anube, had established
itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push
down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains. Like the Bulgars, this
Romance population had chosen the Orthodox creed, and so had the purely
Slavonic Serbs, who had replaced the Rumans in the basin of the Morava and
the Bosnian hills, as far westward as the Adriatic coast. Beyond, the
heathen Magyars had pressed into the Danubian plains like a wedge, and cut
off the Orthodox world from the Latin-Teutonic Christendom of the west;
but it looked as though the two divisions of Europe were embarked upon the
same course of development. Both were evolving a system of strongly-knit
nationalities, neither wholly interdependent nor wholly self-sufficient,
but linked together in their individual growth by the ties of common
culture and religion. In both the darkness was passing. The future of
civilization seemed once more assured, and in the Orthodox world the new
Greek nation seemed destined to play the leading part.

[Footnote 1: The Armenians split off from the Catholic Church four
centuries before the schism between the Roman and Orthodox sections of the
latter.]

His cultural and political heritage from his ancient predecessors gave the
Romaic Greek in this period of revival an inestimable advantage over his
cruder neighbours, and his superiority declared itself in an expansion of
the Romaic Empire. In the latter half of the tenth century A.D. the nest
of Arab pirates from Spain, which had established itself in Krete and
terrorized the Aegean, was exterminated by the Emperor Nikiphoros Phokas,
and on the eastern marches Antioch was gathered within the frontier at the
Arabs' expense, and advanced posts pushed across Euphrates. In the first
half of the eleventh century Basil, 'Slayer of the Bulgars', destroyed the
Balkan kingdom after a generation of bitter warfare, and brought the whole
interior of the peninsula under the sway of Constantinople. His successors
turned their attention to the cast again, and attracted one Armenian
principality after another within the Imperial protectorate. Nor was the
revival confined to politics. The conversion of the Russians about A.D.
1000 opened a boundless hinterland to the Orthodox Church, and any one who
glances at a series of Greek ivory carvings or studies Greek history from
the original sources, will here encounter a literary and artistic
renaissance remarkable enough to explain the fascina