Byzantine History in the Early Middle Ages; The Rede Lecture ... 1900 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ... BYZANTINE HISTOEY IN THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES In one of the most suggestive of his essays, Professor Freeman calls the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus "the surest witness to the unity of history."1 And Professor Bury, whose great work has done so much to develop that truth, insists that the old Roman Empire did not cease to exist until the year 1453, when Mohammed the Conqueror stormed Constantinople. The line of Roman emperors, he says, "continued in unbroken succession from Octavius Augustus to Constantine Palaeologus."2 Since George Finlay, nearly fifty years ago, first urged this truth on public attention, all competent historians have recognised the continuity of the civilisation which Constantine seated on the Golden Horn; and they have done justice to its many services to the West as well as to the East.3 But the nature of that continuity, the extent of these services, are still but dimly understood by the general public. Prejudice, bigotry, and rhetoric have done much to warp the popular conception of one of the chief keys to general history. In spite of all that scholars have said, the old sophism lingers on that the empire and civilisation of Rome ended with Romulus Augustulus in 476, until, in a sense, it was revived by the great Charles; that, in the meanwhile, a vicious and decaying parody of the Empire eked out its contemptible life on the Bosphorus. Such was the language of the popular writers of the last century, and Gibbon himself did something to encourage this view. When, in his 48th chapter, he talked of Byzantine annals as "a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery," and saw that he still had more than eight centuries of the history of the world to compress into his last two volumes, we suspect that the great...