the Persians, and Heraclius delivered the city and the empire by a march as brilliant as it was daring. Leading five thousand veterans across Asia Minor and through the mountains he "penetrated into the heart of Persia and recalled the armies of the great king to the defence of their bleeding country." After three campaigns he returned in triumph and entered, as no Emperor since Theodosius the Great had done, by the Golden Gate.

In his absence thirty thousand Avars, who had swept over the Balkan provinces like a devouring flame, broke through the great wall and encamped under the very walls of the city itself. Churches in the suburbs were burnt to the ground and the famous Church of the Theotokos in Blachernae was on the point of being destroyed, when some panic caused the Avar horsemen to retire. The danger was too obvious for the warning to be neglected, and the Senate, which had refused with contumely the offers of the barbarian leaders, allies of the Persian King, drove back the enemy and immediately increased the fortifications by a new wall. This splendid barrier, magnificent to-day in its ruins, stretched from the enclosure outside the palace of Blachernae, at the foot of the sixth hill, to the Golden Horn. It is flanked by three hexagonal towers.

A year later, in 627, the Emperor, who dreaded even the sight of the sea, crossed the Bosphorus by a bridge of boats, decked with branches of trees to imitate a forest. Landing north of the city he marched inland and crossed the valley at the head of the Golden Horn-below the "Sweet Waters of Europe"-by a bridge made by Justinian nearly opposite the end of the walls. So along the triumphal way he went, past the new walls that have ever since borne his name, and entered by the Golden Gate, the Emperor who had vanquished the Persians, saved his empire, and brought back the greatest of all relics, the sacred wood of the true Cross, which S. Helena, the mother of Constantine, had found on Calvary.

But Heraclius was not to triumph unchecked. The fatal temptation of theological strife conquered even the conqueror of the Persians, and the beginning of the Monothelite controversy dates from the Ekthesis of Sergius the patriarch, a document which, if it were intended to make peace, certainly provoked, war that was not ended, though its area was defined, by the decision of the Fourth General Council, which met at Constantinople in 680, and condemned those who denied that Christ had two wills, human and divine.

The dreary years of the latter half of the seventh century may be rapidly summarised. Constantinople saw the settlement of barbarians, Slaves and Balgars, almost at its gates. Emperor succeeded emperor without anyone appearing who was worthy to be the heir of Heraclius. At length in 672 the Saracens, who had long devastated Asia, brought a fleet up the Hellespont and besieged the city. Their total defeat by Constantine IV., whom his people nicknamed Pogonatus (the bearded), was the greatest triumph of the Christian powers against the infidel; it was won, it is said, by the newly-discovered "Greek fire," so long to be the terror of the foes of the Empire. Constantinople proved herself the bulwark of Europe against the infidel. The nations of the West sent their envoys to applaud. Six hundred years later another Constantine was to fall, when his city was at length captured by the followers of Mohammed.

Justinian II., the son of Constantine Pogonatus, was a great builder like his namesake, whom probably he sought to imitate; but in character he was far from resembling the builder of S. Sophia. In the inimitable phrases of Gibbon, "The name of a triumphant law-giver was dishonoured by the vices of a boy.... His passions were strong; his understanding was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride that his birth had given him the command of millions, of whom the smallest community would not have chosen him for their local magistrate. His favourite ministers were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy, an eunuch and a monk; to the one he abandoned a palace, to the other the finances; the former corrected the Emperor's mother with a scourge, the latter suspended the insolvent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow and smoky fire. Since the days of Commodus and Caracalla, the cruelty of the Roman princes had most commonly been the effect of their fear; but Justinian, who possessed some vigour of character, enjoyed the sufferings and braved the revenge of his subjects about ten years, till the measure was full of his crimes and of their patience."

The attempt to banish a popular general whom he had long imprisoned was the occasion of a revolt which cast the Emperor from the throne; and the hippodrome saw again an act of tragic vengeance, when the tongue and nose of the fallen C?sar were slit in the presence of the people who had borne with him too long.

THE GOLDEN HORN FROM EY?B

Let Professor Bury's summary continue the tale:-"The twenty years which intervened between the banishment of Justinian in 695 and the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 717 witnessed a rapid succession of monarchs, all of whom were violently deposed. Isaurian Leontius was succeeded by Apsimar, who adopted the name Tiberius, and these two reigns occupied the first ten years. Then Justinian returned from exile, recovered the throne, and 'furiously raged' for six years (705-711). He was overthrown by Bardanes, who called himself Philippicus; then came Artemius, whose imperial name was Anastasius; and finally the years 716 and 717 saw the fall of Anastasius, the reign and fall of Theodosius, and the accession of Isaurian Leo, whose strong arm guided the Empire from ways of anarchy into a new path."[10]

In the tragedies of these years Constantinople bore its full share, and no more strange contrast to the scene of his barbarous mutilation could be imagined than that when Justinian II. sat again, ten years later (705) in the hippodrome, with his feet on the necks of the two monarchs who had filled his throne in the meantime. As the fickle people saw the "slit-nose," as they called him, triumphant over Leontius and Apsimar they called out in the words of the psalms, which came so readily to their lips, "Thou hast trodden upon the lion and the asp: the young lion and the dragon hast thou trodden under thy feet."

Six years later (711) there was a more terrible tragedy. Justinian was justly dethroned and slain, and his little boy Tiberius, the child of his exile, was torn from the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae and cruelly butchered outside the palace wall. The next years were stained by crimes and follies hardly less revolting than those that had gone before; there could be no more bitter irony than the single word which the humble tax-gatherer, who was elevated against his will to the imperial throne under the name of Theodosius II., inscribed upon his tomb-?γ?εια-health was to be found nowhere for the empire in his day.

His successor, Leo the Isaurian, whom the Senate and the patriarch of Constantinople chose in 718 to be their lord, had seen an adventurous life, and was already the general and imperator of the great eastern army.

His first task was to defend the city against the Saracens. The great siege of 718, lasting twelve months, failed chiefly through his skill and patience. The invaders encamped before the city in August 717; the name of their Suleiman was one which was later to be very familiar to the Byzantines. When winter came it was one of those bitter seasons to which Constantinople is often subject. For many weeks snow lay on the ground, and the besiegers suffered far more than the garrison. Leo defended the city with extraordinary skill, and at length, at the right moment, by a well planned sortie he scattered the infidels, and of the great host of a hundred and eighty thousand men the Mohammedan historians say that only thirty thousand escaped back to the East. No greater feat was ever performed by the great empire, the bulwark of Christendom, than this heroic defence and splendid repulse.

It was not wholly the work of Leo, for the Bulgarians came from the north to his aid, and a pestilence, even before the storms of the Dardanelles destroyed their fleet, caused the withdrawal of the Saracen host. Then as an administrator he reformed the government, as a legist he reissued and revised the laws. The great earthquake of 739 caused the institution of a new tax, if not a new financial system.

"Some of the oldest monuments in the city were thrown down by the shock, the statue of Constantine the Great, at the gate of Attalus; the statue and sculptured column of Arcadius; the statue of Theodosius I., over the Golden Gate, and the church of Irene, close to S. Sophia. The land walls of the city were also subverted; and in order to repair the fortifications Leo increased the taxes by one-twelfth, or a miliarision in a nomisma."

Thus Professor Bury.[11] But to such acts, important though they were, Leo the Isaurian does not owe the fact that his name will never be forgotten in the history of the Empire which he ruled. It was he who began the attack upon the ancient custom of the Eastern churches which gave rise to the long and bitter iconoclastic controversy. It were idle for a Western accustomed to the severity and restraint of English worship to pretend to judge without partiality the conflict which arose in the eighth century among the Easterns. To Englishmen it comes with a shock of surprise to learn that they are regarded as Romanists, as has recently happened, because they do not use incense in every public service of the Church, according to the immemorial usage of the East. Similarly it is with diffidence that we learn to recognise the reverence paid to icons, pictures of sacred things, as a true and helpful part of Oriental devotion. It tends, we think, to superstition; as much perhaps as our grandfathers' pride in the black gown of the preacher, or the curious customs which led in England to the "plethoric Sunday afternoon." Leo the Isaurian, and after him his son, Constantine V. (nicknamed Copronymus by his people, probably "from his devotion to the stables"), of whom the latter certainly had no sense of the reality of religion, embarked on an ill-omened attempt to purge from the Church, and to destroy in the sacred buildings themselves, all the brilliant pictures and mosaics which commemorated the saints and received the homage, bordering no doubt on superstition, of the faithful. They objected that it was a sin to represent Christ in art at all; and that the representation of His Mother tended to the exaltation of her name into that of a Divinity. "Apostles of rationalism" these Emperors have strangely been called, who fought against an ineradicable passion of their people. As dear to the hearts of the Greek Christians as their subtle questionings into the deep meanings of divine things, their determination to be satisfied with nothing less than a precise and logical definition of the faith once for all given to the saints, was their craving for outward and visible signs to represent the gifts of God at once in the Divine Life and in the lives of the saintly followers of the Lord, and their own reverence and consecration of all that was beautiful in the work of man. The force of Mohammedanism had lain in its austere rejection of any outward image of Divine things; heretics, Judaising or Monophysite, had from time to time taken up the cry against these innocent representations of the saints. If the "worship" of images tended to obscure the spiritual truth of religion, the destruction of all visible memorials of the saints, emblems of the divine attributes, or representations of the passion of Christ, was even more certain to tell against the real belief of a race at once ignorant and dramatic, to whom the eye was the constant teacher of the mind. However strange and unedifying the reverence paid to icons may seem to the modern Western mind, it is but the shallowest ignorance which would call it idolatry, and it is plain that any hasty attempt to interfere with the popular expression of religious ideas must tend, if hastily and unskilfully conducted, to impair the faith of the people itself. Led by men who were believed by the enthusiastic and conservative Byzantines to be influenced by Monophysites, Jews and Mohammedans, it was certain to provoke a desperate resistance, and that the more widespread because the issue was not an intricate matter of scholastic teaching, but a plain issue of practice in which every day passions were deeply concerned.

In 726, almost, it would seem, without warning, the Emperor Leo issued an edict that all images in churches should be utterly abolished. The patriarch, rather than consent to the action, resigned his office. The story of what followed may be given in the words of Mr Tozer.[12]

"The work of destruction now commenced in earnest; the statues were everywhere removed, and the pictures on the walls were whitewashed over, and though numerous outbreaks occurred, and some executions took place before it was accomplished, yet on the whole the opposition was not formidable. The act which caused the greatest indignation was the removal of the magnificent image of Christ which surmounted the bronze gateway of the imperial palace, and was the object of great reverence. In order to take down this statue and burn it, a soldier of the guard had mounted a ladder, when a number of women assembled at the spot to beg that it might be spared; but, instead of listening to them, the soldier struck his axe into the face of the image. Infuriated by this, which appeared to them to be an insult offered to the Saviour Himself, they dragged the ladder from under his feet and killed him. The Emperor avenged his agent by executing some, and exiling others, of the offenders, and set up in the place of the statue a plain cross, with an inscription explaining the significance of the change.

"In the defence of images there stood forth two champions, the one in the West, the other in the East; and the points of view from which they respectively regarded them illustrate the different feelings of the two churches on the subject. The former of these was Pope Gregory II., who at first strongly remonstrated with the Emperor on his edict, and afterwards, when he endeavoured to enforce its observance in Italy, encouraged his people to disregard the order, and defied his nominal sovereign in violent and even insulting language. At last he excommunicated his nominee, the patriarch Anastasius. But he advocated the retention of images on the practical ground of their utility in instructing the young and ignorant, and as being an incentive to devotion. Far more exalted and more subtly defined was the position attributed to them by the other advocate, who spoke from the distant East. This was John of Damascus, otherwise known as S. John Damascene, the last of the Fathers of the Greek Church. This learned and acute theologian, who in many ways was superior to the age in which he lived, at one time filled a civil post of some importance under the Caliphs, who now ruled in Syria, but afterwards retired to the monastery of S. Saba, in the wilderness of Engedi, the strange position of which, overhanging a deep gorge that leads down to the Dead Sea, is still the wonder of the traveller. As he lived in the dominion of the Saracens he was beyond the reach of the Emperor's arm, and now undertook the cause of his suffering co-religionists. In three powerful addresses he set forth his arguments for image worship. Some of them follow the familiar lines of defence, that these objects were memorials of the mysteries of the faith; and that in the adoration of them the spiritual was reached through the medium of the material. But beyond this he made it plain that, to his mind, and the minds of those who thought with him, the worship of images was closely connected with the doctrine of the Incarnation, the earthly material having been once for all sanctified when the Son of God took human flesh, and being thenceforth worthy of all honour. From this we may learn both how it came to pass that the most religious men of the age became enthusiasts for what was in itself superstitious, and also what was the cardinal point of difference between them and their opponents. For, while the one side regarded figures of Christ as a degradation of a heavenly being, to the other they were a practical confession of His true humanity, and any disregard of them appeared in the light of a denial of the Incarnation. At last, when it was found that the Emperor persevered in his attack, the iconoclasts were anathematised by the orthodox congregations in all the Mahometan countries outside the Empire. Both John and Gregory protested throughout against the interference of the State with the Church in this matter as being beyond its province; and, owing to the close connection which existed between the clergy and the people, they were generally regarded as the assertors of liberty and of the right of private judgment in opposition to despotism."

The indirect effects of Leo's action were even more important than the obvious ones. The division which ensued between Italy, resisting iconoclasm under the Pope's authority, and the imperial power made the Emperor decide to transfer to the patriarch of Constantinople the jurisdiction over Sicily and Calabria, leaving to the Pope that over the exarchate of Ravenna which still nominally obeyed the C?sar. The meaning of this is thus expressed by Professor Bury.

"The effect of this act of Leo, which went far to decide the medi?val history of Southern Italy, was to bring the boundary between the ecclesiastical dominions of New Rome and Old Rome into coincidence with the boundary between the Greek and the Latin nationalities. In other words, it laid the basis of the distinction between the Greek and the Latin Churches. The only part of the Empire in which the Pope now possessed authority was the exarchate, including Rome, Ravenna and Venice. The geographical position of Naples, intermediate between Rome and the extremities of Italy, determined that its sympathies should be drawn in two directions; in religious matters it inclined towards Old Rome, in political matters it was tenacious of its loyalty to New Rome."[13]

But this was not all. An immense immigration of persecuted monks and priests as well as lay folk practically recolonised much of Southern Italy.

Constantine Copronymus was far more eager than his father to push the iconoclastic campaign. In 761 he began a deliberate and bitter persecution of those who opposed him. Already, under Leo the Isaurian, the virgin Theodosia had been martyred. Her festival is still kept on May 29, and the church raised to her memory still stands transformed into a mosque just within the Aya Kapou, on the Golden Horn. Many whom the Greek Church still commemorates were now slain and others tortured. Constantine was equally hostile to monks, and he was as bitter against his creatures whom he suspected as against those who openly disputed his will. The patriarch whom he had set up fell into disgrace in spite of his support of iconoclasm. He was degraded in S. Sophia, carried round the Hippodrome sitting backwards on an ass, and at last beheaded as a traitor.

The successor of Constantine, Leo IV., was significant only in that he followed his policy of persecution. He left the crown in 780 to his son Constantine and his widow Irene. Conspiracies, real or alleged, of his brothers were bitterly punished. The Empress Irene was satisfied so long as her son was still a boy to allow him a nominal share in the government; but when he grew up and showed an independent spirit, she used the growing unpopularity which came upon him after his repudiation of his wife to raise a party against him, and hired troops to take his life. He escaped death only to lose his eyes, and his wicked mother, surrounded by degraded favourites, reigned alone. It was she whom the great Teutonic King Charles was ready to wed, and the failure of the negotiations led, with other more notable causes, to the creation of the new empire of the West, so long held by German C?sars, but professing still to be-as that of Constantinople historically was-the heir of the ancient empire of the Roman world.

Wicked as Irene was, it was given to her to restore peace to the Church, and to reunite though only for a time the Catholic Church throughout the world. So completely was the popular feeling against the iconoclasts that it needed little of the intrigue or violence which Irene was so ready to use to secure the result she desired. In 786, when her worst passions had not been revealed and she still lived in union with her son, the seventh General Council met at Nicaea. It was attended by representatives from Italy as well as from the East, and as its decisions represent the use and teaching of the Eastern Church to-day, they may here be summarised in Professor Bury's words.

"At the seventh sitting (5th or 6th October), the definition (?ρο?) of doctrine was drawn up; after a summary repetition of the chief points of theology established by previous Universal Councils, it is laid down that the figure of the holy cross and holy images, whether coloured or plain, whether consisting of stone or of any other material, may be represented on vessels, garment, walls or tables, in houses or on public roads; especially figures of Christ, the Virgin, angels, or holy men: such representations, it is observed, stimulate spectators to think of the originals, and, while they must not be adored with that worship which is only for God (λατρε?α) deserve adoration (προσκ?νησι?)."[14]

But Irene's services to the Church were not allowed then, any more than we should allow them now, to preserve her in power. The stars in their courses seemed to the superstitious to fight against her, and, though she held the crown she had so ill-won for five years, the end came at last by the treachery of those she had raised to highest place. "For five years," says Gibbon, "the Roman world bowed to the government of a female; and, as she moved through the streets of Constantinople, the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot before the golden chariot of their queen." But among the patricians whom she had chosen was the treasurer Nicephorus, who on October 31, 802, having captured his benefactress, and with some spark of generosity, undestroyed by his ambition and his avarice, sent her to banishment rather than to death, ascended the throne of the C?sars.

With him began a new dynasty, a new century, and in some ways a new era for the imperial city.

During the eighth century Constantinople, as a city, underwent a great change. This was not merely due to the incessant ebb and flow of population, the coming and going of different detachments of the imperial army, the founding of new monasteries by men from all parts of the Christian world, the opening of new commercial establishments, the coming of new trading embassies, but to one great and irremediable disaster. From 745 to 747 the city was devastated by the plague, that bubonic distemper, so familiar already but now more terribly destructive than ever before. The words of Theophanes, who lived when the remembrance of it was still fresh, though they have been often quoted, may be quoted again. They stand side by side with the modern records of the still powerful pestilence.

"And in the spring of the first indiction (747) the pestilence spread to a greater extent, and in summer its flame culminated to such a height that whole houses were entirely shut up, and those on whom the office devolved could not bury their dead. In the embarrassment of the circumstances, the plan was conceived of carrying out the dead on saddled animals, on whose backs were placed frameworks of planks. In the same way they placed the corpses above one another in waggons. And when all the burying-grounds in the city and suburbs had been filled, and also the dry cisterns and tanks, and very many vineyards had been dug up, the gardens too within the old walls were used for the purpose of burying human bodies, and even thus the need was hardly met."

THE AQUEDUCT OF VALENS

The effect of the great loss of life which ensued was felt at once. At the very time when multitudes were seeking refuge in Italy from the iconoclastic persecution, came this new depopulation, and Constantine found himself obliged to encourage, and even enforce, immigration from every part of his dominions. Chiefly he brought Greeks from the mainland, and their places were filled by Slaves from the North. Greece and the Balkan States as they appear to-day, and even to some degree Constantinople itself took a new and marked departure in the middle of the eighth century. Constantinople received a new Greek population and, while its official classes still preserved the pomp and dignity of Roman traditions, began to feel itself more than ever Greek. None the less it was still actively and obviously cosmopolitan. Scholars from all parts of the world came to the university where ancient classics were still read and where Greek was still a living tongue. Constantine actually made Nicetas, a man of Slavonic race, patriarch, and it is said that his clergy mocked at his pronunciation of the Greek of the Gospel. Armenians had already become almost as prominent in the city as they are to-day; at the beginning of the ninth century one of them actually became Emperor. As early as the reign of Justin II. a large colony of traders from Central Asia was established in the city. When communication became easier and the power of the Roman State, reviving under Heraclius, more wide spread, the riches of the city increased. It is noted that the influence of the Church was steadily directed against luxury, and that nothing at all like the scenes described by Juvenal or Petronius marked the Byzantium of the days of the iconoclasts. Constantine himself was a man who lived freely, and the monks whom he attacked commented severely on his life. But the rich men of Constantinople, as a rule, though they delighted in the outward adorning of gold and precious stones, and loved entertainments, the circus and excursions on the Bosphorus, lived on the whole simply. Though the churches, as well as the houses, glittered with mosaics and gems, the asceticism which the many monasteries kept always visibly before the eyes of the people, had its influence among the rich as well as the poor. Rich though the imperial city was it was rich most of all in its churches and its relics. And indeed the constant danger from without, and the pressing needs of a large population, both gave employment to great numbers and gave to the government always some practical work which kept up the taxes. The laws, it has been observed, recognised the duty of the State to provide work for the people, and to see that they did it. Idleness was regarded as a crime as well as a sin: the State declared that for this reason it must actively discourage it, and no less because "it is unfair that strong men should live by the consumption of the superfluity of the labour of others, because that superfluity is owed to the weak." It is noted also that "besides the inevitable staff of public workmen, who, in a city like Byzantium, where fires were frequent and earthquakes not uncommon, had much to do beyond the repairs necessitated by the wear and tear of time, the State also supported multitudes of bakers"-for the State still followed the Roman rule and provided the poor with bread as well as public games-"and we are taught that the gardens, to which we sometimes meet casual references in the historians, were not the property of private citizens, but were parks for the people, kept up at the State's expense." Already we see that some of the features most prominent in the city to-day belonged to it in the early Middle Age. The great Dome of S. Sophia glittered upon the wayfarer as he sailed up towards the mouth of the Golden Horn, and the city as the soldier looked at it from the tower of Heraclius was a city set in bowers of perpetual green. Another feature as prominent, which the foreigner sees from the heights of Pera, owes its preservation to Constantine Copronymus. The aqueduct of Valens had been destroyed by the Avars in the reign of Heraclius, Constantine brought thousands of workmen together and repaired it, and the water flowed as of old into the capacious cisterns which were the work of the greatest of eastern architects.

The ninth century began with the new and short-lived dynasty of Nicephorus. "His character," says Gibbon, "was stained with the three odious vices of hypocrisy, ingratitude and avarice; his want of virtue was not redeemed by any superior talents nor his want of talents by any pleasing qualifications." The historians, being ecclesiastics, resented his attempt to assert the most extreme claims of the iconoclastic emperors to rule the Church, and the people despised him for his treachery and his failures in war. He fell in 811 in battle against the Bulgarians. In six months his son, Stauricius, followed him to the tomb. Michael Rhangabe, who had married Procopia, the daughter of Nicephorus, then reigned for two years, but his weakness caused his deposition, and the people of Constantinople found a new sovereign, Leo the Armenian, forced upon them by the army. During his reign the imperial city was again besieged. Hadrianople was lost, and but for the death of the Bulgarian king it seems unlikely that Leo would have been able to drive back the forces which overran the peninsula. Yet Leo, conqueror though he was, was able to hold the crown but little longer than his predecessors. In 820 a conspiracy of his generals, which his own generosity had made possible, attacked him as he sang matins on Christmas Day, and slew him at the foot of the altar in the chapel. He did not reign without leaving a memorial of his rule which lasts to this day. The wall of Heraclius was not thought fully to defend the quarter of Blachernae. Leo determined to build another wall and dig a broad moat in front of the Heraclian wall. "The wall of Leo," says Professor Van Millingen, "stands 77 feet to the west of the wall of Heraclius, running parallel to it for some 260 feet, after which it turns to join the walls along the Golden Horn." It is a strong fortification, and the number of attacks afterwards delivered on that quarter show how necessary it was that it should be strong. "Its parapet-walk was supported upon arches, which served at the same time to buttress the wall itself, a comparatively slight structure about 8 feet thick. With a view of increasing the wall's capacity for defence, it was flanked by four small towers, while its lower portion was pierced by numerous loopholes. Two of the towers were on the side facing the Golden Horn, and the other two guarded the extremities of the side looking towards the country on the west. The latter towers projected inwards from the rear of the wall, and between them was a gateway corresponding to the Heraclian gate of Blachernae."[15]

Michael II., called the Stammerer, who was then brought from the dungeon to the throne, and on whose legs,-such was the haste of the revolution,-the fetters actually remained for some hours after he was Emperor, was twice besieged in Constantinople by a rival general, but was relieved by the Bulgarians, and showed to the captured leader, Thomas the Slavonian, none of the mercy that had been shown to himself. He died in 829, and his son Theophilus reigned in his stead. Of his character and reign the most contradictory reports are given; but it is interesting to recall the scene of his choice of a wife, as Theophanes tells it. He determined to choose a bride from among the beauties of Constantinople, and when they were assembled he walked between two lines of lovely damsels. When he came to the poetess Kasia, he addressed her in verse:

δι? γυναικ?? ε?σερρ?η τ? φα?λα.

She replied, more happily,

?λλ? κα? δι? γυναικ?? τ? κρε?ττονα πηγ?ζει.

It was in the style of the old Greek poets: the leaders of each semichorus championing the cause of their sex in the immortal question: "Through woman evil things entered"; "but also through woman better things well forth." The lady was too witty to be empress, and Theodora, who was chosen instead, became not only a happy wife but a wise regent after the death of Theophilus. He died in 842, and Theodora was regent for her son Michael till 856. Her husband had been Iconoclast, and he scourged those who would not receive his edict. His widow declared that he had repented on his death-bed, and procured his absolution after death. Before the year of his death was out Theodora had replaced the images and a synod had reiterated the right and benefit of image-"worship." But the independence of the Eastern Church was none the less fully secured; and the indignant protests of Popes showed that they were becoming, as their own pretensions grew, more and more estranged from Constantinople.

The wisdom of the mother was not rewarded in the life of her son. Michael III. was perhaps the most contemptible sovereign who ever sat on the imperial throne of the East. He gave himself up to pleasure and in particular to the Circus. He was a drunkard and buffoon, and he delighted to mock in public processions the most sacred ordinances of the Christian religion. In 867 he was murdered by one whom he had raised almost to the purple. The years of his reign were diversified by sieges-notably the first attack of some hitherto unknown barbarians from the North-East.

Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries Constantinople was attacked four times by the Russians. The traders told of the riches of the city, and the barbarians were eager to carry them away. In June 860 they actually anchored in the Bosphorus and attacked the walls, but the return of Michael III. drove them off, and they were afterwards completely defeated. A second attempt is said to have taken place in 907, when the rough barks of the pirates were drawn over the isthmus; a third in 941 was as completely defeated; and again in 1048 the Greek fire proved effective.

But these later sieges were still in the far future when Michael, with the aid, men said, of the Blessed Virgin of the Blachernae, scattered the invaders, and passed again into the seclusion of his corrupt court, from whose recesses no news but that of murders and debaucheries seems ever to have penetrated without. "The state of society at the Court of Constantinople," says Finlay, "was not amenable to public opinion, for few knew much of what passed within the walls of the great palace; but yet the immense machinery of the imperial administration gave the Emperor's power a solid basis, always opposed to the temporary vices of the courtiers. The order which rendered property secure, and enabled the industrious classes to prosper, through the equitable administration of the Roman law, nourished the vitality of the Empire, when the madness of a Nero and the drunkenness of a Michael appeared to threaten political order with ruin. The people, carefully secluded from public business, and almost without any knowledge of the proceedings of their government, were in all probability little better acquainted with the intrigues and crimes of their day than we are at present. They acted, therefore, only when some real suffering or imaginary grievance brought oppression directly home to their interests or their feelings. Court murders were to them no more than a tragedy or a scene in the amphitheatre, at which they were not present."[16]

Thus, when C?sar followed C?sar, with no change for the city over which they were supposed to rule, the intrigues and scandals which disgraced the reign of Michael III. raised scarce a stir among the people; and when he died by the hands of one who had taken-it was said-a base part in some of the most degraded of his acts, men hardly wondered and certainly did not condemn.

Basil the Macedonian, had had a romantic life. As a boy he had wandered penniless to Constantinople, and slept on the steps of the church of S. Diomed. The kindness shown to the wayfarer by the abbat of the monastery attached to the church was rewarded, when Basil became Emperor, by the erection of a new church and monastery, some pillars of which still lie neglected upon the beach of the Sea of Marmora, not far from Yedi Koulé station. His immense strength, personal beauty, and acute intelligence, soon made their way, and he completed his ascent to power it is said by marrying a mistress of Michael III.

As sovereign and the founder of a dynasty, Basil the Macedonian was amongst the greatest of the Emperors. He was a successful warrior, an able administrator of finance, a great builder of churches, and a repairer of the walls. But his greatest glory is that of restorer of the ancient Roman law. He returned, as has been shown by Professor Bury,[17] to the principles of Justinian, in the Basilica, which were the most important reconstruction of Roman law in the Middle Ages, and the last it received.

We must hurry over these years, in which Constantinople itself underwent but few changes. Leo VI., the "philosopher," who has been more happily called a pedant, left no trace on the history of the city, save his name as a repairer on one of the towers of the sea-walls by Koum Kapou. His son, Constantine VII., called Porphyrogenitus, because he was "born in the purple," (i.e. not when his father was Emperor, but because of the porphyry lined chamber reserved for his mother at his birth), was at first under the charge of his uncle Alexander and then of his mother Zoe, and lastly of a successful general Romanus, who surrounded himself with a galaxy of imperial sons, allowing Constantine VII. also still to retain the title of Emperor.

"The studious temper and retirement of Constantine," says Gibbon, "disarmed the jealousy of power; his books and music, his pen and his pencil, were a constant source of amusement; and, if he could improve a scanty allowance by the sale of his pictures, if their price was not enhanced by the name of the artist, he was endowed with a personal talent which few princes could employ in the hour of adversity." Constantine was much more than a student. A plot against Romanus and the other C?sars enabled him to resume power, which he held with credit for seventeen years. As a writer he is one of the most important of all the Byzantine historians.

The chief feature indeed of this age is its literary interest. Two Emperors ruled whose pride it was to be men of letters. Leo the wise, and Constantine born in the purple, were both men who wrote of war and government as they knew them, and left to their successors remarkable pictures of their times. Leo describes the military forces which had still a magnificent organisation and a record of victory and valour but little tarnished. The nobles of Constantinople could fight as well as intrigue. Rich, brave and popular, the ancient families which lingered so long after the Mohammedan conquest in the ancient houses of the Phanar could always be relied upon to furnish gallant officers for the troops. Constantine wrote of the Themes, of the Imperial administration, and of the court ceremonial-the last an extraordinary work describing the dignity and state of the emperors, and regulating the minutest detail of the pomp with which their daily life was surrounded.

The Court of the Eastern Empire indeed was by far the most brilliant of the Middle Ages, and the Empire itself, weak and corrupt though it may seem, was much the strongest government of the time, and the one under which life and property were most secure. The commerce of Constantinople was still greater probably than that of any other city of the world. East and West poured their treasures into the city.

The reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was diversified, like those of so many of his predecessors, as has already been said, by revolutions, which placed many C?sars on at least the steps of the throne. Romanus and his sons Constantine (called the Eighth) and Stephen, came to an end in 945, and from that time till his death in 958 Constantine VII. reigned alone. His son, Romanus II., succeeded him, and to him came a time of war, in which his arms were victorious over the Mohammedans through the genius of his general, Nicephorus Phocas. In 963 Romanus died, and Nicephorus, marrying his widow Theophano, became joint Emperor with the young Basil.

Nicephorus was above all things a warrior. He recovered for the Empire the lands of Cilicia, North Syria, and Cyprus. His triumph in 966, celebrated in the Hippodrome and in the great street of the city, was the prelude to many another great military display; yet not being sole Emperor, he never entered in triumph through the Golden gate, though it was at that gate that he was received in 963 when he began his joint reign.[18] But his life as Emperor was an unhappy one. So unpopular was he in the city, owing to his opposition to the lavish generosity of his predecessors and to his debasement of the coinage, that he was often stoned in the streets and had to fortify the great Palace; and his portrait has been limned for posterity by his enemies. Chief among the pictures of medi?val Constantinople is that drawn by Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, who came on behalf of the Emperor Otto I. to treat of a marriage between Theophano, the daughter of the Emperor Romanus, and the future Otto II.

Liudprand had visited Constantinople in 948. Then he spoke of the great palace to which he was admitted to audience with Constantine Porphyrogenitus, of its golden tree in which golden birds of divers kinds sang sweetly, of the golden lions that guarded the throne, shaking the earth with the beat of their tails, and roaring at the approach of the envoys-marvellous features of the Eastern Court which the Emperor had not forgotten to record in his account of the ceremonial. Then he saw, too, the Emperor recline at dinner after the ancient fashion, he saw the games of the Hippodrome, and he marvelled at the size of the fruit and at the extraordinary acrobatic strength of the boys of the circus. Then he was treated with great distinction. Now, in 968, his reception was very different. In his letter to the two Ottos he declared that he even lodged in a roofless house, exposed to heat and cold, and constantly under guard, and that he suffered agonies from the resinous Greek wine. First he saw Basil, the Emperor's brother, and then he was admitted to the presence of Nicephorus himself, whom he describes as more a monster than a man, black as an Ethiop, and small as a pigmy. A pretty argument took place between envoy and Emperor; the Greek refusing the imperial title to the German C?sars of the West, while the Western bishop would not allow any rights of the East to the Italian lands of old Rome. Their converse was interrupted by the hour of prayer, and Liudprand joined the procession to S. Sophia. Tradesmen and low-born folk, says the contemptuous bishop, lined the streets, many of them barefoot, because of the holiness of the procession. Nicephorus alone wore gold and jewels.

When they entered the great church the choir sang "Lo there cometh the morning star. The dawn riseth. He reflects the rays of the sun. Nicephorus our ruler, the pale death of the Saracens."[19] The famous phrase, "pallida mors Saracenorum," which Liudprand uses, was to be terribly avenged; but then it was a triumphant expression of the safety which the city owed to the wise Emperor. As he went, says Liudprand, "his lords the Emperors" (Basil and Constantine, the sons of Romanus) bowed before him. After the Eucharist the bishop dined with the Emperor, and was again, he says, subject to his taunts. "You are not Romans but Lombards," was the Eastern mockery of the German imperialism; and the reply was that to the Westerns there was no name more contemptible than that of Roman. Such abrupt witticisms naturally consigned Liudprand again to his "hated dwelling, or more truly, prison." He wrote to Basil the curopalates (a post of honour second only to that of C?sar) and John Tzimisces the Logothete, beseeching that if his mission was not favourably received, he might return at once; and then in an interview with Nicephorus, in the presence of Basil the chamberlain (parakinomenos) he pressed the proposal of Otto for a marriage. The Emperor replied that it was unheard of that a princess born in the purple, the child of an Emperor born in the purple, should be given in marriage to a "gentile" or "barbarian." So day by day the meetings were renewed and the proud Italian thought that he was treated each time with new indignity, being even set below a Bulgarian envoy-to whose master the Greeks would even allow the title of "Vasileus" (βασιλε??) which they would not give to Otto, and towards whose people alone it seemed that the Eastern Empire at this time had any kindly feeling. Theology as well as politics were often in question, and the Italian bishop was mocked at for the modernism of his doctrines, as the Greeks mock the Latins to-day. He was kept, he says, in company with five lions; and the women, as he passed through the streets, called out in pity at his woe-worn appearance. Sometimes he visited the Emperor in the camp at Balukli (ε?? π?γα?, he says, in one of his snatches of Greek) and quoted Plato to him; sometimes he had to listen to homilies of S. John Chrysostom read aloud; more often he had to hear what seemed to him the grossest insults of the Germans and the Latins, insults which he gladly returned in his report to the Ottos upon "the wild ass Nicephorus," and which he even ventured, he says, to write on the wall of his prison in verses none too easily to be understood. At length he was allowed to leave the city, "once most opulent and flourishing, now half-starved, perjured, lying, cunning, greedy, rapacious, avaricious, boastful." His report, as we have it, breaks off in a torrent of denunciations of the Greeks and their ways. His mission was a failure, but Theophano, refused by Nicephorus, was afterwards given by John Tzimisces, to be bride to Otto II.

This curious survival of tenth century opinion illustrates the almost total severance which had now come about between the East and the West, and shows how natural was the destruction which was soon to come upon the city of the C?sars. The West had ceased to feel for the Eastern survival of empire anything of brotherhood or Christian fellowship. First it would seek to conquer the bulwark of Christendom for itself; then it would let it fall before the conquering infidels.

Nicephorus did not long retain the throne he had so well defended. John Tzimisces (or Tchemchkik), an Armenian, who won the favour of the Empress Theophano, joined in a plot to overthrow his benefactor, and Nicephorus was murdered in the palace. John Tzimisces reigned in his stead. He made treaty with the patriarch Polyeuctus, by which he gave up the claim that Nicephorus had asserted, that all episcopal nominations should only be valid by the Emperor's consent. He gave high promotion to the dignified and imposing Basil, the chamberlain whom Psellus the historian describes as so impressive a person. He banished the wicked Empress Theophano to the Princes' islands. Then he reigned as joint Emperor with the young Emperors Basil and Constantine, whose rights he was scrupulous to preserve.

John Tzimisces was famous as a gallant defender of the empire. The people of Constantinople knew him chiefly for the imposing ceremonies of his accession, of his second marriage with Theodora, daughter of Constantine VII., and of his departure for war against the barbarian invaders, when the clergy led him in pomp to his embarkation on the Golden Horn, and blessed his ships, and the citizens watched a naval sham fight from the walls. Domestic rebellions-those of Bardas, Sclerus, and of the family of Phocas-as well as the dangerous Russian invasions-distracted his reign: but Tzimisces was a successful general, and by his conquest over the Russians under Swiatoslaf he preserved the Empire, and began that association of teaching and Christian influence which is returned to-day by the orthodox Russians to the Church of Constantinople, which is their mother, and which now, in her time-honoured conservatism, weak though she is, she is inclined rather to resent than to welcome. From his conquest John Tzimisces returned in triumph to Constantinople through the Golden gate, followed by his soldiers and his captives, greeted by the Church and by the officers of his court, and watched by the vast population of the imperial city. It was one of the greatest of the triumphs, as it was one of the last. The ancient usages were retained in all their pomp. The senate met the Emperor at the gate with the conqueror's chaplet and with the golden chariot drawn by four white horses, in which they besought him to drive through the streets. Dramatically he showed his sympathy with the religious feeling of his people; the chariot should carry the Ikon of the Blessed Virgin which he had taken in Bulgaria and to which he attributed his victories: he would ride behind, clothed as an emperor and a general, and would offer in S. Sophia the crown of the conquered Bulgarian kings. Then in the palace the young Bulgarian chieftain Boris, who had followed his triumph on foot, was despoiled of the insignia of sovereignty, yet ranked among the officers of the imperial court.

It was not the last of the victories of John Tzimisces. He returned more than once a conqueror from Armenia and Mesopotamia. He died in 976, in the midst of his victories; and since the young Emperors whom he had guarded were now grown to man's estate, men spoke of his death as mysterious and as probably due to poison.

In Basil II. the Empire again had a warrior Emperor, but one who added to the delights of war the devotion of an almost monastic religion. While his brother, Constantine IX., confined himself to the court and its pleasures, Basil in many hard-won fights achieved the title of Bulgaroktonos, the slayer of the Bulgarians. For thirty-four years he fought the great King Samuel, who had built up a power in the Balkans, till at last he utterly broke up the Slavs, captured all their fortresses, and extended the frontier of the Empire to Belgrade, and so down the Danube to the Black Sea. It was, as Gibbon says, "since the time of Belisarius, the most important triumph of the Roman arms." Victories also he won in the East, but they served only to break down the kingdom of Armenia, and thus to destroy what might have been a bulwark against the infidel. Basil, who reigned from 963 to 1025, when he died at the age of sixty-eight, and who for more than fifty years was practically the sole ruler of the Empire, was a stern, vigorous man, sharp in speech, often cruel in victory, serious and restrained in life, but fond of mirth in his moments of ease. He was a complete contrast to his idle brother, who lived it seemed only for the Hippodrome and the society of the ladies of his court. Basil was never married. Constantine, who survived him three years, left three daughters.[20] During his long reign Basil had swept away all rivals from his path: the great chamberlain Basil had early been banished, and there was no dynasty to compete with the Macedonians in the last days of their power.

Basil taught the people that the Emperor could rule without the intervention of courtiers, and thus when he died the imperial city looked for a man to be at its head. If they had feared rather than loved the great conqueror of the Bulgarians, they respected him because he had kept up the power of the Church and had patronised the learning which still had its home in the East. He left to his successors the alliance of the patriarchal See and a school of literature founded on classic models, which, with all its affectations, gave to the eleventh century an important group of historical writers. In no age, too, was Byzantine art, the art of working in ivory, of miniature, of mosaic, more vigorous. With the death of Basil, however long it might be disguised, the decay began.

When Constantine died his three daughters survived him, Eudocia who preferred a convent to a throne, and Zoe and Theodora, ladies of more ambitious temper. Zoe before her father died was wedded-she was forty-eight-to Romanus Argyrus, an elderly noble already married, whose wife was banished to a convent. Romanus III. was for six years (1028-1034) the nominal ruler of the Empire. He thought himself a philosopher and a warrior; but, says Psellus, "he thought he knew far more than he did." Some of his acts were useful-as his repair of the walls after the earthquakes of 1032 and 1033, commemorated by an inscription on the fourth tower from the Sea of Marmora, shows. But the historian mocks at his long drawn-out building of the monastery of S. Mary Peribleptos and says that a "whole mountain was excavated" to supply the stones. It was his most enduring memorial, and, several times rebuilt, it still survives in the possession of the Armenians as the monastery of S. George, not far from the Psamatia station.

But the Emperor's dreams of war, philosophy and building, were rudely disturbed by the intrigue of his wife with a young Paphlagonian soldier, Michael. He professed to disbelieve it, though it was notorious to the court. His complaisance perhaps allowed him to die in peace, though some said he was killed by a slow poison. On the very day of his death Zoe elevated Michael to the throne, and before the burial of Romanus the senate kissed the right hand of his successor.

Michael appears before us in the pages of the rhetorical Psellus as almost a hero and a saint. He reclaimed sinners after the manner of Justinian, he reformed the administration, he daily worshipped God in the services of the Church, and nightly walked the streets to watch and to prevent crime. One of the strangest pictures of medi?val Constantinople is that which Psellus gives us of the unwearied Emperor, disguised in monkish dress, passing swiftly "like lightning" through the streets at night, watching that his people might be preserved from crime. Yet with all his virtues he was a drunkard, and the epileptic fits to which he became more and more subject were probably due to his vices. So terribly did his affliction increase upon him that when he gave audience it was necessary to surround him with curtains which could in a moment be drawn to hide his paroxysms, and when he rode his guards formed a circle about him. His greedy relations surrounded him and urged him to provide for them, and when he had signalised his reign by a heroic defence of the Empire against a rising of the Bulgarians he returned in triumph only to retire to a monastery and to die.

Zoe emerged from the seclusion in which she had passed the last years of her young husband's life, and was induced by her family to make his nephew, Michael Kalaphates Emperor. Raised to the throne by his family he set himself at once to reduce it to the lowest depths. "The names of kinship, the common tie of kindred blood, appeared to him mere childishness, and it would have been nothing to him if one wave had engulfed all his kin." The same measure he meted to the nobles and the officials; but he courted popularity with the traders and the populace more than any of his predecessors had done, and when he showed himself in the streets silk carpets were strewn before him and he was greeted as the noblest of the C?sars. Yet he relied too much upon the fickle mob. When the senate consented to his banishment of Zoe, shorn as a nun, to Prince's Island, he proclaimed his act in the forum of Constantine for the acceptance of the people.

But Constantinople again showed that, favoured as it had been like a petted child, it could show its power. The people assembled in knots at street corners and protested against the banishment of the heiress of the Macedonian warrior. The conclaves became a riot and the riot a revolution. Women ran through the streets tearing their hair and beating their breasts. Officers of State joined the mob, and they rushed to destroy the houses of the Emperor's family. Zoe was hastily recalled from Prinkipo, and shown in purple robes to the people in the Hippodrome. But it was too late. The mob broke open the monastery of the Petrion (by the Phanar) where her sister Theodora had long lived in retirement, and forced her to go with them to S. Sophia and there the patriarch Alexius and the vast crowd hailed her as Empress. The Emperor and his uncle took refuge in the church of the Studium. They were dragged from the altar and their eyes were put out; and Zoe and Theodora, who hated each other, became joint Empresses.

Their rule was extravagant and reckless; and while the State was advancing rapidly towards bankruptcy, the aged Zoe took a third husband, after two attempts at choice, wedding Constantine Monomachus, who reigned from 1042 to 1054 as Constantine X. The old Empress and her young husband gave themselves entirely to pleasure, to luxury and buffoonery. The Emperor, generous in giving and knowing how to confer benefits after the manner of an Emperor, beautified the city by the building of the magnificent monastery of S. George at the Mangana (near Deirmen Kapou on the Mamora), and amused the citizens by showing them an elephant and a camelopard. The court which Constantine and Zoe gathered round them was a strange assembly; its chief personage was the Emperor's mistress Skleraina, whom the Empress treated as a friend. The people resented the conjunction and cried "we will not have Skleraina to reign over us, nor on her account shall our purple-born mothers, Zoe and Theodora, die." The aged Zoe herself appeased them. It was an extraordinary state of society, reminding us of the eighteenth century in France: the intrigues that Psellus tells are indeed hardly credible. But the social corruption coexisted with a real revival of learning. Constantinople became the centre of a new study of literature, which had decayed since the iconoclastic emperors set themselves to destroy culture and Leo III. abolished the University. Constantine refounded the University, endowing two chairs-philosophy and law-which were held by Psellus and his friend, John Xiphilinos. A revival of the study of the classics followed this institution: Psellus considered himself a Platonist, and he thought himself worthy to represent as well as to revive the best traditions of Greek literature. In the hands of Anna Comnena and her contemporaries, the purism which the writers affected became little more than an Attic euphuism.

While the Emperor and his friends were thus busy with trifles, and the government was in the hands sometimes of wise ministers such as Leichudes, sometimes of mere thieves, the throne was constantly threatened by revolts (of which the most famous was that of George Maniakes) and by direct attacks on the city, such as that of the Russians, and in 1047 of Leo Tornikos. This latter was nearly successful. Many of the citizens were ready to join him, and but for the military skill shown by Constantine (if we rightly read the rhetorical description of Psellus) Leo would probably have entered and found himself welcomed as Emperor.

In 1054 Constantine X. died, and the aged Theodora, the last survivor of the Macedonian house, came forth again from her convent and reigned with the aid of ministers who were at least capable and honest. On her death, after two years as sole ruler, the throne passed, by her wish, to an able but aged soldier, Michael Stratioticus.

Psellus shows that the accession of this sovereign marked a crisis in the history of the Empire. Constantine X. had reformed the Senate, opening it to all men of merit apart from their birth. Michael VI. thought he could rely entirely on the civil functionaries, but the army was still strong enough to dictate to the Emperor, and his unwise acts led to an alliance between the generals and the energetic patriarch Michael Cerularius. Michael attempted to negotiate with Isaac Comnenus, whom the army had chosen as their leader, and who was encamped at Nic?a (Isnik); but before the envoys, among whom was Psellus, had completed their mission, a rising in the city, led by some discontented senators, had dethroned and slain Michael, and the whole city was waiting to welcome Isaac as Emperor.

Constantinople in this revolution decisively chose her own Emperor. The Senate and the chiefs of certain "clubs" (the successors of the factions of the Circus so prominent four centuries before) guided, as seems probable, by the patriarch, carried the city with them. Isaac they summoned from Skutari: Michael departed to a monastery with the patriarch's kiss of peace.

The scene when Isaac was about to cross the Bosphorus to receive his crown was a dramatic one. He called Psellus, the envoy of his deposed rival, to him, and said, when the philosopher spoke of the enthusiasm of the people, "I liked thy tongue better when it reviled me than now when it speaks smooth words." But he began his reign by an amnesty, for he made Psellus president of the Senate, and Michael the patriarch-however much he may have distrusted him-he treated with the fullest confidence and honour.

While these political and dynastic changes had supplied the Empire with a new ruler almost every year, the growing alienation between East and West had been marked decisively by the separation of the Churches. Two great names embody in the East the final protest against Roman assumption. The Church of Constantinople had never abandoned its claim to equality with that of Rome, though it allowed to the ancient city the primacy of honour. Photius, who became patriarch in 858, and died in 891, owed his throne to an election which was not canonical, and though a council in 861 at Constantinople, at which papal legates were present, confirmed him in his office, Pope Nicholas I. declared that its decisions were illegal, and that Photius was deposed and excommunicated, while the Emperor himself was attacked in language of peculiar vehemence. The papal claim to decide between two claimants to the patriarchate was fiercely resented. Photius declared the equality of his see with that of Rome. To the Roman claim of jurisdiction, complicated also by assertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church, were added points of theological contention which the churches debated with as much eagerness, and it would seem, as little desire, to arrive at a reasonable solution. The addition of the words Filioque to the Nicene Creed, asserting the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, was, and is, resented by the Greeks as an addition to "the faith once for all delivered to the Saints." The use of unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist was regarded in the East as an heretical innovation. There were, and are, other points of dispute; but none, it is probable, but for the strong national feeling of Italy and of Greece, would have caused a final breach.

The position which Photius defended with skill and vigour in the ninth century was reasserted by Michael Cerularius in the eleventh. He regarded the teaching of the West on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, says Psellus, as an intolerable heresy; and he was prompt to reassert jurisdiction over the churches of Apulia, now conquered by the Normans and made subject to Rome. The final breach came from Rome itself. On July 16, 1054, two legates of the Pope laid on the altar of S. Sophia the act of excommunication which severed the patriarch from the communion of the West, and condemned what were asserted to be seven deadly heresies of the Eastern Church.

But to return to the imperial revolution.

Isaac Comnenus, who was called to the throne in 1057, had been brought up in the palace, but he was none the less a warrior and a man of determination, who had served the Empire well. He reigned only for two years, and then retired to end his days in religion, in the famous and beautiful monastery of the Studium, which looks from a slight elevation over the Sea of Marmora, some half mile away, and whose half ruined walls are to-day among the most striking of the memorials of the past that Constantinople can show.

With the beginning of the dynasty of the Comneni the causes which brought about the fall of the Empire can clearly be traced. The imperial power, concentrated more and more in the imperial household, and finally in the Emperor himself, had come to be devoted chiefly, in the hands of feeble or self-indulgent emperors, to the maintenance of imperial dignity and pride in the city itself. The magnificent administration which had presented a coherent and effective government while the rest of Europe was in "the dark ages," was beginning to sink into a mere machine for the support of a luxurious Court. The Empire was neglected. The aristocracy of Byzantium was treated with severity or contempt. The officials of the State were the mere nominees of the Emperor. For their interest and for the pursuit of popularity among the people it was that government seemed to exist. Every year, as the defences of the Empire grew weaker, the shows of the Hippodrome, the festivals of the Church, the entertainments of the palace, grew more splendid. When the other States of Europe were yet in their cradle, when England as a Power had hardly begun to exist, the long history of the Empire was verging irresistibly towards decay.

"The domestics of the Basilian dynasty carried on the work of political change," says Finlay,[21] "by filling the public offices with their own creatures, and thereby destroying the power of that body of State officials, whose admirable organisation had repeatedly saved the Empire from falling into anarchy under tyrants or from being ruined by peculation under aristocratic influence. In this manner the scientific fabric of the imperial power, founded by Augustus, was at last ruined in the East as it had been destroyed in the West. The Emperors broke the government to pieces before strangers destroyed the Empire.

"The revolution which undermined the systematic administration was already consummated before the rebellion of the aristocracy placed the imperial crown on the head of Isaac Comnenus. No organised body of trained officials any longer existed to resist the egoistical pretensions of the new intruders into ministerial authority. The Emperor could now make his household steward prime minister, and the governor of a province could appoint his butler prefect of the police. The Church and the law alone preserved some degree of systematic organisation and independent character. It was not in the power of an emperor to make a man a lawyer or a priest with the same ease with which he could appoint him a chamberlain or a minister of State."

The decay of which the general causes are thus sketched can clearly be traced in the series of historians who give us the records of the years from the accession of John Comnenus to the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, from the year 1057, that is, to the year 1204. Psellus, monk, secretary of State, philosopher, statesman, gives, as we have already seen, a close account of the intrigues of the court. Michael Altaleiates records the years 1034-1079. Nicephorus Bryennius and his wife, Anna Comnena, wrote from within the story of the politics of Alexius Comnenus, the former to some extent, the latter very greatly, influenced by the classic revival, and endeavouring to form their work on classic models. John Cinnamus, Nicetas Acominatos, John Scylitzes, John Zonaras, are all chroniclers who have special sources of information; and the result is that for the century of decay which culminated in the collapse of the Empire before the Latins, we have information almost complete.

The Emperor Isaac was assisted at the first by the able patriarch Michael Cerularius, who put into exercise all the claims of his predecessors to power and independence, to equality with Rome, and to superiority over the churches related to the patriarchate. Strife soon broke out between Emperor and patriarch. Michael appeared in the red boots which marked the imperial dignity, declaring that he was the equal of the Emperor; and of the Emperor himself he said, in what seems to have been a popular proverb, "Oven, I built you, and I can knock you down." He was seized and banished to Proconnesus.

After the retirement of Isaac, Constantine Ducas, like the Comneni a Cappadocian, and a friend of their own, reigned for eight years, 1059-1067, and left the reputation of a man anxious only to save money, and thus unable to protect the frontiers of the Empire. Under him we learn the importance of the Emperor's personal guard of Varangians-a body of barbarian warriors founded early in the eleventh century, and consisting at first of Russians, whom the wars of Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimisces and Basil Bulgaroktonos had taught the Empire to respect; and of Scandinavians, and later of Danes, and after the Norman Conquest of fugitive Englishmen, who, rather than serve the foreign conquerors of their own land, gladly came to win fame and wealth as the guardians of the C?sar's throne. Constantine XI. paid the Varangians while he neglected the rest of his army. The Empire paid the penalty in the ravaging of Armenia by the Seljuk Turks, and of Bulgaria by the Tartars. When he died in 1067, already the name of Alp-Arslan, the Sultan of the Seljuks, struck terror into the Asiatic provinces of the Empire, and the sceptre of the C?sars fell to Michael VII., a child who could not protect what his father had not cared to defend. The mother of the young Emperor, Eudocia, married a gallant general, Romanus Diogenes, who, with the title of joint Emperor, won but little power in the palace, but was readily allowed to lead the armies in the field. Of his campaigns it is only needful to say that, while for a time he held back the Seljuks, in 1071, at Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier, his troops were scattered by the overwhelming hordes of the barbarians, and when night fell Alp-Arslan placed his foot upon the neck of the prostrate C?sar, his captive.

In Constantinople a new revolution followed the news of the Emperor's defeat. John Ducas, brother of Constantine XI., for a time held the post of Regent for his nephew. When Romanus was released from captivity he was seized and his eyes were put out, a crime which resulted in his death. The scenes of blood and treachery which marked these years, when the Court still kept up its splendours in the presence of pestilence, famine, and decay, are almost incredible; but the vengeance that was surely coming shows the weakness that resulted from the reign of corruption and crime. Michael VII. was called Parapinakes, "the peck-stealer," a name "given him because in a year of famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a fourth short of its proper contents." He was overthrown by an adventurer named Nicephorus Botoniates, whose reign of three years was a period of vice and waste which brought the Empire rapidly nearer to its fall. Michael VII. retired, like Romanus, to the Monastery of the Studium, where as titular bishop of Ephesus, he passed the last years of his life in peace. Three years exhausted the patience of the nobles with the aged and debauched Nicephorus. Maria, once wife of Michael VII. and now wife of his successor, formed a plot against him, and from a number of conspirators, Alexius Comnenus, son of the Emperor Isaac, was chosen to lead the troops who determined to give a new C?sar to the exhausted Empire. In 1081 the friends of the conspirators escaped through the gate of Blachernae with horses they had stolen from the Imperial stables. They returned with an army: the German guards who held the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapou) were bribed, and the adherents of Comnenus poured into the heart of the city. A battle at first seemed certain, for the Varangians stood boldly across the forum of Constantine to defend the approaches to the great palace. But when George Palaeologus, a gallant officer connected by marriage with the Comneni, secured the fleet, the heart of the aged Nicephorus failed him, and he fled to S. Sophia, whence he was removed like so many of his predecessors to a monastery.

Alexius Comnenus was not strong enough to restrain the motley rabble who had entered in his train. The city was given over to pillage. The very palaces and monasteries were spoiled by the barbarians from the Balkans. It was from this date that the ruin of the city began. If the churches still maintained their relics and their jewels, the commercial prosperity, which all through these years of imperial corruption and weakness it had struggled to maintain, now began to slip from its grasp. It was clear that property was no more safe than life; and as the Italian cities began to secure the commerce of the Levant, the merchants of Constantinople fell behind in the race for wealth, and saw the trade that had been theirs taken by the Venetians, the Pisans and the Genoese, who now settled at their very gates.

Alexius Comnenus was at first not sole Emperor. Constantine Ducas, the son of Michael VII., was also called Emperor, but he soon died. Alexius then reigned alone, but not without many plots against him. Within, the city managed to suppress the conspirators; without, he suffered defeat from the Normans at Durazzo, and preserved with difficulty the Thessalian province. He won fame among his people as a persecutor of Paulicians and Bogomils; and Basil, a monk, was entrapped by Alexius into a confession of his heretical opinions and then burnt as a heretic in the Hippodrome, to the delight of the people of Constantinople. He kept off the Turks, though they were now (1092) settled so near as to have Smyrna for their capital. But his chief danger came from the Crusades.

In spite of the breach between the Churches it was impossible for the Eastern Emperor openly to do otherwise than welcome the hosts who in response to the preaching of Peter the Hermit and the call of Urban II. marched through Hungary and Bulgaria and arrived outside the land walls in a ragged and disordered condition. Hugh of Vermandois had landed near Durazzo, but had been treated almost as a foreigner, and having been made to do homage to Alexius, awaited in the imperial city the arrival of the rest of the hosts. His treatment was resented by Godfrey of Bouillon; but the skill and tact of Alexius triumphed. In the palace of the Blachernae, while the hosts were encamped outside the walls, the Emperor received the leaders, among them Godfrey, Bohemond, and Peter the Hermit himself, and by cajoling some, bribing others, threatening those who seemed weakest, he procured that they all should do him homage and promise to convey to him all of his Empire that they should recover from the Turks.

To the people of Constantinople the warriors of the West seemed like ignorant and half-brutal children, ever gabbling, boasting, and changeable. The warlike garb of the Latin priests and bishops disgusted the Greeks and widened the breach between the Churches. The climax seemed to come on the day when the chiefs did homage to the Emperor. Thus the story is told by Anna Comnena, who was herself then fourteen years old, and may not improbably have witnessed the scene.

"As soon as they approached the great city, they occupied the place appointed for them by the Emperor, near to the monastery of the Cosmidion.[22] But this multitude was not, like the Hellenic one of old, to be restrained and governed by the loud voices of nine heralds. They required the constant superintendence of chosen and valiant soldiers to keep them from violating the commands of the Emperor. He, meantime, laboured to obtain from the other leaders that acknowledgment of his supreme authority which had already been drawn from Godfrey himself. But notwithstanding the willingness of some to accede to this proposal, and their assistance in working on the minds of their associates, the Emperor's endeavours had little success, as the majority were looking for the arrival of Bohemond, in whom they placed their chief confidence, and resorted to every art with the view of gaining time. The Emperor, whom it was not easy to deceive, penetrated their motives; and by granting to one powerful person demands which had been supposed out of all bounds of expectation, and by resorting to a variety of other devices, he at length prevailed, and won general assent to the following of the example of Godfrey, who also was sent for in person to assist in this business.

"All, therefore, being assembled, and Godfrey among them, the oath was taken; but when all was finished, a certain noble among these counts had the audacity to seat himself on the throne of the Emperor. The Emperor restrained himself and said nothing, for he was well acquainted of old with the nature of the Latins.

"But the Count Baldwin stepping forth, and seizing him by the hand, dragged him thence, and with many reproaches said, 'It becomes thee not to do such things here, especially after having taken the oath of fealty. It is not the custom of the Roman Emperors to permit any of their inferiors to sit beside them, not even of such as are born subjects of their empire; and it is necessary to respect the customs of the country.' But he, answering nothing to Baldwin, stared yet more fixedly upon the Emperor, and muttered to himself something in his own dialect, which, being interpreted, was to this effect-'Behold, what rustic fellow is this, to be seated alone while such leaders stand around him!' The movement of his lips did not escape the Emperor, who called to him one that understood the Latin dialect, and inquired what words the man had spoken. When he heard them the Emperor said nothing to the other Latins, but kept the thing to himself. When, however, the business was all over, he called near to him by himself that swelling and shameless Latin, and asked of him, who he was, of what lineage, and from what region he had come. 'I am a Frank,' said he, 'of pure blood, of the nobles. One thing I know, that where three roads meet in the place from which I came, there is an ancient church, in which whosoever has the desire to measure himself against another in single combat, prays God to help him therein, and afterwards abides the coming of one willing to encounter him. At that spot a long time did I remain, but the man bold enough to stand against me I found not.' Hearing these words the Emperor said, 'If hitherto thou hast sought battles in vain the time is at hand which will furnish thee with abundance of them. And I advise thee to place thyself neither before the phalanx, nor in its rear, but to stand fast in the midst of thy fellow-soldiers; for of old time I am well acquainted with the warfare of the Turks.' With such advice he dismissed not only this man, but the rest of those who were about to depart on that expedition."

A scene such as this made the Greeks regard the Westerns simply as barbarians, and they rejoiced when the host at last passed over the Bosphorus to fight the Turks. For the first year Alexius remained with the army; but as they became divided among themselves, and refused to give up to him the territory they conquered in the East, he returned to Constantinople, satisfied with the conquest which had driven back the Turks in Asia for more than 200 miles.

While the Empire gained by its most dangerous enemy being thus driven back, it lost seriously in other ways. "Between 1098 and 1099 a continual stream of armed pilgrims traversed the Byzantine Empire," everywhere bringing ruin and devastation with them. One detachment of Lombards actually attempted to storm the Blachernae quarter and were only with great difficulty taken over to Asia, where they slaughtered Christians as readily as Turks. Open war broke out between Bohemond and Alexius, and it was the last success of Alexius that he was able to beat off the attacks of the Christians of the West. He died in 1118, his last hours disturbed by a plot in which his wife Irene and his daughter Anna were engaged to compel his son John to yield the Empire to Anna's husband, Nicephorus Bryennius.

Alexius may have seemed to leave the Empire stronger than he found it; but in truth, though its military power was greater, its commercial greatness was passing away. The development of trade in the Levant through the establishment of Christian kingdoms in the East by the Crusaders reduced the trade of Constantinople, it has been estimated, by "a third or even a half in the fifty years that followed the first crusade." A system of financial extortion and a debased coinage brought the merchants of the city still nearer to ruin, and that ruin seemed consummated when they found the Genoese and Pisans settled with special privileges in their midst. But the new Emperor at least kept up appearances. He was a conqueror, and he was popular among his subjects, called at first Maurojoannes (Black John), from his dark complexion, he soon became called Kalojoannes, for his goodness rather than his beauty. At the first he was met by conspiracy. His sister Anna was ready to have him murdered that she and her husband might ascend the throne. He discovered the plot, and after a few weeks restored her to all her possessions. His brother Isaac fled from Constantinople to the Turks, and though he returned, his son afterwards became a Mohammedan. For chief minister the Emperor had a Turkish slave who had been captured by his father at Nicaea and brought up with him. These instances show how closely the Empire, in spite of its Christianity, was drawing nigh to the Turks, a state of affairs paralleled by the relations between Christians and Moors in Spain in the days of El Cid Campeador, and which made the conquest, when it came, less abrupt and terrible than it seems to-day.

The reign of John Comnenus (1118-1143) was perhaps the brightest in the later years of the Empire. "Feared by his nobles, beloved by his people," says Gibbon, "he was never reduced to the painful necessity of punishing, or even of pardoning, his enemies. During his government of twenty-five years[23] the penalty of death was abolished in the Roman Empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the human theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety. Severe to himself, indulgent to others, the philosophic Marcus would not have disdained the artless virtues of his successor, derived from his heart and not borrowed from the schools. He despised and moderated the stately magnificence of the Byzantine Court, so oppressive to the people, so contemptible to the eye of reason. Under such a prince innocence had nothing to fear and merit had everything to hope; and without assuming the tyrannic office of a censor he introduced a gradual though visible reformation in the public and private manners of Constantinople."

Manuel I., his youngest son, whom he chose for his military daring in preference to his brother Isaac, was "a mere knight errant, who loved fighting for fighting's sake, and allowed his passion for excitement and adventure to be his only guide." It is said that he made a special payment to secure the good will of the clergy on his accession; but he was vicious as well as passionate, and the crimes of his court received a licence from his own acts. Buffoonery as well as vice seems to have marked the life of Constantinople, for the popular minister, John Kameratos, was renowned as the greatest drinker of his time, as being able to swallow a vast quantity of raw beans and drink "the water contained in an immense porphyry vase at two draughts," and he was favoured by the Emperor chiefly for his powers as a singer and dancer. Manuel himself was skilled in surgery and was a theologian as well as a warrior, but his abilities were of no service to the Empire. The citizens saw the Italians encroaching upon them at every point. Heavy taxation was continued, but the army and navy alike decayed in his time. Only the public games were kept up, and outwardly Constantinople was as gay and wealthy as ever. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew who visited the city in 1161, wrote of the magnificence that he saw everywhere, and the riches of the traders and nobles, and in the Hippodrome he said that "lions, bears and leopards were shown, and all nations of the world were represented, together with surprising feats of jugglery." With all this, and especially after the war with Venice, which was ended in 1174, the city was really becoming poor, and it might almost seem defenceless. Manuel did much for the defences; a large part of the land walls, defending the palace of Blachernae, was added by him; an inscription on the tower close to Narli Kapoussi records his repair of part of the sea wall; and he built many other gates and additional fortifications. It was indeed time.

The eleventh century saw the position of the Empire and the safety of the imperial city continually threatened not only by active attacks but by internal dissensions; dissensions which, it has been well said, would have settled themselves a century before, but which now both weakened the city and made its weakness apparent to the world.

How weak the city was, was seen in 1146, when a Norman fleet sailed up the Hellespont, and the admiral robbed the imperial gardens of fruit. Bulgars, Serbians, Turks, had all at different times threatened the city, and without success, but its internal weakness was made the more evident as the century went on by the division which was arising between the Emperor and his people. Manuel I. was believed to be at heart a Latin; his campaigns of the West, his marriages to Western wives, his neglect of the fleet, his encouragement of foreign settlers in the capital, all increased his unpopularity. Matters were not improved under the boy, Alexius II., when the struggle between his mother and the minister she favoured, and his sister, took place in the streets of the city, and in S. Sophia itself. The dynastic dispute was complicated, like all the disputes in Constantinople, by ecclesiastical interests, and the return of a patriarch who had been driven out was one of those picturesque scenes in which the people delighted, which showed their independence of the government, but revealed also, only too plainly, that there was now no union in Church or State.

A few words may suffice to explain and date the events of the latter part of the twelfth century.

Manuel up to his death in 1180 retained all the appearance of a victorious Emperor, though he suffered a severe defeat in 1176, at Myriokephalon in Phrygia, from the Seljukian Turks. Crusading princes, the Turkish Sultan Kilidji Arslan, and the Christian King, Amaury of Jerusalem, visited him at Constantinople, and were received with ostentatious splendour. Alexius II., his son and successor, was a boy of thirteen, and in two years the streets of the imperial city witnessed a desperate encounter between his supporters and those of his sister Maria, which swept up to the walls of S. Sophia. Then Andronicus, the cousin of the Emperor Manuel, was recalled from banishment, and he signalised his acquisition of power by a massacre of the Latins in the city. From this he proceeded to slay every one who stood in his way, till, in 1183, having murdered the young Alexius, he seated himself on the throne. For two years he continued a course of crimes greater than those that any sovereign ever committed, till a popular insurrection crowned a descendant of the great Alexius. Andronicus, though the vilest of men, had made a serious effort to reform the administration and reduce the influence of the nobles. His fall left the Empire to its fate.

The miserable end of the wickedest of the Emperors, as it is told by a recent writer from the pages of Nicetas, may well serve to illustrate the horrors with which the Empire in its fall was only too familiar.

He was confined in the prison called after the Cretan Anemas, who was first imprisoned there by Alexius Comnenus. "He quitted it only to die at the hands of his infuriated subjects. On the eve of his execution he was bound with chains about the neck and feet, like some wild animal, and dragged into the presence of his successor, Isaac Angelus, to be subjected to every indignity. He was reviled, beaten, struck on the mouth; he had his hair and beard plucked, his teeth knocked out, his right hand struck off with an axe, and then was sent back to his cell, and left there without food or water or attention of any kind for several days. When brought forth for execution, he was dressed like a slave, blinded of one eye, mounted upon a mangy camel, and led in mock triumph through the streets of the city to the Hippodrome, amidst a storm of hatred and insult, seldom, if ever, witnessed under similar circumstances in a civilised community. At the Hippodrome he was hung by the feet on the architrave of two short columns which stood beside the figures of a wolf and a hyena, his natural associates. But neither his pitiable condition, nor his quiet endurance of pain, nor his pathetic cry, "Kyrie eleison, why dost Thou break the bruised reed?" excited the slightest commiseration. Additional and indescribable insults were heaped upon the fallen tyrant, until his agony was brought to an end by three men who plunged their swords into his body, to exhibit their dexterity in the use of arms."[24]

Isaac Angelus was little more worthy of his position than the man whom he displaced. He gave himself to enjoyment, to building, to luxury of every kind. He lost Bulgaria and Cyprus, and when his own general, Alexis Branas, turned against him and led his troops to besiege Constantinople, it was saved only by Conrad of Montferrat, the husband of the Emperor's sister Theodora, who was then in the city on his way to the East.

The troops of Branas assembled outside the walls and attacked, but were driven back from the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapoussi): the famous icon of the Blessed Virgin, believed to have been painted by S. Luke, was carried round the walls: then a sortie led by Conrad scattered the rebels and brought the revolt to an end. But Isaac was incapable of ruling. He retained his throne with difficulty for ten years. At length in 1195, when he was on the way to the Bulgarian war, he was betrayed by his brother Alexius. He was not, as would have happened two centuries before, made a monk: he was imprisoned in a monastery, blinded, and left to die in peace. No one foresaw his restoration.

Alexius III., called also Angelus Comnenus, was no wit better than his brother, but he had a clever wife, Euphrosyne, in whom the worst characteristics of the Eastern Empresses were reproduced. Her profligacy and extravagance completed the ruin of the Empire, and when the fourth crusade turned its arms against the city it fell an easy prey.

It has been well said of the rule of the early Byzantines-during the period, that is, that extended from the foundation of the city by Constantine down to the death of Michael VI. and the end of the Macedonian dynasty-that no other government has ever existed in Europe which has secured for so long a time the same advantages to the people. There was a general security for life and property; there was a magnificent system of law; there was a genuine and commanding influence of religion; and municipal government was, for the age, well developed. But this can only be accepted with considerable qualifications. If the government itself did not change, the dynasties often did; if there was a good code of laws, there were terrible and barbarous punishments, and there were often periods of mob-rule; if there was a sound system of municipal government, it was far from a complete check on the excesses of imperial power.

But the most striking characteristic of these centuries, when all deductions have been made, is the stability of the government. As the city and the Empire were ruled under Isaac Comnenus, so, save for changes more superficial than real, had it been ruled under Justinian. The new families of merchant princes that had grown up and lined the Bosphorus with their houses, were as much in touch with the old system as the old families had been. Trading interests had become stronger and stronger with each century, and trading interests are in the main conservative. But the century and a half that followed the accession of the Comneni told inevitably in favour of further changes. First there was the slow and terrible advance of the Turks, cutting away strip by strip the outskirts of the Empire. Then there was the exhaustion proceeding from the constant passage through the Empire of crusaders, often pillaging, always contending, a continual drain upon the material resources of the land. More important still was the great and rapid increase of dynastic contentions. As ever, internal dissension was the real cause of the self-betrayal which gave up Constantinople in 1204 to the robbers of the West.

The condition of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century has been the subject of more than one exhaustive examination. We must briefly summarise what is known of the capital at this period of its greatest riches, and perhaps its greatest weakness. First and most prominently, it was a great commercial centre. Subordinate to its commerce were its art, rich and wonderful though that was, its military power, even its popular and all-embracing religious spirit. Commerce influenced all these. It gathered together all the nations of the earth, and it inspired them with greed for its treasures. Constantinople was, as it still is to some extent, in spite of the revolutions wrought by railways and by steamships, the most important outlet of commerce in the world. All the traffic of Asia naturally came that way; the great caravans of Central Asia, the trade of Palestine, Asia Minor, Persia, even Egypt, journeyed naturally to the New Rome. So naturally was Constantinople the centre of trade that she acted as a sort of universal banker. Her coins were in use in India and in distant England.

And the merchants who made their living in Constantinople had, like those of the Hansa in London, their own permanent settlements. You may see to-day the great khans or caravanserais where the merchants and pilgrims congregate, the walls strong to resist attacks, the gates closed at nightfall, the arrangements for common meals and common ablutions; and as you pass by you see the dark figures clustering in the doorways, or sitting on the marble steps, in their picturesque colours, and with that strange far-away look on their faces that you learn to know so well in the land where there is never any more pressing need than repose, or any delight more sweet. The custom of these great common lodgings, and very often the buildings themselves, go back far into the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century they held great colonies of merchants strong for mutual combination and defence. Many of them were near to the wharves, as close within the walls as might be, and some without. No visitor to-day can fail to be struck by the great khan hard by the Mosque of Validè Sultan, which he passes when he has crossed the Galata Bridge on his way to S. Sophia.

The traders of the thirteenth century were by no means all Christians. Jews and even Mohammedans were allowed to settle in the imperial city, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf bitterly says "it would have been right even to have rased the city to the ground, for, if we believe report, it was polluted by new mosques, which its perfidious Emperor allowed to be built that he might strengthen the league with the Turks." It seemed strange to the Western that such toleration should be allowed. The Jews and the Albigenses were the only "dissenters" he had met; but in the East there were not only the Romanists, but the Monophysite Armenians and the Nestorian Chaldeans; Jews and Mohammedans made no such very great addition to the parliament of religions. And they all, infidels and heretics alike, brought their riches to the great mart. As the Turks advanced over Asia, scattering ruin and blight before their path, the riches of the devastated cities fled to shelter behind the Byzantine walls. No city it seemed to a Jewish observer of the time was so rich or so full of business save Baghdad. Gold was nothing accounted of; it covered the walls and pillars of the palace, it made the throne of the Emperor, the lamps of S. Sophia, the vessels of many an almost forgotten church. "The whole Empire had been put under contribution for the adornment of the capital. The temples and public buildings of Greece, of Asia Minor, and of the islands of the Archipelago, had been ransacked to embellish what its inhabitants spoke of as the Queen City, and even Egypt had contributed an obelisk and many other monuments." All who saw the city were amazed at its riches, at the magnificence of its buildings, of its churches, palaces, houses of nobles and merchants. Marble and stone houses filled the chief streets; the splendid marble from the quarries of the Proconnesus, the stone which still stands firm in the massive dwellings of the Phanar. There were of course then as now many houses of wood, and fires were constant, but those who noted the fine houses destroyed as more than in the three largest cities of France, noted also that of those that remained as of the treasures of the churches there was "neither end nor measure." And with all this there was a profound sense of security, so often and so unwarrantably contemporaneous with a marked development of luxurious life. Constantinople had never been captured, men easily believed that it never would be. Its walls, so magnificent in their decay, had proved and were thought still to be impregnable. The subtle influence of Oriental habits had eaten, it seemed, into the life that had been so strong and fierce under Justinian or Heraclius. Men, as they had ceased to contend earnestly for faith or morals, had sunk down into a luxurious pleasure-loving life, almost like that of old Rome or modern London. Some of the worst features of Asiatic life had already been introduced; the entourage of the Sultan that is now so conspicuous at the Selamlik had its counterpart in the court of the Comneni. The Emperor's favourites were coming to be the administrators of the Empire: so bitterly complains the chronicler Nicetas-"these creatures who guard the mountains and the forests for the Emperors' hunting with as great care as the old pagans guarded the groves sacred to the gods, or with a fidelity like that with which the destroying angel guards the gates of Paradise, threatened to kill any one who attempted to cut timber for the fleet": it was at the crisis of the Empire. And while the Empire was ruled by eunuchs and the court by mistresses the Emperors of the twelfth century lived in luxury, effeminacy, and indolence. It had come to be thought-what a contrast from the days of the sleepless Justinian!-that work was impossible for a C?sar of the East. And the example spread, as such examples always do, downwards. It was easy for there to be a general who could not lead, soldiers who could not fight, sailors who could not navigate beyond the Bosphorus. And there was no hope of regeneration from a strong Church preaching righteousness. The Emperors in the time of their power had reduced the patriarchs to impotence: and now there was no one in the Church to resist, as there was no one in the State to lead. Yet still the immemorial protest of the Church was not altogether silenced. Historians show that there were many priests and monks who preached and lived according to a high standard of morality and religion. Learning still survived, and piety, without ostentation but never wholly without influence.

It is not necessary to detail the causes which led to the diversion of the fourth Crusade upon Constantinople. Venice, it is enough to say, betrayed the Christian cause by a secret treaty with the infidel, and then formed a plot for the capture of the city. Alexius III. had deposed Isaac Angelus in 1195; his son Alexius was allowed to escape and secretly took ship for Italy and eventually threw himself upon the charity of his brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia, the claimant of the imperial crown of the West. He was assisted; and by a series of complicated intrigues the Crusaders were induced to undertake the capture of Constantinople and the restoration of the Empire to the supposed rightful heir, as a step towards the accomplishment of the duty to which they were pledged, the recovery of the Holy Land. The Pope's wishes were set aside, the honest leaders were hoodwinked, and Dandolo won the day.

On the 23rd of June 1204 the crusading fleet anchored at San Stefano. Thence they saw the magnificent city that lay before them. "Be sure," says Villehardouin, "there was not a man who did not tremble, because never was so great an enterprise undertaken by so small a number of men." Next day they sailed up to the Bosphorus, past the walls, crowded with spectators, to the anchorage of Chalcedon. The Emperor sent to know their intentions: they ordered him to surrender the crown to the young Alexius. Then came another of those picturesque scenes of which the medi?val history of the New Rome is so full. It was determined to show the young prince to the people whom he came to recover to their allegiance. The splendid Venetian galleys sailed up to the walls of the Sea of Marmora, and stopped where the crowds that thronged them could see. Then loud voices proclaimed the presence of the young Alexius, and demanded the loyal assent of the people to the restoration of his father. Only mocking laughter came back from the walls.

Then the Crusaders prepared for the attack. First it was necessary to break the chain which crossed the Golden Horn from Galata, near what is now Tophané, to near the point of the peninsula of Byzantium. A fierce attack was made on the watch-tower at Galata, from which the chain began. It was captured, the chain was loosed, and the fleet sailed up the Golden Horn. The army was then landed beyond the walls, where is now Eyoub, and took up a position opposite the Blachernae quarter, which had so long been felt to be the weakest point. They were opposed then by the wall of Manuel Comnenus which extended southward of the wall of Heraclius, and considerably in advance of the old Theodosian fortification. Moats, walls, towers, stood before them, a defence hitherto unbroken, and which even before the last fortification was erected it had been found impossible to overthrow.

And so it proved again. When the attack on July 17, 1203, was directed against the northern point of the wall of the Blachernae quarter, near the Xylo-porta, it was utterly defeated. And so again when Dandolo, the old blind Doge, dauntless in bravery as adept in cunning, led the attack from his galleys, their success was but temporary. The old sea-dog had his galley drawn up close to the walls, threw himself on shore, on the narrow strip of land that stood between the water and the walls, and planted the gonfalon of S. Mark on one of the towers. The ends of the flying bridges were thrust from the vessels on to the towers and thus twenty-five were captured. But the Venetians could not maintain their position, and when the Greeks were reported to have made a sortie from the gate of S. Romanus, south of the Blachernae quarter, they withdrew to help these other Crusaders who were attacked.

Meanwhile within the walls disaffection with the government of Alexius III. was growing into readiness to accept the new sovereign to be set up by the Crusaders rather than to risk the chances of capture. Alexius himself would do nothing to protect the city: and when he brought out his troops to the sortie, he retired with them before any fighting took place. Before the next day he himself fled across the sea, deserting his wife and children and the city. The imprisoned Isaac was at once released and placed upon the throne.

This was far from satisfying the greed of the Crusaders. It took away from them every honest cause for attack. So they demanded through Villehardouin, who has himself written us the account of it, that Isaac should consent to the hard terms which Alexius his son had agreed to-that the Empire should be placed under the Roman Pope; that 200,000 marks of silver should be given to the army, and that they should be supported for a year; that 10,000 of them should be taken to Egypt in Greek vessels at the Emperor's expense, and supported there for a year; and that Isaac should agree, during the whole of his life, to keep five hundred knights for the defence of the Holy Land. The Emperor, though from the first he said that he thought it would be impossible to carry it out, felt bound to give his consent to the convention. Alexius was crowned in S. Sophia as joint occupant of his father's throne, and it seemed as if the danger was at an end.

But it was only just begun. Some of the Crusaders wanted to push on at once to the Holy Land or to Egypt; but they had not enough money, and no ships. And the Venetians who held the ships delayed: they cared for nothing but that the army should be divided. Within the city the fiercest opposition was aroused when it was known that Alexius had promised to subordinate the Church to Rome. He was making large exactions too, to pay the men who had brought him back to his country. Feeling against him rose rapidly in the capital. He left with Boniface of Montferrat to pursue the fugitive Emperor to Adrianople.

During his absence the populace, eager to vent their rage upon the foreigners, attacked the Pisan quarter: a sort of retaliatory measure was the attack of the Crusaders on a Saracen mosque between S. Irene and the sea. The Saracens had legal rights of toleration, and the Christians of Constantinople defended them. The riot ended, as riots so often do in the East, in a fire-and before it was over a great strip of the most thickly populated part of the city, running right across from the Golden Horn to the Mamora, was utterly destroyed. Confusion soon reigned within the city. The old Emperor, so long imprisoned, was weak and foolish; but young Alexius was equally weak and enjoyed his new sovereignty without the slightest dignity. He drank and gambled in the Crusaders' tents, took off his imperial circlet, and wore the woollen caps of his boon companions. And he could not find money to pay the incessant demands of the greedy host. As new taxes were levied the citizens resisted, and eventually the Western troops became really in need. They had not enough provisions: why were they waiting: why were the ships not ready to carry them on their quest?

At length all the allies agreed to demand formally of the Emperor the payment of the money that was promised; if he refused they would defy him to his face. The scene was another of those dramatic audacities which so often flash across the history of the city. Villehardouin and five others stood before the Emperors on their thrones in the palace of Blachernae, and their spokesman, Conan de Bethune, spoke thus:

"We come to summon you in the presence of your barons to fulfil the agreement made between you and us. If you fulfil it, well; if not, take note that the barons will hold you neither for lord nor friend, but they will deem themselves free to take what belongs to them as they can get it. They give you warning that till they have defied you they will do you no harm. They will not betray you; that is not the custom of their land. Now you have heard what we have said, and you will take counsel on the matter how you will."

No such speech, men said, had ever been made to a Roman Emperor; and Villehardouin wonders that the envoys were allowed to depart in peace. But for a week or two nothing happened. Yet the city was slowly rising to fever point. Attacks were made on the Venetian fleet; the people assembled in the great Church of S. Sophia and debated how they could drive out the foreigner, and replace the dastard Emperors. Then it seemed to Alexius that he must protect himself. He called on Boniface of Montferrat to protect the palace with Frenchmen and Italians. That sealed his fate.

Alexius Ducas, a kinsman of the Emperors and protovestiarios of the household, whom the people called "Mourtozouphlos" on account of his thick overhanging eyebrows, determined to dethrone the C?sars and replace them. He prevailed on Alexius to leave the palace for safety, and at once placed him in chains. In a few days both he and his father were dead, and Alexius V. was crowned in S. Sophia.

The new Emperor set himself at once to defend the city, and at once he drew down on him the vengeance of the Crusaders. They were, of course, the defenders of Isaac Angelus and his son. "Never was so horrible a treason committed by any people as deposing and imprisoning young Alexius," says Villehardouin, who had a few days before taken part in insulting him to his face. When a little later they heard that he was dead, they paused for a while as though in dismay: their difficulties grew on them: the storms of a January at Constantinople made them reluctant to embark: and yet what could they do?

Henry Dandolo met the new Emperor in conference within the walls, and demanded the submission of the Church to Rome and an immediate payment of money. It is said that there was a treacherous attempt to capture the Emperor. At any rate no compromise was arrived at, and the divergent parties among the Crusaders agreed to besiege the city. Long was the debate before the final step was taken. They talked, says Villehardouin in his quaint way, before and behind. At last it was agreed how to divide the spoil, how a new Emperor and a new patriarch should be chosen.

On April 9, 1204, the first attack was delivered, on the Petrion or Phanar, and the gate now called Petri Kapoussi at the east of the church of the Patriarchate was first attacked. The invaders were repulsed. A second attack, on the 12th, was more successful. "The flying bridge of the Pélerine lodged itself on a tower and allowed a bold French knight, André d'Urboise, to rush across, seize the tower, and clear a way for their comrades to follow. Here ladders were then landed, the walls scaled, three gates forced, and the city thrown open to the whole host of the invaders." In vain did Mourtozouphlos try to rally his troops; he was forced to take refuge in the palace of the Bucoleon. In the night he fled through the Golden Gate, through which before Emperors had entered only in triumphal procession. Next day the Crusaders entered; the palaces were occupied; the troops marched through the streets; and then the horrible work of plunder and ravage began.

Nicetas, the Grand Logothete, whose own house was burnt earlier in the siege, and who now had to escape with his family as best he might, tells piteous tales of the horrors that ensued. Of the destruction of precious things it seems impossible to draw an adequate picture. S. Sophia, then the richest as well as the finest church in the world, was utterly despoiled; and what had been "an earthly heaven, a throne of divine magnificence, an image of the firmament created by the Almighty," became like a bare barn, and was defiled by the most disgraceful scenes of profanity and horror.

When the church had been stripped of everything it contained, the altars of precious metals broken up to be melted down, the vestments and carpets and hangings carried off, the sacred vessels packed up with the other plunder as if they were common things, the sacred icons torn down from the splendid iconostasis; when the tombs of the emperors had been rifled, and the body of Justinian cast out like that of a criminal in the search for treasure, it might be thought that the worst was over. It was not so. Then began the hunt for relics which made not the least degrading part of the work of these soldiers of Christ. Well was it said by a contemporary that if these soldiers had when they besieged the city the shield of the Lord, now when they had taken the city they threw away His shield and took the shield of the devil. Bitter, and well deserved, were the words of Nicetas. "You have taken up the Cross, and have sworn on it and on the Holy Gospels to us that you would pass over the territory of Christians without shedding blood and without turning to the right hand or to the left. You told us that you had taken up arms against the Saracens only, and that you would steep them in their blood alone. You promised to keep yourselves chaste while you bore the Cross, as became soldiers enrolled under the banner of Christ. Instead of defending His tomb, you have outraged the faithful who are members of Him. You have used Christians worse than the Arabs used the Latins, for they at least respected women."

Of the extraordinary quantity of ecclesiastical plunder taken by the Crusaders we have the records collected by Comte Riant in his monumental (and delightful) volumes of Exuvi? Sacr? Constantinopolitan?. It may be observed, to begin with, that he collects no less than a hundred and forty-four letters relating to the reception in the West of these stolen relics. To these are added endless references in the chroniclers of the time, who were enchanted with the riches that poured upon their religious houses, and displayed all the passion of a collector of antiquities combined with the business instincts of a dealer in curiosities and the piety of a hagiologist. In spite of all this evidence-and there is more of it, in inscription, later lives of the saints, and the like-it is impossible to discover exactly all that was stolen, because the lists of the relics preserved in the churches of Constantinople at the actual time of the siege have disappeared. But it is possible of course, from earlier lists, as well as from the sources already named, to discover what were the greater part of the relics taken.

The riches of Constantinople were well known to the Crusaders when they turned to besiege it. The stories of the earlier crusades were well known, when the Greeks had loved to show the treasures of the imperial city, the riches of S. Sophia, and even of the imperial palace. In the East were almost all the most sacred survivals, nearly all that remained in fact, or was believed to remain, of the relics of the Saviour, His Mother, and most of His Apostles. In the West, till the thirteenth century, there was practically nothing but the relics of Western, and, therefore, comparatively modern, saints, and the few more sacred treasures that had been given by Eastern sovereigns to those of the West.

For three days the pillage went on. Churches escaped no more than palaces or private houses. Indeed they were more greedily ransacked: and after the days of direct pillage there came weeks, months, of deliberate search for relics which had been concealed. The result was, as M. Riant says, to rob Constantinople of two distinct sorts of sacred objects; of relics, with or without their reliquaries, and of ecclesiastical furniture. It seems that the treasures taken were supposed to be placed in a common fund and divided proportionately among the nations concerned; but there was a great deal of chicanery and jobbery as well as of direct spoliation; ecclesiastical furniture certainly was supposed to be divided like the other booty, but the relics were regarded as too sacred for anything but direct robbery. It should be added, also, that much that was not taken at first was acquired during the period of the Latin Empire in ways more or less legitimate. The robbery went on for forty years.

Time would fail to tell of the wonderful things that were discovered and stolen. Almost every country in Europe received some fragments of the True Cross, found by S. Helena. Besides this there were drops of the Saviour's Blood, one of His teeth, some of His hair, the purple robe, some of the bread blessed at the Last Supper, and countless relics of the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles. The heads of S. John Baptist and of many of the Apostles found their way to the West. Venice was incomparably the largest gainer, but even the little church of Bromholm in Norfolk, by a gift which was the result of a double robbery, became the possessor of a fragment of the true Cross. The Crusaders were not content with taking relics of the primitive Church, but must needs take also the mortal remains of the Greek Fathers; you may see the head of S. Chrysostom to-day in the cathedral of Pisa.

The reliquaries, the exquisite examples of Byzantine art, that were scattered about the West, remain very often even now to witness to the completeness of the spoliation. But artistically the things that were destroyed, broken up or melted down, were far more precious than those that survived. If S. Mark's still possesses the horses that once stood in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, we know that magnificent statues of Juno, of Paris, of Bellerophon, an exquisite figure of Helen, of which Nicetas pathetically deplores that "she who had formerly led all spectators captive could not soften the heart of the barbarians," and many ancient works, statues, medallions, vases, were destroyed in the furnace. There are remains of ancient art in Constantinople to-day; but when we think of the pillage of 1204 and the Mohammedan Conquest we marvel that there is anything more ancient than the sixteenth century, or more valuable than a kettle or a candlestick of old time, to be found in the whole city.

The capture of the city was followed by the election, by twelve electors representing the Crusaders, of an Emperor for the throne of the C?sars. Baldwin Count of Flanders, by what process of intrigue we do not know, was chosen. He was "heaved" upon the shield, as the ancient custom was; he received the reverence of those who had been his equals in the campaign; he was led in triumph to S. Sophia, and in a strange mixture of Latin and Greek rites was consecrated, crowned and enthroned a week after his election, as C?sar and Augustus.

But this was not all. It is possible that in time the citizens, weary of their decadent rulers, might have come to accept without active discontent the rule of a gallant and chivalrous Christian knight such as Baldwin. But the Crusaders, and most of all the Pope, would not be content with this. If they were justified at all in the havoc they had made it was only because the Easterns were heretics and idolaters and schismatics. The Church of Constantinople was "rebellious and odious" to that of Rome. It must be brought to submission. So a century later the case is summed up, "God delivered the city into the hands of the Latins because the Greeks declared that the Holy Ghost proceeded only from the Father, and celebrated the mass with leavened bread." Such was the feeling,-though the expression of it is somewhat of an anachronism,-that animated now the leaders of the hosts, which, sated with their debauchery, began to feel something of an inevitable remorse.

But Innocent III. was of too pure a soul to countenance the iniquity that had been committed. Among all the shameless hypocrisies of the time his words of denunciation ring out true. Even the union of the Churches on which he had set his heart seemed to him now to be impossible. "Disappointment, shame, and anxiety weaken us when we ask whether the Greek Church can enter into union with the Apostolic see when that Church had seen among the Latins only the works of darkness."

Meanwhile the Venetians set canons in the Church of S. Sophia, and elected Morosini to be patriarch. It was an empty honour. In fifty-seven years a Greek again was seated on the throne of Justinian, and the Liturgy of S. Chrysostom was again sung in S. Sophia; but long before that revolts had made the Latin hold on the East more and more precarious, and the city more and more able to reassert its ancient independence.