East. After their victory they built Baghdad — a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism — and this first world-city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Cæsarism, from the Caliphate to the Sultanate, which, in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power without form — here also the only kind of power still possible.
We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world as elsewhere democracy was a class-ideal — the outlook of townsmen and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages with land, be it a desert or plough-land. The "no" which answered the Caliph-tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and neither free-thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary to it. Magian mind and Magian money are "free" in quite a different way. The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence, not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicæa. The consensus of the Faithful, the "people" in the most daring sense, was looked upon as willed by God ("Nature," Rousseau would have said), as equal and free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.[1] Not long afterwards there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social matters wholly radical,[2] who set up a state of their own beyond the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every way to the communistic-religious movement of the Karramiyya, which extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only after a twenty years' struggle (817-837);[3] and the other like outbreak of the Carmathians[4] in the West (890-904), whose liaisons reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were still other disguises of the political party-battle. When now we are told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to see the passions of the century of the image-controversy (740-840) in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis (843) — the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and simultaneously of the free-church monkish policy — signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense of the word.[5] And, lastly, this period is the time of the
- ↑ K. Dieterich, Byz.. Charakterköpfe, p. 54: "Since thou wilt have an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing about Emperors — we will not follow though it were an angel that bade us; how much less if thou!"
- ↑ Cf. p. 316.
- ↑ Huart, Gesch. d. Araber (1914), I, p. 299.
- ↑ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., art. "Carmathians." — Tr.
- ↑ Krumbacher, Byz. Lit.-Gesch., p. 969.
