dition of
order lived on. The army itself preserved Roman discipline and technique
to a remarkable degree, and the military districts were already becoming
the basis for a reconstituted civil government. The wealth of Latin
technicalities incorporated in the Greek style of ninth-century
officialdom witnesses to this continuity with the past and to the
consequent political superiority of the Romaic Empire over contemporary
western Europe.

Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently
secure field for its future development. In the Balkan peninsula the Slav
had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching from
Avlona to Salonika. East of Salonika the empire still controlled little
more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military highway
linking them with each other and with Constantinople. But beyond the
Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia as far as
Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both of the
Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.

A new Greek nation had in fact come into being, and it found itself in
touch with new neighbours, whom the Ancient Greek had never known.
Eastward lay the Armenians, reviving, like the Greeks, after the ebb of
the Arab flood, and the Arabs themselves, quiescent within their natural
bounds and transfusing the wisdom of Aristotle and Hippokrates into their
native culture. Both these peoples were sundered from the Orthodox Greek
by religion[1] as well as by language, but a number of nationalities
established on his opposite flank had been evangelized from Constantinople
and followed the Orthodox patriarch in his schism with Rome. The most
important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter was the Bulgarian
kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from the Danube and the
Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople and Salonika. It had
been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic nomads from the
trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely absorbed in the Slavonic
population which they had endowed with their name and had preserved by
political consolidation from the fate of their brethren further south.
This Bulgarian state included a large 'Vlach' element descended from those
Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their
original migration; while the main body of the 'Rumans', whom the same
thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the D