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FEW GLIMPSES OF DOMESTIC LIFE 199 and the political development of the empire which destroyed the belief that allegiance was necessarily due to the ruler in the capital had been for two centuries a disintegrating ele- ment which prevented the growth of the apathy on political and social questions, and the deadly contentment which has been a characteristic of the great Slavic race. In the cities there was intellectual life : Salonica, Nicaea, Smyrna, and other centres of population had in times past vied with the capital in general culture and still retained something of their attachment to it. To the last hour of the empire there was, as we have seen, general and absorb- ing interest in the question of the Union of the Churches. But interest in other questions which had once kept religious thought from stagnation had largely died out. The more pressing questions of life interested the citizens. Moreover, the people believed that all questions of Christian belief had been settled. The Creed was final and had no more need of revision than the style of the Parthenon. The practices adopted from Paganism had become so generally accepted as to pass without dispute. Iconoclasts and Paulicians can hardly be said to have left any representatives. A Pagan Christianity with a Pantheism accepting holy springs, mira- culous pictures, miracle-working relics, had become the accepted form of faith, a form which we of the twentieth century find it as difficult to understand as the earlier belief which had regarded the emperor as divinity. One of the difficulties of the student of political and social history of the thirteenth and two following centuries is that of being unable to get glimpses of personal character- istics or domestic life. The men who figure in contemporary writings are too often little better than dummies who move and turn, but do not suggest vitality. An historical novel of the period written upon the lines of Scott or Dumas, of Kingsley or Charles Reade, or better still, anything corresponding to Chaucer's ' Canterbury Tales,' would be of priceless value in giving indications not merely of what was the environment of a Constantinopolitan but of the characteristics of an individual of the period. The writers on whom we have to