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THE BYZANTINES. 95 contemporaries, could not altogether escape from the influence of their neighbors; they, however, were the guardians of classical civilization and were Christians, and strove to keep above the deluge of barbarism by which the rest of the world was then inundated. When modern writers accuse the Byzantines of cruelty they seem to forget that their contemporaries in Western Europe had manners and principles of jurisprudence which were marked by a ferocity unapproached by anything in Byzantine despo- tism. Bikela refers to executions of Dolino in Italy and of Hugh the Defender (the young) in England, to the murderers of James I. in Scot- land, and to the whole history of the processes against the templars or the lepers in France ; to the peculiar sentence of high treason in England, often fully carried out within the last century, and even pronounced in Ireland in the present century ; to the legislation of England with re- gard to religion, and especially its application during the sixteenth century; to the execution of the last Inca of Peru by the Spanish Govern- ment, and of Damiens by the French. Bikelas, however, does not mention the Spanish Inquisi- tion, thQ chambers of torture, especially in Ger- many, the institutio criininalis Carolina, the tor-