Kiev. In the time of Nestor, who still knew that they had once formed an independent State, they dwelt between Pripiet and Düna. The Sagulates appear still later in the country of Thessalonica. The Belegezetes inhabited Thessalian Thebes and Demetrias, and were industrious agriculturists. The Baiunetes are inhabitants of the country of Baina (Vaina), near the town of Radowich in Macedonia; kindred names appear also in Russia (district of Vojniči). The region of Verzetia, in Macedonia or Thessaly, over which in 799 a prince Akamir reigned, is called after the Verzetes. The Runchini dwell on a tributary of the Strymon, the Strumani on the main river. Thus there is a considerable list of settled Slavonic tribes in the north of Greece. In the Peloponnese we know of the Milenzi (Miλnyyoí) and Jezerzi ('Enpiraí) on the Eurotas; the Maniazi (Macŵraι) in the southern Taygetus.

The capabilities of the Slavs had been already recognised by Justinian in his military appointments. Dobrogost was in 555 at the head of the Pontic fleet; in 575 Onogost became a patrician. Priscus, the conqueror of the Slavs, who defeated the general Radgost and took captive King Muzok in 593, availed himself of the Slav Tatimir to convey the prisoners. A Slav, Nicetas (766-780), mounted the patriarchal throne of Constantinople; descent from a distinguished Slavonic family in the Peloponnese is ascribed to the father-in-law of Christopher, son of the emperor Romanus I Lacapenus; but the Slavonic descent of the Armenian emperor Basilius, asserted by the Arab Hansa, is obviously as incorrect as the fable of the "Slav" Justinian related by Theophilus.

We must see in these expeditions of the Avars and Slavs a true national migration which flows and ebbs. Capable generals, like Priscus, inflicted heavy reverses on both nations; but on one occasion only the outbreak of pestilence in the Avar camp saved Constantinople, and the demands made on the army increased enormously. It mutinied and raised to the throne the centurion Phocas (602–610), who put Mauricius and his five sons to death. But this arrogance of the army led to popular risings, especially in the native country of the emperor, Anatolia and Cilicia, then in Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and above all among the Monophysites. The Persians attempted to avenge Mauricius, and a peace with the Avars had to be concluded at any price. But the Byzantine standard of government had long been too high to tolerate permanently on the imperial throne an incapable officer of low rank who dealt with insurrections in the most merciless fashion. Priscus, the general, allied himself with the exarch Heracleius of Africa, and the latter became emperor. The age of Justinian had ended in murders; the dissolution of the empire would soon have followed had not the sword rescued it.

D. THE ORIENTAL ELEMENTS OF BYZANTINE CULTURE

CONSTANTINOPLE (= Byzantium = New Rome) was, like Old Rome, divided into fourteen districts; even the seven hills could, to the satisfaction of some Byzantine students of history, be rediscovered, if required, by the exercise of some imagination within the limits of Constantinople itself. The old patrician families, who had lived on the Bosphorus since the days of Constantine, might, as regards the games in the circus, which were accurately copied, cherish the belief that no alterations had been made in the customs of Old Rome. The military system, the strength and pride of the Romans at a time when the army no longer consisted of Italians,

or even of subjects of the empire, still remained Roman at Byzantium. The only difference was that in the seventh century the word of command became Greek; and in this connection the old word "Hellenic" might no longer be employed, having degenerated into the meaning of "pagan." The old traditions of the Roman Senate, extolled more than five hundred years before by eloquent Hellenic lips (Cineas) as an assembly of kings, were cherished in the New Rome. The East Roman Senate preserved a scanty remnant of the sovereign power, since it claimed the formal right of ratifying a new emperor. The political ideal of the Byzantine Empire was Roman, only diluted into an abstraction by a tinge of cosmopolitanism. Huns, Armenians, Khazars, Bulgarians, and Persians were employed in the army. The employment of such mercenaries and constant later intercourse with the governments of Arabia and Persia, helped largely to give the Byzantine Empire in intellectual and ethical respects the stamp of an Oriental empire. Not merely that the imperial office was conceived as a mystery, which might only come into publicity on extraordinary occasions amid the most splendid and most ridiculous pomp even the Western feeling of personal dignity slowly died away, and occasional corporal punishment was quite consistent with the exalted position of the Byzantine nobles. The stiffness and pedantry of the State based on class and caste, in the form which Diocletian had given it, had precluded any new stimulus from below. The upper classes would have remained in the ruts worn deep by the lapse of centuries, devoid of every powerful incentive, had not religious disputes offered opportunities for the assertion of personal opinion, while the intrusion of Oriental influences, the revival of Oriental ideas on art and law, caused an agitation like bubbling springs in standing pools.

Not merely did the Asiatic governors possess a higher rank than the European; even Orientals, especially Armenians, acquired an ever increasing importance at court and in the army. Amongst the leaders of the latter, Manuel (under the emperors Theophilus and Michael III) and John Kurkuas (940-942, commander-in-chief against the Arabs, "the second Trajan") are especially famous. Even the pearl diadem of the East Roman emperors repeatedly adorned the brows of Armenians (Bardanes [Philippicus], Artavasdes [† 743], Leo V, Basilius I, Romanus Lacapenus, John I Tzimisces), and once fell to an Arab (Nicephorus I). A granddaughter of Romanus I married in 927 the Czar Peter of Bulgaria. The Ducas family and the Comneni prided themselves on their relationship to the Czar Samuel of West Bulgaria, an Oriental in spite of his European home. In the

Peter Delian

Aaron Catherina Isaac I Comnenus (1057-59) John = Anna Dalassena Constantine X, John Ducas (1041, blinded) (1048) Ducas († 1067)

Cæsar

-Eudocia

veins of the empress Irene, after 732, wife of Constantine V, there flowed Finnish blood; she was the daughter of the chief (Khakhan) of the Khazars. The khan of the Bulgarians was made, under Justinian II († 711), a patrician of the empire, as was a Persian of the royal house of the Sassanids. The Byzantine general, with whose battles the shores of the Black Sea echoed, and whose glory an epic of the tenth century rapturously extols, Basilius Digenis Acritus, was son of the Arabian Emir Ali of Edessa by a Greek wife. The family of the Arabian Emir Anemas in Crete was in the service of John Tzimisces, while George Maniaces, who reconquered Sicily (1038), bears a Turkish name.

In order to obtain an idea of the strange mixture of Oriental and Western life, let us consider the appearance which Constantinople itself would present to a stranger in the time of the emperor Justinian.

As we skim over the glittering water of the Bosphorus in a Byzantine dromond, we see, rising above the gentle slope of the Nicomedean hills, the snowy peaks of the Bithynian Olympus, a fitting symbol of Asia. But on our left hand the mighty capital with its palaces and domes enchains the eye. From behind the strong ramparts which guard the shores, between the long stretch of the hippodrome and the various blocks of the palace, Hagia Sophia towers up, its metalcovered cupolas glittering like gold in the sunlight. In the gulf of the Golden Horn our boat threads its course through hundreds of dromonds and smaller vessels; when safely landed, we must force our way through the motley crowd, and reach the church of St. Sophia through a seething mass of loose-trousered turbaned Bulgarians, yellow and grim-faced Huns, and Persians with tall sheepskin caps. Forty windows pour floods of light on the interior of the church; the sunbeams irradiate columns gorgeous with jasper, porphyry, alabaster, and marble; they play over surfaces inlaid with mother-of-pearl; they are reflected from the rich golden brilliance of the mosaics in a thousand gleams and flashes.2 The want of repose in the ornamentation, the deficiency of plastic feeling, and the prominence which is consequently given to coloured surfaces are emphatically Oriental; not less so are the capitals of the pillars, stone cubes overlaid with ornament, in which we must see a reversion to the traditions of Syro-Phoenician art, and the pattern of the mosaics, where the after-effect of a style originally Chinese, and later Perso-Syrian, is seen in the network of lozenges.

A walk round Constantinople confirms this impression. By the side of the golden throne of Theodosius huge Egyptian pylons tower up; we pass by immense water-tanks constructed in the Syrian fashion and glance at the columned cisterns, which are of Egyptian origin. If we enter the house of a noble we find the floor, according to the immemorial tradition of the East, paved with glazed tiles; the furniture covered, so far as possible, with heavy gold-leaf- a revival of Assyrian fashions, which through Byzantine influence reached even the court of Charles the Great (Charlemagne; cf. p. 61). We notice on the silk tapestries and carpets strange designs of animals, whose childishly fantastic shapes might be found in the Farthest East. The products of the goldsmith's craft, pierced and filled with transparent enamel, point also to Oriental traditions, no less than the extravagant splendour of the nobles and their wives who inhabit these rooms. Gold, precious

1 See the illustration of "Constantinople shortly before and shortly after its Capture by the Turks" in Chapter II.

2 See the explanation of the picture "The Enthroned Christ," Vol. IV, p. 202.

The Greeks after Alex-' ander the Great

stones, or transparent enamel glitter on the long tunics of the men, on their richly ornamented chlamydes and even on their shoes, while their swords are damascened in the primitive Assyrian fashion. The ample robes of the women are thickly covered with embroidery; broad sashes encircle their waists, while narrow embroidered capes hang down from their shoulders. These fashions recur at the court of the later Carlovingians, who are only shown to be Germans by the fashion in which they dress their hair.

The immense imperial palace is a city in itself, a city of marvels. The inhabitant of the rustic West who visited the Cæsars of the East were amazed, as if the fables of the East had come to life. The golden spear-heads of the body-guard carry us back in thought to the old Persian court (see the picture on page 146 of Vol. III); the splendid colours of their robes are borrowed from the East. A mysterious movement announces some great event: the clang of the golden bell and the deep-toned chant of the priests herald the entry of the Basileus. If an envoy was admitted to an audience in the imperial hall, his eye would be caught by another relic of the Persian court, the golden plane-tree, which rose high into the air behind the throne; artificial birds fluttered and chirruped, golden lions roared round the throne; in the midst of all that bewildering splendour sits immovable a figure, almost lost in costly robes, studded with gold and jewels, more a picture, a principle, or an abstraction than a man, the emperor. Every one prostrates himself at the sovereign's feet, in the traditional Eastern form of adoration, the proskynesis. The throne slowly moves upwards and seems to float in the air. Western sovereignty had never before attempted so to intoxicate the senses; the gorgeous colouring and vivid imagination of the East (see explanation to illustration, Vol. III, p. 288) were enlisted in the cause of despotism. If we go out into the street again we hear a stroller singing a ballad which the populace has composed on the emperor in Oriental fashion.

This composite art of Byzantium thus represents a decomposition of the GrecoRoman style into its original Asiatic elements, and a fuller development of these in a congenial soil. The wonderful Greek sense of form was gone, and the style of the Roman Empire had disappeared, if it ever existed; the concealment and covering of the surfaces, the Oriental style of embroidery and metal plates, had become the Byzantine ideal.

In other respects also the intellectual life shows effeminate and Eastern traits. The authors make their heroes and heroines burst into tears or fall into fainting fits with an unpleasing effeminacy and emotionality, only explicable by Oriental influences. Not only the novelists but even the historians, with that lavish waste of time peculiar to the Oriental, describe their personages in the minutest and most superfluous detail. This habit of elaborate personal descriptions was a tradition of Greco-Egyptian style, due to the same craving for the perpetuation of the individual which produced mummy portraits on the coffins of the dead, and caused wills to be adorned with the testator's picture. In the domain of belles lettres the fable and the adventurous travel-romance of the Indians were interwoven with late Greek love stories, so that motifs which first appear in Indian fables spread thence to the West, where they can be traced down to Boccaccio's Decameron. Byzantine architecture shows close dependence on the Arabian models. The emperor Theophilus (829-842) had his summer palace built at the advice of John Grammaticus, who was well acquainted with the Arabs, on the model of the

Caliph's palace at Bagdad, while in the palace of Hebdomon the decoration of the Arabs was imitated.

Foreign words found their way in numbers into the Greek language, often denoting Oriental commodities. The Arabic names for beer (povккâя), for fortunetelling books (páμmλov, Arabic rami), for a wick (parλov, Arabic fatila), for safety (apavárn, Arabic amanat), were adopted at this time. With the Persian imperial mantle for the coronation (Mandiya) and the ordinary imperial mantle (Skaramangion), the Persian names were also borrowed, although the name for the pearl diadem, which Arsacids and Sassanids had also worn, does not appear. The West faded out of the Byzantine range of vision, while the nations of the East attracted more attention. Procopius of Cæsarea († 563) relates strange. notions as to the appearance of Britain. When the Book of Ceremonies, which treats of the procedure with foreign rulers, mentions the princes of Bavaria and Saxony, it states that the country of the Niemetz belongs to them. Little more was known of the Germans in 900 than the name given them by Magyars and Slavs, and the ambassador of the emperor Otto I sat at table in the Byzantine court below the Bulgarian ambassador. The Eastern countries, on the other hand, came more and more clearly into view. The historian Theophylactus Simocattes drew in 620, presumably through the good offices of the Turks (instructed by the letter of the khan of the Turks to the emperor Mauricius, which envoys had brought to Byzantium in 598), an able sketch of China, congratulated the Chinese, in reference to the Byzantine disputes as to the succession, on being ignorant of such matters, and spoke enthusiastically of Chinese law, praising especially the rule which forbade men to wear gold or silver. The legend that Alexander the Great was the founder of the two largest Chinese cities appears also in his writings.

Thus the new influences which now came into play had long existed in the lower strata of Oriental society, or had their origin in Oriental spheres outside Byzantine national life. Whether or not this Byzantine civilization should, therefore, be termed a mixed civilization, it had at any rate so much vitality that it exercised on other civilizations, in the East and the West, an influence as great as had been that of the mixed civilization of Phoenicia and Nearer Asia; the civilization of Syria, locally more independent, played the part of a broker between the East and the West.

E. THE BYZANTINE PROVINCE OF SYRIA AS MEDIATOR BETWEEN WEST AND EAST

WHILE the southern provinces of the Byzantine Empire maintained in general a brisk intercourse with the East (the enthusiastic East-Roman patriot Cosmas Indicopleustes journeyed from Egypt to India, which he described in vivid colours), Syria especially offered a jardin d'acclimatation for Western and Eastern suggestions and ideas, and continued to do so, even after the Byzantine dominion was destroyed in 6-10 and the Arabs took over the country (Vol. III, p. 303). GrecoRoman culture had been completely victorious there under the Roman Empire; the sound of the old Aramaic national language was only heard in isolated villages. Christianity, as a genuinely democratic power, had adopted the discarded language of the mother country and the people, and soon raised it to the rank of a universal language. The achievements of Greek intellectual life were translated into Syrian.