Walid had, in the last years of his reign, made preparations for a great expedition against Constantinople. Suleiman carried them on with energy, and as early as the autumn of A.D. 715 Maslama invaded Asia Minor at the head of a numerous army, whilst a well-equipped fleet under Omar b. Hobaira sailed out to second him. It is said that Suleiman was firmly persuaded that Constantinople would be conquered during his reign, in accordance with a Sibylline prophecy which said that the city would be subdued by a caliph bearing the name of a prophet, he himself being the first to fulfil this condition.[20] Moreover, the Byzantine empire was in these years disturbed by internal troubles. The first year of the expedition was not unsuccessful. The siege of Amorium in Phrygia was broken up, but Pergamum and Sardis were taken. On the 25th of August 716 the blockade of Constantinople began from the land side, and two weeks later from the sea side. A few months before, Leo the Isaurian had ascended the throne and prepared the city for the siege. This lasted about a year. The besieged were hard pressed, but the besiegers suffered by the severe winter, and were at last obliged to raise the siege. Maslama brought back the rest of his army in a pitiful state, while the fleet, on its return, was partly destroyed by a violent tempest. The Moslems regard this failure as one of the great evils that have befallen the human race, and one which retarded the progress of the world for ages,[21] the other calamity being the defeat in the battle of Tours by Charles Martel. Entry: 7
Thus the 14th and 15th centuries have characteristics which differentiate them from all preceding and succeeding centuries, The triumph of the papacy over the Empire had been short-lived. Owing to the disturbed state of Italy, Clement V. was in 1305 compelled to take refuge at Avignon, and till 1377--a period known as the Babylonish captivity--the popes remained in France. While the Empire and papacy steadily decline, while the Byzantine empire falls before the Turks, strong monarchies are gradually formed in England, France, Spain, and Portugal, and in Italy the Renaissance movement covers the later years of the 15th century with glory (see RENAISSANCE). During these centuries there is common to Europe no one principle which is to be found in all kingdoms. But while the old system, founded on belief in the unity of Europe under the Empire and papacy, declines amid chaos and turbulence, there is much intellectual and political activity which portends the appearance of an entirely new state of things. The 14th and 15th centuries may truly be styled a period of transition. Entry: 2
III. _The Latin Occupation and Turkish Conquest._--The capture of Constantinople and dissolution of the Byzantine empire by the Latins (1204) brought in its train an invasion of Greece by Frankish barons eager for new territory. The natives, who had long forgotten the use of arms and dreaded no worse oppression from their new masters, submitted almost without resistance, and only the N.W. corner of Greece, where Michael Angelus, a Byzantine prince, founded the "despotat" of Epirus, was saved from foreign occupation. The rest of the country was divided up between a number of Frankish barons, chief among whom were the dukes of Achaea (or Peloponnese) and "grand signors" of Thebes and Athens, the Venetians, who held naval stations at different points and the island of Crete, and various Italian adventurers who mainly settled in the Cyclades. The conquerors transplanted their own language, customs and religion to their new possessions, and endeavoured to institute the feudal system of land-tenure. Yet recognizing the superiority of Greek civil institutions they allowed the natives to retain their law and internal administration and confirmed proprietors in possession of their land on payment of a rent; the Greek church was subordinated to the Roman archbishops, but upheld its former control over the people. The commerce and industry of the Greek cities was hardly affected by the change of government. Entry: III
ISAAC I. (COMNENUS), emperor of the East (1057-1059), was the son of an officer of Basil II. named Manuel Comnenus, who on his deathbed commended his two sons Isaac and John to the emperor's care. Basil had them carefully educated at the monastery of Studion, and afterwards advanced them to high official positions. During the disturbed reigns of Basil's seven immediate successors, Isaac by his prudent conduct won the confidence of the army; in 1057 he joined with the nobles of the capital in a conspiracy against Michael VI., and after the latter's deposition was invested with the crown, thus founding the new dynasty of the Comneni. The first care of the new emperor was to reward his noble partisans with appointments that removed them from Constantinople, and his next was to repair the beggared finances of the empire. He revoked numerous pensions and grants conferred by his predecessors upon idle courtiers, and, meeting the reproach of sacrilege made by the patriarch of Constantinople by a decree of exile, resumed a proportion of the revenues of the wealthy monasteries. Isaac's only military expedition was against the Hungarians and Petchenegs, who began to ravage the northern frontiers in 1059. Shortly after this successful campaign he was seized with an illness, and believing it mortal appointed as his successor Constantine Ducas, to the exclusion of his own brother John. Although he recovered Isaac did not resume the purple, but retired to the monastery of Studion and spent the remaining two years of his life as a monk, alternating menial offices with literary studies. His _Scholia_ to the _Iliad_ and other works on the Homeric poems are still extant in MS. He died in the year 1061. Isaac's great aim was to restore the former strict organization of the government, and his reforms, though unpopular with the aristocracy and the clergy, and not understood by the people, certainly contributed to stave off for a while the final ruin of the Byzantine empire. Entry: ISAAC
During the 12th and 13th centuries the Crusades thus proved a large factor in the commercial prosperity of the Italian maritime states, an "open door" between East and West was secured, and reinforcements from Europe were poured into Syria as long as the peoples of the West regarded the stability of the Latin kingdom of Syria as a matter of prime importance. During the crusading period a check was placed to the tide of Mahommedan conquest, while to the caliphate the Crusades proved a perpetual drain upon its material resources. To the Mahommedans the possession of the Holy Places by the Christians was as great a humiliation as their desecration by the Mahommedans was to the crusaders. Unfortunately the Crusades led to a disastrous schism between the Byzantine empire and western Christendom, which had calamitous results. The decay of the crusading spirit was a necessary result of the growth of the consolidation of the European nations, but the price paid was the fall of Constantinople and the establishment of the Turks in eastern Europe. The Crusades thus not only postponed the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks for some two hundred years, but led, as had already been said, to a vast expansion of commerce, as seen in the rapid growth and development of the Italian cities, and to a striking development of town life. Entry: 2
After the fall of the Roman Empire, when instrumental music had fallen into disrepute and had been placed under a ban by the church, the art of playing upon such highly-developed instruments gradually died out in western Europe. With the disappearance of the civilization and culture of the Romans, the skilled crafts also gradually vanished, and the art of making metal pipes of delicate calibre and of bending them was completely forgotten, and had to be reacquired step by step during the middle ages from the more enlightened East. The names of the instruments and representations of them survived in MSS. and monuments of art, and as long as the West was content to turn to late Roman and Romano-Christian art for its models, no difficulties were created for the future archaeologist. By the time the Western races had begun to express themselves and to develop their own characteristics, in the 11th century, the arts of Persia, Arabia and the Byzantine Empire had laid their mark upon the West, and confusion of models, and more especially of names, ensued. The greatest confusion of all was created by the numerous translations and glosses of the Bible and by the attempts of miniaturists to illustrate the principal scenes. In Revelation, for instance (ch. viii.), the seven angels with their trumpets are diversely represented with long tubas, with curved horns of various lengths, and with the buisine, busaun or posaune, the descendant of the buccina. Entry: FIG
At this stage the crusades, and the consequent opportunities afforded to western engineers of studying the solid fortresses of the Byzantine empire, revolutionized the art of castle-building, which henceforward follows recognized principles. Many castles were built in the Holy Land by the crusaders of the 12th century, and it has been shown (Oman, _Art of War: the Middle Ages_, p. 529) that the designers realized, first, that a second line of defences should be built within the main enceinte, and a third line or keep inside the second line; and secondly, that a wall must be flanked by projecting towers. From the Byzantine engineers, through the crusaders, we derive, therefore, the cardinal principle of the mutual defence of all the parts of a fortress. The _donjon_ of western Europe was regarded as the fortress, the outer walls as accessory defences; in the East each envelope was a fortress in itself, and the keep became merely the last refuge of the garrison, used only when all else had been captured. Indeed the keep, in several crusader castles, is no more than a tower, larger than the rest, built into the enceinte and serving with the rest for its flanking defence, while the fortress was made strongest on the most exposed front. The idea of the flanking towers (which were of a type very different from the slight projections of the shell-keep and rectangular tower) soon penetrated to Europe, and Alnwick Castle (1140-1150) shows the influence of the new system. But the finest of all castles of the middle ages was Richard Coeur de Lion's fortress of Château Gaillard (1197) on the Seine near Les Andelys. Here the innermost ward was protected by an elaborate system of strong appended defences, which included a strong _tête-de-pont_ covering the Seine bridge (see Clark, i. 384, and Oman, p. 533). The castle stood upon high ground and consisted of three distinct enceintes or wards besides the keep, which was in this case merely a strong tower forming part of the innermost ward. The donjon was rarely defended _à outrance_, and it gradually sank in importance as the outer "wards" grew stronger. Round instead of rectangular towers were now becoming usual, the finest examples of their employment as keeps being at Conisborough in England and at Coucy in France. Against the relatively feeble siege artillery of the 13th century a well-built fortress was almost proof, but the mines and the battering ram of the attack were more formidable, and it was realized that corners in the stonework of the fortress were more vulnerable than a uniform curved surface. Château Gaillard fell to Philip Augustus in 1204 after a strenuous defence, and the success of the assailants was largely due to the wise and skilful employment of mines. An angle of the noble keep of Rochester was undermined and brought down by John in 1215. Entry: FIG
Before Mahomet's time Arabian paganism had already been attacked both from the outside and from the inside. On the one hand the northern tribes had gradually been christianized, owing to the influence of the Byzantine empire; on the other hand south Arabia had fallen successively under Jewish, Abyssinian and Persian influence; and the last, though little is known of Persian rule, is unlikely to have favoured pagan cults. Christianity had also some important representation in Najran far south of Mecca, while Jewish settlements were prospering north of Mecca in the Prophet's future home Yathrib and its neighbourhood. Power, civilization and learning were thus associated with monotheism (Judaism), dualism (Mazdaism) and tritheism (as the Arabs interpreted Christianity); paganism was the religion of ignorance (_jahiliyyah_, interpreted by Goldziher as "barbarism," but the difference is not very considerable). Mecca itself and the neighbouring and allied Taif are said to have produced some monotheists or Christians, who identified the _Allah_ of Mecca with the _Allaha_ or God of the Syrian Christians, called by the Abyssinian Christians "Lord of the Regions," and by the Jews "the Merciful" (_Rahmana_); one such is said to have been a cousin of Khadija, Mahomet's wife; his name is given as Waraqah, son of Naufal, and he is credited with copying or translating a Gospel. We even hear of flagellant monks and persons vowed to total abstinence among the precursors of Islam. Entry: MAHOMET
Isolated enterprises somewhat of the character of a Crusade, but hardly serious enough to be dignified by that name, recur during the 14th century. The French kings are all crusaders--in name--until the beginning of the Hundred Years' War; but the only crusader who ever carried war in Palestine and sought to shake the hold of the Mamelukes on the Holy Land was Peter I., king of Cyprus from 1359 to 1369. Peter founded the order of the Sword for the delivery of Jerusalem; and instigated by his chancellor, P. de Mézières (one of the last of the theorists who speculated and wrote on the Crusades), he attempted to revive the old crusading spirit throughout the west of Europe. The mission which he undertook with his chancellor for this purpose (1362-1365) only produced a crop of promises or excuses from sovereigns like Edward III. or the Emperor Charles IV.; and Peter was forced to begin the Crusade with such volunteers as he could collect for himself. In the autumn of 1365 he sacked Alexandria; in 1367 he ravaged the coast of Syria, and inflicted serious damages on the sultan of Egypt. But in 1369 he was assassinated, and the last romantic figure of the Crusades died, leaving only the legacy of his memory to his chancellor de Mézières, who for nearly forty years longer continued to be the preacher of the Crusades to Europe, advocating--what always continued to be the "dream of the old pilgrim"--a new order of knights of the Passion of Christ for the recovery and defence of Jerusalem. De Mézières was the last to advocate seriously, as Peter I. was the last to attempt, a Crusade after the old fashion--an offensive war against Egypt for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.[57] From 1350 onwards the Crusade assumes a new aspect; it becomes defensive, and it is directed against the Ottoman Turks, a tribe of Turcomans who had established themselves in the sultanate of Iconium at the end of the 13th century, during the confusion and displacement of peoples which attended the Mongol invasions. As early as 1308 the Ottoman Turks had begun to settle in Europe; by 1350 they had organized their terrible army of janissaries. They threatened at once the débris of the old Latin empire in Greece and the archipelago, and the relics of the Byzantine empire round Constantinople; they menaced the Hospitallers in Rhodes and the Lusignans in Cyprus. It was natural that the popes should endeavour to form a coalition between the various Christian powers which were threatened by the Turks; and Venice, anxious to preserve her possessions in the Aegean, zealously seconded their efforts. In 1344 a Crusade, in which Venice, the Cypriots, and the Hospitallers all joined, ended in the conquest of Smyrna; in 1345 another Crusade, led by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne, ended in failure. The Turks continued their progress; in 1363 they captured Philippopolis, and in 1365 they entered Adrianople; the whole Balkan peninsula was threatened, and even Hungary itself seemed doomed. Already in 1365 Urban VI. sought to unite the king of Hungary and the king of Cyprus in a common Crusade against the Turks; but it was not till 1396 that an attempt was at last made to supplement by a land Crusade the naval Crusades of 1344 and 1345. Master of Servia and of Bulgaria, as well as of Asia Minor, the sultan Bayezid was now threatening Constantinople itself. To arrest his progress, a Crusade, preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mézières, _divisio_ and _propria voluntas_, were the ruin of the crusading army, and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated. Not the Western Crusades but an Eastern rival, Timur (Tamerlane), king of Transoxiana and conqueror of southern Russia and India, was destined to arrest the progress of Bayezid; and from the battle of Angora (1402) till the days of Murad II. (1422) the Ottoman power was paralysed. Under Murad, however, it rose to its old height. To meet the new danger a new union of the churches of the East and the West was attempted. As in 1074 Gregory VII. had dreamed of such a union, to be followed by a joint attack of East and West on the Seljuks, so in 1439, at the council of Florence, a new union of the two churches was again attempted and temporarily secured, in order that a united Christendom might face the new Turkish danger.[58] The logical result of the union was the Crusade of 1443. An army of cosmopolitan adventurers, led by the Cardinal Caesarini, joined the forces of Wladislaus of Poland and John Hunyadi of Transylvania, and succeeded in forcing on Murad II. a truce of ten years at Szegedin in 1444. But the crusaders broke the truce, to which Caesarini had never consented; and, attempting to better what was already good enough, they were defeated at Varna. Here the last Crusade ended; and nine years afterwards, in 1453, Mahommed II., the successor of Murad, captured Constantinople. It was in vain that the popes sought to gather a new Crusade for its recovery; Pius II., who had vowed to join the crusade in person, only reached Ancona in 1464 to find the crusaders deserting and to die. Yet the ghost of the Crusades still lingered. It became a convention of diplomacy, designed to cover any particularly sharp piece of policy which needed some excuse; and the treaty of Granada, formed between Louis XII. and Ferdinand of Aragon for the partition of Naples in 1500, was excused as a thing necessary in the interests of the Crusades. In a more noble fashion the Crusade survived in the minds of the navigators; "Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Albuquerque, and many others dreamed, and not insincerely, that they were labouring for the deliverance of the Holy Land, and they bore the Cross on their breasts."[59] "Don Henrique's scheme," it has been said, "represents the final effort of the crusading spirit; and the naval campaigns against the Moslem in the Indian seas, in which it culminated, forty years after Don Henrique's death, may be described as the last Crusade."[60] Entry: 9
A new explanation may now be ventured upon as to the name which the Gipsies of Europe give to themselves, which, it must be emphasized, is not known to the Gipsies outside of Europe. Only those who starting from the ancient Byzantine empire have travelled westwards and spread over Europe, America and Australia call themselves by the name of Rom, the woman being Romni and a stranger Gazi. Many etymologies have been suggested for the word Rom. Paspati derived it from the word Droma (Indian), and Miklosich had identified it with Doma or Domba, a "low caste musician," rather an extraordinary name for a nation to call itself by. Having no home and no country of their own and no political traditions and no literature, they would naturally try to identify themselves with the people in whose midst they lived, and would call themselves by the same name as other inhabitants of the Greek empire, known also as the Empire of New Rom, or of the Romaioi, Romeliots, Romanoi, as the Byzantines used to call themselves before they assumed the prouder name of Hellenes. The Gipsies would therefore call themselves also Rom, a much more natural name, more flattering to their vanity, and geographically and politically more correct than if they called themselves "low caste musicians." This Greek origin of the name would explain why it is limited to the European Gipsies, and why it is not found among that stock of Gipsies which has migrated from Asia Minor southwards and taken a different route to reach Egypt and North Africa. Entry: A
The importance of Byzantine culture and literature in the history of the world is beyond dispute. The Christians of the East Roman empire guarded for more than a thousand years the intellectual heritage of antiquity against the violent onslaught of the barbarians. They also called into life a peculiar medieval culture and literature. They communicated the treasures of the old pagan as well as of their own Christian literature to neighbouring nations; first to the Syrians, then to the Copts, the Armenians, the Georgians; later, to the Arabians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Russians. Through their teaching they created a new East European culture, embodied above all in the Russian empire, which, on its religious side, is included in the Orthodox Eastern Church, and from the point of view of nationality touches the two extremes of Greek and Slav. Finally the learned men of the dying Byzantine empire, fleeing from the barbarism of the Turks, transplanted the treasures of old Hellenic wisdom to the West, and thereby fertilized the Western peoples with rich germs of culture. Entry: II
The period from the death of Charlemagne (814) to the 12th century is characterized in western Europe by the general weakening of the idea of central government and by the rise of feudalism. During the same period the East Roman or Byzantine empire escaped disruption and, preserving the traditions of Roman civil and military administration, formed an effective barrier for Europe and Christendom against the advancing tide of Islam. At the same time, however, the growing divergence between the Eastern and Western Churches, which had been accentuated by the iconoclastic controversy (see ICONOCLASTS), and was destined in 1053 to culminate in a definite schism, was gradually widening the breach between the two types of European civilization, which came into violent conflict at the beginning of the 13th century, when crusaders from western Europe captured Constantinople and set up a Latin empire in the East (see ROMAN EMPIRE, LATER; CHURCH HISTORY; CRUSADES). In western Europe, meanwhile, the unity of the empire did not long survive Charlemagne. Its definite break-up dates from the treaty of Verdun (843), by which Charles the Bald received Neustria, Aquitaine and western Burgundy, Louis the German Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony and Thuringia, and the emperor Lothair the middle kingdom known by his name, the _regnum Lotharii_ or Lotharingia (see LORRAINE). By the partition of Mersen (870) Lotharingia itself was divided between the West and East Frankish realms--France and Germany, terms which from this time begin to represent true national divisions. With the treaties of Verdun and Mersen the history of the European state system may be said to begin. Entry: 2
Sketches of Hellenistic civilization generally are found in J. P. Mahaffy's _Greek Life and Thought_ (1887), _The Greek World under Roman Sway_ (1890); _The Silver Age of the Greek World_ (1906); Julius Kaerst, _Gesch. d. hellenist. Zeitalters_ (Band ii., publ. 1909); and in Beloch's _Griechische Geschichte_, vol. iii. (for the century immediately succeeding Alexander). R. von Scala's "The Greeks after Alexander," in Helmolt's _History of the World_ (vol. v.), covers the whole period from Alexander to the end of the Byzantine Empire. P. Wendland's _Hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum u. Christentum_ (1907) is an illuminating monograph, giving a conspectus of the material. For Hellenistic Egypt, Bouché-Leclercq, _Histoire des Lagides_, vol. iii. (1906). (E. R. B.) Entry: AUTHORITIES
2. _Historical Causes of the Crusades._--Within fifteen years of the Hegira Jerusalem fell before the arms of Omar (637), and it continued to remain in the hands of Mahommedan rulers till the end of the First Crusade. For centuries, however, a lively intercourse was maintained between the Latin Church in Jerusalem, which the clemency of the Arab conquerors tolerated, and the Christians of the West. Charlemagne in particular was closely connected with Jerusalem: the patriarch sent him the keys of the city and a standard in 800; and in 807 Harun al-Rashid recognized this symbolical cession, and acknowledged Charlemagne as protector of Jerusalem and owner of the church of the Sepulchre. Charlemagne founded a hospital and a library in the Holy City; and later legend, when it made him the first of crusaders and the conqueror of the Holy Land, was not without some basis of fact. The connexion lasted during the 9th century; kings like Alfred of England and Louis of Germany sent contributions to Jerusalem, while the Church of Jerusalem acquired estates in the West. During the 10th century this intercourse still continued; but in the 11th century interruptions began to come. The fanaticism of the caliph Hakim destroyed the church of the Sepulchre and ended the Frankish protectorate (1010); and the patronage of the Holy Places, a source of strife between the Greek and the Latin Churches as late as the beginning of the Crimean War, passed to the Byzantine empire in 1021. This latter change in itself made pilgrimages from the West increasingly difficult: the Byzantines, especially after the schism of 1054, did not seek to smooth the way of the pilgrim, and Victor II. had to complain to the empress Theodora of the exactions practised by her officials. But still worse for the Latins was the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljukian Turks in 1071. Without being intolerant, the Turks were a rougher and ruder race than the Arabs of Egypt whom they displaced; while the wars between the Fatimites of Egypt and the Abbasids of Bagdad, whose cause was represented by the Seljuks, made Syria (one of the natural battle-grounds of history) into a troubled and unquiet region. The native Christians suffered; the pilgrims of the West found their way made still more difficult, and that at a time when greater numbers than ever were thronging to the East. Western Christians could not but feel hampered and checked in their natural movement towards the fountain-head of their religion, and it was natural that they should ultimately endeavour to clear the way. In much the same way, at a later date and in a lesser sphere, the closing of the trade-routes by the advance of the Ottoman Turks led traders to endeavour to find new channels, and issued in the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America. Nor, indeed, must it be forgotten that the search for new and more direct connexions with the routes of Oriental trade is one of the motives underlying the Crusades themselves, and leading to what may be called the 13th-century discovery of Asia. Entry: 2