A short history of the near East from the founding of Constantinople (330, A. D. to 1922)

Front matter

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Preface

This volume relates succinctly the history of the Near East from the founding of Constantinople to the Greco-Turkish crisis of 1922. Whatever its shortcomings, the present book can at least claim that it outlines the whole historic picture of those remarkable events which have now once again focussed the gaze of the world upon the unhappy Levant.

A story like this of the age-long debate betwixt East and West, whereof perhaps the first real non-legendary argument was held at the battle of Marathon, divides itself naturally into three main sections:

(1) Christian Constantinople.

(2) Early Islam and the Saracenic Kalifates.

(3) The intrusion of the Turanian Turks into Nearer Asia and next into Europe, and then their retreat and practical expulsion from the latter continent.

Such factors as the various “Balkan” races and kingdoms have, however, received all the space possible.

A just presentation requires that proper attention should be given to the capital events of former ages, despite a natural interest in rather recent happenings. It is more valuable to emphasize the importance of Leo the Isaurian’s deliverance of Constantinople from the Saracens than to dwell at length on the battle of Kirk Kilisse.

In handling the events of the past generation, and especially in treating the diplomacy of the “Eastern Question,” the aim has been merely to restate a few familiar facts for the purposes of reference, not to compete with several detailed, excellent, and very recent monographs. Conspicuous among these is that of my colleague, Professor Mason W. Tyler, The European Powers and the Near East, a work indispensable by its scope and original scholarship for Turkish events since 1875. Of corresponding value is also the Fifteen Years of Turkish History, 1907 to 1922, by Professor A. H. Lybyer of the University of Illinois, who has brought to his task a discriminating first-hand knowledge of the Levant.

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Vill PREFACE

No history covering the sweep of years from 330 to 1922 A.D. can pretend to be written throughout from primary sources, but a decent acquaintance with considerable masses of original material from Eusebius and Zosimus down to the recent blue books upon the present fate of the Ottoman Empire has perhaps permitted me to express myself with understanding. Scholars desiring a critical list of references on the subject can happily find them in the new cooperative bibliography, the “Guide to Historical Literature” prepared for the American Historical Association. However, I desire to make specific acknowledgment of my indebtedness to the following general works by modern authors (besides, of course, using very many monographs on isolated personages, events and institutions), namely:

For Islam and the Saracens, to Muir, Margoliouth, Sykes, Ameer Ali and Le Bon.

For the Ottoman Turks, to a much longer list of distinguished writers, whereof the more conspicuous are Von Hammer, Creasy, Menzies, Davey, Lane Poole, De la Jonquiére, Halil Ganem and H. A. Gibbons, not to mention writers on very recent events, such as Marriot.

In preparing almost all parts of this work I have found suggestion and stimulus ‘in the remarkable chapters on the Nearer Orient contained in the great Lavisse et Rambaud Histoire Générale. Many will recognize my large debt to the discussions therein by Wahl, Bayet, and especially by Rambaud. Taken together these constitute an achievement of French scholarship which by great misfortune has never received an English translation.

W.S. D.

Minneapolis, Minn.

Note ON THE SPELLING OF Proper NAmMEs.

Familiar Greco-Latin names are ordinarily given in their Latinized forms, and less familiar Greek and Byzantine names by direct transliteration from the original. There is no standardized system of transliterating Arabic and Turkish names into English, and as a rule the form has been adopted which would seem most familiar to Western readers. Thus the great Ottoman potentate of the XVI century is given as ‘“Solyman” instead of the more scientific ‘“Souleiman.”

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE I. ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM IN THE LEVANT: Tue FouNDING OF CHRISTIAN CONSTANTINOPLE

Il. Tue CuHristTriAN EMPIRE OF CONSTANTINOPLE: THE East RoMAN. PERIOD THROUGH JUSTINIAN (395- COS Sena Pon nae p Oe helt Naeem harika is 6 YR EA

III. Tue CurisTIAN EMPIRE AT CONSTANTINOPLE (continued): THe PERSIAN AND SARACENIC PERILS CROSSE OLA ibersi mish Ste ai, cee te MEM Cnet oe |e

II

fe

LIST OF MAPS

. BYZANTINE EMPIRE AT PERIOD OF GREATEST PROSPERITY (950-

. CoNSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE BYZANTINE EMPERORS MebrE OARACENIC Wortp+(about $75: A.D.) 3 oy ey eo

. THE LEVANT AFTER THE First CRUSADE (about 1120 A.D.) .

Tue BALKAN AND A*GEAN Lanps (about 1350 A.D.)

. THE EXPANSION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

. THe OTTOMAN EMPIRE, SHOWING LOSSES IN EuROPE (1683-

. THE OTTOMAN Empire (1815-1878 A.D.) .

. THe BALKAN LANDS AFTER THE BERLIN SETTLEMENT

CIS7S AD: yi

. StamBout (Modern Constantinople)

THe BALKAN LANDS AFTER THE TREATY OF BUCHAREST GiGi s v7. 1D.) Suni

THE BALKANS AND LEVANT AS ARRANGED BY THE TREATY OF SEVRES (1920)

THE BALKANS AND LEVANT AS PROPOSED FOR SETTLEMENT AFTER THE EXPULSION OF THE GREEKS FROM ANATOLIA; SEPTOMBER, LOG2s- 701000 s\\ ei 7/1s vis: jtete means

PAGE 51 60

345 364

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY

THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE AT CONSTANTINOPLE

330-— 717 “East Roman” Period

330 Founding of Constantinople by Constantine the Great.

395 Permanent division of the Roman Empire, Constantinople capital of Eastern half.

527— 505 Reign of Justinian (1) the Great. 610— 641 Reign of Heraclius: great Persian and Saracenic invasions.

717-1071 “Byzantine” Period 717 Constantinople saved by Leo the Isaurian from the Saracens.

963-1025 Period of Conquest and expansion under Nikephoros Phokas, John Zmiskes, and Basil II. Byzantine apogée.

1071 Romanos IV defeated at Manzikert by Seljuk Turks. Loss of Asia Minor.

1071-1453 “Greek” Period 1081-1118 Partial restoration of Empire by Alexios

I.. Komnenos: Crusades begin.

1204 Capture and sack of Constantinople by Latins in Fourth Crusade.

1204-1261 “Latin’ Empire at Constantinople,

“Greek” Empire at Nicza.

1261 Recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks (Palaiologoi Emperors).

1453 Capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

XV

CHRONOLOGICAL: SUMMARY

RIsE oF ISLAM AND SARACENIC EMPIRES

Mohammed (born 570 ?) begins his prophetic career at Mecca.

The “Hegira”—flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina.

Battle of Bedr, first Moslem victory.

Capture of Mecca by Mohammed.

Death of Mohammed.

Abu-Bekr elected kalif: invasion of Syria and Mesopotamia.

Kalifate of Omar: conquests of Persia, Syria, and Egypt.

Kalifate of Othman.

Kalifate of Ali: civil wars begin among the Moslems.

Omiad dynasty of kalifs at Damascus. Arabia no longer center of Moslem world.

Hossein, son of Ali, killed at Kerbala: beginning of “Shiah” schism.

Overthrow of Omiads by Abbasside kalifs.

Abbasside kalifs at new capital of Bagdad. Persian influence predominant.

Haroun-al-Raschid kalif: Saracenic apogée.

Slow decline of Abbasside kalifate: growing power of Turkish guard. Emirates fall away. Rival kalifs at Cordova and Cairo.

Sack of Bagdad by Mongols under Hulagu: end of Abbasside kalifate.

THE OTTOMAN TURKS Death of Ertoghrul in Anatolia.

Capture of Brusa.

Turks take Gallipoli and enter Europe.

1389 1402

1699 1821-1827

1853-1856 1877-1878

1878 1909

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY Xvil Battle of Kossova, crushing of Serbia.

Battle of Angora, Bayezid I overthrown by Timur the Tartar.

Capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II.

Reign of Solyman the Magnificent: Ottoman apogée. Battle of Mohacz, crushing Hungary.

First siege of Vienna.

Battle of Lepanto.

Second siege of Vienna. Ottoman “High Tide.” Peace of Karlowitz: Ottoman disintegration begins. Greek War for Independence. (Navarino, 1827.)

Crimean War: respite gained for the Turks soon wasted. |

Turko-Russian War (Abortive Treaty of San Stefano, 1878).

Treaty of Berlin: creation of Bulgaria.

Deposition of Abdul-Hamid II: “Young Turk” revolution.

oalkan Europe.

Wars: Turkey nearly extruded from

Turkey in the World War: collapse of Ottoman Em-~ pire.

Abortive Treaty of Sevres.

Defeat of Greeks in Anatolia: revival of Turkish Nationalism, is de a

Chapter I

ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM IN THE LEVANT; THE FOUNDING OF CHRISTIAN CONSTANTINOPLE

THE ORIGINS OF BYZANTIUM

It was about 660 B. c. when a deputation from Megara questioned the Delphic Oracle, “‘Where shall we found our projected colony?” Not without worldly wisdom the Pythoness answered, “Found it opposite to the ‘City of the Blind.’” This “Delphic Utterance” was easy to interpret. Chalcedon was a Greek settlement upon the Asiatic side of the southern end of the Bosphorus. One mile away, on the European shore, there rose a far superior site, a hill-crested peninsula easy to defend. On the southern side was the blue Propontis (Sea of Marmora); on the eastern a noble salt river, the Bosphorus; on the northern that deep inlet and harbor which was the later ‘Golden Horn,” while on the western opened the rich hinterland of Thrace toward which a relatively short wall betwixt the Propontis and the harbor could guard against attack. The adjacent waters abounded in fish. Already a lively commerce was developing between the Greek lands and the Black Sea (“Euxine’’), all passing directly through the Bosphorus. The climate was healthful and not too severe. The Megarian colonists therefore made haste to obey the mandate of Apollo.

For the next thousand years Byzantiwm remained an important center, first as a city-republic of free Greece, then as a local metropolis of the Roman Empire. In 196 a.p. it was stormed by the stern Emperor Septimius Severus warring against his rival, Pescennius Niger. The city was ruthlessly devastated, but was speedily

I rebuilt and resumed its prosperity. In 323 A. D., however, Byzantium again became a focus of war when Licinius, Emperor of the East, undertook to hold the place against Constantine, the first Christian Augustus, his western rival. Constantine captured Byzantium after a very violent siege. Licinius was taken in Asia and ‘‘disappeared”’ in captivity (324 A.D.). The old Megarian colony was thus left in the power of that daring imperial innovator, who had not hesitated to set the crucified Nazarene upon a religious equality with Jupiter Capitolinus.

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT JouNps “NEW RoME” (330 A.D.)

Probably Constantine had already resolved to found a new capital for the Eastern half of the unwieldy Roman Empire. Bitter experience had just taught him the capacities of Byzantium for defense even against a very skillful attack. Here, therefore, instead of say at Nicomedia (modern “Ismid”) in Asia Minor, which was the spot favored by his mighty predecessor Diocletian, he would found his “New Rome”; im Europe but hardly of Europe;—with Thrace behind her, but looking out upon Asia, with ships from North and South sailing past the Eastern windows of her palaces; and with land-roads and sea-roads far more convenient than those of “Old Rome” by the Tiber, for directing the defense of the Empire upon the oft threatened Danubian or Euphrates frontiers.

Speedily now Constantine issued the necessary decrees. The inexorable despotism and centralization of the Later Roman régime put at his behests the treasury, a great corps of competent architects and engineers, and last but not least vast gangs of serfs (‘“‘coloni’’) or at least of ‘“‘minores”’ (citizens of inferior rights) who worked practically at forced labor even as did the toilers on Cheops’s pyramid. Constantine’s courtiers affected to marvel at the wide boundaries which he paced off as the limits of his new capital. “I shall cease,’’ announced he with resounding piety, ‘“‘when He that goes before me shall stop!”

Constantine in fact seems to have desired to found a distinctly Christian city; although he prudently allowed the ceremonies for dedicating the new seat of Empire to present a curious mixture of Christian and pagan symbolism. Thus many churches were erected not in honor of personal saints, but of some impersonal qualities, such as “Holy Wisdom” (Hagia Sophia) so that they could be con-

ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM 2 tinued as temples to acceptable ‘“‘Virtues” in case the old paganism should overpower the new Christianity.

In 330 A.D. after years spent in frantic building, at first probably upon hastily drawn plans and with temporary materials, the new capital was dedicated by elaborate rites and games prolonged over forty days, and culminating on the 11th of May, which was henceforth reckoned the birthday of the metropolis. The Emperor himself bore the golden statue of the “Fortune of the City” in the magnificent procession which marked the supreme act in these ceremonies. Henceforth the Roman Empire had two official capitals, and by general consent the new foundation was speedily known neither as Byzantium, nor as ‘““New Rome,” but as Constantinople, the City of Constantine.

Such a city immediately became “great” in fact as well as in name. The presence of one of the most elaborate and extravagant courts which ever existed, the command or the moral compulsion by the Emperor upon the Senatorial nobility to follow their master; the great opportunities offered trade and industry in the new capital; the amusements of the circus and theater, and the wholesale corn doles offered the proletariat; the more legitimate attractions of living at the center of the best intellectual and esthetic life of the age; also the great advantage of extreme physical safety at a time when invasions were imperiling the Empire—these were some of the elements combining to swell the population of Constantinople. Probably its inhabitants far outnumbered those of the older Rome some decades before that fatal 410 A.D. when Alaric’s Goths gave an irreparable blow to the aging Mother of Empires.

Down to 395 A.D. Constantinople was usually, although not continuously, the residence of at least one of the Emperors if the supreme office was temporarily divided. In that year the death of Theodosius I, the last ruler of the united Empire, led to the definite separation into the Western Empire (ruled by his son Honorius from Ravenna) and the Eastern Empire (ruled by his elder son Arcadius from Constantinople), which division became practically permanent. Henceforth an “Augustus” dwelled regularly by the Bosphorus, save when he was waging foreign wars or making peaceful progresses through his dominions.

So began the “East Roman Empire”; later transmogrified into what we call the “Byzantine” and then the “Greek Empires’”— each with its seat at Constantinople. To understand the peculiar genius of this great political unit one must indulge in a retrospect of the relations of Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Levant during the preceding centuries.

THE ‘‘WESTERNIZING” OF THE LEVANT

In 479 B.c. Pausanias the Spartan overthrew Mardonius the Persian at Platea in Boeotia. So ended, disastrously for the Orientals, the first great assault of Asiastics upon Europe. In 331 B.c. Alexander of Macedon, boasting himself the “Captain General” of the Greeks, took ample revenge for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, when he destroyed the vast host of Darius III at Gaugamela (Arbela). Then followed events involving far more than simply the ruin of Persia. Alexander penetrated far into Bactria (Turkestan), into lands whereof Greek-speaking men had hardly so much as known the names. He pushed into India and had the Punjab at mercy before the mutiny of his weary army forced him reluctantly to turn westward. He returned to Babylon and was busy with far-reaching schemes for amalgamating Europeans and Asiatics when death smote him in 323 A.D.

It is safe to doubt whether even the genius of Alexander could really have fused East and West; but it is still more certain that his premature death made it impossible for Greek influence to fasten itself securely upon those enormous lands reaching from the Euphrates to the Indus. True it is, however, that Grecianized satraps for the “Macedonian” Kings of the House of Seleukos (the most prominent of Alexander’s successors) held sway far into the East for over a century; true also, that even in remote Bactria, kings called by such good Hellenic names as Eukratides and Menander retained power possibly as late as 100 a.D.,—striking coins with Greek legends and probably maintaining a somewhat Hellenized court in those cities which preceded Samarcand and Bokhara. Certain, too, it seems that considerable colonies of Greek (or at least Grecianized) merchants, soldiers of fortune, entertainers, actors, and even litterateurs existed in many capitals, far East of the Euphrates, and so continued for generations.

Nevertheless it is fair to say that Hellenization, so vehemently championed by Alexander and the Seleukids, never struck root far beyond Mesopotamia. It is a tribute to the Greek genius, the

ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM 5 genius of a numerically weak nation, that it was, however, indeed able to tighten and to retain its hold upon the Levant proper. The triumph of the Greek language over the most tenacious and selfsufficient of all the Semitic races is a witness to this victory. The Septuagint version of the Jewish Scriptures, prepared obviously for the Hebrew multitudes who had discarded their native vernacular; the intrusion of Greek names into strictly Jewish circles, enrolling even a Philippos among the Christian disciples; the ability of such a crude tyrant as Antiochos Epiphanes (175-164 B.c.) to come measurably near to forcing the Jews into repudiating outright their inveterate religious usages—these are decisive testimonies to the penetration of the Greek language and civilization into Syria.

If the Jews almost succumbed to this attack by Europe, the Aramaic and Phcenician regions seemed much more certain to surrender their native culture. In Egypt matters were hardly different. Greek became the common written language, often driving out the use of Coptic even in districts remote from Alexandria, and relegating the hieroglyphic and hieratic writing to religious and official texts cherished by the priesthood. In Asia Minor the Hellenic triumph was far more complete. Doubtless in the days of St. Paul there were still remote districts where the rustics gossiped in ‘“‘the speech of Lycaonia,” and probably too in that of Celtic Galatia. But apparently everywhere a traveler who could speak the tongue of Athens could talk freely to every person of importance. The amorphous nature of Levantine paganism made most religious transitions very easy. Egyptian Amon became identified with Zeus. Baal was sometimes called Helios and sometimes Apollo; and the Phrygian Cybele was promptly assimilated with the venerable Hellenic Rhea, the consort of Kronos.

RomeE ASSISTS THE WESTERNIZING PROCESS

The coming of Roman supremacy brought not the least setback to this Hellenizing of the Levant. The Roman government frankly accepted Greek civilization as something worthy of protection, and confirmed Greek as an official language (practically on a par with _ Latin) in about all the provinces east of the Adriatic. A “Secretary for Greek Correspondence” became one of the most important Imperial ministers. The actual situation about 30 A.D. was well exemplified in that superscription which Pilate in bitter irony set over the cross of Jesus upon Calvary; when the prisoner’s alleged crime was recited first in Latin (understood in Jerusalem probably by very few persons outside the procurator’s official circle) ; in Greek, the language which the great majority of all the spectators, Jewish or Gentile, could read and speak; and finally in Hebrew, probably comprehended readily by only a learned minority of the gloating Pharisees or Sadducees. The vernacular of Palestine at this time was of course Aramaic.

In a sentence, when the Roman Empire was at its height, and especially after the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Hadrian as the imperial colony of Alia Capitolina (135 a.p.), Greco-Roman influence in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor seemed to be transforming the Near East into outwardly ‘‘Westernized” lands. But this condition could not last. The general weakening of the Empire after 180 A.D. involved an equal weakening of Western influence in the Levant.

In the third Christian century, while economic and social decay were undermining the Roman Imperial régime, the forces of Orientalism at length obtained what they had lacked for centuries—the support of a strong military power just beyond the Euphrates. As early as the third century B. c., to be sure, the Turanian Parthians had first expelled the Seleukid viceroys from Media, Persia proper, and Babylonia, and then had held the Romans (the successors of the Seleukids) pretty successfully to the west of Mesopotamia. But the Parthians, although their redoubtable horse-archers proved terrible to the legions, were too ill-organized and unscientific seriously to threaten the hold of the Romans upon Syria. It was all that the Parthians could do to thwart the skillfully conceived attempt of Trajan in 114-117 A.D. to make the whole Tigro-Euphrates valley into new imperial provinces. For practical purposes, however, despite Roman punitive expeditions in 163-165, in 195 and in 217 A.D., there was practical equilibrium between East and West along

1The Parthians struck coins with Greek legends. How their princes delighted in a veneer of Greek culture, yet underneath were raw Turanians, is proclaimed in the famous story concerning Crassus, the Roman invader of Mesopotamia, who was slain 53 B.C. His head was duly forwarded to the Parthian court at Seleucia. The ‘Great King,” in the course of a marriage-feast, was witnessing a presentation of Euripides’ play, “The Bacchai.”’ During the performance the head of Crassus was flung into the court theater. Instantly, amid great applause, Jason, the leading actor, seized the trophy and went through the wild Bacchanal’s dance, flourishing the head and chanting appropriate verses from the play. The head was thereupon snatched from him by a Parthian noble who claimed this honor. The King Orodes, filled with joy, made large presents to both the nobleman and to Jason. No other incident coula better illustrate the essentially barbaric character of the Parthian power.

ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM 4 the Euphrates from the days of Augustus to those of Alexander Severus. For two and a half centuries the Parthian monarchy appeared indeed extensive and pretentious, but obviously spongy and with its ‘Great King” often at sore odds with his vassals. Then suddenly came a change which shook all of Nearer Asia. In 226 a.p. the Parthian dominion was utterly destroyed by the revolt of Ardishir the Persian, the founder of the Sassanid or ‘““New Persian”? Empire.

THE MILITANT SASSANID MONARCHY IN PERSIA (226 TO 640 A.D.)

The Sassanids (“Descendants of Sassan”’) and their people were Aryans, who claimed to be of the same folk who had overshadowed the world in the days of Cyrus and Darius I. They were far more virile, resourceful, and aggressive than the Parthians. Their welldisciplined armies often borrowed the Roman tactics. King and people were violent Zoroastrians, ‘Fire Worshippers,” disciples of one of the worthiest, but also one of the most militant religions sprung out of the East. Soon Ardishir and his successors were the “Kings of Kings” of a vast, lumbering empire extending from the Euphrates substantially to the confines of Bactria and India. They were not rulers who were content for long to let the Romans repose safely to the west of the Euphrates.

This revival of a great aggressive Oriental power came at a moment when the Western world was plunging into grievous difficulties. The Roman army was making and unmaking emperors in chronic mutinies. The Goths and other Germanic barbarians were violating both the Danube and the Rhine frontiers. The imperial fiscal and civil administration was nigh demoralized. This sudden peril from Persia therefore put the western elements in the Levant ? speedily on the defensive, when in Sapor I (240-271 A.D.) the Orient found one of its most vigorous champions. In 260 a.p. he had the unique glory of taking a Roman Emperor, Valerianus, as his prisoner, and of holding him captive for life, while Persian troops poured into Syria, mastering Antioch, and pressing into Cilicia and Cappadocia. The old Empire of Cyrus seemed on the point of a complete revival.

Sapor was promptly halted, however, though not by legions come

?In this book the name “Levant” will be used for the lands on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and especially for those in Asia west of the Euphrates.

out of Italy. After centuries of political eclipse, following first the original Persian and then the Greco-Macedonian conquests, the Semites of Syria were showing signs of political renewal. Their oasis of Palmyra had become a great commercial center and a lordly capital. The local merchant princes, nominally members of the Roman aristocracy but equally proud to be the sheiks of their bold — desert riders, were headed by Odenathus, who saw in Persia a threat to his own schemes for Palmyrene aggrandizement. His Arabian cavalry (the same type of fierce warriors whose descendants some day were to lead the hosts of Islam) inflicted humiliating losses on Sapor and chased him over the Euphrates. But this was not a victory for the West. It seemed merely to show that Rome was leaving the Levant to shift for itself. The weak Emperor in Italy, Gallienus (son of the unfortunate Valerianus) actually allowed Odenathus to flaunt the purple of a “colleague” and an “Augustus.”

The great Odenathus died in 266 a.p., but his vigorous wife Zenobia promptly proclaimed his sons ‘‘Augusti” and arrogantly called herself the “Queen of the East.” Syria, Egypt, and much of Asia Minor seemed under her power. Rome she affected to patronize and Persia to defy. For a few years it seemed probable that the Levant was about to resume its virtual independence under new Semitic dynasts seated at Palmyra.

The attempt was premature. A mighty potence still lay in Rome. A truly great Emperor, Aurelianus, having cast out the Barbarians from Italy, set forth for the East to teach a stern lesson to Persian and Palmyrene. In 272 a.p. he routed Zenobia’s Saracenic lancers, took Palmyra, and, after a second revolt, reduced that upstart capital to ashes. In Persia Sapor I was dead, and his successors were now delighting the Romans by their civil wars. In 283 a.D. the Emperor Carus conducted an inconclusive punitive expedition up the Tigris almost to Ctesiphon, the Persian capital; but in 297 A.D. the “junior Emperor” Galerius, acting for his puissant superior Diocletian, defeated the “‘Great King” Narses so decisively that the latter was compelled to cede wide provinces east of the Euphrates, carrying the Roman frontier far into Mesopotamia. By the time Constantinople was founded the Persians, however, had largely recovered from these disasters; and in 363 A.D. the inept Jovianus was compelled to cede back to Sapor II practically all these Mesopotamian conquests.

ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM 9

The Romans retained indeed a few fortresses beyond the Euphrates, but their hold was precarious, and that mighty river was again practically the boundary between the “Nearer East,” still under Western domination, and that ‘““More Remote East” where the writ of no Latin- or Greek-speaking potentate ran. More serious still for European statesmen was the consciousness that just beyond the Euphrates stretched a mighty alien monarchy, ready, at the first sign of any Roman preoccupation or weakness, to fling its invading hosts into Syria. This standing fear of the ruin or loss of some of their most valuable provinces, made it nigh impossible to concentrate the full military strength of the Roman Empire against the Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Vandals, when the hour of peril in the West drew nigh. Thanks to the Sassanids the Roman had to meet the Germanic invader with one hand tied behind his back.

EASTERN AND WESTERN INFLUENCES IN THE EARLY CHURCH

While the Western control of the Levant was thus being imperiled by Persia, Christianity was extinguishing paganism all the way from Palestine to Britain,—and Christianity in that day was by no means a Strictly Western religion. Down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 a.pD.) the number of Jews in the primitive Church had probably largely exceeded the number of Gentiles. Later, as the movement waxed stronger, it becomes evident enough that under the guise of discussion of abstruse theology a desperate war was raging within the Church between what may be called the sane intellectualism of the Greco-Romans and the transcendental enthusiasms of the Eastern believers. Grecian reasonableness and Roman legalism soon began to give the Church a body of faith and a solid organization which vastly increased the appeal of the new religion to thoughtful men in the West, and finally to the Emperors themselves. While, however, the predominant type of Christianity was thus becoming Occidentalized, an endless string of “heresies”

8 The revival of Oriental religions of course was not confined to the spread of Christianity. As the Roman Empire weakened, not a few bizarre pagan cults penetrated westward from the Near East. Examples of these are the worship of the Syro- Pheenician sun-god, Elagabalus, a ‘‘Baal’’ that was enrolled temporarily as the chief deity of the city of Rome itself by the depraved Emperor Bassianus (familiarly known himself from his own god as “‘Elagabalus’”’) in 219 a.p.; and the more worthy cult of the Persian deity Mithras (‘The Unconquerable Sun’’) whose esoteric worship spread very widely through the imperial army, and whose chapels were found in the Roman garrison towns along the Rhine and Danube. Thus when the Empire was shaken and pine Bare distressed, the East once more undertook to provide the West with religious consolation.

Ke) A SHORT HISTORY OF THE NEAR EAST revealed the trend of the Eastern genius. Gnosticism, Montanism, Docetism, and finally (in Semitic North Africa) Donatism, not to mention twenty other vagrant persuasions, were clearly the product of the Oriental tendency to desire to walk by impulse and faith and not by a sight, in a manner very repellent to those Church Fathers trained in the moods of Athens and Rome.

The famous Arian Controversy concerning the nature of ‘Jesus, although it racked the whole Church and afflicted Gaul and Spain, began in the bishopric of Alexandria, between men who, notwithstanding that they argued vehemently in Greek, had ancestors who might well have wrought on the Speaking Memnon. Almost all the other great heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries took rise in the Eastern provinces among men of passionate faith and flighty imagination. In almost every instance the imperial government, supporting the saner types of Christianity acceptable in the West, put its coercive secular power at the disposal of the ‘‘Orthodox” prelates, the champions of the great creeds promulgated by the World Councils. Westernism of course easily won the Papacy at Rome; and after some hesitation it won the Patriarchate at Constantinople. Christianity as a world religion thus took on the spirit of Europe and not of Asia.