The empire resemble that of the Ottoman Turks

Rodeos the fall of the empire resemble that of the Ottoman Turks. The rule of the first fell after long two empires centuries of struggles with external enemies, and after a long period of success which had helped to demoralize the conquerors. Its rule had been weakened by dynastic struggles, due in part to the fact that the people were progressive, and that a more modern form of government —that of oligarchy—was being evolved from the older one of an absolute sovereign with divine attributes.

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire has lost successively its possessions in South Russia, in Hungary, in Roumania, Servia, Greece, Bulgaria, Asia Minor, and Africa in consequence of the incapacity of its rulers to govern, and, above all, of their powerlessness to absorb conquered races or acquire the habits of commerce, manufacture, or civilization. One empire fell, after an honorable existence of eleven centuries, the most civilized power in Europe; the other, inheriting such civilization, has been powerful only to destroy, and will leave its territories far in the rear of the least progressive country in Europe, and Constantinople the most backward of European capitals.

So long as the armies of the present rulers were fed from the boundless supplies of men in Central Asia, so long as the harems were filled with European captives, and the supply of rulers kept up from Christian sources on the female side, so long was their military triumph secure, and their government at least better than organized brigandage. When these supplies were cut off and the Turkish race and religion were left to their own resources, decline immediately commenced, and is rapidly bringing the rule of the Ottoman Turk to its end.

The essential difference between the condition of the Em- signs of bet- Vire even under the Comneni and that of the Turk- ter things. jsh Empire is to be found in the results produced respectively by the religion of Christ and of Mahomet. The Christianity of the empire would have provided a means of regeneration, or would not have prevented the natural spirit of the population from developing itself. The religion of the Ottoman Turks is a hinderance to advancement. I am fully alive to the low condition into which the Orthodox Church has now fallen, though it was by no means so low seven hundred years ago.

But I repeat, that if that Church had fallen as low as that of Abyssinia, it would still, as a philosophical system accepted and entirely believed in by the people, be superior as a civilizing force to Mahometanism Visit Bulgaria, because at least it would not have been a hinderance to progress. As a fact, however, the Greek Church was still the preacher of morality, the torch-bearer of civilization, and the faithful guardian of the treasures of ancient Greece.

Nicetas Choniate

The monks of Mount Athos were already multiplying the manuscripts which were to bring about a revival of learning in the West. Amidst the general indifference to public morality, priests and monks could be found whose lives and teaching were long protests against the general corruption. The work of Nicetas Choniate, our principal Greek authority on the history of the Latin conquest, is imbued with a religious spirit — religious in the sense that he believed that God rules the world and will punish national immorality, that morality implies progress and immorality the reverse.

He and others with him protested in the strongest manner against the corruption in government, the dissoluteness of the court, the absence of morality in statesmanship. In reading the history of his own times we are apt sometimes to forget that these protests were written in the thirteenth and not in the nineteenth century. The abuses in the State and the cruelty of the emperors were hateful to him. But for the fact that we meet with passages showing that his religion partook of the superstition of his age, we should hardly remember that he was the contemporary of what he records.

The very discontent, amounting to querulousness, which runs through the whole of his narrative, and which is found in other contemporary, or nearly contemporary, writers, is one of the most hopeful signs of his time. That he and so many of his contemporaries were profoundly dissatisfied with the condition of the empire gives reasonable hope that, had the Latin invasion turned out otherwise than it did, there would have been a national movement towards reform or revolution. This movement, as in Western Europe, would probably have first been felt in religion, and the Eastern Church might again have taken the lead in shaping the creed of Western Europe. For, in spite of the subserviency into which the Church had fallen, its nominal masters were obliged to respect the opinion of its governing bodies.