s little or no evidence of works
of charity outside the monastery being undertaken by Studite monks. Strict
personal poverty was enforced, and all were encouraged to approach
confession and communion frequently. Vows had been imposed on monks by the
council of Chalcedon (451). The picture of Studite life is the picture of
normal Greek and Slavonic monachism to this day.

During the middle ages the centre of Greek monachism shifted from
Constantinople to Mount Athos. The first monastery to be founded here was
that of St Athanasius (_c._ 960), and in the course of the next three or
four centuries monasteries in great numbers--Greek, Slavonic and one
Latin--were established on Mount Athos, some twenty of which still survive.

Basilian monachism spread from Greece to Italy and Russia. Rufinus had
translated St Basil's Rules into Latin (_c._ 400) and they became the rule
of life in certain Italian monasteries. They were known to St Benedict, who
refers his monks to "the Rule of our holy Father Basil,"--indeed St
Benedict owed more of the ground-ideas of his Rule to St Basil than to any
other monastic legislator. In the 6th and 7th centuries there appear to
have been Greek monasteries in Rome and south Italy and especially in
Sicily. But during the course of the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries crowds of
fugitives poured into southern Italy from Greece and Sicily, under stress
of the Saracenic, Arab and other invasions; and from the middle of the 9th
century Basilian monasteries, peopled by Greek-speaking monks, were
established in great numbers in Calabria and spread northwards as far as
Rome. Some of them existed on into the 18th century, but the only survivor
now is the monastery founded by St Nilus (_c._ 1000) at Grottaferrata in
the Alban Hills. Professor Kirsopp Lake has (1903) written four valuable
articles (_Journal of Theological Studies_, iv., v.) on "The Greek
monasteries of South Italy"; he deals in detail with their scriptoria and
the dispersal of their libraries, a matter of much interest, in that some
of the chief collections of Greek MSS. in western Europe--as the Bessarion
at Venice and a great number at the Vatican--come from the spoils of these
Italian Basilian houses.

Of much greater importance was the importation of Basilian monachism into
Russia, for it thereby became the norm of monachism for all the Slavonic
lands. Greek monks played a considerable part in the evangelization of the
Slavs, and the first Ru