rainy night, an adventurous subaltern, with three hundred soldiers, approached the rampart, applied his scaling-ladders, Occupied two adjacent towers, stood firm against the pressure of multitudes, and bravely maintained his post till he was relieved by the tardy, though effectual, support of his reluc tant chief. The first tumult of slaughter and rapine subsided; the reign of Cæsar and of Christ was restored; and the efforts of a hundred thousand Saracens, of the armies of Syria and the fleets of Africa, were consumed without effect before the walls of Antioch. The royal city of Aleppo was subject o Seifeddowlat, of the dynasty of Hamadan, who clouded his past glory by the precipitate retreat which abandoned his kingdom and capital to the Roman invaders. In his stately palace, that stood without the walls of Aleppo, they joyfully seized a well-furnished magazine of arms, a stable of fourteen hundred mules, and three hundred bags of silver and gold. But the walls of the city withstood the strokes of their battering-rams; and the besiegers pitched their tents on the neighboring mountain of Jaushan. Their retreat exasperated the quarrel of the townsmen and mercenaries; the guard of the gates and ramparts was deserted; and while they furiously charged each other in the market-place, they were surprised and destroyed by the sword of a common enemy. The male sex was exterminated by the sword; ten thousand youths were led into captivity; the weight of the precious spoil exceeded the strength and number of the beasts of burden; the superfluous remainder was burnt; and, after a licentious possession of ten days, the Romans marched away from the naked and bleeding city. In their Syrian inroads they com manded the husbandmen to cultivate their lands, that they themselves, in the ensuing season, might reap the benefit: more than a hundred cities were reduced to obedience; and eighteen pulpits of the principal moschs were committed to the flames to expiate the sacrilege of the disciples of Mahomet. The classic names of Hierapolis, Apamea, and Emesa, revive for a moment in the list of conquest: the emperor Zimisces encamped in the paradise of Damascus, and accepted the ransom of a submissive people; and the torrent was only stopped by the impregnable fortress of Tripoli, on the sea-coast of Phoenicia. Since the days of Heraclius, the Euphrates, below the passage of Mount Taurus, had been impervious, and almost invisible, to the Greeks. The river yielded a free passage to the victorious Zimisces; and the historian may imitate the speed with which he overran the once famous cities of Samosata, Edessa, Martyropolis Amida,1 116 and Nisibis, the ancient limit of the empire in the neighborhood of the Tigris. His ardor was quickened by the desire of grasping the virgin treasures of Ecbatana,117 a wellknown name, under which the Byzantine writer has concealed the capital of the Abbassides. The consternation of the fugi. tives had already diffused the terror of his name; but the fancied riches of Bagdad had already been dissipated by the avarice and prodigality of domestic tyrants. The prayers of the people, and the stern demands of the lieutenant of the Bowides, required the caliph to provide for the defence of the city. The helpless Mothi replied, that his arms, his revenues, and his provinces, had been torn from his hands, and that he was ready to abdicate a dignity which he was unable to support. The emir was inexorable; the furniture of the palace was sold; and the paltry price of forty thousand pieces of gold was instantly consumed in private luxury. But the ap prehensions of Bagdad were relieved by the retreat of the Greeks thirst and hunger guarded the desert of Mesopotamia; and the emperor, satiated with glory, and laden with Oriental spoils, returned to Constantinople, and displayed, in his triumph, the silk, the aromatics, and three hundred myriads of gold and silver. Yet the powers of the East had been bent, not broken, by this transcient hurricane. After the departure of the Greeks, the fugitive princes returned to their capitals; the subjects disclaimed their involuntary oaths of allegiance; the Moslems again purified their temples, and overturned the idols of the saints and martyrs; the Nestorians 116 The text of Leo the deacon, in the corrupt names of Emeta and Myctarsim, reveals the cities of Amida and Martyropolis, (Miafarekin. See Abulfeda, Geograph. p. 245, vers. Reiske.) Of the former, Leo observes, urbus munita et illustris; of the latter, clara atque conspicua opibusque et pecore, reliquis ejus provinciis urbibus atque oppidis longe præstans. 117 Ut et Ecbatana pergeret Agarenorumque regiam everteret . . . aiunt enim urbium quæ usquam sunt ac toto orbe existunt felicissimam esse auroque ditissimam, (Leo Diacon. apud Pagium, tom. iv. p. 34.) This splendid description suits only with Bagdad, and cannot possibly apply either to Hamadan, the true Ecbatana, (D'Anville, Geog. Ancienne, tom. ii. p. 237,) or Tauris, which has been commonly mistaken for that city. The name of Ecbatana, in the same undefinite sense, is transferred by a more classic authority (Cicero pro Lege Maniliâ, c. 4) to the royal seat of Mithridates, king of Pontus. and Jacobites preferred a Saracen to an orthodox master; and the numbers and spirit of the Melchites were inadequate to the support of the church and state. Of these extensive conquests, Antioch, with the cities of Cilicia and the Isle of Cyprus, was alone restored, a permanent and useful accession to the Roman empire.118 118 See the Annals of Elmacin, Abulpharagius, and Abulfeda, from A. H. 351 to A. H. 361; and the reigns of Nicephorus Phocas and Johr Zimisces, in the Chronicles of Zonaras (tom. ii. 1. xvi. p. 199—1. xvii. 215) and Cedrenus, (Compend. p. 649-684.) Their manifold defects are partly supplied by the MS. history of Leo the deacon, which Pagi obtained from the Benedictines, and has inserted almost entire, in a Latin version, (Critica, tom. iii. p. 873, tom. iv. 37.)* The whole original work of Leo the Deacon has been published by Hase, and is inserted in the new edition of the Byzantine historians. M. Lassen has added to the Arabian authorities of this period some extracts from Kemaleddin's account of the treaty for the surrer der of Alep po.-M. CHAPTER LIII. STATE OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE TENTH CENTURY. EXTENT AND DIVISION. WEALTH AND REVENUE, PAL TITLES AND OFFICES. -- ACE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. PRIDE AND POWER OF THE EMPERORS. TACTICS OF THE GREEKS ARABS, AND FRANKS. LOSS OF THE LATIN TONGUE. STUDIES AND SOLITUDE OF THE GREEKS A RAY of historic light seems to beam from the darkness of the tenth century. We open with curiosity and respect the royal volumes of Constantine Porphyrogenitus,' which he composed at a mature age for the instruction of his son, and which promise to unfold the state of the Eastern empire, both in peace and war, both at home and abroad. In the first of these works he minutely describes the pompous ceremonies of the church and palace of Constantinople, according to his own practice and that of his predecessors. In the second, he attempts an accurate survey of the provinces, the themes, as they were then denominated, both of Europe and Asia.3 The system of Roman tactics, the discipline and order of the troops, and the military operations by land and sea, are ex 1 The epithet of Пogqvooyivntos, Porphyrogenitus, born in the purple, is elegantly defined by Claudian : Ardua privatos nescit fortuna Penates; Et regnum cum luce dedit. Cognata potestas And Ducange, in his Greek and Latin Glossaries, produces many passages expressive of the same idea. A splendid MS. of Constantine, de Cæremoniis Aulæ et Ecclesiæ Byzantinæ, wandered from Constantinople to Buda, Frankfort, and Leipsic, where it was published in a splendid edition by Leich and Reiske, (A. D. 1751, in folio,) with such lavish praise as editors never fail to bestow on the worthy or worthless object of their toil. 3 See, in the first volume of Banduri's Imperium Orientale, Constantinus de Thematibus, p. 1-24, de Administrando Imperio, p. 45— 127, edit. Venet. The text of the old edition of Meursius is corrected from a MS. of the royal library of Paris, which Isaac Casaubon had formerly scen, (Epist. ad Polybium, p. 10,) and the sense is illustrated by two maps of William Deslisle, the prince of geographers till the appearance of the greater D'Anville. plained in the third of these didactic collections, which may be ascribed to Constantine or his father Leo.4 In the fourth, of the administration of the empire, he reveals the secrets of the Byzantine policy, in friendly or hostile intercourse with the nations of the earth. The literary labors of the age, the practical systems of law, agriculture, and history, might redound to the benefit of the subject and the honor of the Macedonian princes. The sixty books of the Basilics,5 the code and pandects of civil jurisprudence, were gradually framed in the three first reigns of that prosperous dynasty. The art of agriculture had amused the leisure, and exercised the pens, of the best and wisest of the ancients; and their chosen precepts are comprised in the twenty books of the Geoponics of Constantine. At his command, the historical examples of vice and virtue were methodized in fifty-three books, and every citizen might apply, to his contemporaries or himself, the lesson or the warning of past times. From the august character of a legislator, the sovereign of the East descends to the more humble office of a teacher and a scribe; 4 The Tactics of Leo and Constantine are published with the aid of some new MSS. in the great edition of the works of Meursius, by the learned John Lami, (tom. vi. p. 531-920, 1211-1417, Florent. 1745,) yet the text is still corrupt and mutilated, the version is still obscure and faulty. The Imperial library of Vienna would afford some valuable materials to a new editor, (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. vi. p. 369, 370) 5 On the subject of the Basilics, Fabricius, (Bibliot. Græc. tom. xii. p. 425-514,) and Heineccius, (Hist. Juris Romani, p. 396-399,) and Giannone, (Istoria Civile di Napoli, tom i. p. 450-458,) as historical civilians, may be usefully consulted: XLI. books of this Greek code have been published, with a Latin version, by Charles Annibal Frabrottus, (Paris, 1647,) in seven tomes in folio; IV. other books have been since discovered, and are inserted in Gerard Meerman's Novus Thesaurus Juris Civ. et Canon. tom. v. Of the whole work, the sixty books, John Leunclavius has printed (Basil, 1575) an eclogue or synopsis. The cxIII. novels, or new laws, of Leo, may be found in the Corpus Juris Civilis. I have used the last and best edition of the Geoponics, (by Nicolas Niclas, Leipsic, 1781, 2 vols. in octavo.) I read in the preface, that the same emperor restored the long-forgotten systems of rhetoric and philosophy; and his two books of Hippiatrica, or Horse-physic, were published at Paris, 1530, in folio, (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. vi. p. 493--500.) 7 Of these LIII. books, or titles, only two have been preserved and printed, de Legationibus (by Fulvius Ursinus, Antwerp, 1582, and Daniel Hoeschelius, August. Vindel. 1603) and de Virtutibus et Vitia by Henry Valesius, or de Valois, Paris, 1634.) VOL. V. 29 |