Empire, the later history of which appeared to Gibbon 'a tedious and
uniform tale of weakness and misery'. Its services to civilization and
the greatness of many of its rulers were revealed to the world by
Finlay, whose narrative was acclaimed by Freeman as the most
considerable work of English historical literature since the _Decline
and Fall_. In the half-century that has elapsed since its completion,
the exploration of a thousand years has gone busily forward. The lead
was taken in France by Rambaud, Schlumberger, and Diehl, the latter of
whom was rewarded for his efforts by his appointment as first occupant
of the Chair created in Paris in 1899. Greater than any of the three was
Krumbacher, the prince of German Byzantinists, for whom a Chair was
founded at Munich in 1892, and whose encyclopaedic survey of Byzantine
literature is beyond comparison the most important single work in this
field of historical study. England is worthily represented by Professor
Bury, whose narrative of the Empire has already reached the ninth
century.

Byzantium has emerged from the scholarship of two generations no longer
decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the
home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in
darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against
the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly
remarked that Constantinople was for ages the seat of the only regular
and systematic Government in the world. Its administrative machine was
the most elaborate yet invented by man, and the Court was to mediaeval
Europe what Versailles was to the rulers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It was indeed a bureaucratic despotism in which
liberty was unknown, and, except in art, its spirit was imitative; but
to preserve Greek culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to
defend it against the repeated assaults of Islam was to deserve well of
civilization.

While the Byzantine Empire carried over important elements from the
classical world, Western and Central Europe passed under the dominion of
ideas which were as foreign to those of Greece and Rome as they are to
the conceptions of to-day. We have outgrown the blind contempt of the
eighteenth century and the gushing enthusiasm of the Romantic Movement;
but it is still a difficult task to form a just estimate of the
character of the thousand years that began with Augustine and ended