The middle ages, sketches and fragments

Front matter

i

THE MIDDLE AGES

BY THE SA3IE AUTHOB.

Foreword

The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the general reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known usually as the Middle Ages. The writer will be amply rewarded if they serve to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of to-day is rooted in those ten marvellous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history, are not intelligible apart from a sufficient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the mediaeval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last four centuries are only the last chapters in a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. If anything seems distinctive of the modern mind

6 FOREWORD,

as against the mediaeval temperament, it is the sense of law, an even, constant, inerrant working of forces and principles that brook no interference from without and are supremely equitable in their operations. If we compare mediaeval with modern history, we shall learn with certainty that in both there is dominant this reign of law, a consistent inexorable unity of purpose, a progressive social formation. In both there are divine and human elements that occupy, in varying prominence, the foreground of the great world-stage, tending always to create a higher type of mankind, to nurse the dormant idealism of the race, and to lift it gradually toward the goal of all human endeavor — the flawless life of the spirit chastened and transformed and deified by the imitation of the God-man.

The essays and papers included in this volume have appeared elsewhere at intervals. For the courteous permission to reprint them I desire to express my thanks to the Catholic Worlds the American Catholic Quarterly Review^ the Catholic Times, the Ave Maria and the Catholic University Bulletin,

Contents

Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World . 9

Justinian the Great (a.d. 527-565) .... 35

The Christians of Saint Thomas .... 221

I

Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, the modern Sophia and capital of the present kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant of his historians says that he came of an obscure race of barbarians.^ Nevertheless, in an empire every of chronology pertaining to the reign of Justinian the reader mayconsult the classic work of Clinton, "Fasti Romani : The Civil and Literary Chronology of Rome and Constantinople" (to a.d. 641), (Oxford, 2 vols., 1845-50) ; cf. also Muralt, " Essaide Chronographie Byzantine" (St. Petersburg, 2 vols., 1855-73), and H. Gelzer, " Sextus Julius Africanus " (Leipzig, 1880-85).

An attempt has been made to collect the Greek Christian inscriptions from the fifth to the eighteenth century. " Inscriptions Grecques Chr^tiennes " (St. Petersburg, 1876-80), pp. 11-143. Mgr. Duchesne and M. Homolle promise a complete "Corpus." Cf. Bulletin Critique (October 5, 1900, p. 556). The coins and medals of the period are best illustrated in Schlumberger's " Sigillographie de I'Empire Byzantin" (Paris, 1884), a work that rounds out and replaces the earlier treatises of De Saulcy, Banduri, Eckel, and Cohen.

1 It is worth noting that the Slavonic origin of Justinian has lately been called in question by James Bryce, English Historical Review (1887), Vol. II., pp. 657-686. It is said to have no other foundation than the biography by a certain Bogomilus or Theophilos, an imaginary teacher of Justinian. This biography is not otherwise mentioned or vouched for than in the Latin life of Justinian by Johannes Marnavich, Canon of Sebenico (d. 1639). Bryce holds that Marnavich gives us only echoes of a Slavonic saga about Justinian. Jiricek ("Archiv fiir Slavische Philologie" (1888), Vol. II., pp. 300-304) condemns the whole story as a forgery of Marnavich. Thereby would fall to the ground all that Alemannus, the first editor of the "Anecdota" of Procopius (1623), writes concerning the Slavonic genealogy, name, etc., of Justinian. Cf. Krumbacher, *'Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur" (Munich, 1891), p. 46.

soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky soldier. Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite such another " paysan du Danube " as Lafontaine describes in one of his most perfect fables (XI. 6) :

He may have been not unlike the good Ursus in " Quo Yadis/' or that uncouth Dacian in " Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long service of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and succeeded, with universal consent, to Anastasius when that hated "Manichaean" died childless. The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered to make a Roman holiday — the land had long been Romanized, had even furnished the empire with a succession of strong and intelligent rulers, those Illyrian emperors whom Mr. Freeman has so magisterially described. Justin was an uneducated barbarian, and cut his signature painfully through a gold stencil plate, as did his contemporary, the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, king of Italy. Yet he had the wisdom of experience, the accumulated treasures of the sordid Anastasius, the counsel of good civil officers, old and tried friends in many an Isaurian, many a Persian, campaign. Above all, he had the devotiorf of his youthful nephew, Justinian. Possible pretenders to the throne were removed without scruple — a principle that has always been prevalent by the Golden Horn. Before Justin died his nephew had reached the command of all the imperial forces, though never himself a warlike man. In 527, on the death of his uncle, he found himself, at the age of thirty-six, sole master of the Roman Empire. It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, after the drums and tramplings of a dozen conquests. The West, indeed, was gone — it seemed irretrievably. At Pa via and Ravenna the royal Ostrogoth governed an Italian State greater than history has seen since that time.

At Toulouse and Barcelona the Visigoth yet disposed of Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and Orleans and Soissons the children of Clovis meditated vaguely an empire of the Franks. The Rhineland and the eternal hills of Plelvetia, where so much genuine Roman blood had been spilled, were again a prey to anarchy. Britain, that pearl of the empire, was the scene of triumphant piracy, the new home of a half dozen Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited by the great State's hour of trial to steal one of her fairest provinces, and were obliterating in blood the faintest traces of her civilizing presence. Even in the Orient, where the empire stood rocklike, fixed amid the seething waters of the Bosphorus, the Hellespont, and the Euxine, it knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids of Persia threatened the vast level plains of Mesopotamia, while a new and inexhaustible enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and Slavonic tribes, terrible in their numbers and their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold, amenable to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and murder and universal disorder. Justinian must have often felt, with Henry the Fourth, that the wet sea-boy, ^^ cradled in the rude imperious surge," was happier than the king. Withal, the empire was yet the only Mediterranean State. It yet held Syria and Egypt. Asia Minor was faithful. The Balkan provinces, though much troubled, and poor harassed Greece were imperial lands. ^ The empire alone had navies

1 The political geography of the empire in the sixth century may be studied in "Hieroclis Synecdemus," edition of Gustav Parthey and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered.^ Alone as yet it had the paraphernalia of a wellappointed and ancient State — coinage, roads, transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with arts and literature and all that is implied in the fair old Latin word humanitas. It stood yet for the thousand years of endeavor and progress that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. And well it was for humanity that its destinies now passed into the hands of one who was penetrated with the keenest sense of responsibility to God and man. Though he reached the highest prize of life before his prime, it has been said of him that he was never young. The ashes of rebellion and insurrection had been smouldering in the royal city since, with the death of Marcian (457), the old, firm, Theodosian control had come to an end. The frightful political consequences of the great Monophysite heresy that was born with the Council of Chalcedon (451) were dawning on the minds of thoughtful men. The Semitic and Coptic Orient

(Berlin, 1866). Here are reprinted the " Notitias Episcopatuum " or catalogues of ecclesiastical divisions known usually as the ' ' Tactica." Cf. also Banduri, " Imperium Orientale " (Paris, 1711, fol.) ; " Antiquitates ConstantinopolitansB " (Paris, 1729, fol.).

1 Gf rorer, " Byzantinische Studien," Vol. II., pp. 401-436; "Das byzantinische Seewesen.''

was creating that shibboleth which would serve it for a thousand years against Greek and Eoman — a blind and irrational protest against the real oppressions and humiliations it once underwent. Of its own initiative the empire had abandoned, for good or for ill, its historical basis and seat — Old Rome. It had quitted the yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer the scene of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassanid with the sea at its back, to create a suitable forum for the government of the world, where Christian principles might prevail, and where a certain inappeasable nemesis of secular wrong and injustice would not haunt the imperial soul as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital one thing was left behind — perhaps it was irremovable— the soul of Old Rome, with all its stern and sober qualities, its practical cast and temper, its native horror of the shifty mysticism of the Orient and the unreality of the popular forms of Greek philosophy. There is something pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the Great, " The art of arts is the government of souls." It is like an echo of the sixth book of Vergil, " Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento." Perhaps this is the germ of solid truth in the legend that Constantine abandoned the civil authority at Rome to Pope Silvester. He certainly did abandon, to the oldest and most consistent power on earth, — a power long since admired by an Alexander Severus and dreaded by a Decius — that rich inheritar^ce of prestige and authority which lay embedded in the walls and monuments of ancient Rome. Within a century something of this dawned on the politicians of Constantinople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle to help its bishop to the ecclesiastical control of the Orient. In history there are no steps backward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the last consistent, if romantic, prophet of the empire, was wont to shiver with indignation at the thought of the consequences of this act.

But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of government, they gained a Greek soul. It was an old Greek city they took up - — Byzantium. Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with Hellenism, whose far-flung outpost it had long been. History, climate, commerce, industries, the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of Roman men and families, the contempt for the pure Orientals, forced the emperors at Constantinople from the beginning into the hands of a genuine local Hellenism that might hav.e shed its old and native religion^ but could not shed its soul, its immortal spirit. Henceforth the world was governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre.^ This meant that government for the future was to be mingled in an ever increasing measure with metaphysics ; that theory and unreality, the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the fleeting elements of life, were to have a large share in the administration of things civil and ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth —

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

1 " The Greek characteristics of the empire under Justinian are calculated to suggest vividly the process of ebb and flow which is always going on in the course of history. Just ten centuries before Greek Athens was the bright centre of European civilization. Then the torch was passed westward from the cities of Hellenism, where it had burned for a while, to shine in Latin, Rome. Soon the rivers of the world, to adopt an expression of Juvenal, poured into the Tiber. Once more the brand changed hands ; it was transmitted from the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, once more eastward, to a city of the Greek world — a world, however, which now disdained the impious name 'Hellenic' and was called 'Romaic' By the shores of the Bosphorus, on the acropolis of Graeco-Roman Constantinople, the light of civilization lived pale but steady for many hundred years — longer than it had shone by the Ilissus, longer than it had gleamed by the Nile or the Orontes, longer than it had blazed by the Tiber, and the Church of St. Sophia was the visible symbol of as great a historical idea as those which the Parthenon and the Temple of Jupiter had represented, the idea of European Christendom. The empire, at once Greek and Roman, the ultimate results to which ancient history, with Greek history and Roman, had been leading up, was for nine centuries to be the bulwark of Europe against Asia, and to render possible the growth of the nascent civilization of the Teutonic nations of the West by preserving the heritage of the old world." — Bury, "History of the Later Roman Empire," Vol. IL, p. 39.

Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers from Rome. They one day mounted the throne in their worst shape, the shape of the sophist, in the person of Marcus Aurelius ; but, indeed, they had no proper place in Rome, where government has always tended to keep its head clear and calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the average practical and attainable. Not so in the Greek Orient. With the triumph of the Christian religion the gods of Hellas fell from theii* rotten pedestals. But they were never the governing element, the principe generateur of the Greek life. That was the individual reflective mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things, seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, not for any definite purpose, but because this restless research was its life, its delight ; because at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised the outer and visible world as an immense phenomenon, a proper and commensurate subject for the ruinous gicidity of its criticism.

It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of these opmiosissimi homines of Greece which begat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nestorius, and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even partially conquered in their defeat, for they compelled, to some extent, a philosophical refutation of their own vagaries; they helped Plato, and later Aristotle, to their high seats in Christian schools. With sure instinct the earliest Christian historians of heresies set down among them certain phases of Greek philosophy. " Quid Academice et Ecdesice ! *' cries Tertullian in his book on Prescription, as though he smelled the battle from afar.

In the intense passion of the Arian and christological discussions the highest Greek gift, metaphysics, and the finest Greek training, dialectics, came to the front. In every city of the Greek world the most abstruse and fine-drawn reasoning was indulged in habitually by all classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its obscure origin among those third-century philosophers of Antioch who gave to that school its grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He appeared at Nicaea in the company of pagan philosophers, and when defeated carried his cause at once before the sailors and millers and wandering pedlers along the sea front at Alexandria. And for two centuries the shopkeepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and Alexandria would rather chop logic than attend to their customers. For the victories of the mind the burdens of the State were neglected or forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of thought was carried into the council chamber, to prevail therein very often to the detriment of the commonwealth. The great officers of the State were too often doubled with theologians. The emperor himself took on gradually the character of an apostolic power, with God-given authority to impose himself upon the churches, formulate creeds, decide the knottiest points of divinity, make and unmake bishops great and small, and generally to become, in all things, a* visible providence of God on earth .^ This is what the Eastern world acquired by losing its Roman emperors and gaining a succession imbued with the spirit of Hellenic thought, and accustomed to the exercise of despotic power in a city that had no old and stormy republican traditions, being no more than the high golden seat of imperial authority from its foundation. Were it not for the magnificent resistance of Old Rome in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bishops would have allowed the cause of Christianity to become identified with the Csesaro-papism of the emperors.

If we add to the loss or absence of desirable

Roman qualities on the part of these great governors of imperial society, and the acquisition of undesirable Greek qualities, certain influences of the Orient, we shall, perhaps, better understand the situation in which Justinian found himself. It was noted very early that in contact with the Orient the extremely supple and impressionable Greek genius suffered morally. It lost its old Dorian or Argive independence, and, stooping to conquer, took on the outward marks of seiVitude while dwelling internally in its own free illimitable world of opinion and criticism. Long wars, commerce, travel, especially prolonged sojourns in corrupting Persia, had habituated the Eastern Greeks to political absolutism. Since Alexander the habits of servile subjection of their own conquered populations of Syria and Egypt were influential in this direction. The Roman emperors from Diocletian on were themselves caught by the externals of the Great King's court, and seem to have transferred much of its ceremonial to their own. The presence in Constantinople of a great multitude of miscellaneous Orientals and the exaggeration of style and rhetoric peculiar to this as to all other times of decadence, added strength to this current servilism.

II

The great problem tliat faced Justinian on his accession was the very character and limits of the Roman State for the future. Were the encroachments of one hundred years, the extinction of the Imperium in the West, to be finally condoned to those victorious Germans who in the last century had absorbed the political control of Italy, Gaul, Africa, Spain, Sicily ? Or should an effort be made to reestablish again an orhis terrarum, the ancient world-wide cycle of imperial authority ? Should Carthage, Milan, Ravenna, Trier, Rome itself, be forever renounced; or must one last struggle be made to win back the cradle of the empire and the scene of its first conquests ? Every possible argument pointed in an affirmative sense — the raison d'etat, the religious considerations and influences, the demands of commerce and industry, the incredibly strong passion of sentiment evoked by the memories and glory of Old Rome. In the heart of Justinian burned the feelings of a CaBsar and a Cru- . sader, a great trader and carrier of the Royal City, and a Hellene scandal-stricken at the overflow of barbarism and '' Medism " that was fouling all the fair and sweet uses of life. In the person of Belisarius he found a worthy general, one of the most intelligent and resourceful men who ever led troops into action. He found also for Belisarius a secretary, Procopius, who has left us a brilliant record of the great campaigns by which the ancient lands of the empire were won back. For twenty-five years the world of the Mediterranean resounded with the din of universal war. Around the whole periphery of empire went on the work of preparation, a thousand phases of mortal conflict, a thousand sieges, truces, and bloody battles. Belisarius broke the short-lived and fanatic Vandal power in 531, and Carthage, so dearly bought with Roman blood, was again a Roman city. Justinian lived to see the heroic resistance of the Ostrogoths made vain, after the death of their noble king, by the total subjugation of Italy and its reincorporation with the empire. In the meantime the great corn-granary of the empire, Sicily, was won back, and the constant fear of famine tliat hung over Constantinople and the army disappeared. Scarcely had he relief in Africa or Italy when the emperor moved his troops to the plains of Mesopotamia or even to the rocky fastnesses of Colchis, the modern Georgia, chastening at once the proud Mede and

54 JXISTINIAN THE GEE AT.

the fierce shepherds of those inaccessible hills. With the exception of the Persian campaigns, these wars ended successfully for the Roman State. One last outpouring of Teutons — the long advancing Lombards — wrenched away Northern Italy from the immediate successor of Justinian and interposed a hopeless barrier against any attempts to reconquer Austria, Switzerland, and Bavaria. But Central and Southern Italy were saved. A praetorian prefect was set over Northern Africa ; Sardinia and Corsica were once more integrant portions of the great Mediterranean State. A praetor again governed in Sicily as in the days of Cicero. From the inaccessible marshes of Ravenna an exarch or patrician ruled the remnants of the Roman name in the original home of that race. Even in Spain Justinian recovered a footing, and several cities of the coast recognized again the authority that had so long civilized the Iberian peninsula.

Doubtless it was owing to the incredible exigencies of the Persian wars that Central Europe swept finally out of the immediate vision of the emperor. The men, ships, moneys, and efforts of all kinds that it took to carry on these long and costly and unsatisfactory campaigns against the Persian, could well have availed to reunite the lost lands of the West and to make the Rhine and the Danube again Roman rivers. The interest in the island of Britain grew so faint that it appears in Procopius only as the home of innumerable spirits, a vast cemetery of ghosts ferried over nightly from Gaul by terrified mariners who are chosen in turn and compelled by supernatural force .^

The Frank went on absorbing at his leisure the Rhineland, Switzerland, Bavaria, Southern Gaul, and threatened to sweep Spain and Northern Italy into his State.^ Indeed, out of the fragments that escaped Justinian and Belisarius, the greatest of the Frankish race, the mighty Karl, would one day resurrect the Roman Empire in the West. If Justinian did not recover all the Western Empire, at least he brought to an end the Germanic invasions by exterminating Vandal and Ostrogoth and reestablishing in the West some formal and visible image of the old Roman power and charm. Henceforth Thuringi-

1 Nothing could illustrate more forcibly the thoroughness of the decadence of the old Roman power in the West than the presence in Procopius of this curious survival of old Druidic lore. Cf. Edouard Schur^, " Les Grandes L^gendes de France " (Paris, 1892), p. 154.

'■2 Gasqurt, " 1/ Empire Byzantin et la Monarchic franque " (Paris, 1888) ; Lecny de la Marche, " La Fondation de la France au V. et VI. slides " (Paris, 1893).

ans, Burgundians, Alemans, Visigoths, Suevi, Alans, the whole Golden Horde of tribes that first broke down the bounds of the empire, tend to disappear, submerged in the growing Prankish unity. The one unfortunate race that came last — the Lombards — was destined to be utterly broken up between the three great Western powers of the two succeeding centuries, the children of Pepin Heristal, the Byzantine exarchs of Italy, and the bishops of Rome. Could Justinian have kept the line of the Danube free and secure, the course of mediaeval history would surely have been changed. This was the original weak spot of the empire, and had always been recognized as such. Trajan tried to Romanize the lands just across it — the ancient Dacia — but his successor, Marcus Aurelius, had to withdraw. An inexhaustible world of miscellaneous barbarians — an officina gentium — ^was at the back of every frequent rebellion, and their warriors were like the leaves of the summer forest. Here, too, was the fateful margin of empire, along which broke eventually the last surges of every profound social or economic disturbance of the far Orient, flinging across the great river in wild disorder Hun and Slav and Avar and Gepid and Bulgar. The first encroachments on Roman life and security culminated, after a century of warfare, in the ever memorable campaigns and retreats of Attila. And when the empire of the mighty Hun fell apart at his death, the Germans, Slavs, Bulgars, and other non-Hunnic tribes whom he had governed from his Hungarian village, took up each its own bandit life and divided with the Hunnic tribes the wild joys of annual incursions into those distracted provinces that are now the modem kingdoms of the Balkans and Greece, but were then Illyricum, Moesia, Thrace, Thessaly, Macedonia, Epirus.

The Avars and the Huns, remnants perhaps of the horde of Attila, were the most dreaded in the time of Justinian. But they only alternated with the Slavs, to whom they gave way within a century, so endless was the supply of this new family of barbarism. These latter were tall, strong, blond, with ruddy hair, living in rude hovels and on the coarsest grain,- fiercely intolerant of any rule but that of the father of the family, jealous and avaricious, faithless like all barbarians, yet childlike in their admiration for power and grandeur. They harassed yearly the whole immense peninsula of the Balkans. They climbed its peaks, threaded its valleys, swam its rivers, a visitation of human locusts. The regular armies of Justinian were of no ayail, for these multitudes fought only in ambuscade, a style of warfare peculiarly fitting to the Balkans, which are like the "Bad Lands" of Dakota on an immense scale. They shot poisoned arrows at the Romans from invisible perches, and at close quarters were dread opponents by reason of their short and heavy battle-axes. It was in vain that line within line of fortifications were built, that in isolated spots the watch-towers and forts were multiplied and perfected, that every ford and pass and cross-road had its sentry boxes and castles. The enemy had been filtering in from the time of Constantine/ and was already no small element of the native population. So, as German had called to German across the Rhine, Slav called to Slav across the Danube ; the Romans were caught between the hammer and the anvil, between the barbarian within and his brother from without. Nevertheless, it was not without a struggle that filled four centuries more that Constantinople let go her mountain bulwark. Every river ran red, and every hillside

10. Seeck, "Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt," (Berlin, 1897), Vol. I., Part II., c. 6 ; "Die Barbaren im Reich," pp. 391-548.

was drenched with blood, in that memorable contest, in which she sometimes saw from the walls of the Royal City the plains of Thrace one smoking ruin, and again all but cut off, root and branch, her Slavonic and Bulgarian enemies.^

Doubtless the heart of Justinian was sore pressed at his impotency against the swarming Slavs and Avars. He loved his Illyrian home, and built on the site of his native village a city, Justiniana Prima (near Sophia), which he fondly hoped would be a new Byzantium in the Balkans. With a foreconscious eye he made it a bishopric, even a patriarchate, and ordered for it honors second only to those of the most ancient sees of the Christian world. This act was productive of grave consequences in later times that fall beyond our present ken."

The long wars of Justinian with Persia were otherwise important. Here it was a death strug-

1 The influence of Constantinople in the later Slavonic world is incontestable. Besides the "Chronicle of Nestor" (French translation by L. Leger, Paris, 1884), cf. Gaster, " Grseco-Sclavonic " (London, 1877); Rambaud, "La Russie Epique" (Paris, 1876); Krek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-geschichte " (Graz, 1877), pp. 461-473 ; and the pro-Byzantine work of Lamansky (in Russian), " On the Historical Study of the Grseco-Sclavonic World " (St. Petersburg, 1871).

2 Duchesne, " Les Eglises Sdpar^es" (Paris, 1897).

gle between Persia striving to reach, the sea and Constantinople struggling to keep her back. These wars lasted more or less continuously from 528 to 562, and sometimes coincided with the greatest expeditions in the West. From time to time a peace was concluded or a truce — the peaces were really only truces. The usual result was the payment of a heavy tribute on the part of the emperor, amounting at times to as much as a million dollars, not to speak of the numerous sums paid by the cities of Mesopotamia and Syria, and the incalculable treasures carried off in each of these campaigns. If the Persian resented new fortifications in the vicinity of the Euphrates, war was declared. If the Saracen sheiks who stood with the Romans fell into a dispute with their brethren who served Persia over a desert sheepwalk, it was settled by a long war between the Romans and the Persians. Endless sieges of fortified cities, heavy ransoms from pillage and burning, extraordinary single combats, marching and countermarching across Syria and Mesopotamia, fill the pages of the historians. The local Jews and Samaritans, yet numerous and powerful, were no small source of weakness to the Romans. So, too, were the ugly heresies of the Monophysites and Nestorians, with all the hatreds and heartburnings they occasioned against Constantinople, the protectress of the orthodox faith of Chalcedon, a general council almost universally misunderstood, and equally hated in Syria and Egypt. In 532, for example, Justinian purchased peace for eleven thousand Roman pounds of gold (about two and a half millions of dollars). He was then in the throes of the Vandal war in Africa and on the point of the expeditions against the Moors and to recover Sicily. When Belisarius was in the very heart of the Gothic war in Italy, Chosroes again broke the peace, solicited by Witigis, the head of the Gothic forces, and joined by many dissatisfied Armenians, who considered themselves oppressed by the Romans — perhaps, too, embittered by the persecution directed against the Monophysites.