> much to us, but usually we are content to accept them as independent

phenomena, and we seldom pause to wonder whether there is any deeper

connexion between them than their name. It is the purpose of these pages

to ask and give some answer to this question.



The thought that his own Greece might perish, to be succeeded by another

Greece after the lapse of more than two thousand years, would have caused

an Ancient Greek surprise. In the middle of the fifth century B.C.,

Ancient Greek civilization seemed triumphantly vigorous and secure. A

generation before, it had flung back the onset of a political power which

combined all the momentum of all the other contemporary civilizations in

the world; and the victory had proved not merely the superiority of Greek

arms--the Spartan spearman and the Athenian galley--but the superior

vitality of Greek politics--the self-governing, self-sufficing city-state.

In these cities a wonderful culture had burst into flower--an art

expressing itself with equal mastery in architecture, sculpture, and

drama, a science which ranged from the most practical medicine to the most

abstract mathematics, and a philosophy which blended art, science, and

religion into an ever-developing and ever more harmonious view of the

universe. A civilization so brilliant and so versatile as this seemed to

have an infinite future before it, yet even here death lurked in ambush.



When the cities ranged themselves in rival camps, and squandered their

strength on the struggle for predominance, the historian of the

Peloponnesian war could already picture Athens and Sparta in ruins,[1] and

the catastrophe began to warp the soul of Plato before he had carried

Greek philosophy to its zenith. This internecine strife of free

communities was checked within a century by the imposition of a single

military autocracy over them all, and Alexander the Great crowned his

father Philip's work by winning new worlds for Hellenism from the Danube

to the Ganges and from the Oxus to the Nile. The city-state and its

culture were to be propagated under his aegis, but this vision vanished

with Alexander's death, and Macedonian militarism proved a disappointment.

The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the cities more sorely

than their own quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the

Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental rallied and expelled

Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, while the new cloud of Rome

was gathering in the west. In four generations[2] of the most devastating

warfare the world had seen, Rome conquered all the coasts of the

Mediterranean. Greek city and Greek dynast went down before her, and the

political sceptre passed irrevocably from the Hellenic nation.



[Footnote 1: Thucydides, Book I, chap. 10.]



[Footnote 2: 264-146 B.C.]



Yet this political abdication seemed to open for Hellenic culture a future

more brilliant and assured than ever. Rome could organize as well as

conquer. She accepted the city-state as the municipal unit of the Roman

Empire, thrust back the Oriental behind the Euphrates, and promoted the

Hellenization of all the lands between this river-frontier and the Balkans

with much greater intensity than the Macedonian imperialists. Her

political conquests were still further counterbalanced by her spiritual

surrender, and Hellenism was the soul of the new Latin culture which Rome

created, and which advanced with Roman government over the vast untutored

provinces of the west and north, bringing them, too, within the orbit of

Hellenic civilization. Under the shadow of the Roman Empire, Plutarch, the

mirror of Hellenism, could dwell in peace in his little city-state of

Chaeronea, and reflect in his writings all the achievements of the

Hellenic spirit as an ensample to an apparently endless posterity.



Yet the days of Hellenic culture were also numbered. Even Plutarch

lived[1] to look down from the rocky citadel of Chaeronea upon Teutonic

raiders wasting the Kephisos vale, and for more than three centuries

successive hordes of Goths searched out and ravaged the furthest corners

of European Greece. Then the current set westward to sweep away[2] the

Roman administration in the Latin provinces, and Hellenism seemed to have

been granted a reprieve. The Greek city-state of Byzantium on the Black

Sea Straits had been transformed into the Roman administrative centre of

Constantinople, and from this capital the Emperor Justinian in the sixth

century A.D. still governed and defended the whole Greek-speaking world.

But this political glamour only threw the symptoms of inward dissolution

into sharper relief. Within the framework of the Empire the municipal

liberty of the city-state had been stifled and extinguished by the waxing

jungle of bureaucracy, and the spiritual culture which the city-state

fostered, and which was more essential to Hellenism than any political

institutions, had been part ejected, part exploited, and wholly compromised

by a new gospel from the east.



[Footnote 1: About A.D. 100]



[Footnote 2: A.D. 404-476]



While the Oriental had been compelled by Rome to draw his political

frontier at the Euphrates, and had failed so far to cross the river-line,

he had maintained his cultural independence within sight of the

Mediterranean. In the hill country of Judah, overlooking the high road

between Antioch and Alexandria, the two chief foci of Hellenism in the

east which the Macedonians had founded, and which had grown to maturity

under the aegis of Rome, there dwelt a little Semitic community which had

defied all efforts of Greek or Roman to assimilate it, and had finally

given birth to a world religion about the time that a Roman punitive

expedition razed its holy city of Jerusalem to the ground.[1] Christianity

was charged with an incalculable force, which shot like an electric

current from one end of the Roman Empire to the other. The

highly-organized society of its adherents measured its strength in several

sharp conflicts with the Imperial administration, from which it emerged

victorious, and it was proclaimed the official religious organization of

the Empire by the very emperor that founded Constantinople.[2]



[Footnote 1: A.D. 70.]



[Footnote 2: Constantine the Great recognized Christianity in A.D. 313 and

founded Constantinople in A.D. 328.]



The established Christian Church took the best energies of Hellenism into

its service. The Greek intellectuals ceased to become lecturers and

professors, to find a more human and practical career in the bishop's

office. The Nicene Creed, drafted by an 'oecumenical' conference of

bishops under the auspices of Constantine himself,[1] was the last notable

formulation of Ancient Greek philosophy. The cathedral of Aya Sophia, with

which Justinian adorned Constantinople, was the last original creation of

Ancient Greek art.[2] The same Justinian closed the University of Athens,

which had educated the world for nine hundred years and more, since Plato

founded his college in the Academy. Six recalcitrant professors went into

exile for their spiritual freedom, but they found the devout

Zoroastrianism of the Persian court as unsympathetic as the devout

Christianity of the Roman. Their humiliating return and recantation broke

the 'Golden Chain' of Hellenic thought for ever.



Hellenism was thus expiring from its own inanition, when the inevitable

avalanche overwhelmed it from without. In the seventh century A.D. there

was another religious eruption in the Semitic world, this time in the

heart of Arabia, where Hellenism had hardly penetrated, and under the

impetus of Islam the Oriental burst his bounds again after a thousand

years. Syria was reft away from the Empire, and Egypt, and North Africa as

far as the Atlantic, and their political severance meant their cultural

loss to Greek civilization. Between the Koran and Hellenism no fusion was

possible. Christianity had taken Hellenism captive, but Islam gave it no

quarter, and the priceless library of Alexandria is said to have been

condemned by the caliph's order to feed the furnaces of the public baths.



[Footnote 1: A.D. 325.]



[Footnote 2: Completed A.D. 538.]



While Hellenism was thus cut short in the east, a mortal blow was struck

at its heart from the north. The Teuton had raided and passed on, but the

lands he had depopulated were now invaded by immigrants who had come to

stay. As soon as the last Goth and Lombard had gone west of the Isonzo,

the Slavs poured in from the north-eastern plains of Europe through the

Moravian gap, crossed the Danube somewhere near the site of Vienna, and

drifted down along the eastern face of the Alps upon the Adriatic

littoral. Rebuffed by the sea-board, the Slavonic migration was next

deflected east, and filtered through the Bosnian mountains, scattering the

Latin-speaking provincials before it to left and right, until it debouched

upon the broad basin of the river Morava. In this concentration-area it

gathered momentum during the earlier part of the seventh century A.D., and

then burst out with irresistible force in all directions, eastward across

the Maritsa basin till it reached the Black Sea, and southward down the

Vardar to the shores of the Aegean.



Beneath this Slavonic flood the Greek race in Europe was engulfed. A few

fortified cities held out, Adrianople on the Maritsa continued to cover

Constantinople; Salonika at the mouth of the Vardar survived a two hundred

years siege; while further south Athens, Korinth, and Patras escaped

extinction. But the tide of invasion surged around their walls. The Slavs

mastered all the open country, and, pressing across the Korinthian Gulf,

established themselves in special force throughout the Peloponnesos. The

thoroughness of their penetration is witnessed to this day by the Slavonic

names which still cling to at least a third of the villages, rivers, and

mountains in European Greece, and are found in the most remote as well as

in the most accessible quarters of the land.[1]



[Footnote 1: For example: Tsimova and Panitsa in the Tainaron peninsula

(Maina); Tsoupana and Khrysapha in Lakonia; Dhimitzana, Karytena, and

Andhritsena in the centre of Peloponnesos, and Vostitsa on its north coast;

Dobrena and Kaprena in Boiotia; Vonitza on the Gulf of Arta; Kardhitsa in

the Thessalian plain.]



With the coming of the Slavs darkness descends like a curtain upon Greek

history. We catch glimpses of Arab hosts ranging across Anatolia at will

and gazing at Slavonic hordes across the narrow Bosphorus. But always the

Imperial fleet patrols the waters between, and always the triple defences

of Constantinople defy the assailant. Then after about two centuries the

floods subside, the gloom disperses, and the Greek world emerges into view

once more. But the spectacle before us is unfamiliar, and most of the old

landmarks have been swept away.



By the middle of the ninth century A.D., the Imperial Government had

reduced the Peloponnesos to order again, and found itself in the presence

of three peoples. The greater part of the land was occupied by 'Romaioi'--

normal, loyal, Christian subjects of the empire--but in the hilly country

between Eurotas, Taygetos, and the sea, two Slavonic tribes still

maintained themselves in defiant savagery and worshipped their Slavonic

gods, while beyond them the peninsula of Tainaron, now known as Maina,

sheltered communities which still clung to the pagan name of Hellene and

knew no other gods but Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Hellene and Slav need not

concern us. They were a vanishing minority, and the Imperial Government

was more successful in obliterating their individuality than in making

them contribute to its exchequer. The future lay with the Romaioi.



The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome. 'Romaika,' as it

is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of the

'koine' or 'current' dialect of Ancient Greek, in which the Septuagint and

the New Testament are written. The vogue of these books after the triumph

of Christianity and the oncoming of the Dark Age, when they were the sole

intellectual sustenance of the people, gave the idiom in which they were

composed an exclusive prevalence. Except in Tzakonia--the iron-bound coast

between Cape Malea and Nauplia Bay--all other dialects of Ancient Greek

became extinct, and the varieties of the modern language are all

differentiations of the 'koine', along geographical lines which in no way

correspond with those which divided Doric from Ionian. Yet though Romaic

is descended from the 'koine', it is almost as far removed from it as

modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient

Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values

of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the

basis of a metrical system. In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed

itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has

destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented

syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination of

words, and always impoverishing their vowel sounds. In the ninth century

A.D. this new enunciation was giving rise to a new poetical technique

founded upon accent and rhyme, which first essayed itself in folk-songs

and ballads,[1] and has since experimented in the same variety of forms as

English poetry.



[Footnote 1: The earliest products of the modern technique were called

'city' verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has

remained 'the city' par excellence for the Romaic Greek ever since the

Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.]



These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the

rudiments of a new art. Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three tiny

churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares them with

the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same promise of

vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own. The material--worked

blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses

of contemporary brick--produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the

eye; and the structure--a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome--

is the very antithesis of the 'upright-and-horizontal' style which

confronts him in ruins upon the Akropolis.



[Footnote 1: The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]



These first achievements of Romaic architecture speak by implication of

the characteristic difference between the Romaios and the Hellene. The

linguistic and the aesthetic change were as nothing compared to the change

in religion, for while the Hellene had been a pagan, the Romaios was

essentially a member of the Christian Church. Yet this new and determining

characteristic was already fortified by tradition. The Church triumphant

had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model of the Imperial

bureaucracy. Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a

hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at

Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation

of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable

fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the

Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of

the Latin world on the other.



The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its

Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and

ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek 'koine' and by keeping the

Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch

with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors. The

vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during the Dark Age, when

all the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for

survival; but about a third of the greatest authors' greatest works had

been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the

remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and

encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for

these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in

their libraries they were henceforth studied, cherished, and above all

recopied with more or less systematic care.



The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present, but

the most direct link of all was the political survival of the Empire.

Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away. The marvellous system of

Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in the throes of

dissolution. Within a century of its final codification by Justinian's

commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was now replaced by

more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued with Mosaic

principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of the New

Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the Lex Talionis.

The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and elaborated by

Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps districts were the

only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age. Yet the tradition of

order lived on. The army itself preserved Roman discipline and technique

to a remarkable degree, and the military districts were already becoming

the basis for a reconstituted civil government. The wealth of Latin

technicalities incorporated in the Greek style of ninth-century

officialdom witnesses to this continuity with the past and to the

consequent political superiority of the Romaic Empire over contemporary

western Europe.



Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently

secure field for its future development. In the Balkan peninsula the Slav

had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching from

Avlona to Salonika. East of Salonika the empire still controlled little

more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military highway

linking them with each other and with Constantinople. But beyond the

Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia as far as

Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both of the

Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.



A new Greek nation had in fact come into being, and it found itself in

touch with new neighbours, whom the Ancient Greek had never known.

Eastward lay the Armenians, reviving, like the Greeks, after the ebb of

the Arab flood, and the Arabs themselves, quiescent within their natural

bounds and transfusing the wisdom of Aristotle and Hippokrates into their

native culture. Both these peoples were sundered from the Orthodox Greek

by religion[1] as well as by language, but a number of nationalities

established on his opposite flank had been evangelized from Constantinople

and followed the Orthodox patriarch in his schism with Rome. The most

important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter was the Bulgarian

kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from the Danube and the

Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople and Salonika. It had

been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic nomads from the

trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely absorbed in the Slavonic

population which they had endowed with their name and had preserved by

political consolidation from the fate of their brethren further south.

This Bulgarian state included a large 'Vlach' element descended from those

Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their

original migration; while the main body of the 'Rumans', whom the same

thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the Danube, had established

itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push

down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains. Like the Bulgars, this

Romance population had chosen the Orthodox creed, and so had the purely

Slavonic Serbs, who had replaced the Rumans in the basin of the Morava and

the Bosnian hills, as far westward as the Adriatic coast. Beyond, the

heathen Magyars had pressed into the Danubian plains like a wedge, and cut

off the Orthodox world from the Latin-Teutonic Christendom of the west;

but it looked as though the two divisions of Europe were embarked upon the

same course of development. Both were evolving a system of strongly-knit

nationalities, neither wholly interdependent nor wholly self-sufficient,

but linked together in their individual growth by the ties of common

culture and religion. In both the darkness was passing. The future of

civilization seemed once more assured, and in the Orthodox world the new

Greek nation seemed destined to play the leading part.



[Footnote 1: The Armenians split off from the Catholic Church four

centuries before the schism between the Roman and Orthodox sections of the

latter.]



His cultural and political heritage from his ancient predecessors gave the

Romaic Greek in this period of revival an inestimable advantage over his

cruder neighbours, and his superiority declared itself in an expansion of

the Romaic Empire. In the latter half of the tenth century A.D. the nest

of Arab pirates from Spain, which had established itself in Krete and

terrorized the Aegean, was exterminated by the Emperor Nikiphoros Phokas,

and on the eastern marches Antioch was gathered within the frontier at the

Arabs' expense, and advanced posts pushed across Euphrates. In the first

half of the eleventh century Basil, 'Slayer of the Bulgars', destroyed the

Balkan kingdom after a generation of bitter warfare, and brought the whole

interior of the peninsula under the sway of Constantinople. His successors

turned their attention to the cast again, and attracted one Armenian

principality after another within the Imperial protectorate. Nor was the

revival confined to politics. The conversion of the Russians about A.D.

1000 opened a boundless hinterland to the Orthodox Church, and any one who

glances at a series of Greek ivory carvings or studies Greek history from

the original sources, will here encounter a literary and artistic

renaissance remarkable enough to explain the fascination which the

barbarous Russian and the outlandish Armenian found in Constantinople. Yet

this renaissance had hardly set in before it was paralysed by an

unexpected blow, which arrested the development of Modern Greece for seven

centuries.



Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror

from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish nomads

from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world

as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as slaves, then as

mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk

grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam. As champions

of the caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels encroachment on

the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic Empire's progress in

Armenia, and in A.D. 1071--five years after the Norman founded at Hastings

the strong government which has been the making of England--the Seljuk

Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd that heritage of strong

government which had promised so much to Greece.



Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement

there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a

miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after tribe

crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which

their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed

in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed

Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from

one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately

cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for

nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only

monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are

the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses built by the Seljuk sultans

themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best

witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced.

The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable. He imposed his

language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek

had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life,

though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk

and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake,

bridge, and village in the country took on a Turkish name, and a new

nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which

nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the

supreme enemy, of the race.



This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire's doom. Robbed of its Anatolian

governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be

self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at

least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal regime of the Turks

in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in

Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded

by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government

as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers, about

the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula. Raids

across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of

Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before

the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring

expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade. The

crusaders assembled at Constantinople, and the Imperial Government was

relieved when the flood rolled on and spent itself further east. But one

wave was followed by another, and the Empire itself succumbed to the

fourth. In A.D. 1204, Constantinople was stormed by a Venetian flotilla

and the crusading host it conveyed on board, and more treasures of Ancient

Hellenism were destroyed in the sack of its hitherto inviolate citadel

than had ever perished by the hand of Arab or Slav.



With the fall of the capital the Empire dissolved in chaos, Venice and

Genoa, the Italian trading cities whose fortune had been made by the

crusades, now usurped the naval control of the Mediterranean which the

Empire had exercised since Nikiphoros pacified Krete. They seized all

strategical points of vantage on the Aegean coasts, and founded an

'extra-territorial' community at Pera across the Golden Horn, to

monopolize the trade of Constantinople with the Black Sea. The Latins

failed to retain their hold on Constantinople itself, for the puppet

emperors of their own race whom they enthroned there were evicted within a

century by Romaic dynasts, who clung to such fragments of Anatolia as had

escaped the Turk. But the Latin dominion was less ephemeral in the

southernmost Romaic provinces of Europe. The Latins' castles, more

conspicuous than the relics of Hellas, still crown many high hills in

Greece, and their French tongue has added another strain, to the varied

nomenclature of the country.[1] Yet there also pandemonium prevailed.

Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched

the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the

French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the

west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the

encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east. To complete the

anarchy, the non-Romaic peoples in the interior of the Balkan peninsula

had taken the fall of Constantinople as a signal to throw off the Imperial

yoke. In the hinterland of the capital the Bulgars had reconstituted their

kingdom. The Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the

Thessalian plains. The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the

Adriatic had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out

migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring

princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of

continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only less

common than Slavonic. South-eastern Europe was again in the throes of

social dissolution, and the convulsions continued till they were stilled

impartially by the numbing hand of their ultimate author the Turk.



[Footnote 1: e.g. Klemoutsi, Glarentsa (Clarence) and Gastouni--villages

of the currant district in Peloponnesos--and Sant-Omeri, the mountain that

overlooks them.]



The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the way

of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions, which

showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth. This was the extreme

march on the north-western rim of the Anatolian plateau, overlooking the

Asiatic littoral of the Sea of Marmora. It had been founded by one of

those Turkish chiefs who migrated with their clans from beyond the Oxus;

and it was consolidated by Othman his son, who extended his kingdom to the

cities on the coast and invested his subjects with his own name. In 1355

the Narrows of Gallipoli passed into Ottoman hands, and opened a bridge to

unexpected conquests in Europe. Serbia and Bulgaria collapsed at the first

attack, and the hosts which marched to liberate them from Hungary and from

France only ministered to Ottoman prestige by their disastrous

discomfiture. Before the close of the fourteenth century the Ottoman

sultan had transferred his capital to Adrianople, and had become

immeasurably the strongest power in the Balkan peninsula.



After that the end came quickly. At Constantinople the Romaic dynasty of

Palaiologos had upheld a semblance of the Empire for more than a century

after the Latin was expelled. But in 1453 the Imperial city fell before

the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the conqueror

eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from Peloponnesos

to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the uniformity of the

Ottoman domain. Under his successors the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled

on for half a century more over south-eastern Europe, till it was stayed

on land beneath the ramparts of Vienna,[1] and culminated on sea, after

the systematic reduction of the Venetian strongholds, in the capture of

Rhodes from the Knights of St. John.[2] The Romaic race, which had been

split into so many fragments during the dissolution of the Empire, was

reunited again in the sixteenth century under the common yoke of the Turk.



[Footnote 1: 1526.]



[Footnote 2: 1522.]



Even in the Dark Age, Greece had hardly been reduced to so desperate a

condition as now. Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained a

continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to repeople it

with a Turkish majority from Anatolia. Greek commerce would naturally have

benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the Levant, had not the

Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to the Jews expelled from

Spain. These Sephardim established themselves at Constantinople, Salonika,

and all the other commercial centres of the Ottoman dominion, and their

superiority in numbers and industry made them more formidable urban rivals

of the Greeks than the Venetians and Genoese had ever been.



Ousted from the towns, the Greek race depended for its preservation on the

peasantry, yet Greece had never suffered worse rural oppression than under

the Ottoman regime. The sultan's fiscal demands were the least part of the

burden. The paralysing land-tax, collected in kind by irresponsible

middlemen, was an inheritance from the Romaic Empire, and though it was

now reinforced by the special capitation-tax levied by the sultan on his

Christian subjects, the greater efficiency and security of his government

probably compensated for the additional charge. The vitality of Greece was

chiefly sapped by the ruthless military organization of the Ottoman state.

The bulk of the Ottoman army was drawn from a feudal cavalry, bound to

service, as in the mediaeval Latin world, in return for fiefs or 'timaria'

assigned to them by their sovereign; and many beys and agas have

bequeathed their names in perpetuity to the richest villages on the

Messenian and Thessalian plains, to remind the modern peasant that his

Christian ancestors once tilled the soil as serfs of a Moslem timariot.

But the sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with

irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a

fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at

Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical Moslems. This corps

of 'Janissaries'[1] was founded in the third generation of the Ottoman

dynasty, and was the essential instrument of its military success. One

race has never appropriated and exploited the vitality of another in so

direct or so brutal a fashion, and the institution of 'tribute-children',

so long as it lasted, effectually prevented any recovery of the Greek

nation from the untimely blows which had stricken it down.



[Footnote 1: Yeni Asker--New soldiery.]