, -e v-o^ 4 o 'bV '^0^ 4 o %.^^-' Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2011 witii funding from Tine Library of Congress littp://www.archive.org/details/middleagessketchOOshah THE MIDDLE AGES SKETCHES AND FRAGMENTS BY THOMAS J. SHAHAN, S.T.D., J.U.L. PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. ; AUTHOR OF *' THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY," ETC. NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO BENZIGER BROTHERS PBINTEES TO THE HOLT APOSTOLIC SEB 1904 UBHARYof C0N3R£SS Two Gop-e-i Heceivej NOV 14 I&U4 Ccpyriifivi tfitry CLASS /^^ XXc. No; COPY 6. ^^. \^ S^ Nip ®lwtit» Sttt))ttttt8tttt» Nsw Yomx, September 2, 1904. REMIGIUS LAFORT, Censor Librorum. «if JOHN M. FARLEY, Archbishop of New York. CoTTBi&wr, 1904, »T BuKziSBB Beothbbb. E0 ms I9ear iWentJ EDWARD JOSEPH McGOLRICK THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED FOREWORD. The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the general reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known usually as the Middle Ages. The writer will be amply rewarded if they serve to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of to-day is rooted in those ten mar- vellous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history, are not intelligible apart from a suffi- cient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the medisBval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last four centuries are only the last chapters in a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. If anything seems distinctive of the modern mind 5 6 FOBEWOBB, as against the mediaeval temperament, it is the sense of law, an even, constant, inerrant working of forces and principles that brook no interference from with- out and are supremely equitable in their operations. If we compare mediaeval with modern history, we shall learn with certainty that in both there is domi- nant this reign of law, a consistent inexorable unity of purpose, a progressive social formation. In both there are divine and human elements that occupy, in varying prominence, the foreground of the great world-stage, tending always to create a higher type of mankind, to nurse the dormant idealism of the race, and. to lift it gradually toward the goal of all human endeavor — the flawless life of the spirit chastened and transformed and deified by the imi- tation of the God-man. The essays and papers included in this volume have appeared elsewhere at intervals. For the cour- teous permission to reprint them I desire to express my thanks to the Catholic Worlds the American Catholic Quarterly Review^ the Catholic Times^ the Ave Maria and the Catholic University Bulletin* CONTENTS. Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World . 9 Justinian the Great (a.d. 527-565) .... 35 The Religion of Islam .113 Catholicism in the Middle Ages .... 134 The Christians of Saint Thomas .... 221 The Medieval Teacher 230 The Book of a Mediaeval Mother .... 240 German Schools in Sixteenth Century . . . 255 Baths and Bathing in the Middle Ages . . . 286 Clergy and People in Medieval England . . 297 The Cathedral-builders of Medieval Europe . 311 The Results of the Crusades ..... 355 On the Italian Renaissance , . . * . 394 THE MIDDLE AGES. GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BARBARIAN WORLD. The latter part of the sixth century of our era offers to the student of human institutions a fascinating and momentous spectacle — the simultaneous transition over a great extent of space from an ancient and refined civilization to a new and uncouth barbarism of manners, speech, civil poHty, and culture. It was then that the great mass of the Roman Empire, which generations of soldiers, statesmen, and administrators had consolidated at such fright- ful expense of human blood and rights, was irrevocably broken by the savage hordes whom it had in turn attempted to resist or to assimilate. One moment it seemed as if the fortune of a Justinian and the genius of a Belisarius were about to regain all Italy, the sacred nucleus of conquest, and to proceed thence to a reconsti- 9 10 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT, tution of the Roman State in Western Europe. But it was only for a moment. Fresh multi- tudes of Teutonic tribesmen swarmed from out their deep forests along the Danube or the Elbe, and overflowed Northern Italy so effectually as to efface the classic landmarks, and to fasten forever on the fairest plains of Europe their own barbarian cognomen. It is true that the bureaucracy of Constantinople, aided by the local pride of the cities of Southern Italy, by a highly centralized military government, by the prestige and the influence of the Catholic bishops, as well as by the jealousy and disunion of the Lombard chiefs, maintained for two centuries the asser- tion of imperial rights, and a steadily diminish- ing authority in the peninsula and the islands of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But, by the end of the sixth century, all serious hope of reorganizing the Western Empire was gone. Thenceforth (thanks to the Lombard) the Frank and the Visigoth, luckier than their congeners the Ostrogoth and the Vandal, might hope to live in peaceful enjoyment of the vast provinces of Spain and Gaul, and the fierce pirates of old Saxony could slowly lay the foundations of a new empire on the soil of abandoned and help- less Britain. In the West not only was the GBEGOBY THE GRJ^AT. 11 civil authority of Rome overtlirown, but there went with it the venerable framework of its an- cient administration, the Latin language — that masterful, majestic symbol of Roman right and strength — the Roman law, the municipal system, the great network of roads and of intercom- mercial relations, the peaceful cultivation of the soil, the schools, the literature, and, above all, that splendid unity and consolidarity of interests and ideals which were the true cement of the ancient Roman State, and which welded together its multitudinous parts more firmly than any bonds of race or blood or language. Notwithstanding the transient splendor, the victories and conquests, of the reign of- Justinian, the condition of the Orient was little, if any, better than that of the West. The Persian and the Avar harassed the frontiers, and occasionally bathed their horses in the sacred waters of the Bosphorus. The populations groaned beneath the excessive taxes required for endless fortifica- tions, ever recurring tributes, the pompous splendor of a great court, and the exigencies of a minute and numerous bureaucracy. Egjrpt and Syria, no longer dazzled by the prestige or protected by the strong arm of Rome, began to indulge in velleities of national pride and spirit, 12 GBEGOBY THE GREAT. and, under the cover of heresy, to widen the political and social chasm that yawned between them and the great heart of the empire. The imperial consciousness, as powerful and energetic in the last of the Palseologi as in a Trajan or a Constantine, was still vigorous enough, but it had no longer its ancient instruments of good fortune, wealth, prestige, and arms. The shrunken legions, the diminished territories, the dwindling commerce, foreshadowed the dissolu- tion of the greatest political framework of antiquity; and in the quick succeeding plagues, famines, and earthquakes, men saw the ominous harbingers of destruction. TJie time of which I speak was, indeed, the close of a long, eventful century of transition. Already the political heirs of Rome and Byzantium were looming up, both East and West. In the East, fanatic, con- quering Islam awaited impatiently the tocsin of its almost irresistible propaganda, and in the West the Frank was striding through war and anarchy and every moral enormity to the brill- iant destiny of continental empire. We may imagine the problems that beset at this moment the mind of a Boethius or a Cassiodorus. Would the fruits of a thousand years of Greek and Roman culture be utterly blotted out? GREGORY THE GREAT, 13 Would the gentleness and refinement that long centuries of external peace and world-wide com- merce and widest domination had begotten be lost to the race of man ? Would the teachings of Jesus Christ, the source of so much social betterment, be overlaid by some Oriental fanati- cism or hopelessly degraded by the coarse natu- ralism of the Northern barbarians ? Could it be that in this storm were about to be ingulfed the very highest conquests of man over nature and over himself, the delicate and difficult art of government, the most polished instruments of speech, the rarest embodiments of ideal thought in every art, that sweet spiritual amity, the fruit of religious faith and hope, that common Christian atmosphere in which all men moved and breathed and rejoiced ? We all know what it was that in these cen- turies of commotion and demolition saved from utter loss so much of the intellectual inheritance of the Graeco-Roman world, what power tamed and civilized the barbarian masters of the West- ern Empire, fixed them to the soil, codified and purified their laws, and insensibly and indirectly introduced among them no small share of that Roman civilization which they once so heartily b^ted; and which in their pagan days they looked 14 GBEGOBY THE GREAT, on as utterly incompatible with Teutonic man- hood and freedom. It was the Catholic hierarchy which took upon itself the burden and responsi- bility of civil order and progress at a time when absolute anarchy prevailed, and around which centred all those elements of the old classic world that were destined, under its aBgis, to traverse the ages and go on forever, moulding the thought and life of humanity as long as men shall admire the beautiful, or reverence truth, or follow after order and justice and civil security. It was the bishops, monks, and priests of the Catholic Church who in those troublous days stood like a wall for the highest goods of society as well as for the rights of the soul ; who resisted in person the oppression o^ the barbarian chief just emerged from his swamps and forests, as well as the avarice and unpatriotic greed of the Roman who preyed upon his country's ills ; who roused the fainting citizens, repaired the broken walls, led men to battle, mounted guard upon the ramparts, ai;id negotiated treaties. Indeed, there was no one else in the ruinous and totter- ing State to whom men could turn for protection from one another as well as from the barbarian. It seemed, for a long time, as if society were returning to its original elements, such as it had GREGORY THE GREAT, 15 once been in the hands of its Architect, and that no one could better administer on its dislocated machinery than the men who directly represented that divine providence and love out of which human society had arisen. The keystone of this extraordinary episcopate was the papacy. The Bishop of Rome shared with all other bishops of the empire their in- fluence over the municipal administration and finances, their quasi-control of the police, the prisons, and the public works, the right to sit as judge, not alone over clerics and in clerical cases, but in profane matters, and to receive the ap- peals of those who felt themselves wronged by the civil official. Like all other bishops of the sixth century, he was a legal and powerful check upon the rapacity, the ignorance, and the collu- sion of the great body of officials who directed the intricate mechanism of Byzantine administra- tion. But over and above this the whole world knew that he was the successor of the most illustrious of the apostles, whose legacy of authority he had never suffered to dwindle; that he was the metropolitan of Italy, and the patriarch of the entire West, all of whose churches had been founded directly or indirectly by his see. 16 * GBEGOBY THE GREAT. From the time of Constantine his authority in the West had been frequently acknowledged and confirmed by the State and the bishops. In deferring to his decision the incipient schism of the Donatists, the victor of the Milvian Bridge only accepted the situation such as it was out- lined at Aries and Antioch and Sardica, such as Valentinian formally proclaimed it, and the Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian made the funda- mental law of the State. Long before Constan- tine, the Bishop of Eome seemed to Decius and Aurelian the most prominent of the Christian bishops, and since then every succeeding pon- tificate raised him higher in the public esteem. Occasionally a man of transcendent genius, like Leo the Great, broke the usual high level of superiority, and shone as the saviour of the State and the scourge of heresy; or again, skilful administrators like Gelasius and Hormisdas piloted happily the bark of Peter through ugly shoals and rapids. But, whatever their gifts or character, one identic consciousness survived through all of them — the sense of a supreme mission and of the most exalted responsibility in ecclesiastical matters. Did ever that serene consciousness of authority need to be intensified ? What a world of suggestion and illustration lay GBEGOBY THE GREAT. 17 about them in their very episcopal city, where at every step the monuments of universal domina- tion met their gaze, where the very atmosphere was eloquent with the souvenirs of imperial mastery and the stubborn execution of the imperial will, where the local mementoes of their own steady upward growth yet confronted them, where they could stand in old St. Peter's, even then one of the most admired buildings of antiquity, over the bodies of Peter and Paul, surrounded by pilgrims from all parts of the world, and echo the words of the first Leo, that already the spiritual rule of the Roman pontiffs was wider than the temporal one of the Roman emperors had ever been ! It was to this office, and in the midst of such critical events as I have attempted to outline, that Gregory, whom after-ages have styled the Great, succeeded in 590 a.d. He could boast of the noblest blood of Rome, being born of one of the great senatorial families, a member of the gens Anicia, and destined from infancy to the highest political charges. His great-great-grand- father, Felix II. (483-492), had been Bishop of Rome, and he himself at an early age had held the office of praetor, and walked the streets of Rome in silken garments embroidered with 18 GEEGOBY THE GBEAT. shining gems, and surrounded by a mob of clients and admirers. But he had been brought up in the strictest of Christian families, by a saintly mother ; and in time the blank horror of public life, the emptiness of human things in general, and the grave concern for his soul so worked upon the young noble that he threw up his promising camera, and, after distributing his great fortune to the poor, turned his own home on the Coelian Hill into a monastery, and took up his residence therein. It was with delibera- tion, and after satisfactory experience of the world and life, that he made this choice. It was a most sincere one, and though he was never to know much of the monastic silence and the calm lone-dwelling of the soul with God, these things ever remained his ideal, and his correspondence is filled with cries of anguish, with piteous yearnings for solitude and retire- ment. On the papal throne, dealing as an equal with emperors and exarchs, holding with firm hand the tiller of the ship of state on the angriest of seas, corresponding with kings, and building up the fabric of papal greatness, his mighty spirit sighs for the lonely cell, the obedience of the monk, the mystic submersion of self in the placid ocean of love and con- GBEGOBY THE GEE AT, 19 templation. His austerities soon destroyed his health, and so he went through fourteen stormy years of government, broken in body and chafing in spirit, yet ever triumphant by the force of his superb, masterful will, and capable of dictating from his bed of pain the most successful of papal administrations, one which sums up at once the long centuries of organic development on classic soil and worthily opens the great drama of the Middle Ages. In fact, it is as the first of the mediaeval popes that Gregory claims our especial attention. His title to a place among the benefactors of human- ity reposes in great part upon enduring spiritual achievements which modified largely the history of the Western Empire, upon the firm assertion of principles which obtained without contradic- tion for nearly a thousand years, and upon his writings, which formed the heads and hearts of the best men in Church and State during the entire Middle Ages, and which, like a subtle indestructible aroma, are even yet operative in Christian society. The popes of the sixth century were not un- conscious of the fact that the greater part of the Western Empire had passed irrevocably into the hands of barbarian Teutons, nor were they 20 GBEGOMY THE GREAT. entirely without relations with the new possessors of Koman soil; but their temporary subjection to an Arian king, the Gothic war, and the cruel trials of the city of Rome, the meteoric career of Justinian, as a rule deferential and favorable to the bishops of Rome, the painful episode of the Three Chapters, in which flamed up once more the smouldering embers of the great christological discussions, the uncertain re- lations with the new imperial office of the exarchate, as well as a clinging reverence for the empire and its institutions, kept their faces turned to the Golden Horn. They had welcomed Clovis into the church with a prophetic instinct of the role that his descendants were to play, and they kept an eye upon the Catholic Goths, on the Suabians of Northwestern Spain, and on the Irish Kelts. Individual and sporadic mis- sionary efforts originated among their clergy, of which we would know more were it not for the almost complete destruction of their local annals and archives in the Gothic wars. But withal, one feels that these sixth-century popes belong yet to the old Graeco-Roman world, that they hesitate to acknowledge publicly that the im- perial cause is lost in the West, that the splendid unity of the Roman and the Christian name is GBEGOBT THE GREAT. 21 only a souvenir. On the other hand, the barba- rian was too often a heretic, too often slippery, selfish, and treacherous, while the Roman was yet a man of refinement and culture, loath to go out among uncouth tribes who had destroyed whatever he held dear. In a word, he nourished toward the barbarian world at large that natural repulsion which he afterward reproached the British Kelt for entertaining toward the Saxon destroyer of his fireside and his independence. Gregory inaugurated a larger policy. He was the first monk to sit on the Chair of Peter, and he brought to that redoubtable office a mind free from minor preoccupations and devoted to the real interests of the Roman Church. He had been praetor and nuncio, had moved much among the bishops and the aristocracy of the Catholic world, and was well aware of the inferior and painful situation that the New Rome was preparing for her elder predecessor. The careers of Silverius, Yigilius, and Pelagius were yet fresh in the minds of men, and it needed not much discernment to see that, under the new regime, the Byzantine court would never will- ingly tolerate the ancient independence and tra- ditional boldness of the Roman bishops. It was, therefore, high time to find a balance 22 GREGOBT THE GEE AT, to the encroachments and sinister designs of those Greeks on the Bosphorus, who were drift- ing ever further away from the Latin spirit and ideals ; this the genius of Gregory discovered in the young barbarian nations of the West. It would be wrong, however, to see in his conduct only the cold calculations of a statesman. It was influenced simultaneously by the deep yearnings of the apostle, by the purest zeal for the salvation and betterment of the new races which lay about him like a whitening harvest, waiting for the sickle of the spiritual husband- man. While yet a simple monk he had extorted from Pelagius the permission to evangelize the Angles and the Saxons, and had proceeded some distance when the Romans discovered their loss and insisted on his return. Were it not for their selfishness he would have reached the shores of Britain, and gained perhaps a place in the charmed circle of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who were during that century engaged in the losing conflict for independence which ended so disastrously at the Badonic Mount. This is not the place to relate the details of the numerous relations which Gregory established on all sides with the barbarian peoples of Europe. GREGOBY THE GEE AT, 23 The nearest to him were the Lombards, that resistless hammer of the Italo-Roman state, and one of the most arrogant and intractable of all the Teutonic tribes. His policy with them is peace at any price. Now he purchases it with Church gold, sorely needed elsewhere ; and again he concludes a treaty with these iron dukes in the very teeth of the exarch. He takes their rule as an accomplished fact. He refuses to be an accomplice in the base, inhuman measures of the Byzantine governors. He rests not until he has converted their queen Theodelinda, and their king Agilulf; with a certain mixture of bitterness and joy he proclaims himself more a bishop of the Lombards than the Romans, so numerous were their camp-fires upon the Cam- pagna, and so famihar the sight of their hirsute visages and the sound of their horrid gutturals among the delicate and high-bred denizens of Eome. It was he who restrained this rugged and contemptuous race ; who started among them a counter current against their brutal paganism and their cold, narrow, unsentimental Arianism ; who left to them, in his own person and memory, the most exalted type of Christian manhood — at once fearless and gentle, aggressive and 24 GBEGOET THE GREAT, enduring, liberal and constant, loyal to a decay- ing, incapable empire, but shrewd and far-seeing for the interests of Western humanity, whose future renaissance he must have vaguely felt as well as an Augustine or a Salvian. Beyond the Alps the descendants of Clovis had consolidated all of Gaul under Frankish rule. Though Catholics, they were too often purely natural barbarians, restrained with difficulty from the greatest excesses, and guilty in every reign of wanton oppression of Church and people. They sold the episcopal sees to the highest bidder, and they often intruded into these places of honor and influence their soldiers or their courtiers. With great tact and prudence Gregory dealt with these semi-Christian kings. In his correspondence he argues at length, and explains the evils of a simoniacal episcopate ; he pleads for a just and mild administration; he warns them not to exert their power to the utmost, but to temper justice with mercy, and to learn the art of self-control. In all the range of papal letters there is scarcely anything more noble than the correspondence of Gregory with the kings of Gaul, Spain, and England. This fine Roman patrician, this ex-prsetor, recalls the palmy days of republican Rome, when her con- GBEGOBY THE GBEAT. 25 suls and legates smoothed the way of success as much by their diplomacy as by their military skill. He speaks with dignity to these rugged kings, these ex-barbarian chieftains, yet with grave tenderness and sympathy. He recognizes their rank and authority, their prowess and their merits. He reminds them that they are but earthly instruments of the heavenly King, and that their office entails a grave responsibility, personal and official. At times he dares to in- sinuate a rebuke, but in sweet and well-chosen words. He ranks them with Constantine and Helen, the benefactors of the Roman see. His language is generally brief, but noble, courteous, earnest, penetrating, and admirably calculated to make an impression upon warlike and im- tutored men, who were delighted and flattered at such treatment from the uncrowned head of the Western civilization. Childebert and Brune- haut, Recared and Ethelbert and Bertha, be- came powerful allies in his apostolic designs, and opened that long and beneficent career of early mediaeval Christianity when the youthful nations grew strong and coalesced under the tutelage of the papacy, which healed their dis- cords, knitted them together, and transmitted to them the spirit, the laws, the tongues, the arts, 26 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT, and the culture of Greece and Rome — treasures that, in all probability, would otherwise have perished utterly. We are in great measure the descendants of these ancient tribes, now become the nations of Europe, and we cannot disown the debt of grati- tude that we owe to the memory of that Roman who first embraced, with an all-absorbing love, the Frank, the Lombard, and the Gael, the Os- trogoth and the Visigoth, the Schwab, the Wend, and the Low-Dutch pirates of the Elbe and the Weser. Hitherto their chiefs had es- teemed the vicarious lieutenancy of Rome, so deep-rooted was their esteem for the genius of the empire. But they knew now what a pro- found transformation was worked in the West, and they began the career of independent na- tions, exulting in their strength. Politically they were forever lost to the central trunk of the empire, but they were saved for higher things, for the thousand influences of Roman thought and experience. They wei'e made chosen vessels, not alone of religion, but of the arts and sciences, of philosophy and govern- ment, and of that delicate, refined idealism, that rare and precious bloom of long ages of sincere Christian life and conduct, which would GREGORY THE GREAT, .27 surely have perished in a new atmosphere of simple naturalism. No act of Gregory's eventful career has had such momentous consequences as the conversion of the Angles and the Saxons. They were, if possible, a more hopeless lot than the Lombards, revengeful, avaricious, and lustful, knowing only one vice — cowardice — and practising but one virtue — courage. Though distant, the fame of their brutality had reached the ends of the earth. Moreover, they had already nearly ex- terminated a flourishing Christianity, that of Keltic Britain. In a word, they were not so very urjike the Iroquois when Brebeuf and Lallemant undertook their evangelization. I need not go over the recital of their conver- sion. All his life Gregory cherished this act as the greatest of his life. He refers to it in his correspondence with the East, and it con- soled him in the midst of failures and discour- agements. His great soul shines out through the pages of Bede, who has left us a detailed narrative of this event — his boundless confi- dence in God, his use of purely spiritual weap- ons, his large and timely toleration. For these rude Saxons he would enlist all the sympathy of the Franks and the cooperation of the British 28 GBEGOBY TEE GREAT. ^ clergy. He directs in minutest detail the prog- ress of the mission, and provides during life the men and means needed to carry it on. Truly he may be called the apostle of the English, for, though he never touched their soil, he burned with the desire to die among them and for them, he opened to them the gate of the heavenly kingdom, and introduced them to the art and literature and culture of the great Christian body on the continent. Henceforth the Saxon was no longer the Red Indian of the classic peoples, but a member of the world-wide Church. Quicker than Frank or Lombard he caught the spirit of Rom«, and as long as he held the soil of England was un- swervingly faithful to her. Through her came all his culture — the fine arts and music and the love of letters. His books came from her libraries, and she sent him his first architects and masons. From her, too, he received with the faith the principles of Roman law and pro- cedure. When he went abroad, it was to her that he turned his footsteps ; and when he wear- ied of life in his pleasant island home, he be- took himself to Rome to end his days beneath the shadow of St. Peter. In the long history of Christian Rome she never knew a more GREGORY THE GREAT, 29 romantic and deep-set attacliment on the part of any people than that of the Angles and the Saxons, who for centuries cast at her feet not only their faith and their hearts, but their lives, their crowns, and their very home itself. Surely there must have been something extraordinary in the character of their first apostle, a great well-spring of affection, a happy and sympathetic estimate of the national character, to call forth such an outpouring of gratitude, and such a devotion, not only to the Church of Rome, but to the civilization that she represented. To-day the English-speaking peoples are in the van of all human progress and culture, and the English tongue is likely to become at no distant date the chief vehicle of human thought and hope. Both these peoples and their tongue are to-day great composites, whose elements it would not be easy to segregate. But away back at their fountain-head, where they first issue from the twilight of history, there stands a great and noble figure who gave them their first impetus on the path of religion and refinement, and to whom must always belong a large share of the credit which they enjoy. As pope and administrator of the succession of Peter, Gregory ranks among the greatest of 30 GREGOBT THE GREAT, that series. His personal sanctity, his influence as a preacher, his interest in the public worship, and his devotion to the poor, are only what we might expect from a zealous monastic bishop; but Gregory was eminent in all these, while surpassingly great in other things. No pope has ever exercised so much influence by his writings, on which the Middle Ages were largely formed as far as practical ethics and the dis- cipline of life were concerned. They were in every monastery, and were thumbed over by every cleric. Above all, his book of the " Pas- toral Rule " fashioned the episcopate of the Middle Ages. By the rarest of compliments, this golden booklet was translated into Greek, and Alfred the Great put it into Anglo-Saxon. It was the vade-mecum of every good bishop throughout Europe, and a copy of it was given to every one at his consecration. It was reck- oned among the essential books that every priest was expected to own, and it would not be too much to say that, after the Bible^ no work exercised so great an influence for a thousand years as this little manual of clerical duties and ideals. It filled the place which the ^^ Imitation of Christ " has taken in later times ; and in the direct, rugged Latin of its periods, in the stern, GREGORY THE GREAT. 31 uncompromising doctrine of its author, in its practical active tendency, in its emphasis on the public social duties of the bishop, and in its blending of the heavenly and the earthly king- doms, are to be found several of the distinctive traits of the mediaeval episcopate. He laid out the work for the mediaeval popes, and in his person and career was a worthy type of the bravest and the most politic among them. Though living in very critical times, he main- tained the trust confided to him and handed it over increased to his successors. There is no finer model of the Latin Christian spirit ; and some will like to think that he was put there, at the confi.nes of the old and the new, between Romania and Gothia, to withstand the flood of Byzantinism, to save the Western barbarian for Latin influences, and to secure to Europe the transmission of the larger and more congenial Latin culture. Yet he was, like all the Catholic bishops of that age, devoted to the ideal of the Christian Empire, and while he recognized the hand of Providence in the breaking up of the once proud system, he did not spare the expression and the proof of bis loyalty to the emperors at Constantinople. Though virtually the founder 32 GBEGORT THE GEE AT. of the temporal power of the papacy, he ever held his temporal estate for ajid under New Eome, and was never happier than when he could safeguard or advance her interests. Like most men of his time, he believed that the last of the great empires was that of Rome, and that when it fell the end of the world was close at hand. Indeed, the well-known couplet (made famous by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims) belongs to his epoch, and strikingly conveys the popular feeling : — "While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall ; And when Rome falls, the world." Long ages have gone by since he was gath- ered to his rest (604) in the portico of old St. Peter's, with Julius and Daraasus, Leo and Gelasius, and all the long line of men who built up the spiritual greatness of Eome. Le- gends have gathered about his memory, like mosses and streamers on the venerable oak, and calumny has aimed sonie poisoned shafts at his secular fame. But history defends him from the unconscious transformation of the one, and the intentional malice of the other, which ever loves a shining mark. She shows to the admiring ages his portrait, high-niched GBEGOBT THE GBEAT. 33 in the temple of fame^ among the benefactors of humanity, the protector of the poor and the feeble against titled wealth and legalized op- pression, the apostle of nations once shrouded in darkness, now the foremost torch-bearers of humanity. He appeared to posterity as one of that very small number of men who, holding the highest authority, administer it without fault, lead unblemished lives, and find time and opportunity to heal, with voice and pen and hand, the ills of a suffering w^orld, and advance its children on a path of unbroken progress, guided by the genius of pure religion, consoled, elevated, and purified by all that the noblest thought and the widest experience of the past can offer.^ 1 The works of Gregory the Great are reprinted in Migne (Pl. Ixxv.-lxxix.) from the Benedictine edition of Sainte Marthe (Paris, 1705, 4 vols. foL). A critical edition of his "Registrum Episto- Tarum," or "Letter-Book," is now at hand, owing to the learned industry of P. Ewald and L. M. Hartmann (Mon. Germ. Hist. Epistolse, I. -II., Berlin, 1891-1899). His account of St. Benedict has been reedited from the "Dialogues" by P. Cozza-Luzzi (Rome, 1880), and the " Homilies," by G. Pfeilschifter, under the auspices of Dr. Knopfler's "Seminary of Church History" (Munich, 1900). There is an English translation of the "Regula Pastoralis," or "Shepherd's Book," by H. R. Bramley (London, 1874). The English philologian, Henry Sweet, edited and trans- lated into English the West Saxon version made by King Alfred for the edification of his, priests and people (Early English Text Society Publications, Londo-n, 1871). Concerning his correspon- 34 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT. dence with St. Augustine of Canterbury on the toleration of heathen customs, cf. Duchesne, " Origines du Culte Chretien " (Paris, 1899, 1902), and Sagmliller, Theol. Quartal. Schrift. (1899), Vol. 160. The age and authenticity of the " Sacramentary," or Old Roman Missal, that goes under his name, are discussed by Duchesne (op. cit.) and by Dr. Probst in a work of much erudition, " Die abend- landische Messe vom V. bis zum VII. Jahrhundert" (Mtinster, 1896). The origins of the so-called Gregorian Chant are treated by r. A. Gevaert, " Les Origines du Chant Liturgique de I'Eglise Latine " (Gand, 1900), and " La M^lopee Antique dans le Chant de I'Eglise Latine" (Gand, 1895) ; cf. G. Morin, "L'Originedu Chant Gr^gorien (Paris, 1890). The oldest printed lives of Gregory the Great are those by Paulus Diaconus, at the end of the eighth cen- tury, and by Johannes Diaconus (Migne, Pl. Ixxxv. 59-242) about 872 or 873. There is said to exist in England a manuscript life of him composed at a still earlier date. Among the latest and best works on this great pope are Wisbaum, "Die wichtigsten Einrichtungen und Ziele der Thatigkeit des Papstes Gregor d. Gr." (Leipzig, 1885) ; Clausier, "St. Gregoire le Grand, Pape et Docteur de PEgiise" (Paris, 1886) ; C. Wolfsgruber, "Gregor d. Gr." (Saulgau, 1890), and the articles entitled "II Pontificato di S. Gregorio Magno nella Storia della Civiltk Cristiana" in the Givilta GattoUca (1890-93), Series XIV. , Vols. 5-9, and XV., Vols. 1-&. A useful account of his life is that of Abbot Snow in the " Heroes of the Cross " series (Lon- don, Th. Baker, 1897). The celebration of the thirteenth centenary of his death (604) will doubtless call forth many learned tributes to his manifold greatness and significance. His relations to the Em- peror Phocas are discussed by * Fr. Gorres in the Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Theologie (1901), Yo\. XLIV.,pp. 592-602, and the accusation of ignorantism, by * R. Labbadini, " Gregorio Magno e la Grammatica," in Bullettino difilologia dassica (1902), Vol. VIIL, pp. 204-206, 259 ; cf. *Er. and P. Bohringer, " Die Vater des Paps- thums Leo I. und Gregor I." (Stuttgart, 1879), in the new edition of " Die Kirche Christi und ihre Zeugen." The asterisked writers are non-Catholic. For a full bibliography of Gregory the Great cf. the new edition of Chevalier's " Repertoire Historique du Moyen Age," and the second edition of Potthast, " Bibliotheca Historica Medii ^vi." The reader may consult with profit the historians of the City of Rome, Gregorovius, von Reumont, and Grisar, and for a literary appreciation of the pope the classical (German) work of Ebert on the "Latin Literature of the Early Middle Ages." JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A.D. 527-565). Peehaps the most crucial period of Christian history, after the foundation century of Christ and the apostles, is the sixth century of our era. Then goes on a kind of clearing-house settle- ment of the long struggle between Christianity and paganism. It was no false instinct that made Dionysius the Little begin, shortly before the middle of that century, to date his chronol- ogy from the birth of Christ, for then disap- peared from daily use the oldest symbols of that pagan civil power which had so strenuously disputed with the new religion every step of its progress. The annual consulship was then abol- ished, or retained only by the emperor as an archaic title. That immemorial root of Roman magistracy, the thrice-holy symbol of the City's majestas, could rightly pass away when the City had fulfilled its mission and function in the ancient world. The Roman Senate, too, passed away at the same period — what calls itself the Roman Senate at a later time is a purely local and municipal institution. The old relig- 35 36 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. ion of Rome was finally no more than a mem- ory. For the two preceding centuries it had gone on, sullenly shrinking from one level of society to another, until its last representatives were an individual here and there, hidden in the mighty multitudes of the Christian people of the empire.^ The schools of literature, philosophy, and rhetoric were no longer ensouled with the principles of Hellenism. Their last hope was buried when the Neoplatonists of Athens took the road of exile to beg from the Great King, that born enemy of the Roman name — the prophet of "Medism" — a shelter and support.^ In dress, in the system of names, in the popular literature, in the social institutes, in the spoken language,^ in the domestic and public architec- IV. Schultze, "Untergang des griechisch-romischen Heiden- tums " (Jena, 1892), Vol. II., pp. 385-389 ; cf. also pp. 214, 215. The documents for the disappearance of Western paiganism are best col- lected in Beugnot, "Histoire de la destruction du paganisme en Occident" (2 vols., Paris, 1835). Since then it is the subject of many learned works. 2 Gregorovius, " Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter," Vol. I., p. 58, does not believe that any formal edict was issued by Justinian against the continuance of the pagan schools ; they lapsed into desuetude. 3 Bury, "The Language of the Komaioi in the Sixth Century," "History of the Later Roman Empire," Vol. II., pp. 167-174; Free- man, " Some Points in the Later History of the Greek Language," Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. III. (1882) ; Tozer, "The Greek- speaking Population of Southern Italy," ibid:, Vol. X., pp. 11-42 (1889). JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 37 ture, in the spirit of the law, in legal procedure, in the character of city government, in the ad- ministration of the provinces, in the very con- cept of the State and of empire, there are so many signs that the old order passeth away and a new one even now standeth in its place. The symptoms of internal trouble, noted on all sides from the time of Marcus Aurelius and graphically diagnosed by St. Cyprian, had gone on multiplying. They did not portend that decay which is the forerunner of death, as many had thought while the ancient society was dissolving before their eyes,^ but that decay which is the agent of great and salutary changes. Their first phase, the long and eventful Wandering of the Nations, had broken up. East and West, the old framework of society as the Greek and Roman had inherited, created, or modified it. On the other hand, that most thorough of all known forces, the spirit of Jesus Christ, had been working for fifteen generations in the vitals of this ancient society, disturbing, cleansing, casting forth, healing, binding, reno- vating, a social and political organism that- — 1 "Sic quodcumque nunc nascitur mundi ipsius senectute de- generat, ut nemo mirari deberet singula in mundo deficere ccepisse, cum ipse jam mundus totus in defectione sit et fine." — St. Cyfkian, "Ad Demetrianum," c. 4, ed. Hartel. 38 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. " Lay sick for many centuries in great error." In such periods of history much depends on the ideals and character of the man or men who stand at the helm of a society that is working its way through the straits and shoals of transi- tion. Was it not fortunate for Europe that a man like Charlemagne arose on the last limits of the old classical world, with heart and brain and hand enoiigh to plan and execute a political basis sufficiently strong to hold for centuries to come the new States of Western Christen- dom? It is here that Justinian enters on the stage of history and claims a place higher than that of Charlemagne; second to that of no ruler who has affected for good the interests of his fellow- men. He is not, I admit, a very lovable figure. He stands too well within the limits of the Grseco-Roman time to wear the illusive halo of Teutonic romance. But in the history of humankind those names shine longest and brightest which are associated with the most universal and permanent benefits. Is he a bene- factor of society who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before ? Then what shall we say of one who established for all time the immortal principles of order and justice and JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 39 equity, without which all human endeavor is un- certain and usually sinks to the lowest level ? ^ 1 The principal authority for the life and works of Justinian is the contemporary Procopius, the secretary and lieutenant of Beli- sarius. In his account of the Gothic, Vandal, and Persian war» he exhausts the military history of the empire. His work on the buildings of Justinian and the "Anecdota" or "Secret History" that bears his name are entirely devoted to the emperor, the former in adulation, the latter in virulent condemnation. Agathias, also a contemporary, has left us an unfinished work on the reign of Jus- tinian that deals chiefly with the wars of 552-558. To John Lydus, one of the imperial officers, we owe an account of the civil service under Justinian. Theophanes, a writer of the end of the sixth century, has left some details of the career of the emperor. The " Church History " of Evagrius and the " Breviarium " of the Car- thaginian deacon Liberatus are of first-class value for the ecclesi- astical events. His own laws (Codex Constitutionum and Novelise) and his correspondence, e.g. with the bishops of Eome, are sources of primary worth, as are also at tins point the "Liber Pontificalis" and the correspondence of the popes with Constantinople. In his chapters on Justinian, Gibbon followed closely Le Beau, "Histoire du Bas Empire" (Paris, 1757-84). Among the general historians of Greece in the past century who deal with the events of this reign are to be named Finlay, " A History of Greece " from its conquest by the Komans to the present time (146 b.c. to 1864 a.d.), new and revised edition by H. F. Tozer (Oxford, 1877, 7 vols.) ; Bury, " A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene " (395-800) (2 vols., London, 1887). The German histories of Greece by Hopf (1873), Hertzberg (1876-78), Gregorovius (histories of mediaeval Rome and Athens, 1889), and the modern Greek histories of Paparrigopoulos (1887-88) and Lambros (1888) cover the same ground, though they differ considerably in method and apprecia- tions. There is an "Histoire de Justinien " (Paris, 1856), by Isambert, very superficial and imperfect, and a life of the empress by Debidour, " L'Imp6ratrice Theodora" (Paris, 1885), to which may be added Mallet's essay on Theodora in the English Histori- cal Beview for January, 1887. Several essays of Gfrorer in his "Byzantinische Geschichten" (Graz, 3 vols., 1872-77), notably pp. 315-401, are both instructive and picturesque. For all questions 40 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. I. Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, the modern Sophia and capital of the present kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant of his historians says that he came of an obscure race of barbarians.^ Nevertheless, in an empire every of chronology pertaining to the reign of Justinian the reader may- consult the classic work of Clinton, "Fasti Eomani : The Civil and Literary Chronology of Rome and Constantinople" (to a.d. 641), (Oxford, 2 vols., 1845-50) ; cf. also Muralt, " Essai de Chronographie Byzantine" (St. Petersburg, 2 vols., 1855-73), and H. Gelzer, " Sextus Julius Africanus " (Leipzig, 1880-85). An attempt has been made to collect the Greek Christian in- scriptions from the fifth to the eighteenth century. " Inscriptions Grecques Chr^tiennes " (St. Petersburg, 1876-80), pp. 11-143. Mgr. Duchesne and M. HomoUe promise a complete "Corpus." Cf. Bulletin Critique (October 5, 1900, p, 556). The coins and medals of the period are best illustrated in Schlumberger's " Sigillographie de I'Empire Byzantin" (Paris, 1884), a work that rounds out and replaces the earlier treatises of De Saulcy, Banduri, Eckel, and Cohen. 1 It is worth noting that the Slavonic origin of Justinian has lately been called in question by James Bryce, English Historical Heview (1887), Vol. II., pp. 657-686. It is said to have no other foundation than the biography by a certain Bogomilus or Theophilos, an imaginary teacher of Justinian. This biography is not otherwise mentioned or vouched for than in the Latin life of Justinian by Johannes Marnavich, Canon of Sebenico (d. 1639). Bryce holds that Marnavich gives us only echoes of a Slavonic saga about Jus- tinian. Jiricek ("Archiv fur Slavische Philologie" (1888), Vol. II., pp. 300-304) condemns the whole story as a forgery of Marna- vich. Thereby would fall to the ground all that Alemannus, the first editor of the "Anecdota" of Procopius (1623), writes concerning the Slavonic genealogy, name, etc., of Justinian. Cf. Krumbacher, "Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur" (Munich, 1891), p. 46. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 41 soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky soldier. Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite such another " paysan du Danube " as Lafontaine describes in one of his most perfect fables (XI. 6) : " Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue. Toute sa personne velue Representait un ours, mais un ours mal l^chd. Sous un sourcil epais il avait I'oeil caclie, Le regard de travers, nez tortu, grosse levre : Portait sayon de poll de chevre, Et ceinture de joncs marins." He may have been not unlike the good Ursus in " Quo Vadis/' or that uncouth Dacian in " Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long service of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and succeeded, with universal consent, to Anastasius when that hated "Manichaean" died childless. The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered to make a Roman holiday — the land had long been Romanized, had even furnished the empire with a succession of strong and intelligent rulers, those Illyrian emperors whom Mr. Freeman has so magisterially described. Jus- tin was an uneducated barbarian, and cut his signature painfully through a gold stencil plate, as did his contemporary, the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, king of Italy. Yet he had the wis- 42 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. dom of experience, the accumulated treasures of the sordid Anastasius, the counsel of good civil officers, old ^nd tried friends in many an Isau- rian, many a Persian, campaign. Above all, he had the devotion of his youthful nephew, Jus- tinian. Possible pretenders to the throne were removed without scruple — a principle that has always been prevalent by the Golden Horn. Before Justin died his nephew had reached the command of all the imperial forces, though never himself a warlike man. In 527, on the death of his uncle, he found himself, at the age of thirty-six, sole master of the Eoman Empire. It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, after the drums and tramplings of a dozen con- quests. The West, indeed, was gone — it seemed irretrievably. At Pa via and Ravenna the royal Ostrogoth governed an Italian State greater than history has seen since that time. At Tou- louse and Barcelona the Yisigoth yet disposed of Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and Orleans and Soissons the children of Clovis meditated vaguely an empire of the Franks. The Rhineland and the eternal hills of Helvetia, where so much genuine Roman blood had been spilled, were again a prey to anarchy. Britain, that pearl of the empire, was the scene of tri- JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 43 umphant piracy, the new home of a half dozen Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited by the great State's hour of trial to steal one of her fairest provinces, and were obliterating in blood the faintest traces of her civilizing presence. Even in the Orient, where the empire stood rocklike, fixed amid the seething waters of the Bosphorus, the Hellespont, and the Euxine, it knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids of Persia threatened the vast level plains of Mesopotamia, while a new and inexhaustible enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and Slavonic tribes, terrible in their numbers and their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold, amenable to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and mur- der and universal disorder. Justinian must have often felt, with Henry the Fourth, that the wet sea-boy, "cradled in the rude imperious surge," was happier than the king. Withal, the empire was yet the only Mediterranean State. It yet held Syria and Egypt. Asia Minor was faithful. The Balkan provinces, though much troubled, and poor harassed Greece were imperial lands. ^ The empire alone had navies 1 The political geography of the empire in the sixth century may he studied in "Hieroclis Synecdemus," edition of Gustav Parthey 44 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered.^ Alone as yet it had the paraphernalia of a well- appointed and ancient State — coinage, roads, transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with arts and literature and all that is implied in the fair old Latin word humanitas. It stood yet for the thousand years of endeavor and progress that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. And well it was for humanity that its destinies now passed into the hands of one who was penetrated with the keenest sense of responsi- bility to God and man. Though he reached the highest prize of life before his prime, it has been said of him that he was never young. The ashes of rebellion and insurrection had been smouldering in the royal city since, with the death of Marcian (457), the old, firm, Theodosian control had come to an end. The frightful political consequences of the great Monophysite heresy that was born with the Council of Chal- cedon (451) were dawning on the minds of thoughtful men. The Semitic and Coptic Orient (Berlin, 1866). Here are reprinted the " Notitise Episcopatuum " or catalogues of ecclesiastical divisions knowp usually as the ' ' Tac- tica." Cf. also Banduri, "Imperium Orientale" (Paris, 1711, fol.) ; "Antiquitates Constantinopolitanae" (Paris, 1729, fol.)- 1 Gfrorer, " Byzantinische Studien," Vol. 11. , pp. 401-436; " Das byzantinische Seewesen." JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 45 was creating that shibboleth which would serve it for a thousand years against Greek and Roman — a blind and irrational protest against the real oppressions and humiliations it once underwent. Of its own initiative the empire had abandoned, for good or for ill, its historical basis and seat — Old Rome. It had quitted the yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer the scene of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassa- nid with the sea at its back, to create a suitable forum for the government of the world, where Christian principles might prevail, and where a certain inappeasable nemesis of secular wrong and injustice would not haunt the imperial soul as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital one thing was left behind — perhaps it was irre- movable — the soul of Old Rome, with all its stem and sober qualities, its practical cast and temper, its native horror of the shifty mysticism of the Orient and the unreality of the popular forms of Greek philosophy. There is some- thing pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the Great, " The art of arts is the government of souls." It is like an echo of the sixth book of Vergil, " Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento." Perhaps this is the germ of sohd truth in the legend that Constantine abandoned the civil au- 46 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, • thority at Eome to Pope Silvester. He certainly did abandon, to the oldest and most consistent power on earth, — a power long since admired by an Alexander Severus and dreaded by a Decius — that rich inheritance of prestige and authority which lay embedded in the walls and monuments of ancient Rome. Within a century something of this dawned on the politicians of Constanti- nople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle to help its bishop to the ecclesiastical control of the Orient. In history there are no steps back- ward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the last consistent, if romantic, prophet of the em- pire, was wont to shiver with indignation at the thought of the consequences of this act. But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of government, they gained a Greek soul. It was an old Greek city they took up — Byzantium. Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with Hellenism, whose far-flung outpost it had long been. History, clunate, commerce, industries, the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of Ro- man men and families, the contempt for the pure Orientals, forced the emperors at Constantinople from the beginning into the hands of a genuine local Hellenism that might have shed its old and native religion, but could not shed its soul, its JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 47 immortal spirit. Henceforth the world was governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre.^ This meant that government for the future was to be mingled in an ever increasing measure with metaphysics ; that theory and unreality, the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the fleeting elements of life, were to have a large share in the administration of things civil and ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth — " Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 1 "The Greek characteristics of the empire under Justinian are calculated to suggest vividly the process of ebb and flow which is always going on in the course of history. Just ten centuries be- fore Greek Athens was the bright centre of European civilization. Then the torch was passed westward from the cities of Hellenism, where it had burned for a while, to shine in Latin Rome. Soon the rivers of the world, to adopt an expression of Juvenal, poured into the Tiber. Once more the brand changed hands ; it was trans- mitted from the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, once more eastward, to a city of the Greek world — a world, however, which now dis- dained the impious name ' Hellenic ' and was called ' Romaic. ' By the shores of the Bosphorus, on the acropolis of Grseco-Roman Constantinople, the light of civilization lived pale but steady for many hundred years — longer than it had shone by the Ilissus, longer than it had gleamed by the Nile or the Orontes, longer than it had blazed by the Tiber, and the Church of St. Sophia was the visible symbol of as great a historical idea as those which the Par- thenon and the Temple of Jupiter had represented, the idea of Euro- pean Christendom. The empire, at once Greek and Roman, the ultimate results to which ancient history, with Greek history and Roman, had been leading up, was for nine centuries to be the bul- wark of Europe against Asia, and to render possible the growth of the nascent civilization of the Teutonic nations of the West by pre- serving the heritage of the old world." — Bury, "History of the Lat^r Roman Empire," Vol. II., p. 39. 48 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers from Rome. They one day momited the throne in their worst shape, the shape of the sophist, in the person of Marcus Aurelius ; but, indeed, they had no proper place in Eome, where government has always tended to keep its head clear and calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the average practical and attainable. Not so in the Greek Orient. With the triumph of the Chris- tian rehgion the gods of Hellas fell from their rotten pedestals. But they were never the gov- erning element, the principe generateur of the Greek life. That was the individual reflective mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things, seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, not for any definite purpose, but because this restless research was its life, its delight ; because at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised the outer and visible world as an immense phe- nomenon, a proper and commensurate subject for the ruinous acidity of its criticism. It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of these opmiosissimi homines of Greece which be- gat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nes- torius, and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even partially conquered in their defeat, for they com- pelled, to some extent, a philosophical refutation i JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 49 of their own vagaries; they helped Plato, and later Aristotle, to their high seats in Christian schools. With sure instinct the earliest Chris- tian historians of heresies set down among them certain phases of Greek philosophy. " Quid Academice et EcdesicB ! " cries Tertullian in his book on Prescription, as though he smelled the battle from afar. In the intense passion of the Arian and chris- tological discussions the highest Greek gift, metaphysics, and the finest Greek training, dia- lectics, came to the front. In every city of the Greek world the most abstruse and fine-drawn reasoning was indulged in habitually by all classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its ob- scure origin among those third-century philoso- phers of Antioch who gave to that school its grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He appeared at Nicaea in the company of pagan philosophers, and when defeated carried his cause at once before the sailors and millers and wandering pedlers along the sea front at Alexandria. And for two centuries the shop- keepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and Alexandria would rather chop logic than attend to their customers. For the victories of the mind the burdens of the State were neglected or 50 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of thought was carried into the council chamber, to prevail therein very often to the detriment of the commonwealth. The great officers of the State were too often doubled with theologians. The emperor himself took on gradually the character of an apostolic power, with God-given authority to impose himself upon the churches, formulate creeds, decide the knottiest points of divinity, make and unmake bishops great and small, and generally to become, in all things, a visible providence of God on earth .^ This is what the Eastern world acquired by losing its Roman emperors and gaining a succession im- bued with the spirit of Hellenic thought, and accustomed to the exercise of despotic power in a city that had no old and stormy republican tra- ditions, being no more than the high golden seat of imperial authority from its foundation. Were it not for the magnificent resistance of Old Rome in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bish- ops would have allowed the cause of Christianity to become identified with the Caesaro-papism of the emperors. If we add to the loss or absence of desirable 1 Cf. Rambaud, " L'Empereur Byzantin,'* Bevue des Deux Mondes (1891). JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 51 Roman qualities on the part of these great gov- ernors of imperial society, and the acquisition of undesirable Greek qualities, certain influences of the Orient, we shall, perhaps, better understand the situation in which Justinian found himself. It was noted very early that in contact with the Orient the extremely supple and impressionable Greek genius suffered morally. It lost its old Dorian or Argive independence, and, stooping to conquer, took on the outward marks of servitude while dwelling internally in its own free illimit- able world of opinion and criticism. Long wars, commerce, travel, especially prolonged sojourns in corrupting Persia, had habituated the Eastern Greeks to political absolutism. Since Alexander the habits of servile subjection of their own con- quered populations of Syria and Egypt were in- fluential in this direction. The Roman emperors from Diocletian on were themselves caught by the externals of the Great King's court, and seem to have transferred much of its ceremonial to their own. The presence in Constantinople of a great multitude of miscellaneous Orientals and the exaggeration of style and rhetoric pecul- iar to this as to all other times of decadence, added strength to this current servilism. 52 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. II. The great problem that faced Justinian on his accession was the very character and limits of the Roman State for the future. Were the en- croachments of one hundred years, the extinction of the Imperium in the West, to be finally con- doned to those victorious Germans who in the last century had absorbed the political control of Italy, Gaul, Africa, Spain, Sicily ? Or should an effort be made to reestablish again an orhis ter- rarum^ the ancient world-wide cycle of imperial authority ? Should Carthage, Milan, Havenna, Trier, Rome itself, be forever renounced; or must one last struggle be made to win back the cra- dle of the empire and the scene of its first con- quests ? Every possible argument pointed in an affirmative sense — the raison d'etat, the relig- ious considerations and influences, the demands of commerce and industry, the incredibly strong passion of sentiment evoked by the memories and glory of Old Rome. In the heart of Justin- ian burned the feelings of a Caesar and a Cru- sader, a great trader and carrier of the Royal City, and a Hellene scandal-stricken at the over- flow of barbarism and '' Medism " that was foul- ing all the fair and sweet uses of life. In the JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 53 person of Belisarius lie found a worthy general, one of the most intelligent and resourceful men who ever led troops into action. He found also for Belisarius a secretary, Procopius, who has left us a brilliant record of the great campaigns by which the ancient lands of the empire were won back. For twenty-five years the world of the Mediterranean resounded with the din of universal war. Around the whole periphery of empire went on the work of preparation, a- thousand phases of mortal conflict, a thousand sieges, truces, and bloody battles. Belisarius broke the short-lived and fanatic Vandal power in 531, and Carthage, so dearly bought with Roman blood, was again a Roman city. Jus- tinian lived to see the heroic resistance of the Ostrogoths made vain, after the death of their noble king, by the total subjugation of Italy and its reincorporation with the empire. In the meantime the great corn-granary of the em- pire, Sicily, was won back, and the constant fear of famine that hung over Constantinople and the army disappeared. Scarcely had he relief in Africa or Italy when the emperor moved his troops to the plains of Mesopotamia or even to the rocky fastnesses of Colchis, the modern Georgia, chastening at once the proud Mede and A 54 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. the fierce shepherds of those inaccessible hills. With the exception of the Persian campaigns, these wars ended successfully for the Koman State. One last outpouring of Teutons — the long advancing Lombards — wrenched away Northern Italy from the immediate successor of Justinian and interposed a hopeless barrier against any attempts to reconquer Austria, Switz- erland, and Bavaria. But Central and Southern Italy were saved. A praetorian prefect was set over Northern Africa ; Sardinia and Corsica were once more integrant portions of the great Medi- terranean State. A praetor again governed in Sicily as in the days of Cicero. From the inac- cessible marshes of Ravenna an exarch or patri- cian ruled the remnants of the Roman name in the original home of that race. Even in Spain Justinian recovered a footing, and several cities of the coast recognized again the authority that had so long civilized the Iberian peninsula. Doubtless it was owing to the incredible exi- gencies of the Persian wars that Central Eu- rope swept finally out of the immediate vision of the emperor. The men, ships, moneys, and efforts of all kinds that it took to carry on these long and costly and unsatisfactory campaigns against the Persian, could well have availed to JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 55 reunite the lost lands of the West and to make the Rhine and the Danube again Roman rivers. The interest in the island of Britain grew so faint that it appears in Procopius only as the home of innumerable -spirits, a vast cemetery of ghosts ferried over nightly from Gaul by terrified mariners who are chosen in turn and compelled by supernatural force.^ The Frank went on absorbing at his leisure the Rhineland, Switzerland, Bavaria, Southern Gaul, and threatened to sweep Spain and North- ern Italy into his State.^ Indeed, out of the fragments that escaped Justinian and Belisarius, the greatest of the Frankish race, the mighty Karl, would one day resurrect the Roman Em- pire in the West. If Justinian did not recover all the Western Empire, at least he brought to an end the Germanic invasions by exterminating Vandal and Ostrogoth and reestablishing in the West some formal and visible image of the old Roman power and charm. Henceforth Thuringi- 1 Nothing could illustrate more forcibly the thoroughness of the decadence of the old Roman power in the West than the presence in Procopius of this curious survival of old Druidic lore. Cf. Edouard Schurd, " Les Grandes Ldgendes de France " (Paris, 1892), p. 154. 2 Gasquet, " L'Empire Byzantin et la Monarchic franque " (Paris, 1888) ; Lecoy de la Marche, "La Fondation de la France au V. et VI. si^cles " (Paris, 1893). 56 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, ans, Burgundians, Alemans, Yisigoths, Suevi, Alans, the whole Golden Horde of tribes that first broke down the bounds of the empire, tend to disappear, submerged in the growing Frank- ish unity. The one unfortunate race that came last — the Lombards — was destined to be utterly broken up between the three great Western powers of the two succeeding centuries, the chil- dren of Pepin Heristal, the Byzantine exarchs of Italy, and the bishops of Rome. Could Justin- ian have kept the line of the Danube free and secure, the course of mediaeval history would surely have been changed. This was the origi- nal weak spot of the empire, and had always been recognized as such. Trajan tried to Roman- ize the lands just across it — the ancient Dacia — but his successor, Marcus Aurelius, had to withdraw. An inexhaustible world of miscella- neous barbarians — an officina gentium — ^was at the back of every frequent rebellion, and their warriors were like the leaves of the summer forest. Here, too, was the fateful margin of empire, along which broke eventually the last surges of every profound social or economic disturbance of the far Orient, flinging across the great river in wild disorder Hun and Slav and Avar and Gepid and Bulgar. The first JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 57 encroacliments on Roman life and security cul- minated, after a century of warfare, in the ever memorable campaigns and retreats of Attila. And when the empire of the mighty Hun fell apart at his death, the Germans, Slavs, Bulgars, and other non-Hunnic tribes whom he had governed from his Hungarian village, took up each its own bandit life and divided with the Hunnic tribes the wild joys of annual incursions into those distracted provinces that are now the modern kingdoms of the Balkans and Greece, but were then Illyricum, Moesia, Thrace, Thes- saly, Macedonia, Epirus. The Avars and the Huns, remnants perhaps of the horde of Attila, were the most dreaded in the time of Justinian. But they only alternated with the Slavs, to whom they gave way within a century, so end- less was the supply of this new family of bar- barism. These latter were tall, strongs blond, with ruddy hair, living in rude hovels and on the coarsest grain, fiercely intolerant of any rule but that of the father of the family, jealous and avaricious, faithless like all barbarians, yet child- like in their admiration for power and grandeur. They harassed yearly the whole immense pen- insula of the Balkans. They climbed its peaks, threaded its valleys, swam its rivers, a visitation 58 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. of imman locusts. The regular armies of Jus- tinian were of no avail, for these multitudes fought only in ambuscade, a style of warfare peculiarly fitting to the Balkans, which are like the " Bad Lands " of Dakota on an immense scale. They shot poisoned arrows at the Romans from invisible perches, and at close quarters were dread opponents by reason of their short and heavy battle-axes. It was in vain that line within line of fortifications were built, that in isolated spots the watch-towers and forts were multiplied and perfected, that every ford and pass and cross-road had its sentry boxes and castles. The enemy had been filtering in from the time of Constantine/ and was already no small element of the native population. So, as German had called to German across the Rhine, Slav called to Slav across the Danube; the Ro- mans were caught between the hammer and the anvil, between the barbarian within and his brother from without. Nevertheless, it was not without a struggle that filled four centuries more that Constantinople let go her mountain bul- wark. Every river ran red, and every hillside 1 O. Seeck, " Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt," (Berlin, 1897), Vol. I., Part II., c. 6 j "Die Barbaren im Keich," pp. 391-548. JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 59 was drenched with blood, in that memorable contest, in which she sometunes saw from the walls of the Eoyal City the plains of Thrace one smoking ruin, and again all but cut off, root and branch, her Slavonic and Bulgarian enemies.^ Doubtless the heart of Justinian was sore pressed at his impotency against the swarming Slavs and Avars. He loved his Illyrian home, and built on the site of his native village a city, Justiniana Prima (near Sophia), which he fondly hoped would be a new Byzantium in the Bal- kans. With a foreconscious eye he made it a bishopric, even a patriarchate, and ordered for it honors second only to those of the most ancient sees of the Christian world. This act was productive of grave consequences in later times that fall beyond our present ken.^ The long wars of Justinian with Persia were otherwise important. Here it was a death strug- 1 The influence of Constantinople in the later Slavonic world is incontestable. Besides the "Chronicle of Nestor" (French trans- lation by L. Leger, Paris, 1884), cf. Gaster, " Grseco-Sclavonic " (London, 1877); Rambaud, "La Russie Epique" (Paris, 1876); Krek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-geschichte " (Graz, 1877), pp. 451-473 ; and the pro-Byzantine work of Lamansky (in Russian), " On the Historical Study of the Graeco-Sclavonic World " (St. Petersburg, 1871). 2 Puchesne, "Les %lises S^par^es" (Paris, 1897). 60 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. gle between Persia striving to reach, the sea and Constantinople struggling to keep her back. These wars lasted more or less continuously from 528 to 562, and sometimes coincided with the greatest expeditions in the West. From time to time a peace was concluded or a truce — the peaces were really only truces. The usual result was the payment of a heavy tribute on the part of the emperor, amounting at times to as much as a million dollars, not to speak of the numerous sums paid by the cities of Mesopotamia and Syria, and the incalculable treasures carried off in each of these campaigns. If the Persian resented new fortifications in the vicinity of the Euphrates, war was declared. If the Saracen sheiks who stood with the Romans fell into a dispute with their brethren who served Persia over a desert sheepwalk, it was settled by a long war between the Romans and the Persians. Endless sieges of fortified cities, heavy ransoms from pillage and burning, extraordinary single combats, marching and countermarching across Syria and Mesopotamia, fill the pages of the historians. The local Jews and Samaritans, yet numerous and powerful, were no small source of weakness to the Romans. So, too, were the ugly heresies of the Monophysites and Nestori- JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 61 ans, with all the hatreds and heartburnings they occasioned against Constantinople, the protec- tress of the orthodox faith of Chalcedon, a general council almost universally misunder- stood, and equally hated in Syria and Egypt. In 532, for example, Justinian purchased peace for eleven thousand Roman pounds of gold (about two and a half millions of dollars). He was then in the throes of the Vandal war in Af- rica and on the point of the expeditions against the Moors and to recover Sicily. When Belisa- rius was in the very heart of the Gothic war in Italy, Chosroes again broke the peace, solicited by Witigis, the head of the Gothic forces, and joined by many dissatisfied Armenians, who con- sidered themselves oppressed by the Romans — perhaps, too, embittered by the persecution directed against the Monophysites. In their own way these wars are of value for the history of military engineering. Great and ancient cities fall before the engineers of Persia. Antioch, the Queen of the East, for the second time saw a Persian king within her walls. Chosroes even reached the shores of the Medi- terranean, gazed on the great Midland Sea, bathed in its blue waters, and on its shores offered to the sun the sacrifice of a fire-worship- 62 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. per. He had strong hopes of reaching and con- quering Jerusalem and of bri^:ging all Syria under his yoke, but desisted therefrom. Inter- nal disorders and the plague seem to have held him back. The last phase of these Persian wars was unrolled at the extremity of the Black Sea, among the Lazi, in old Greek Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, now Mingrelia and Geor- gia. The people were Christians and under an uncertain Roman protectorate. But they abut- ted on an unruly portion of the Persian Empire, and so were a thorn in the side of Chosroes. Moreover, he had long desired a footing on the Black Sea, whence he could create a navy that would place Constantinople at his mercy and permit him to come into easy contact with those Huns and Slavs and Avars who, from the mouths of the Danube and the plains of Bes- sarabia and Southern Russia, were harassing the Royal City. Hence the great importance of the long and weary struggle for the wild and barren hills of the Caucasian seashore. They were doubly important, because these narrow passes could keep back or let in the trans-Caucasian Scythians and create a new source of ills for a State groaning already under a complication of them. In the end the Persian was shut out, JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 63 chiefly because the population was Christian and uns3niipathetic to him, but not without a war of seven years' duration, filled with romantic epi- sodes and revealing at once all the weaknesses and also the strong points of the Roman mili- tary system. The victory, as usual, cost a nota- ble sum of money. Justinian agreed to pay about one hundred thousand • dollars yearly for fifty years, of which nearly a million dollars had to be paid down at once. Nevertheless, he kept the Persians from becoming a naval power and from undertaking the anti-Christian propaganda that a century later fell to the yet despised Arabs and Saracens who were serving in both armies, unconscious that on the great dial of time their hour was drawing nigh. For the thirty-eight and odd years of his reign the emperor was never free from care as to the existence and limits of the State. It was no ordinary merit to have provided for the defence of the common weal in all that time, to have recovered a great part of what his predecessors had lost, to have restored the prestige of the empire over against Frank and Ostrogoth, to have kept Persia in her ancient limits, and to have saved the Royal City from the fate of Old Rome, which had fallen before the first on- 64 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. slaught of Alaric. No doubt he had able gen- erals — Belisarius, Bessas, John the Armenian, Dagisthseus, Wilgang, and others. It was an age of mechanical inventions and engineering skill, the result of good studies among the ancient books and also of new needs and experi- ences.^ The peculiar character of the barbarian wars and the multitude of old populous cities through the Roman 'Orient gave opportunity for the development of fortifications. By this means chiefly, it would seem, the emperor hoped to withstand the attacks of his enemies. III. The armies of Justinian were recruited on pretty much the same principle as those of his predecessors. Since Diocletian and Constan- tine, conquered barbarians had become the mer- cenaries of the empire and received regularly, as wages, the gold which they had formerly 1 In the " Varise" of Cassiodorus are found many curious con- temporary traces of the survival of the ancient skill in engineering and architecture. Cf. the formula (VII. 6) for the appointment of a Count of the Aqueducts, and (VII. 15) for the appointment of an "Architectus operum publicorum." "Let him consult the works of the ancients, but he vv'ill find more in this city [Rome] than in his books." The "Letters of Cassiodorus" are partially translated by Thomas Hodgkin (London, 1886). JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 65 extorted by the irregular and uncertain methods of invasion and plunder. Isauria in all its in- accessible strongholds became a pepiniere of soldiers for the empire just as soon as it had been demonstrated to these untameable hill-folk that Constantinople would no longer tolerate their impudent independence. The Catholic " Little Goths " of Thrace were good for many a recruit. The disbanded and chiefless Heruli, ousted from Italy by Theodoric^ were at the disposition of the emperor. Sometimes the barbarians came in as faderati or as coloni, half soldiers, half farmers. Sometimes they rose to the high- est offices by bravery and intelligence, like a Dagisthaeus, a John, a Wilgang, a Guiscard, five hundred years ahead of that other Guiscard, who was to beard in Constantinople itself, the suc- cessor of Justinian. It was a heyday for all the barbarian adventurers of the world. Never since the palmy days of Crassus and Caesar, of Antony and Germanicus, was there war at once so griev- ous and widespread, so varied in its fields of battle, and claiming so much endurance, ingenuity, and industry. Then was in demand all that the art of sieges had gained since the Homeric pirates sat down before some lone Greek trader on his 66 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, isolated perch in the ^gean. If Shakespeare's Welsh captain could read of the famous sieges of Daras and Edessa, his soul would go up in flame for joy at these wars carried on with all the science of a dozen Caesars. Trench and counter-trench, wall and parapet, ditch and mine, tower and rampart, battering ram and beam and wedge — a hundred industries were kept going to lay low the huge fortifications of monolith and baked brick that dotted the land of Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it was by his enormous system of fortifications that the great emperor assured the restored peace of his domains. It is true, as Montesquieu has said, that " France was never so weak as when every vil- lage was fortified." Yet under the circum- stances this was the only immediate remedy against countless enemies from without and within, ceaselessly plotting the ruia of the ven- erable old State. The best national defences are those which we can most easily set up and most strongly defend, not what the theorist or philosopher of war can suggest. From Belgrade to the Black Sea, from the *Save to the Dan- ube, citadels with garrisons and colonies were lo- cated and provided with weapons of defence and JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 67 attack. In Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, over six hundred forts were established for observation and resistance. Many of them, perhaps, were such watch-towers and lonely bar- racks as we yet see in the Roman Campagna, whither the shepherd and his herd could turn for a momentary refuge from marauders. All the scum of the northeastern world was floating loosely over the plains of Southern Russia, faintly held back by the Greek cities of the Crimea. The peninsula of Greece was par- ticularly open ; the unwarlike character of its thin population was patent since Alaric had burned and pillaged his way across it in all directions early in the fifth century. Since then its woes are best described by dropping a black pall across the annals of one hundred years. " The centre of earth's noblest ring " was a howling desert, save for a few cities in which, perhaps, the old Greek blood was propa- gated, and some spark of the philosophic mind nursed against a better day.^ The pass of 1 "If we go to look in modern Greece for pure and unmixed Hellenes, untainted by any drop of barbarian blood, that we as- suredly shall not find. . . . The Greek nation, in short, has, like all other nations, been affected, and largely affected, by the law of adoption. . . . The Sclavonic occupation of a large part of Greece in the eighth and ninth centuries is an undoubted fact, and the 68 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, Thermopylse was again fortified and garrisoned. The Isthmus of Corinth was strengthened as a buffer for the wild Peloponnesus, half-heathen as it still was in its remotest valleys and hillsides. The long wall of Thrace that protected the kitchen-garden suburbs of Constantinople was strengthened — not so well, however, that irregu- lar bands of Huns, Avars, and Slavs did not reg- ularly break through and insult the holy majesty of the empire with their barbarian taunts, that mingled with the flames of costly churches and municipal buildings and with the cries of the dying and the outraged. As we peruse these annals it is hard to keep back a tear and a shudder, and we comprehend the preternatural gravity that hangs about every coin and effigy of Justinian. To him it must have seemed as if the original sanctity of order, the rock basis of society, were tottering to its fall. Alas! he could not see that those flames which lit up the Propontis and the Isles of the Princes,^ which fell across the site of ancient Troy and the origi- nal homes of Dorian and Ionian merchants, were not the awful illumination of a " Night of the Sclavonic element in the population of Peloponnesus may he traced down to the time of the Ottoman conquest. " — Ereeman, "Medi- aeval and Modern Greece," op. cit., pp. 340-341. 1 Schlumberger, "Les lies des Princes" (Paris, 1884). JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 69 Gods/' but the dawn of our modern society.^ In such pangs and throes does social man usually reach his highest place, his highest calling on this sad footstool of earth ! Though the quasi-extermination of Isauria by 1 " The first chief who fenced in the Palatine with a wall did not dream that his hill-fortress would become the head of the world. He did not dream that it would become the head of Italy or even of Latium. But the prince who fenced in the New Rome, the prince who bade Byzantium grow into Constantinople, did design that his younger Rome should fulfil the mission that had passed away from the elder Rome. He designed that it should fulfil it more thoroughly tha» Milan or Trier or Mkomedia could fulfil it. And his will has been carried out. He called into being a city which, while other cities have risen and fallen, has for fifteen hun- dred years, in whatever hands, remained the seat of imperial rule ; a city which, as long as Europe and Asia, as long as sea and land keep their places, must remain the seat of imperial rule. The other capitals of Europe seem by her side things of yesterday, creations of accident. Some chance a few centuries back made them seats of government till some other chance may cease to make them seats of government. But the city of Constantine abides and must abide. Over and over again has the possession of that city prolonged the duration of powers which must otherwise have crumbled away. In the hands of Roman, Frank, Greek, and Turk her imperial mission has never left her. The eternity of the elder Rome is an eternity of moral infiuence ; the eternity of the younger Rome is the eternity of a city and fortress fixed on a spot which nature itself had destined to be the seat of the empire of two worlds." — Freeman, "The Byzantine Empire" in "Historical Es- says," Vol. III., series 1892, p. 255. On the city of Constantinople, besides the classic description of Hammer in his " Geschichte der Osmanen," there are for modern times the books of De Amicis, Grosvenor, and Hutton ; for the Middle Ages the "Esquisse topo- graphique" of Dr. Mordtmann (Lille, 1892) ; for the early Middle Ages " Constantinopolis Christiana" (1729, fol.), and Riant, "Ex- uviae Sacrse Christianse" (Geneve, 1877, 2 vols.). 70 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, Anastasius gave peace on the mainland of Asia Minor, Justinian was obliged to protect that vast heart of the empire, with all its superim- posed and ancient civilizations, by great walls towered and flanked at intervals from the Crimea to Trebizond on the Persian frontier, a stretch of ^YQ hundred miles. The Iberian and Caspian gates, those narrow sea margins and mountain throats that control the entry to the Black Sea from the steep ranges of Caucasus, had also to be fortified, or, rather, the strong hand of the emperor must compel the rude mountain chiefs to render to him as well as to themselves this necessary duty. The very sources of the Eu- phrates, forever a dark and bloody line of battle, had to be secured against the feudal satraps of the Great King. In the Mesopotamian plain Amida, Constantine, Nisibis, holy Edessa, must rise up, clad with impregnable armor and filled with warlike men. Restless, unsympathetic, proud, discontented, abused Armenia — the tor- ture of Eome since the days of Mark Antony and still the plague of statesmen — must be fastened once more, however unwillingly, to the body of the Eoman State. In the whole Orient rose up one hope of vic- tory, one sure refuge, the great Gibraltar of JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 71 Daras. One hundred years had Eome toiled at that barrier against Persia. Only the inces- sant wars in Italy and the Mediterranean pre- vented Justinian from making it the capital of Eoman power in the Orient. As it was^ Daras was the chief thorn in the side of Persia, a living monumental insult pushed far into the lands that the Great King looked on as his hereditary domain, and an encouragement to all his own rebels as well as a promise to the thousands of unattached Saracens, the Bedouins of those grassy deserts on whose surface we now look in vain for traces of the greatest fortress that Greek genius ever constructed. Egypt, too, the land of the wheat-bearing and gold-producing Nile, needed the assurance of fortifications against the hordes of Ethiopia and Nubia, and inner unexplored Africa, against the tribes of the Soudan, who, from time imme- morial, under many names, waged war against civilization on its oldest, richest, and narrowest line of development. Justinian never forgot the arts of diplomacy in the midst of all these warlike cares. He was always willing to pacify by tribute the various broken bands of Huns. This had been always one line of imperial policy, even in the palmy 72 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. days of a Theodosius the Great. Much was always hoped from the internal discords of the barbarians, who often dissipated their strength in orgies and self-indulgence. One tribe was played olff against the other by arousing avarice. The Goths, for instance, hated the Franks and the Alemans, so they were willing to exter- minate seventy-five thousand of the latter, who might have helped them to cast out thoroughly the Roman power. The emperor encouraged the King of Abyssinia against the King of the Homerites in Southern Arabia, and made thereby a useful Christian friend, while he broke up an anti-Christian Jewish power. He took in as a body of auxiliary troops the Heruli of Italy, so brutal and stupid that nobody would have them fts neighbors. He gave the Crimea to three thousand shepherd Goths and cultivated the principal men among the Tzani, the Armenians, the Lazi of Colchis. Chosroes could say in 539 that soon the whole world would not contain Justinian, so happy seemed his fortunes about that date. Yet he could also taste the cup of despair, for in 558 he was obliged to witness a small body of wild Huns come up to the very gates of the Royal City, an advance guard of other hordes that were pillaging Thrace and JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 73 Greece. The aged Belisarius could find only three hundred reliable soldiers in a city of one million inhabitants ; yet with them he scattered these Huns and saved the city. The old historian Agathias tells us that there should then have been in the army six hundred and fifty-five thousand fighting men, but it had dwindled down to one hundred and fifty thou- sand. " And of these some were in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others in Colchis, others at Alexandria and in the Thebaid, a few on the Persian frontier." It is to this decay of the army, caused perhaps by jealousy of its immortal leader and by female intrigue, that the same judicious historian, a contemporary and a man of culture, attributes the growing ills of the Eoman State. His thoughtful phrase is worth listening to ; soon this current of philosophic observation will cease, and commonplace chronicling take its place in the seventh and eighth centuries of the Byzan- tine Empire. "When the emperor conquered all Italy and Lybia and waged successfully those mighty wars, and of the princes who reigned at Constantinople was the first to show himself an abso- lute sovereign in fact as well as in name — after these things had been acquired by him in his youth and vigor, and when he entered on the last stages of life, he seemed to be weary of 74 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, labors, and preferred to create discord among his foes or to mollify thera with gifts, and so keep off their hostilities, instead of trusting his own forces and shrinking from no danger. He consequently allowed the troops to decline, because he expected that he would not require their services. And those who were second in authority to himself, on whom it was incumbent to collect the taxes and supply the army with necessary provi- sions, were affected with the same indifference and either openly kept back the rations altogether or paid them long after they were due ; and when the debt was paid at last, persons skilled in the rascally science of arithmetic demanded back from the soldiers what had been given them. It was their privilege to bring various charges against the soldiers and deprive them of theu' food. Thus the army was neglected and the soldiers, pressed by hunger, left their profession to embrace other modes of life." IV. The very religious mind of Justinian could not but be much concerned with the social conditions and problems of his time. His legislation bears the impress of this preoccupation — it is highly moral throughout, and constantly seeks a con- cord on ethical and religious principles. Thus, to go through his code haphazard, we find him concerned about the building of churches and their good order and tranquillity. He is said to have built twenty-five in Constantinople alone, and to have chosen for them the most favorable sites in public squares, by the sea, in groves, on eminences where often great engineering skill was demanded. The rarest woods and the JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 75 costliest marbles were employed, and multitudes of laborers given the means of life. They were usually paid every evening with fresh-coined money as a tribute to religion. He built and endowed many nunneries, hospitals, and mon- asteries, notably in the Holy Land, where he also provided wells and stations for pilgrims. Bridges, aqueducts, baths, theatres, went up con- stantly ; for building he was a second Hadrian. And all this had a social side — the employment of vast numbers of men, the encouragement of the fine arts, great and little. He is concerned about institutions of charity of every kind, and in their interest makes his own the old and favorable laws of his predecessors. In his day every sorrow was relieved in Constantinople. The aged, the crippled, the blind, the helpless, the orphans, the poor, had each their own peculiar shelter, managed by thousands of good men and women who devoted themselves gratuitously to these tasks.^ The slave and the debtor had their rights of asylum acknowledged in the 1 Bulteau, "Essai de I'histoire monastique de I'Orient" (Paris, 1680). The late work of the Abb6 Morin, "Les Moines de Con- stantinople" (Paris, 1897), and the study of Dom Besse, very rich in details, "Les Moines d' Orient anterieurs an Concile de Chalet doine" (Paris, 1900), permit the student to obtain a complete con- spectus of the monastic history of the Orient. 76 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. churches and regulated according to the de- mands of proper police order. The right of freeing the slaves was recognized especially in bishops and priests ; to them was given the power to control the ^^ defenders of the city'^ — a kind of popular tribunes, whose duty it was to supervise the proper administration of justice. He undertook to abolish gambling, claiming, logically enough, that he had the same right to do that as to carry on war and regu- late religion. Blasphemy and perjury and the greater social crimes and sins were visited with specially heavy sanctions, though we may doubt if they often passed beyond the written threat. He legislated humanely for the rescue of aban- doned children and for the redemption of those numerous captives whom the barbarians daily swept away from the soil of the empire. No female could longer be compelled to appear in a theatrical performance, even if she were a slave, even if she had signed a contract to do so, being a free woman. The bishop of each city was authorized to carry out this law. An actress might henceforth marry any member of society, even a senator. He was personally interested in the thousands of poor girls who came yearly to the Royal City, and were often the prey of JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 77 designing persons who had travelled through the provinces, "enticing young girls by promising them shoes and clothes." In the last century it was a custom to offset such creditable details by reference to the ter- rible pages of the " Anecdota/' or " Secret His- tory" of Procopius. And Gibbon has not failed to expend on them some of his most salacious rhetoric and to violate, for their sake, his usual stern principles of doubt and cynicism.^ Per- 1 In a few vigorous phrases Edward Freeman has laid bare a structural weakness of Gibbon : " With all his [Gibbon's] wonder- ful power of grouping and condensation, which is nowhere more strongly shown than in his Byzantine chapters, with all his vivid description and his still more effective art of insinuation, his is cer- tainly not the style of writing to excite respect for the persons or period of which he is treating, or to draw many to a more minute study of them. His matchless faculty of sarcasm and depreciation is too constantly kept at work; he is too fond of anecdotes showing the weak or ludicrous side of any age or person ; he is incapable of enthusiastic admiration for any thing or person. Almost any his- tory treated in this manner would leave the contemptible side uppermost in the reader's imagination ; we cannot conceive Gibbon tracing the course of the Roman Republic with the affection of Arnold, or defending either democracy or oligarchy with the ardent championship of Grote or Mitford." — "Historical Essays" (1892), 3d series (2d ed.), pp. 238-239. This recalls what Morison said of Gibbon — that "his cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause." Coleridge's well-known judgment in his ' ' Table Talk ' ' may be worthy of mention, viz. "that he did not remember a single philo- sophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline and fall of the empire." In an otherwise sympathetic study Augustine Birrell has recorded an equally severe judgment on the historical method and principles of Gibbon : "The tone he thought fit to adopt toward Christianity was, quite apart 78 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, haps I cannot do better than cite the very recent judgment of a special student of Byzantine history : — "The delicacy or affectation of the present age would refuse to admit the authority and example of Gibbon as a sufficient reason for rehearsing the licentious vagaries attributed to Theodora in the indecent pages of an audacious and libellous pamphlet. If the words and acts which the writer attributes to Theodora were drawn, as probably is the case, from real life, from the green rooms of Antioch or the bagnios of Byzantium, it can only be remarked that the morals of those cities in the sixth century did not differ very much from the morals of Paris, Vienna, Naples, or London at the present day." ^ from all particular considerations, a mistaken one. No man is big enough to speak slightingly of the construction his fellow men have put upon the Infinite. And conduct which in a philosopher is ill- judged is in an historian ridiculous. . . . Gibbon's love of the unseemly may also be deprecated. His is not the boisterous impro- priety which may sometimes be observed staggering across the pages of Mr. Carlyle, but the more offensive variety which is heard sniggering in the notes." — "Kes Judicatse" (New York, 1897), pp. 79, 80. 1 Bury, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 61. On Procopius in general, cf . Dahn, *'Prokopios von Csesarea" (Berlin, 1865) ; Gutschmid, "Diebyzan- tinischen Historiker" in the "Grenzboten" (1863), Vol. I., p. 344 ; Eanke, " Weltgeschichte " (1883), Vol. IV., 2, pp. 285-312; Bury, " History of the Later Eoman Empire" (1889), Vol. I., pp. 355-364. Eanke is of opinion that the " Secret History " contains genuine material from the hand of Procopius, as, for instance, the adultery JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 79 Still milder and more favorable is the judg- ment of Kraiise as to the morality of the city of Constantinople, even at a later date, when the first fervor of Christianity had cooled, and the city had suffered from the immoral contact of Islam and had become almost the sink of the Orient. From its foundation in 330 to its fall in 1453 Constantinople was always a Christian city, sometimes fiercely and violently so, never- theless an essentially Christian foundation. The social life, therefore, of the city, and the empire that it gave the tone to, could not but be of, a higher grade than the pagan life had to show, whether we look at the condition of woman, the poor, the slave, or the child, those four usual factors that condition the moral life of all ancient society. All the betterments of Chris- tianity were here available for the slave, and they were many and great. Numberless con- vents opened their doors to women and pro- claimed in them the dignity and independence of human nature in the only way possible in antiquity. The diaconal service of the number- of Antonina, wife of Belisarius. Only such materials have been interwoven and overlaid with other assertions not due originally to Procopius, hut to jealous and disappointed persons, especially those affected hy the stem conduct of Justinian in the Nik6 sedition (532). 80 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. less churclies was largely in their hands ; it was they who cared for the orphan and the poor and the aged. In the schools they conducted, the maidens of the city were taught to read the great classics of the Greek fatherland in a way that did not force them to blush for the first principles of decency. The letters of a Basil and a Chrysostom, the poems of a Gregory of Nazianzum, were written in a language scarcely less pure and elegant than the best masterpieces of Attica.^ The frequent sermons of renowned orators in the churches and the daily conversation of men and women in the best rank and station, par- ticular in language and manner as the Greeks always were, offered a superior culture. Though they had lost their rude Hberties, they had not lost their fine ear for verbal music, their keen and disputatious minds. The society of Con- 1 Withal, mediaeval society was deeply indebted to the empire for the materials and traditions with which it began its career. Cunningham, " The Economic Debt to Ancient Kome" in " West- ern Civilization in its Economic Aspects" (Cambridge University Press, 1900), pp. 5-9; cf. also for the mediseval influence of Constantinople on the West, Dollinger, "Einfluss der griechischen Kultur auf die abendlandische Welt im Mittelalter," Akad. Vor- trage (Munich, 1890), Vol. L, pp. 162-186; Burkhardt, "Renais- sance" ; Voigt, "Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums " (2d ed., 1881) ; and Bikelas, " Les Grecs au Moyen Age," in "La Gr6ce Byzantine et Moderne" (Paris, 1893), pp. 3-88. JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 81 stantinople was at all times famed for the ad- mirably bred women it could show. Pulcheria, Athenais, Eudoxia, were women of the most varied gifts, and they actually governed the gov- ernors of the world by the use of these gifts. The letters of St. John Chrysostom to the Deaconess Olympias, the story of his own mother, of the women of the great Cappadocian family of saints and theologians, reveal a fine and original culture penetrated with religion, but also enthusiastic for all that is holy and per- manently fair, worthy and sweet in life. Whence, indeed, could come the strong men who so long held the Royal City above the waves of barba- rism and disrupting war and internal disorder but from a truly great race of women ? When Con- stantinople was founded, a place was made for the consecrated virgins of the Christian Church. And forever after they held that place of honor so worthily that the tongue of slander has scarcely wagged against them. For over eleven centuries the city stood in the seething waters of secular iniquity, human weakness, Oriental depravity, Moslem immorality, and the miscella- neous filth and sinfulness of the corrupt East. Yet she never ceased to fill these religious houses of men and women, especially the latter, 82 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. and never ceased to behold in them models of the highest spiritual life on earth. We know how to praise the Theophanos, the Marias, and the Anna Komnenas of the Greek Middle Ages. But who shall say how many souls of noble women went their way silently along the ancient cloisters by the Bosphorus, wanting indeed in fame, but not wanting in a multitudinous rich service to every need of humanity ? The Greek sinned tragically against the duty of Christian unity, but he never lost the original Christian respect for the way of sacrifice and perfection. The ancient life about the Mediterranean was governed by principles and manners unknown or unappreciated by us.^ The warm sun and the abundant waters of inexpressibly delicate hues, the rich and varied vegetation, the cool and calming winds, render many of these lands the most delightful of the world. Life there has always been an out-of-door life ; all the higher forms of social amusement have been affected by the climate and the geography. It was so in Old Eome, it is so in all the lands of Italy, Spain, 1 Lenormant, "La Grande Gr6ce" (Paris, 1881-84), 3 vols. JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 83 and Southern France to this day. The peasant dances on the public square ; the strolHng player with his bear or his marionette sets up his tent near-by. The harvest festival, the church fete, the relics of old pagan superstitions baptized into harmlessness by innumerable centuries of tolera- tion — all these are lived out in the open air under a cloudless sky, amid balmy breezes laden with the scents of olive and vine, tig and orange, and the most aromatic shrubberies. As these ancient peoples moved up in the forms of gov- ernment their political life was all out of doors — the speaking, the voting, the mighty contests of eloquence. And when the Greek cities lost to Eome their national isonomy, they could still hire some famous sophist or rhetorician, like Dio Chrysostom, to keep up on the " agora " some faint echo or image of their adored old life.^ So it was that when Constantinople was built, the life of the city soon centred in its great hip- 1 The municipal and domestic life of the Constantinople of Jus- tinian is illustrated somewhat freely in Marrast, "La Vie Byzan- tine au VI. Siecle " (Paris, 1881). For the following centuries, cf. Krause, "Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters " (Halle, 1869) ; Schlum- berger, "La Sigillographie Byzantine" (Paris, 1884). The work of Am^d^e Thierry on St. John Chrysostom contains admirable sketches of early Byzantine life, that are to be supplemented now by the indispensable volume of Aim^ Puech, " St. Jean Chrysos- tome et les Mceurs de son Si6cle " (Paris, 1890). 84 JUSTINIAN TBE GBEAT. podrome. Since Homer described the races by the much-resounding sea, the peoples of the Med- iterranean have been inexplicably fond of horse racing, chariot and hurdle racing. If George Moore had lived among them, he would have produced a superior Esther Waters. General Lew Wallace has left a classic page or two descriptive of the races at Antioch that will per- haps live while our tongue is spoken. But no one has yet caught the spirit of that great hip- podrome by the Golden Horn. It came fresh from Old Rome, with all the prestige of imperial splendor and fondness. In that mighty circus whose ruins yet appall us at Rome an imperial people had ruled, had felt almost as vastly as a god, had raged, thundered, compelled, made to die and to live, had experienced an oceanic ful- ness of life, a glory of self-adulation such as might befit the highest and whitest Alp or the solemn depths of the Hercynian forest. And so, when at Constantinople the emperor sat bediademmed in his chosen seat, the autocrator, the pantocrator, the Basileus, the golden King of Kings, it seemed as if his were indeed an "eternal countenance, sacrosanct, holy, inviola- ble.'' In him that awful mob saw itself mir- rored. Each one, according to his own passion JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 85 or aspiration, saw the reach and the limit of his own possibihties. Nothing affected more profoundly the society of Constantinople than the hippodrome or circus. The great multitude of men and women con- nected with this "peculiar institution" were divided from time immemorial into factions — once red, white, blue, green, from the color of the ribbons attached to the axles of the chariot wheels or to the ears of the horses. These were the symbols borrowed from Old Eome, and in the time of Justinian they had dwindled to two, the Blues and the Greens. The sympathy of the million inhabitants of the city was divided between them, but with the inconstancy of the mob. In the time of the great emperor the Greens had become identified with opposition to the Council of Chalcedon, had become the Mon- ophysite factor of the city. They had, moreover, attracted the hatred of the Empress Theodora. The Blues were the favorites of the imperial family. The contentions of both were endless and very dangerous. They held open and con- temptuous discourse with the emperor during the races, and clamored wildly for justice on their respective enemies. The stormiest scenes of the Pnyx, the fiercest contentions in the 86 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. forum, were child's play to the rocking passions of the great mob of Bines and Greens on some high day of festival. These colors eventually became the symbols of all discontent and rebel- lion. In 532 their violence reached its height in the sedition of Nik^, whereby thirty thousand souls perished in the circus and on the streets, and a great and splendid part of the city was consumed by flames, including the great Church of the Heavenly Wisdom, or St. Sophia. Per- haps this uprising was the end of the genuine city life of the ancients, some remnants of whose turbulent freedom had always lived on in Old Rome and then in Constantinople. With the awful butchery of those days the aristocracy of the city was broken under the iron heel of the cold-faced man who dwelt in the Brazen Palace. Neither priest nor noble ever again wielded the power they once held before this event, which may in some sense be said to mark the true be- ginning of Byzantine imperialism, being itself the last symbolic act of popular freedom. It is significant that the last vestiges of the free po- litical life of Hellas were quenched in the city of Byzas by thousands of ugly and brutal Heruli whom a lucky Slav had attached to himself as so many Great Danes or Molossi ! JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 87 The fiscal policy of Justinian has been criti- cised as the weakest point of his government. In his time the Roman Empire consisted of sixty-four provinces and some nine hundred and thirty-five cities. It had every advantage of soil, climate, and easy transportation. Egypt and Syria should have sufficed to support the imperial majesty with ease and dignity. The former alone contributed yearly to the support of Constantinople two hundred and sixty thou- sand quarters of wheat. The emperor's pred- ecessor, Anastasius, dying, left a treasure of some sixty-five million dollars. It is true that terrible plagues and earthquakes devastated the population and reduced its spirit and courage to a minimum. But they were still more dis- heartened by the excessive and odious taxes. An income tax on the poorest and most toilsome in the cities, known as the " gold of afiliction," earned him a universal hatred. The peasants had to provide vast supplies of corn, and trans- port it at their own expense to the imperial granaries, an intolerable burden that was in- creased by frequent requisitions of an extraordi- nary kind. The precious metals decreased in quantity, partly through the enormous sums paid out annually in shameful and onerous tributes, 88 JUSTINIAN THE QBE AT, partly through pillage and the stoppage of pro- duction, owing to endless war. Weapons, build- ings, fortifications, alms, the movement of great armies and great stores of provisions, consumed the enormous taxes. Heavy internal duties were laid, not only on arms, but on many ob- jects of industry and manufacture, thus render- ing any profitable export impossible. The manufactures of purple and silk were State monopolies. The value of copper money was arbitrarily raised one-seventh. The revenue was farmed out in many cases, and the venality of the collectors was incredible. Honors and dignities were put up for sale. The office of the magistrate became a trade,, out of which the purchaser was justified in reimbursing himself for the cost. The rich were compelled to make their wills in the imperial favor if they wished to save anything for their families; the prop- erty of Jews and heretics was mercilessly confis- cated. With one voice the people execrated a certain John of Cappadocia, the imperial banker and minister of finance. For a while the em- peror bowed to the storm of indignation, but he could not do without the clear head and hard heart and stern principles of this man, and so recalled him to office. His example of avarice JtJSTINlAN THE GEEAT. 89 and cruelty was, of course, imitated all along the line of imperial officers and agents. On the other hand, economies that were unjust or un- popular or insufficient were introduced — the civil list of pensions was cut down, the city was no longer lit up at -night, the public carriage of the mails was abandoned, the salaries of physi- cians reduced or extinguished, the quinquennial donative to the soldiers withdrawn. Though the unfortunate subjects of Justinian suffered untold woes in Greece and Thrace and Syria from invasions and the constant movement of large bodies of soldiery, their taxes were never remitted, hence a multitude of abandoned farms and estates. In a word, Justinian "lived with the reputation of hidden treasures and be- queathed to posterity the payment of his debts." His reign is responsible for the economic ex- haustion of the Eoman Orient, that was pro- longed long enough to permit of the triumph of Islam in the next century — one of the most solemn proofs of the intimate connection of social conditions with religious change and revolution. Justinian had one passion, the imperial passion par excellence, the passion of architecture.^ He 1 The art and architecture of ancient Constantinople have never ceased to fascinate a multitude of writers since Ducange. Indeed, 90 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, delighted in great works of engineering, in prod- igies of mechanical invention. We have seen that he bnilt many churches, and rich ones, in the Royal City. He eclipsed them all by his building of St. Sophia, little thinking that he was raising it for the wretched worship of the successors of an Arab camel driver. For him Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletum raised in the air this new thing in architecture, bold, light, rich, vast, solemn, and open. Ten thousand men worked six years at it. They were paid every day at sunset with new-minted pieces of silver. And when it was done, the emperor, standing amid its virgin and shining the series begins much earlier. Procopius added to his fame as a writer, if not to his character for honesty, by his "De Edificiis" (Bonn ed., 1838). His contemporary, the Guardsman Paul (Silen- tiarius) , described in minute detail the glories of Sancta Sophia, and a mass of curious information that drifted down the centuries lies stored up in the book of the antiquarian Codinus, "De Edificiis " (Migne PG., Vols. 157 and 158). The monumental works of Sal- zenberg and Labarte have found worthy followers and critics in Pulgher, Paspatis, Unger, Bayet, Ferguson, Mtintz, Springer, Kon- dakoff, and Kraus. Cf. Choisy, "L'Art de batir chez les Byzan- tins" (Paris, 1884); Bayet, "L'Art Byzantin" (Paris, 1883); and Mrs. J. B. Bury in ' ' History of the Lower Roman Empire," Vol. II., pp. 40-54. Eor the very abundant literature of this subject, cf. Kraus, " Geschichte der christlichen Kunst" (Berlin, 1898-99, 2 vols.). Its profound influence on the symbolism of the Middle Ages may be traced partly through " The Painter's Book of Mount Athos" in Didron's "Manuel d'Iconographie Grecque et Chr^ti- enne" (Paris, 1845). Cf. Edward Freshfield on "Byzantine Churches" in Archceologia, Vol. 44, pp. 451-462. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 91 splendors, could cry out, " Glory to God ! . . . I have vanquished thee, Solomon ! '' It still stands, after twelve hundred years of service, a stately monument to the grandeur of his mind and the vastness of his ideas. He also built in the city the great Chalke, or Brazen Palace, so called from a bronze-ceiled hall, and across the strait the gardens of the Heraeum on the Asiatic shores of the Propontis. Cities rose everywhere at his command, and no ignoble ones. We have seen what a circle of forts and walls he built about the empire, what expensive enterprises he carried on in the Holy Land. He built and endowed many monasteries and churches else- where in the empire. And if he collected sternly, he knew how to spend with magnificence. The churches of Rome and Ravenna were adorned by his generosity — one may yet read in the Liber Pontificalis, drawn up by a Roman sacristan, the list of church plate given by the emperor to the Church of St. Peter. He convoked and celebrated a General Council, which was always a heavy expense to the empire, for the trans- portation and support of the prelates. We do not read that he did much for schools. He is accused of closing those at Athens. But they were pagan schools, and modern critics like 92 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. Gregorovius and others doubt whether they were closed by any formal edict. ,They fell away by reason of the general misery and the emptiness and inadequacy of their teaching, unfitted for a world that was destined to know no more the serenity of the old Hellenic contemplation, whose weakness it had exchanged for the saving severity of Christian discipline. It is certain that he opened law schools at Berytus, Con- stantinople, and Kome. He made wise provisions for the teaching and conduct of the young lawyers on whom the civil service of the State was to depend. Justinian was no philosopher ; he was a theologian and a grave Christian thinker. Perhaps he felt little interest in the propagation of Greek culture. He was a religious, orthodox man, troubled about his soul, and concerned with much prayer and inner searching of his spirit. The sweet figments of old Greek poets, like the pure mild ra- tionalism of Confucius, were no food for the ruler of many millions in a decaying and ruinous state, no concern of an Isapostolos, the earthly and civil Vicegerent of the Crucified. He could read in the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, scarcely dead a generation before him, of the follies and the criminal heart of a Julian the JUSTimAN THE GREAT. 93 Apostate, his predecessor. He saw all around him the hopeless congenital weakness of pagan philosophy to bear the appalling evils of the time. Only the Son of Man could save this last stage of the old Graeco-Roman society. To Him, therefore, and the Holy Spirit of Celestial Wisdom be all public honor rendered ! VI. Had Justinian done nothing but restore to the empire the members torn from it by the convulsions of a century, his name would be for- ever famous among the great rulers of that ancient State. But he did more — he recast the laws of Rome and made them serviceable for all time — those ancient laws in which, as Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph von Ihering have shown, are deposited the oldest experiences and the most archaic institutions of the great Aryan family to which all Western peoples belong. By this act he passed into a higher order of men than even the autocrators of Old or New Rome ; he became a benefactor of humanity — one of its solemn pontiffs, peer of Solon and Lycurgus, of Aristotle and Plato, of Ulpian and Papinian — nay, a greater than they, for their laws have 94 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. either perished from society or survive by the act of Justinian. It is not easy to put in a nut- shell a subject of such infinite charm and im- portance. Gibbon thought it worthy of the most immortal chapter in his book, and pens innumerable have labored at describing this great work as men describe the Pyramids or the Alps, with minds distracted by admiration and the stupor that all true greatness inflicts upon us. The Laws of Rome! It was a long and varied process by which they grew, the steady exercise of that terrible Majestas Populi Eo- mani. Leges and plehiscita, senatus-consulta and responsa prudentum, i.e. the laws of the forum, the Senate, and the renowned opinions of learned jurists — they had grown century by century, until their number was legion and their indi- vidual original wisdom was crossed by their suc- cessive contradictions and repetitions. For seven hundred and fifty years before Christ had the City been growing. In that time every human interest had come up for consideration. The functions of war and peace, of conquest and division of spoils and administration, of trade and industry, commerce and luxury, production and exchange and distribution — every interest JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 95 arising from the soil, or from tlie family, or from human agreements, or from the attempts of social authority to assure peace by justice and equity — all these had been the object of Roman legislation. Originally local and jealous, . so local that it looked askance at the men of Veii and Praeneste, scarce a day's walk away, it expanded mightily and took in what was good in all the legislations of the past, all the solid deposit of business, common sense, and com- mercial practice as it was floating around in what came to be known as the Law of Nations. The common Roman might see in expansion only a chance for trade and power ; the great thinkers of the State conceived the purpose of this ex- pansion of the city to be, as the Younger Pliny put it, " ut humanitatem homini daret,'' i.e. the spread of the light of civilization and its bene- fits, by the red right hand and the dripping sword if need be. Could we read the minutes of the meetings of the Roman Senate on the annexation of Northern Africa after the Jugurthan war, we should be reminded, I dare say, of a certain late session of our own august body of legislators, so true is it that history repeats itself. When the republic lapsed into an empire, so gently that the first emperor dared only call 96 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. himself the foremost citizen, the lawmaking power was the first to pass away from the people. Henceforth there are no leges — the world is governed by the will of the imperator, and he acts through constitutions and rescripts, ix. general and particular decisions, which are registered in the imperial chancery and become the actual law of the land. Besides, there was a peculiar annual legislation of the praetor, or city magistrate, and another body of law arising from the opinions of licensed lawyers — ratioci- nated decisions that originally won the force of law by their reasonableness, and in time were collected in books and held almost as sacred as lex or constitution. What all this reached to, after five centuries of imperial government of the world, one may well imagine. As the will of the emperor was the real source of law since Cassar's death, so the first attempt at a reform or a codification of the law must begin with the imperial constitutions. Two hundred years and more before Justinian, in Old Kome, this need had been felt, and the Gregorian and Hermogenian codes had been pre- pared for official use. But they were soon antiquated, and a new one, the famous Theodosian Codex, was issued in 438 by the Emperor JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 97 Theodosius II. But it was rare^ bulky, costly, and therefore not always at hand. Moreover, numerous grave constitutions had been added since 438, precisely a time of transition, when the lawmaking genius is called on most earnestly to adapt the rule to the facts. Justinian estab- lished, February 13, 528, a commission of ten men — decemviri — to execute a new code. Tribonian and Theophilus were the principal lawyers, and they were charged to see that only up-to-date constitutions were incorporated, minus all that was obsolete or superfluous or repetition or preamble. They might erase, add, or alter words in the older constitutions they accepted, if it was necessary for their use as future law. He wanted three things, brevity, compactness, and clearness, and in less than fourteen months he received them in the document to which he gave the name of Codex Jitstinianeus, and which was published April 7, 529. The next step was harder — it was a question of collecting and sifting the responsa prudentum, or answers given by recognized and licensed lawyers, and which had always enjoyed a high degree of consideration before the magistrates of Rome.. They were the real philosophers of the law, but philosophers after the Roman 98 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. heart, — terse, grave, direct, — condensing a para- graph of difeseness into one strong, luminous line that seemed to shed truth and peace along its whole length. These answers had been given for over a thousand years, and were then scattered about in numberless treatises — it is said over two thousand, to speak only of those enjoying actual authority. They had been the bane of the Roman bar for many a day. Since they were all good law, and apparently equal, the practice of law had degenerated into cita- tions — whoever had the most dead men to speak for him was the victor. This was intol- erable ; it came at last to the famous Law of Citations, that fixed the five greatest names, and among them, as senior or chief, the immortal Papinian, that high priest, king, and prophet of all lawyers, past, present, and to come. At this huge mass of ancient law, therefore, a new commission was directed, under the authority of Tribonian. From this Golden Dust-heap they were to extract, to enucleate, what was good and useful as law or interpre- tation or illustration. Out of all the materials they should erect a fair and holy temple of justice, divided into fifty books, and these prop- erly subdivided and paragraphed and numbered. JUSTINIAiar THE GBEAT. 99 It meant that the decisions of thirteen hundred years, had to be gone over, and, according to present utihty, a choice struck and the balance rejected. Seventeen specialists did it in three years. The work was called the "Digest," or " Pandects." There are in it something less than ten thousand sententice, or brief opinions of an- cient lawyers, harmonized, castigated, clarified — at least Justinian and his lawyers thought so. Could Cujas or Donelli have been at their side, what reproachful looks they would have cast! For the Middle Ages hunted out end- less contradictions in the huge mass of these " opinions " that only external authority had united. Thereby the ancestors of our present lawyers lived fair and lovely lives, with rich benefices and fine gowns of silk or brocade, and the noblest palaces in the town, and ample esteem from Church and State. How they must have smiled when they heard Boccaccio or Pietro Dante commenting on the poet's famous line, " D'entro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano." It is calculated that by the edition of the Digest a law library of one hundred and six books was reduced to five and a third, a com- LofC. 100 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. parison that only faintly reflects the relief that its publication gave. Finally the emperor caused the preparation in four books of a manual of the principles of Roman Law^ which he called the " Institutions." It became a part of the codified law, being largely a reproduction and adaptation of a similar work of the second century that was owing to the great j insist Gaius.^ This work of Justinian has met with some reproaches from our modern critics ; perhaps they are deserved. It has been accused of too much theorizing, too much ratiocination, too much blending of the schoolmaster with the leg- islator to the detriment of the latter. But what man of heart will blame the emperor for per- mitting " the pagan Tribonian to preserve the color and tone of second and third century Stoicism, for the occasional brief reflections on the origin and nature of ^ human liberty and human dignity ? They are delicious oases in a desert of rigid rules and sententious decisions. In this new Roman Law it is the spirit and the content of the Law of Nations that pre- dominate. The old, hard, selfish Romanism is 1 The vicissitudes of the law of Justinian in the Latin Middle Ages- have been described fully in the classic work of Savigny, and by a host of later writers. For its history in the Orient, cf. Mortreuil, " Histoire du droit Byzantin" (Paris, 1843-46, 3 vols.). JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 101 eliminated. From the Golden Horn the Genius of Order lifts up an illuminating torch to shine afar over the Euxine of the Barbarians and the Hellespont of the Greeks — nay, across the Mediterranean and ^gean, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to follow forevermore with its sunlike radiance every path of human endeavor, every channel of human contention, every relation of man to man and of practical government to its subjects. This Roman Law, after all, was the salt and the light of the Middle Ages. For love of it, even before Justinian, the Ataulfs and the Wallias, standing at the parting of the ways, had renounced becoming a Gothia and were willing to be incorporated in a Romania. They adopted it at once, begging the Catholic bishops of their new kingdoms to accommodate it to their present needs, their racial genius, and their immemorial customs. So arose the invaluable Leges Barharorum of Frank and Burgundian and Visigoth and Vandal. Only, the Catholic Church would have no separatist barbarian law, even of that kind. All her ecclesiastics lived by the genuine and common Roman Law, the Law of Justinian : Ecclesia vivit lege Romana. Indeed, she was its second saviour, and thereby 102 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, the saviour of good government^ for in the West it gradually went over very largely into her Canon Law. It was the basis and glory of her oldest university, Bologna, and was the usual path to honor and fame and power. There are those who regret its excessive vitality, since it bears along with it the stamp of its origin, the absolute will of one ruler, which makes it at all times the favorite code of centralized power. The Code Napoleon is built on it, as are most of the great modern codes of Europe. Even Mohammedan law as it arose, in Egypt and Syria especially, accepted and applied the ex- isting law of Justinian that had been working more than a century in these unhappy lands when, for their folly and stupidity, the night of Islam settled down on them. It is the Christian, however, who rejoices most at this act of Justinian. Those Eoman laws that Tertullian denounced were now bap- tized.^ A spirit of humanity henceforth breathed from them. The rights of the moral code were 1 " Postremo legum obstruitur auctoritas adversus earn (sc. veri- tatem). ... Si lex tua erravit, puto, ab homine concepta est; neque enim de coelo ruit." — Tertullian, "Apologeticum," c. iv, 20. The entire opusculum is the protest of a great Eoman lawyer against the inhuman and anomalous iniquities of the Eoman Law as applied to the Christians. JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 103 incorporated into the legal code; religion was not separate from conduct. The new law showed itself most practical in this, that it recog- nized Christianity as triumphant, as the popular religion, and in many ways made a large place for it, recognized its teachers and chiefs as the principal supporters of the State and of public order. The political life of the Middle Ages is all in the Law of Justinian, especially in the Code of his Constitutions, and for this alone it is the most remarkable of books after the inspired writings and the ancient councils. It is not wonderful that Dante, at once the greatest of architectonic poets and last prophet of the empire, crying out over its grave, should speak more than once of Justinian and his laws. In the famous lines of the "Purgatorio" (VI. 89) his whole soul flames out in irrepressible anger : — " Ah 1 servile Italy, grief's hostelry ! A ship without a pilot in great tempest ! 1^0 lady thou of provinces, but brothel ! ***** * What boots it that for thee Justinian The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle?" In the superb sixth canto of the " Paradiso '' he personifies in Justinian the imperial authority that to him is the basis of the State : — " Csesar I was and am Justinian." 104 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. Into the mouth of this shadowy shepherd of men he puts that glorious romantic account of the growth of the Roman name and power: — "What it achieved from Var unto the Rhine, Isere beheld and Saone, beheld the Seine And every valley whence the Rhone is filled ; What it achieved when it had left Ravenna, And leaped the Rubicon, was such a flight That neither tongue nor pen could follow it.'* The true career of Justinian appears to the mediaeyal poet of Italy and Catholicism as that of a " living justice " inspired by God, as the career of a man who upheld the " standard sacrosanct " of order and equity, and thereby " placed the world in so great peace That unto Janus was his temple closed.'* Elsewhere (Canzone XYIII. v. 37) he gives voice to the deepest sentiment of the Middle Ages, when he hails in Italy the serene and glorious custodian of law and order, the true heiress of the genius and calling of the Im- perium that are indelibly stamped on the " Pandects " and " Code " : — " O patria, degna di trionf al f ama, De' magnanimi madre, ****** Segui le luci di Giustiniano, E le focose tue malgiuste leggi Con discrezion correggi, Sicche le laudi '1 mondo e '1 divin regno." JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 105 VII. In the preceding pages little has been said of Justinian from an ecclesiastical point of view, partly because it is the civil or profane side of his life that here attracts ns, partly because of the vast and absorbing interest of the questions and problems that are exhibited when we lift the innermost veil of ecclesiastical history. It was the fate of Justinian to enter upon the last scene of a passionate conflict whose unity had not been broken for a century. The motives of the last protagonists were not always pure or praise- worthy. Local jealousies, festering old sores of a political or economic-social nature, velleities of Coptic and Syrian independence, violent con- tempt and hatred for the Koyal City and its Greek bureaucracy that these paid back with interest, prevented the theological questions of the day from being viewed by all in the dispas- sionate light of simple faith and old tradition. The wrongs of Nestorius were still a rallying cry in Syria, and the injustice wreaked on Dioscorus still roused the fellaheen of Egypt. Obscene spirits, as usual, abounded, and fished fortune out of the troubled waters along which moved pain- fully the bark of Peter. Old sects, schisms, and 106 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. heresies, almost forgotten by the churchmen of the day, still Hved on in remote corners of the Orient, to strike hands on occasion with the Nestorian or Monophysite against the common enemy by the Golden Horn.^ Here theology and tax-gathering were cultivated with equal ardor until the broken peasant by the Nile or the Orontes knew not what he hated most — the latest fiscal oppression or the noble Tomus of the great Leo that the local Monophysite clergy had so distorted as to make it pass for a blast from Antichrist. Every emperor, from the time of the second Theodosius, had longed to close these gaping wounds, and had even attempted the same with more or less success. In the wild and universal conflict the independence of the ecclesiastical 1 For tlie history of the government of the Greek churches in and since the time of Justinian the work of Cardinal Pitra is invaluable, "Juris Ecclesiastic! Grseci Historia et Monumenta" (Rome, 1864- 68, 2 vols.) ; cf. the '« Oriens Christianus" of Le Quien (Paris, 1740, 3 vols., fol.), and the precious compilation of Leo AUatius, "De Ecclesise Occidentalis et Orientalis perpetua consensione " (Cologne, 1649). Of great value to the historian are the materials collected by Miklosisch and Mliller, "Acta et Diplomata monasteriorum Orientis" (1871-90, 3 vols.), and by Cardinal Hergenrother, "Monumenta Grseca ad Photium ejusque historiam pertinentia" (Ratisbon, 1869). Usually fair and well-informed is Neale, " His- tory of the Holy Eastern Church" (London, 1847-50, 4 vols.), of which the first two contain a general introduction, the latter a history of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. JUSTTNIAN THE GREAT. 107 power was pushed aside as secondary to the res- toration of outward order and concord. It was an age of great personal and corporate ambitions, on the part of the Oriental clergy in particular. The rapid successions to episcopal sees, brought about by heresy and schism, roused an unholy cupidity in the souls of men otherwise inoffen- sive to Church or State. Only from Rome do we hear regularly the genuine principles of the relations of the two powers, and only there is any effective resistance preached and carried out against the evil Csesaro-papism that lurked in every imperial heart since Constantine.^ Jus- 1 Much has been written in the last three centuries on the rela- tions of Church and State at Constantinople. Cf. Eiffel, "Ge- schichtliche Darstellung der Verhandlungen zwischen Kirche und Staat" (Mainz, 1836), Vol. I.; Niehues, " Geschichte der Ver- handlungen zwischen Kaiserthum und Papsthum im Mittelalter" (Miinster,' 1877-90, 2 vols.). The monograph of A. Gasquet, "L'Autorit6 imp^riale en matiere religieuse h. Byzance" (Paris, 1879), and his "ifetudes Byzantines" (ihid.^ 1888), are of superior worth. Admirable in every way is Charles Diehl's "l^tude sur 1' administration byzantine en Italic " (Paris, 1888), especially c. vi., pp. 368-417, on the relations of the Roman Church with the Em- peror of Constantinople. They may be read most usefully in con- nection with the notes of the Abb6 Duchesne to his edition of the " Liber Pontificalis. " Cf. Ternovsky, " Die griechische Kirche und die Periode der allgemeinen Kirchenversammlungen " (Kiew, 1883) ; Gelzer, "Die politische und kirchliche Stellung von Byzanz " (Leip- zig, 1879) ; Krliger, " Monophysitische Streitigkeiten im Zusam- menhang mit der Reichspolitik " (Jena, 1884), These latter works are colored by the peculiar convictions of their learned authors, as is also Pichler, " Geschichte der kirchlichen Trennung zwischen Orient 108 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. tinian was no exception. First among the em- perors he attains the character of a theologian by his edicts and decrees in the long conflict that arose with the condemnation of Origenism and ended in the painful business of the Three Chapters. Here he recalled the worst day of Arianism, when Constantius at Milan laughed to scorn the canons of the Church and bade the bishops remember that he was their Canon Law. Justinian had been brought up religiously; the little manual of conduct that the good deacon Agapetus prepared for him is yet preserved, and has always been highly esteemed as the parent of those numerous Instructiones Principum, Monitiones, and the like that we meet with in the Middle Ages. He was profuse, by word and act, in his devotion to the Apostolic See of Peter; he acknowledged the supremacy of its authority that had stood a rude and long test und Occident ' ' (Munich, 1864) . The Catholic point of view is magis- terially expounded in the first volume of the classic work of Cardinal Hergenrother, "Photius" (Regensburg, 1867-69, 3 vols.). It also contains the best resume of Byzantine church history before Pho- tius. Of this work Krumbacher, the historian of Byzantine litera- ture, says (p. 232): " Hauptschrift iiber Photius ist und bleibt wohl noch langer Zeit das durch Gelehrsamkeit und Objectivitat ausge- zeichnete Werk des Kardinals J. Hergenrother." In Pitzipios, "L'l]glise Orientale " (Paris, 1888), there is a popular description from a Catholic viewpoint of the politico-ecclesiastical role of the city and clergy of Constantimople from its foundation. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 109 in the Acacian schism just closed, and the "Liber Pontificalis" relates with complacency his gifts to the Roman churches. He received Pope Agapetus. with all honor, but his treat-' ment of the unhappy Yigilius has drawn down on him the merited reprobation of all.^ Perhaps he felt less esteem for the person of the latter, whom he had known intimately as a companion of Agapetus; perhaps, too, his own final lapse into the heresy of an extreme Monophysite sect was a just sanction for the violence done to a sinning but repentant successor of Peter. He confirmed the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople and secured finally for them the second rank, at least in honor. Under him the third canon of the Council of Constantinople (381), and the twenty-eighth canon of the Coun- cil of Chalcedon (451), that Rome had energeti- cally rejected, were tacitly accepted. In the long struggle the honor and the liberties of Alexandria and Antioch had gone down in spite of the papal efforts to save them. The consequences of this were seen within a century, in the rapid, unhindered spread of Islam over 1 Cf. "Liber Pontificalis'' (ed. Duchesne), s.v. " Vigilius" ; Du- chesne, "Revue des Questions Historiques" (April, 1895) ; Thomas Hodgkin, "Italy and Her Invaders" (Oxford, 1896, 2d ed.), Vol. IV., c. xxiii.; "The Sorrows of Vigilius," pp. 571-594. 110 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, Egypt and Syria, and its assimilation of Persia, whereby the fall of Constantinople was made certain. He ruled the churches at pleasure and with a rod of iron, divided ecclesiastical provinces, deposed and exiled the highest pa- triarchs, and not only humiliated St. Peter in the person of Yigilius, but compelled his successors to ask for imperial confirmation and to send large sums of money to secure it. It was well for the churches that no second Jus- tinian followed him. But his despotic temper and his precedents were not soon forgotten. Perhaps it may be urged for him that he met habitually only a weak and sycophantic curial clergy, and that the ancient bonds of empire were all but dissolved in the Orient. He is still remembered in the Greek Church for his hymns, one of which is still in frequent use.^ 1 *' Only-begotten Son and Word of God, Immortal, Who didst vouchsafe for our salvation to take flesh of the holy Mother of God and Ever- Virgin Mary, and didst without mutation become man and v^ast crucified, Christ our God, and by death didst over- come death, being One of the Holy Trinity and glorified together with the Father and the Holy Ghost, save us." — Julian, "Dic- tionary of Hymnology" (London, 1892), p. 460. Cf. Edmond Bouvy, "Les Origines de la Po^sie Chr^tienne," in "Lettres Chr6- tiennes" (1882), Vol. IV., and for the hymn, " Christ and Parani- kas," '' Anthologia Grseca Carminum Christianorum " (Leipzig, 1871), p. 52 ; Stevenson, " Du rhythme dans I'hymnographie grecque" {Correspondant, October, 1876), and the epoch-making JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 111 Indeed, lie is^ perhaps, the oldest hymnographer of the Greeks. But when all has been said, it remains true that his was the timely, welcome, and long reign of an orthodox emperor, that he broke the impact of Monophysitism, that he was generous beyond measure to the churches, and to the poor extremely charitable. The Christian episcopate of the East looked" on him as a father and a providence, and in the storms of the century he was never too far below his high calling. The Western churches loved to remember him as he is depicted in mosaic in San Vitale at Ravenna, clad in imperial purple, surrounded by his officers of state and offering gifts to the bishop of that see.^ essay of Cardinal Pitra, " Hymnograpliie de Tifeglise Grecque" (Rome, 1867). 1 The admirable writings of Charles Diehl on the Byzantine regime in the sixth and seventh centuries are especially worthy of commendation, notably his "Justinien" (Paris, 1902). Justinian holds a place of honor among the writers of Christian hymns ; cf . W. Christ and M. Paranikas, "Anthologia Grseca Carminum Christianorum " (Leipzig, 1871). For his policy in matters of re- ligion, cf. the dissertations of F. Diekamp, " Die Origenistischen Streitigkeiten im VI. Jahrhundert" (Miinster, 1899), and Hist. Jahrbuch (1900), Vol. XXI., pp. 743-757; A. Knecht, "Die Reli- gionspolitik Kaiser Justinians I." (Wtirzburg, 1896), and the article " Origenistic Controversies" in Smith and Wace, "Dic- tionary of Christian Biography, ' ' Vol. IV. The golden booklet " On the Duties of a Christian Ruler," dedicated to the emperor in 532, by his teacher, the deacon Agapetus, may be read in Migne, PG., 112 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. To the bishops of the West, standing amid the ruins of Roman civihzation, his person and reign appeared like those of another Constantine. He was, indeed, a beacon light, set fair and firm where the old world of Greece and Rome came to an end, and along its last stretches the stormy ocean of mediaeval life already beat threateningly. Ixxxvi., 1163-86. It opens worthily the long and important series of mediseval Monita and Instructiones for princes, that contain so much Christian pedagogical material, and are usually neglected in all histories of mediaeval pedagogy. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. The dogma of Islam is simple — one all-pow- erful God whose prophet is Mohammed, and who will reward the good and punish the wicked. But Allah is remote from the world, toward which he is indeed merciful through his prophets, but between which and him there exists no rela- tion of fatherhood and sonship. Islam recog- nizes a revelation closed in Mohammed, but no absolute necessity of redemption, hence no Incar- nation of Christ, who is to the Mohammedan only one of the admirable hnman prophets whom God sent at divers times and whose line ends in the son of Abdallah. It denies the Trinity and travesties the Christian conception of that august mystery. While it admits intermediary spirits, inspiration, the last judgment, and the resurrec- tion of the body, it clothes all these teachings in a gross, sensual, and repugnant form, which robs them of that divine charm that they possess in the Christian presentment of them. The Koran is the Bible of Islam, or rather its fetich, and upon and about it the doctors have built in 113 114 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, the course of time a very Babel of expositions and human traditions, which in daily life a:ffect the morality of Mohammedans no less than the teachings of their Sacred Book itself. Abul Kasem Ibn Abdallah, usually styled Mohammed or Mahomet (the praised), was born about 570 A.D. at Mecca, in the Hijaz or west- ern part of Arabia, not far from the Eed Sea, amid the bare granite hills and sandy wastes of that loneliest and most monotonous of regions. From the middle of the fifth century Mecca had been the centre of a little religious state, whose chief object of worship was the Kaaba, or holy black stone, supposed to have been given by an angel to Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, and close to which was the sacred well Zemzem, which sprang up in the desert for Hagar and her son during their wanderings. The inhab- itants of the town lived by commerce, for the Kaaba had already become the national sanctu- ary of many of the Arab tribes, and at the yearly fairs during the four months of the Sacred Truce its streets were filled with the Bedouin, whose usual home was on the pathless wastes, beneath the cloudless skies of a land phenomenally rain- less. Religion and commerce, friendship and poetry, drew the children of the desert yearly to THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 115 Mecca. They met there the caravans returning from Palestine, Syria, and Persia, and there they joined in the famous poetical tournaments, of which some remnant is left in the elegant Moal- lakats or " suspended " poems, said to have been so named because written in letters of gold on parchment or silk and hung up on the curtains of the Kaaba. They were a fierce, natural, sen- sual race, self-reliant and daring, trusting to the camel and the horse, overflowing with the love of life and pleasure, but ever conscious that the sum of both was an evanescent quantity — hence the streak of gravity and melancholy which runs through their ancient poetic remains. Their lives ran on between the simple pursuits of a nomadic pastoral life and a constant series of razzias and vendettas, arising often from the most trivial cause, but which became sacred legacies through the intense domestic attachments of a people who had yet no higher notion of the State than a congeries of families. Withal, there were sprouting strong germs of national consciousness in the similarity of tastes and pursuits, the un- mixed strain of blood, the songs of the poets and the ancient genealogies, the souvenirs of com- mon losses and common victories. They defied from time immemorial the yoke of the stranger. 116 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. Persia, Rome, and Byzantium had never been able to obtain more than a precarious footing on their confines. They believed in a confused way in one God, but they prayed to the stars, to their amulets, to genii and ogres and demons. It needed only an enthusiast from their own race to compact the scattered elements of greatness which these clear, hard, passionate, untutored men offered to the founder of a religion or a state. This was the work of Mohammed, and in it he was singularly favored by internal and external circumstances. The morality of the Moslem may be reduced to the five great points and to the practice of certain natural virtues. The five command- ments are the confession of Allah and his prophet Mohammed, prayer by prostration to- ward Mecca five times a day, fasting from sun- rise to sunset during the month of Ramadan, at least one pilgrimage to Mecca, and the bestowal of two and one-half per cent, of one's property in alms. Add the duty of sacred war, the fre- quent ablutions, and the observance of Friday (without cessation of labor) as a holy day and we have the substance of the precepts of the Moslem morality. Honesty, benevolence, mod- esty, fraternity, and charity are recommended, THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 117 especially among the Moslems. Deceit, lying, and slander are severely reproved, while gam- bling and the use of wine and other intoxicating liquors are forbidden. Their external morality is essentially Talmudic, interwoven with a mul- titude of minute essential ceremonies. They acknowledge to woman a soul, the hope of im- mortality, and certain civil rights, but polyg- amy, divorce, slavery, and a jealous seclusion make her life that of an inferior and degraded being. Sin is the contravention of legal enactment; the Mussulman does not comprehend the Chris- tian idea that there is an inherent right and wrong in human actions, that God is a moral being. To him He is an absolute Oriental mon- arch, who has hung irrevocably the fate of each man about his neck and toward whom the chief, almost the only, feeling is an exaggerated and sickly quietism, Islam, which means submis- sion or resignation. Fatalism, the almost utter absence of correct notions concerning the spirit- ual life, the degrading example of 'the private life of the prophet who is for the Moslem the most stainless of men, the absolute exclu- siveness and intolerance of their rehgion, the impracticable amalgamation of the civil and the 118 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, spiritual^ the pseudo-theocratic basis of social life — all these elements are working to keep Mohammedanism a stationary religion, except among races of very inferior cultm^e. It is yet powerful in Asia and Africa, where it controls the souls of two hundred millions, but with its political reverses, it has lost the secret of its success, and the four hundred millions of pro- gressive and energetic Christendom no longer fear the crescent, as in days of old, when it waved simultaneously in Spain and Greece, in Italy, Austria, and Hungary, and was only kept at bay by a line of venerable pontiffs, who found in the sole religion of Christ the means of arresting the triumphant course of Oriental fa- naticism and sensuality. Mohammed grew up poor, under the care of near relatives. He was a posthumous son, and his mother, a sickly, nervous woman, died while he was yet a child. He herded sheep and gathered wild berries for a living. Moslem writers relate many legendary and miraculous tales of this period, but they are evidently later inventions meant to glorify the youth of the prophet and to accredit his revelations. In time he entered the service of a rich widow, Kadidja, and after several commercial journeys in her TEE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 119 interest, espoused her in his twenty-fifth year. It was the turning-point of his fortunes, for, though of the distinguished family of the Ko- raish, he had inherited almost nothing. With Kadidja he obtained not only social prominence and wealth, but a woman of spirit and intelli- gence, who plays no small part in his career. About 610 A.D. certain strange dreams and visions began to haunt him. He was naturally of a high-strung, excitable temperament, and according to some authorities, an epileptic. Certainly he manifested in this period of his life unmistakable symptoms of hysteria or of catalepsy. Long swoons, during which he re- mained unconscious, were not uncommon. His mind ran much on religious questions, and he was wont to retire yearly for a considerable time to a mountain near Mecca for prayer and medi- tation. On one of these occasions he seemed to see the angel Gabriel, who held before him a silken scroll, on which he read that " man walk- eth in delusion when he deems that he suffices for himself; to the Lord they must all return." From this time, for two or three years, he was much troubled, but Kadidja comforted and guided him, with the result that all waverings passed away and he arose convinced of his mis- 120 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. sion. At least it would seem that he was honest in the early part of his career, whatever we may think of his later accommodation and tergiver- sation. To these years belong the older parts of the Koran and many of the purer and better elements of the revelation which he went on piecing together from day to day. It was in this period also that he fell in with the Hanif s, or Ara- bian ascetics, who seemed to have been half Chris- tian, and to have practised many of the virtues of those Christian solitaries who peopled the deserts of the border-land between Syria and Arabia, and who exercised from the beginning a profound influence on the neighboring Saracens or Bedouin Heretical priests, Jewish teachers, and Arabian monks seem to have had no small share in the formation of his spiritual character, and the influences of Christianity are all the more proba- ble because of his condition as a merchant and his voyages into Palestine and Syria. Whatever be the complex origin of his beliefs, he made converts slowly. His wife, his cousin Ali, his father-in-law Abu-bekr, an old slave Zaid, and a few others were all who came around him at first. His preaching was dis- tasteful to the Meccans, and the Koraish would have done him bodily harm if they, did not fear; THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 121 his uncle, Abu Talib, the head of the family. Several of his followers suffered much from the townsmen, who were incensed at a preach- ing that decried their idols and threatened to hurt trade and business. They were sheltered by the Christian Abyssinians. Mohammed en- tered on a kind of compromise at this juncture, but soon regretted it, whereupon the Meccans decided on his death. But he escaped by the aid of his family, especially of Ali, his most de- voted cousin, and took refuge in Yahtrib (Me- dina), where he had already made a number of converts, who had agreed to sustain him in spite of the opposition and the interdict of the Koraish of Mecca. This is the famous Hegira, or flight of Mohammed, in the month of June, 622, from which date the Moslems have since counted the flow of time. Jewish proselytism, Messianic hopes, reminiscences of Christian virtue, had long been rife in Medina, and they now met in the head of a melancholy religious dreamer, together with scraps of apocrjrphal gospels and ignorant heretical expositions of Christianity. It was a marvellous period. All over the Orient a hundred heresies were pul- lulating, and in the unhealthy spiritual activity of the time many could not see the great differ- 122 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. ence between the simple dogma, the rational cnl- tus, the earnest, moral ideal of Mohammed and many an heretical travesty of the Christian teaching. At Medina Mohammed built the first plain mosque, instituted the Moslem clergy, and laid the foundations of the theocracy which has since done service as a government in a great part of the Orient. His skill and success as a judge won the hearts of those of Medina, and he soon enjoyed the confidence of the entire community. From 622 to 630 he waged war with the Meccans, intercepted their caravans, overthrew their armies, and finally besieged and took the holy city in January of the latter year. The conquest of the national sanctuary re- acted powerfully upon Mohammed and Islam. At heart he was an Arab and a Meccan. He loved the glory and renown of his race. The Koraish, once his enemies, cante over to him and took control of the movement. What was once an individual, internal, spiritual enterprise became a carnal, external pursuit of glory, power, and booty. The idols were destroyed, it is true, but transformed into minor spirits — djinn, div, peri, and the like ; the holy stone of the Kaaba remained intact ^ Mecca was the na- THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 123 tional and holy capital; most of the ancient ceremonies were retained. It cost the Arabs no change of heart, for there had never been more at stake than the business chances of the city, and that was settled by the victory of Moham- med and the acceptance of his formulas, for which they otherwise found justification in their ancient traditions of monotheism. They passionately loved booty and the foray, and the revelations of Mohammed and the successes of eight years opened up an endless vista of war and pillage — even the conquest of those dim, outlying worlds of Persia and Byzantium. The state of Medina had conquered the state of Mecca, only to bring to the latter the homage of victory. From every quarter came in adhesions to the political revolution in response to the missionaries sent out by Mohammed, and be- fore his death, in June, 632, he had the satis- faction of seeing all the masses of Arabian society accept the inevitable, and enter the new Semitic alliance. The Christian tribes were too weak to resist, but the Jews and the Magians made a bolder front, and for a while were re- spected. Prominent among the means of spreading the doctrine of Islam was the Koran, which means 124 THE BELIGION OF' ISLAM, reading or recitation, i.e. the revelations made by the Holy Spirit or Gabriel to the prophet. It consists of one hundred and sixteen suras or chapter-like divisions, each of which contains from three to nearly three hundred verses. The whole is scarcely as large as the New Testament and contains an extremely varied matter — cere- monial and civil laws, answers and reproofs, dis- quisitions on the attributes of God, attacks on idolaters, the Jews, and Christians, narratives of prophets and saints, travesties of Christian teaching, echoes and even technical terms^^rom the Talmud, histories from the New Testament Apocrypha, and a. chaotic mass of instruction without any order, logical or chronological. It is full of the grossest errors and betrays the ab- sence of all literary culture in its compilers. It is doubtful whether Mohammed ever wTote any- thing — doubtful whether there were any Arabic books in the strict sense before his time. The Koran appears to many critics to be the first written work in the tongue, though the latter was long since a polished language. Its con- tents range all the way from short, oracular statements, that seem as though torn from the speaker under violent pressure, to cool, deliberate legislation. Much of it is su];ely the work of THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 125 reflection, compiled with deliberate intent to deceive, according as the circumstances made revelations useful or handy. Its gradual origin is tangible in the number of abrogated laws that it contains. In its present form it dates from the Chalif Othman, about the middle of the seventh century, who had a new recension made of the original compilation, executed by Zaid, the former amanuensis of Mohammed, at the command of Omar. At that time the suras were preserved only on bits of flat stones, on pieces of leather, ribs of palm leaves, and in the memory of the companions of the prophet. Yet it is believed that we have the Koran substan- tially as it was current shortly after the prophet's death. The Moslems believe that it is eternal and uncreated, immanent in God as His divine word, and that it came down from heaven in a series of descents. According to the Hanbalite sect, it lay from all eternity upon a shining white table of stone as broad as from east to west and as long as from earth to heaven, while an angel with drawn sword stood guard over it. The Mohammedan looks upon its style as something inimitably perfect and a suflicient guarantee of its divine inspiration. It is certain that it pos- sesses considerable beauty, much wild force of 126 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. passion, high imagery, and vigorous rhetoric. But all European Orientalists do not see such sustained perfection in its rhymed phrase. Ac- cording to Noeldeke, there is much verbiage in it, loose connection of thought, repetition of the same words and phrases; in fact, the book shows that the prophet was no master of style, although such a statement is worse than poly- theism to the ears of a pious Turk or Arab. The doctrine of Islam was spread by the sword. The idolaters, the heathen, were exter- minated ; the Jews and Christians, as " the peo- ple of the Book," were permitted to live, but in the most humiliating subjection and surrounded with odious restrictions. For a long time the intercourse of the latter with the Greek Empire was absolutely forbidden, and the lot of the Ori- ental churches in the seventh and eighth cen- turies was the saddest imaginable. There have been wars innumerable among Christians in the name of religion — persecution, too, and oppres- sion — but they are against the sweet, mild law of Jesus ; whereas, according to the teachings of Mohammed, the sacred war ought to be chronic. Islam is a national Arabic travesty of some of the best elements of Judaism and Christianity, elevated to the dignity of a universal religion. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 127 It is a poor, weak, grotesque worship, such as might arise in the brain of a cataleptic visionary and in the midst of a half-savage people. Like all national religions, it identifies the State and the Church. Its pilgrimage to Mecca, prohibi- tion of wine, the veneration of the Kaaba, and similar essential points, are no more than univer- salized Arabism. And it was the sense of politi- cal greatness, of national destiny, together with possible demoniac aid, that made its first fol- lowers so fanatically brave that everything yielded before their awful onslaught. No doubt the religious element was not wanting. The joys of paradise, the fatalist belief, the personal enthusiasm for the prophet, worked wonderfully on the desert tribes and helped to make them the scourge of Christendom. The Christians of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were sadly divided when Islam arose. The christological heresies of two centuries had filled every rank of society with division and embitter- ment. Long-concealed national impulses began to throb in tjie breasts of peoples never willingly subject to Roman rule. Persecuted heretics opened the gates of Egypt and Syria as, two centuries earlier, the Donatists delivered up Africa to the Vandals. Religious oppression and 128 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, the civil despotism of Constantinople reaped the same reward on the same day, and whole nations laboriously won for Christ were for centuries lost to religion and culture. Roth Rome and Persia were exhausted after more than three centuries of irregular warfare, and military valor had declined in both States. In the rapid spread of the teachings of the prophet we must see also a providential chastisement of the discord, in- justice, tyranny, and immorality which fill the pages of Oriental Church history in the sixth and seventh centuries. Endless heresies had so disfigured the Christian faith in the regions in which Islam first emerged that many might be. pardoned for not seeing in it anything worse than the ordinary forms of heretical Christianity. We must also remember that Islam may be meant to serve as a stepping-stone, a transition, for those races whose low mental culture does not permit them at once to appreciate so intel- lectual a religion as the Christian. It has served as a bulwark against the Mongol hordes to pre- vent any such human flood as that wh^ch Attila let loose in the fifth century. The Arab kingdom of Spain deserves well of letters and the sciences for its services in the eighth and ninth centuries, though the origin and the spirit of this literary THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 129 culture are not to be sought in the depressing, intolerant Koran, but in the literature of Greece, preserved for them by Christian hands. Medie- val scholasticism owes no small debt to the men who kept alive the study of Aristotle, and their dangerous philosophical heresies were the spurs which urged on men like Aquinas and Bonaven- tura to plan and execute a successful reconcilia- tion of the philosophy of the Stagirite with Christ and the Church — a problem that seemed an impossibility to a Tertullian. The polemics against the Moslem from St. John Damascene and Theodore Abukara down to Raymond Lullus sharpened the Christian intellect and kept alive abstract and philosophical studies where they might have died out for want of practical utility. It is to this practical need that we owe the famous work of St. Thomas, " Contra Gentes." In another direction, too, the Moslem was des- tined to influence Western Christendom. Under the best caliphs and in the palmy days of Arab rule, the sciences flourished in an eminent de- gree. "We find in their literature many gram- marians and lexicographers of note, poets in abundance and of a high order, translators of many important works from Persian and San- 130 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM, scrit, Greek and Syriac^ among which occur more than one ancient Christian text. They pursued the studies of astronomy and mathe- matics with great eagerness, and in their pas- sion for alchemy were the forerunners of modern chemistry. The Hteratures of Greece, Persia, and India found sympathetic admirers at Bag- dad and Cordova. History and geography flourished, and there is scarcely a century with- out some excellent chroniclers, geographers, and cosmographers, at a time, too, when the latter class of studies was greatly neglected in the Christian West, which can only show for the same period the small geography of the Irishman Dicuil. The commerce of the Middle Ages was to a great extent in their hands. They traded in times of peace with Constantinople, where they had great privileges. Their ships went to India and even into the China seas. Their caravans went by land from Tangier to Jerusalem and from Damascus to the Great Wall of China. They penetrated deep into Northern Africa and sought ivory and black slaves on the eastern coast of that continent. The silks of China and the spices, camphor, steel, and precious woods of India were poured into their markets, while in turn they exported the finest glass, dates. THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 131 refined sugar, mirrors, and blades of steel ; fabrics of silk and gauze and brocade ; figured muslins and striped satin stuffs. Tools, carpets, jewellery, and trinkets were among the staple articles of manufacture. The papyrus, and later the paper, used by the Western Christians were the product of the Moslems, and it was no small annoyance to the imperial and pontifical chanceries to have to use writing materials that bore the water mark of Allah and the prophet. All the trades and industries reached a high degree of prosperity, and in every city the retail commerce was repre- sented by shoemakers, saddlers, dyers, fruiterers, grocers, armorers, booksellers, druggists, per- fumers, and a host of similar small merchants. The Crusades let down the barriers between the Orient and the Occident, and thus the ac- cumulated treasures of the former — literary, ar- tistic, and social — -became at once the common property of mankind. The intellectual wealth and the general refinement of the Oriental peo- ples could not be withheld from the West, but the struggle f