Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/427

CONCLUSION. 409 what is the force which the spring-tide of fanaticism may supply to a horde of barbarians. Tiic Seljukian Turks and the other Maliometan tribes against which the strength of the New Home had been spent were still drunk with the new wine of their conversion to Islam, and fought with the same confidence of victory, recklessness of life, and even desire for death, with which the half -naked and ill -armed followers of an African Mahdi threw themselves on English bayonets. The legions of the New Home withstood the rush of the Asiatic fanatics as steadily as did our own countrymen those of Africa. Again and again they succeeded in inflicting what was apparently a crushing defeat on the Mahometan armies. But the battle had to be fought again after the lapse of a few years, when nev/ fanatics had come to take the place of those who had fallen. The flow of savage or barbarian hordes had, during the two centuries which preceded the disaster of 1204, been as constant on the north of the Black Sea as it had been on the south. Bulgarians, Comans, Patch- inaks, Uzes, and other non-Christian peoples had attacked the imperial city in the rear while she was defending European civilization in Asia Minor. The Sicilian expedition and in- ternal troubles, arising partly from dynastic rivalries, partly from the weakness which had come upon her owing to Asiatic influences, and especially to the weakening of the despotic forms of government before the oligarchical had become suf- ficiently strong to take its place, had lessened her strength, so that she was not able to offer the resistance which she had done two centuries earlier. But she gained breathing-time from the divisions of the Seljukian Turks and from her vic- tories over the Bulgarians and the Comans, and there appears good reason to believe that had she not been destroyed by the people of the West and her organization put an end to during a period of sixty years, she would have been able at a later period to have made a stouter, and probably a successful, resistance to the Ottoman Turks. That this new body of i[a- hometan invaders was able a century and a half later to oc- cupy several important positions in what they called, as their descendants still call it, Roumelia, or the territory of Borne,