to look on the profession of arms with contempt. Here was another outlet for a middle class destroyed.
Other causes were the accumulation of private property, which made the aristocracy rich out of all proportion, the transference of trade to foreign merchants, the intermittent successes and defeats of the empire, which were naturally felt first by the middle class, and the growth of a servile spirit among a poor and lazy population. The great families were, it is true, presently ruined, but the mischief was by this time done, and the Greek natives of the city were plunged into the lowest depths.
Yet there were always among them artificers more skilful, engineers more ingenious, scholars more learned, artists more dexterous, than in any other country of the world. Constantinople, even in its lowest stage of decay, was far in advance of the west of Europe.
The Church decayed with the people—perhaps more rapidly. It is difficult to believe that there was a vital force left at all in this great branch of the Christian Church, and it seems indeed to have become eight hundred years ago what it seems to be now—a Church of the merest formalism. There were endless ceremonies, fasts, feasts, services, worship of saints, relics, and images: to conform to all these was to ensure heaven. There were monasteries in plenty, into which it was the fashion of the aged—Isaac Comnenus retired into one—to retreat, there to pass the remainder of their days in repose and meditation. These monasteries got endowments; the endowments grew to be used for the sup-
