John Bagnell Bury

“ ROMAN EMPIRE, LATER. The reign of Constantine the Great forms the most deep-reaching division in the history of Europe. The external continuity is not broken, but the principles which guided society in the Greek and Roman world are replaced by a new order of ideas. The emperor-worship, which expressed a belief in the ideal of the earthly empire of Rome, gives way to Christianity; this is the outward sign that a mental transformation, which we can trace for 300 years before in visible processes of decay and growth, had reached a crisis. ”

“ Must we then resort here to the hypothesis of Western influence and suppose that the Greek poets borrowed from the Franks both the idea of a knight and the fantastic ideal of chivalrous adventure?
I think not. The kavallarioi of these romances have a different lineage. In prowess and manliness they rival the knights of the West; but they constitute no order; there is no institution of knighthood, none of the distinctive customs of Latin chivalry like the new knight's vigil over his arms. The Latin institution was not the model which produced the Greek ideal. ”

“ He was resolved to resume the old paths of forward policy from which the studious temper of Bayazid had digressed, and to follow in the way of Mohammad the Conqueror. Yet he was also unlike his grandfather. He revelled in war and death; all his deeds seem prompted rather by instinct than by policy. Mohammad seems almost genial beside this gloomy and restless soul. Selim the Grim delighted in cruelty, but he was extremely moderate in pleasure; like his father and uncle he was highly cultivated. He raised the pay of the Janissaries,—this was the meed of their support ”

“ If the king hesitates, it is suggested that he should visit New Rome. The attraction of this idea is irresistible, and when he comes to the capital, the pomp of his reception, the honours shown him by the emperor, and the splendour of the religious ceremonies overcome his last scruples. Thenceforward imperial influence is predominant in his dominion; priests become his advisers; a bishop is consecrated, dependent on the patriarch of Constantinople; and the barbarians are transformed by the penetration of Byzantine ideas. ”

“ His most ardent admirers, however, are constrained to admit that he was deficient in large-hearted benevolence; that he was destitute of any “enthusiasm of humanity”; and that so far as every sort of religious yearning or aspiration is concerned, his poverty was almost unique. Gibbon was such a man as Horace might have been, had the Roman Epicurean been fonder of hard intellectual work, and less prone than he was to the indulgence of emotion. ”

“ In the epic, love is only one note, though a leading note; in the romances it is the main motif, and it is idealized, and dissociated from real life, and invested with mystery. The romancers have worked, as we saw, under the influence of the sophistic novelists; they have adopted some of the tricks of their masters; they have introduced the Hellenistic personification of Love—the irresistible king with deadly arrows, and the conception of heroes or heroines who at first defy the god. ”

“ Belgrade had fallen, Rhodes was now to fall. The pirate-ships of the Rhodian Knights were a pest to the eastern waters of the archipelago and the Asiatic coasts; and not only was it imperative for the Sultan that his line of communication with Egypt should be cleared of the corsair nest, but it was in the interest of public order that the island should be annexed to the Turkish realm. The lords of Rhodes had to depend entirely on themselves, without aid from the west. The first principle of Venetian policy at this time was to keep on good terms with the Turk. ”

“ There was a demand for fiction of the same class as the French romances, and Greek writers responded to it not only by versions, but also by original creations. These creations, however, are of Greek, not foreign parentage; they have a native, not a foreign tradition behind them—the mediaeval epic and the amorous fiction which originated in the Hellenistic age. They are inferior to the best compositions of the French poets; nothing was produced that could be compared remotely, for instance, with Aucassin et Nicolette. They have not the stamp of cosmopolitan literature. ”

“ The true statement is that the Fourth Crusade was only an incident (not in itself decisive) in a world-movement which doomed the Eastern Empire to extinction—namely, the eastward movement of western Europe which began in the 11th century with the rise of the Normans and the First Crusade. Henceforward the Empire was a middle state, pressed between expanding forces on the east and on the west, and its ultimate disappearance was inevitable. ”

“ They were unable to marry or exercise any trade, or leave their camp. It is clear that the existence of such a body of warriors was in itself a constant incentive or even compulsion to warlike enterprises; and peacefully inclined sultans like Bayazid II were unpopular with the Janissaries who were more fanatical in fighting for Islam even than men of Muslim race. Without any bonds of family or country, they were the creatures of the Sultan, in turn imposing their yoke on him. Scanderbeg's tenacious devotion to the memory of his father and the Albanian mountains was an isolated exception. ”

“ Thus the later part of the Decline and Fall, while the narrative of certain episodes will always be read with profit, does not convey a true idea of the history of the empire or of its significance in the history of Europe. It must be added that the pages on the Slavonic peoples and their relations to the empire are conspicuously insufficient; but it must be taken into account that it was not till many years after Gibbon’s death that Slavonic history began to receive due attention, in consequence of the rise of competent scholars among the Slavs themselves. ”

“ The greater part of the host which was collected was a tattered undisciplined rabble; but infinite patience and energy overcame all difficulties. With a few vessels Hunyady broke through the chain of barques by which Mohammad had barred the Save, and entered the besieged city. Though the defenders were far inferior in number and equipment, yet by valour and cunning they defeated all the efforts of the enemy and at last forced the whole army to retreat in confusion, and with tremendous losses, amounting to more than 50,000 killed and wounded, 300 guns, and 27 war-boats. ”

“ An intercourse of many centuries, the commerce of war but also the commerce of peace, did not fail to lead to mutual influence of the Greek and Saracen civilizations. For generation after generation the tide of strife flowed backward and forward over the mountain barriers, and was the great imminent fact for the Christian population of Asia Minor. ”

“ He was a son of the 18th century; he had studied with sympathy Locke and Montesquieu; no one appreciated more keenly than he did political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. This is illustrated by his love of Switzerland, his intense interest in the fortunes of that country, his design of writing “The History of the Liberty of the Swiss”—a theme, he says “from which the dullest stranger would catch fire.” Such views and sentiments are incompatible with the idealization of a benevolent despotism. Yet in this matter Gibbon has been grossly misapprehended and misrepresented. ”

“ Manuel Comnenus during the first part of his reign was the close friend and ally of the western emperor Conrad III., but after Conrad's death, he formed the ambitious plan of realizing in Europe a sovereignty like that of Justinian, and hoped to compass it in conjunction with Rome, the enemy of the Hohenstaufen. His forward policy carried war into Italy; he seized Ancona. But his strength was unequal to such designs. His Latin sympathies, no less than his financial extravagance, made him highly unpopular at home ”

“ Mohammad followed the luckless people to this sequestered fort, and on their surrender they were all gathered together and slain, six thousand of them. At Calavryta a renegade Albanian chief who had been in Turkish service was sawn in two. Here and elsewhere thousands were reduced to slavery. Demetrius had submitted without a blow at Mistra; Thomas fled to Corfu and ended his life at Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. It was thus that the Morea became perhaps the most miserable province in the Turkish realm; nor can there be any doubt but that Mohammad deliberately intended this to be its fate. ”

“ The subject of this youthful effort was suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity—“the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit,” namely, the study of ancient literature. Partly owing to its being written in French, partly to its character, the Essai excited more attention abroad than at home. Gibbon has criticized it with the utmost frankness, not to say severity; but, after every abatement, it is unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. ”

“ The escape of the eastern provinces from the fate of the western illustrates the fact that the strength of the Empire lay in the east. These provinces were more populous and presented greater obstacles to the invaders, who followed the line of least resistance. But it was of immense importance that throughout this period the Empire was able to preserve a practically unbroken peace with its great eastern rival. ”

“ The men and women of the better classes enjoyed a classical education, but it was more conventional than—shall I say?—classical education has been among ourselves; and while they did not succeed in penetrating into the spirit of pagan antiquity, they were unable to free themselves from the tyranny of their brilliant ancestors. Later Greek literature is the literature of men who were the slaves of tradition ”

“ It is one of the fundamental principles of Islam that all Muslims shall be governed by a single Imam, and that Imam must be a member of the Koreish, the tribe of the Prophet. At this time the Imamship was in the hands of a shadow, Mohammad Abu Jafar of the race of Hashim, who kept up the semblance of a court at Cairo. The last of the Caliphs of the Abbasid line, he resigned the caliphate to the Sultan Selim. This formal transference is the basis of the claims of the Sultans of Turkey to be the Imams or supreme rulers of Islam, though they have not a drop of Koreish blood in their veins. ”

“ We may remark in passing that the retreat was often enlivened, or invaded, by friendly tourists from England, whose “frequent incursions” into Switzerland our recluse seems half to lament as an evil. Among his more valued visitors were M. and Mme Necker; Mr Fox also gave him two welcome “days of free and private society” in 1788. Differing as they did in politics, Gibbon’s testimony to the genius and character of the great statesman is highly honourable to both: “Perhaps no human being,” he says, “was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.” ”

“ Fortunately Constans II., grandson of Heraclius, was a man of eminent ability and firmness. The state owed to him the preservation of Asia Minor, and the creation of a powerful fleet (see below) which protected the Aegean coasts and islands against the naval power which the Mahommedans created. He was responsible for completing a new, efficient military organization, which determined the lines of the administrative reforms of Leo III. (see below) . In his last years he turned his eyes to Italy and Africa. He dreamed of restoring Old Rome as the centre of the Empire. ”

“ And just on this account it is not surprising that, although the commingling of the two cultures, Western and Greek, afforded to the French literature of chivalry an unrivalled opportunity for exercising here the potency of charm which it wrought elsewhere, there was no result that can be compared, for instance, to the reception of French romances in Germany. The romantic literature of the West did not come as a new revelation to a people who possessed in their own literature motives, ideals, and a tradition of fantastic fiction which were in many respects homogeneous. ”

“ The chief interest perhaps of the efforts made by Nicholas and his successors to bring about an European peace, for the sake of driving back the Turk and recovering Constantinople, lies in the measure which they suggest of the distance which the world had travelled since the age of the Crusades. In the eleventh and in the twelfth, even in the thirteenth century, a religious sentiment could stir the princes and the peoples of Europe to go forth, not to avert a danger, but to rescue a holy place of pilgrimage. ”

“ Administration.—Three principles underlay the administrative reform of Diocletian: the separation of civil from military functions; the formation of small provincial units; and the scalar structure which deepened on the interposition of the vicar of a diocese and the praetorian prefect between the provincial governor and the emperor. This system lasted unchanged for three and a half centuries. The few unimportant alterations that were made were in harmony with its spirit, until the reign of Justinian, who introduced certain reforms that pointed in a new direction. ”

“ In crossing a swollen river the servants and horses were drowned, and the hero and heroine were washed ashore on opposite banks. Each thinks that the other is dead. Wandering along the edge, Chrysantza comes on the body of one of the men; the features are defaced, but as the clothes and sword of Belthandros are near she believes that the corpse is his, and is about to kill herself when she hears his voice in the distance calling her by name. ”

“ If the conquest had resembled in character the old Persian conquest, if the inhabitants had been required only to pay tribute to a distant ruler and receive his garrisons in their cities, the lot of these lands would have been light. But they were taken into full possession by their new lords; and oriental nomads of an alien and intolerant religion were planted as the dominant race amid the Christian population. The circumstance that the Ottomans were nomads (they were a clan of the Turkish tribe of Oghuz) gives their empire its significance in the history of mankind. ”

“ Constantinople was the first city in the world. The influence which the Empire exerted upon its neighbours, especially the Slavonic peoples, is the second great role which it fulfilled for Europe—a rôle on which perhaps the most speaking commentary is the doctrine that the Russian Tsar is the heir of the Roman Caesar. ”

“ There can indeed be hardly a doubt that the poet knew Belthandros and borrowed the device. But he has avoided the error of allowing it a disproportionate place in his story, and he has so sophisticated it that it has a different poetical value. Lybistros, too, visits the fortress and gardens of Love; but there is no magic; he visits them in dreams; and the mansion, which is called Erotokratia, is pervaded by an atmosphere of allegory. Love himself assumes three forms—of a child, a man in his prime, and an old man ”

“ Meanwhile Jem—who claimed the throne on the ground that, though the younger, he was born in the purple—had advanced to Brusa, and was there proclaimed Sultan. But he was willing to compromise. Through his great-aunt he made a proposal to Bayazid that they should divide the empire—Bayazid to rule in Europe, and he in Asia. The question at stake was not merely a personal one, the extent of Bayazid's sovereignty, but the integrity and power of the Ottoman empire. Moreover, it involved a direct violation of one of the fundamental canons of Islam: that there shall be only one supreme Imam. ”

“ He looked to the interests of Venice from the narrowest point of view, and in founding the new Latin Empire, which was to replace the Greek, it was his aim that it should be feeble, so as to present no obstacles to Venetian policy. The Latin Empire of Romania was a feudal state like the kingdom of Jerusalem; the emperor was suzerain of all the princes who established themselves on Greek territory; under his own immediate rule were Constantinople, southern Thrace, the Bithynian coast, and some islands in the Aegean. ”