Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/88

68 THE DECLINE AND FALL dissevered from the Roman trunk by tlie Turkish conquerors. After these losses, the emperors of the Comnenian family con- tinued to reign from the Danube to Peloponnesus, and from Belgrade to Nice, Trebizond, and the winding stream of the Meander. The spacious provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece, were obedient to their sceptre ; the possession of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete was accompanied by the fifty islands of the j'Egean or Holy Sea ; ^^ and the remnant of their empire trans- cends the measure of the largest of the European kingdoms. The same princes might assert with dignity and truth that of all the monarchs of Christendom they possessed the greatest General city,^^ the most ample revenue, the most flourishing and populous po^puionilnesB State. With the decline and fall of the empire, the cities of the West had decayed and fallen ; nor could the ruins of Rome, or the mud walls, wooden hovels, and naiTow precincts of Paris and London, prepare the Latin stranger to contemplate the situation and extent of Constantinople, her stately palaces and churches, and the arts and luxury of an innumerable people. Her treasures might attract, but her virgin strength had repelled, and still promised to repel, the audacious invasion of the Persian and Bulgarian, the Arab and the Russian. The provinces were less fortunate and impregnable ; and few districts, few cities, could be discovered which had not been violated by some fierce barbarian, impatient to despoil, because he was hopeless to pos- sess. From the age of Justinian the Eastern empire was sinking below its former level ; the powers of destruction were more active than those of improvement ; and the calamities of war were embittered by the more permanent evils of civil and ecclesi- astical tyranny. The captive who had escaped from the bar- barians was often stripped and imprisoned by the ministers of his sovereign : the Greek superstition relaxed the mind by '* 'Ayios [leg. ayioi'] TreAayo?, as it is Styled by the modern Greeks, from which the corrupt names of Archipelago, I'Archipel, and the Arches, have been trans- formed by geographers and seamen (d'Anville, G(5ographie Ancienne, torn. i. p. 281 ; Analyse de la Carte de la Grece, p. 60). The numbers of monks or caloyers in all the islands and the adjacent mountain of Athos (Observations dc Belon, fol. 32, verso), Monte Santo, might justify the epithet of holy, ayios, a slight alteration from the original alya'io<;, imposed by the Dorians, who, in their dialect, gave the figurative name of nt-yt^, or goats, to the bounding waves (Vossius, apud Cellarium, Geograph. Antiq. toni. i. p. 829). [atyn, waves, has, of course, nothing to do with ali, a goat. The derivations suggested of Archipelago and iyiui- Tre'Aoyo? are not acceptable.] 1 According to the Jewish traveller who had visited Europe and Asia, Con- stantinople was equalled only by Bagdad, the great city of the Ismaelites (Voyage de Benjamin de Tudele, par Baratier, tom. i. c. 5, p. 36).