fearful slave-rebellion in Irak — the kernel of the Abbassids' realm — which throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara, and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this slave-state destroyed.
Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental geniuses — the Sultanate. For this is the specifically Arabian form, and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed Cæsarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian, belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political (not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished — for the Caliph as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect is sacred — but he was deprived of all powers that Cæsarism needed to possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Cæsar in fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole richness of being in high form — in law, costume, ethic — that had once been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely factual régime.
So we find by the side of Michael III (842-867) Bardas, and by Constantine VII (912-959) Romanos — the latter even formally Co-Emperor.[1] In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure, overthrew Bardas and founded the sword-dynasty of the Armenians (to 1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled — force-men like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them was John Tzimisces (969-976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was the Turks who played the Armenian rôle; in 841 the Caliph Vathek invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of Sultan. From 861 the Turkish prætorians held the ruler in tutelage, and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan-dynasty of the Buyids, formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities. And then there set in, in both the world-cities, an unrestrained competition between the mighty provincial families for possession of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed, Basileios II and others challenging the great latifundia lords, but this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legis-
- ↑ For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann, Die Weltstellung des Byz. Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen (1894), pp. 21, et seq.
