Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/131

Rh Isaac Angelas (1186), however, when they were heavily taxed, robbed of their cattle, and misused in other ways, they rose under the leadership of three brothers, Peter, Asan, and John, and having made a league with the Bulgarians, raised the standard of revolt, and established what is called the Bulgaro-Wallachian kingdom. Its suc cessive rulers contended with varied fortune against the Byzantine Government, but succeeded in maintaining their position in Thrace and Macedonia, to which countries for a time Thessaly also was added, forming, however, an inde pendent province, with a governor of its own. The emperor Baldwin, the first of the Latin emperors of Constantinople, was captured by them in battle, and put to death. The kingdom continued to exist until the Turks made their ap pearance on the scene, when, in common with the other in dependent sovereignties in these regions, it was finally overthrown.

The period from the end of the 9th century to the fourth crusade was to Greece a time of prosperity. Though its inhabitants were looked down upon as provincials by the people of Constantinople, and the country itself v, 7 as treated with neglect (Basil II. was the only emperor who for sev eral ages visited Athens), yet in material well-being it was one of the most flourishing parts of the empire. Though barbarian inroads were still not wholly unknown, one of the Uzes in particular is mentioned in 1065, yet security generally prevailed, and from the middle of the 1 1th century the coasts had nothing to fear from Saracen corsairs. The land produced com in abundance, so that it even supplied the capital in a time of dearth. The silk manufactures of Thebes, Athens, and Corinth were a source of great wealth, and much of the commerce of the time was in the hands of the people of Greece. The port of Monemvasia, in eastern Laconia, which gave its name to the Malmsey wine, was especially famous as a mediaeval emporium. How far Hellenic feeling and Hellenic traditions survived among the Greeks we have no means of discovering, but the proba bility is that these to a great extent perished, along with the Hellenic names, at the time of the great Slavonic im migration. The whole population had become Christian, though as late as the 9th century paganism existed among the inhabitants of the mountainous regions of Laconia. But in the latter half of the 12th century decline was ready to set in. Their commerce was passing into the hands of the Western traders ; the silk manufacture was transferred by the Norman Roger to Palermo ; and the profits of in dustry were absorbed by taxation, so that no surplus remained to be invested in works of public utility. The writings of Michael Acominatus, the noble and learned archbishop of Athens at the time of the fourth crusade, give clear evidence that in that city the decay had already commenced.

It is during the 12th century that we first meet with compositions in the popular Greek tongue, among the earliest specimens being poems by a monk called Ptochopro- dromus, addressed to the emperor Manuel Comnenus. The literary language of this time was still the same which had been used throughout the Byzantine period the "common" dialect of the Macedonian Greeks, as it had been transmitted with various modifications by the later Greek writers and the fathers of the church. The Byzantine histories and other works which were composed in it are usually stilted and pedantic in style, and conventional in their ideas and their treatment of events ; but it is possible to treat them too slightingly. Some of the writers, like M ichael Psellus and Eustathius of Thessalonica, were men of undoubted ability and learning ; and, besides this, it was the taste for these subjects, however faulty, which main tained the high level of cultivation that distinguished the Byzantines from the people of all other contemporary states during the Middle Ages, arid caused the ancient literature to be preserved. This language was also that spoken at court, so that it is not till the time of the Palaeologi that we find the highest circles and polite composition invaded by the vulgar tongue. But from the 4th century after Christ, if not earlier, there had been a divergence between the written and the spoken language, so that the two formed, so to speak, an upper and a lower stratum. Until the time of the iconoclasts, in all probability, the ancient speech was generally intelligible, but from the end of the 9th century it was a dead language to the great bulk of the nation. The change which the popular idiom was passing through, as might be expected, was twofold, arising, first, from the usual tendency of speech to become more analytical and of words to modify their meaning, and, secondly, from the loss of vocabulary, the mutilation of grammatical forms, and the confusion of syntax, which is produced by want of cultivation. At the same time it passed through no such violent process of disintegration as befell Latin in its change into the Romance languages, so that its historical con tinuity was never broken. But when it emerges to view in the compositions of the 12th century it is already a modern language, and its forms differ little from those of the Romaic of the present century, though of course the voca bulary was as yet free from the intrusive elements -Italian, Albanian, and Turkish which subsequently crept into it. The metre in which these poems were composed was regu lated entirely by accent, and not by the quantity of the syllables, and the verse usually employed was the so-called "political," i.e., popular verse, which corresponds to some of our longer ballad metres. The favourite subject was romances, and in the treatment of these, as well as to some extent in the stories themselves, subsequently to the Frarikish occupation the influence of the French romances is clearly traceable.

V. ''Period of Greek Survival&thinsp;: from the taking of Constantinople by the Latins to its Conquest by the Turks, 1204-1453&thinsp;A.D.

The empire of the East never recovered from the effects of the fourth crusade. It was then broken into a number of separate fragments, and though some of these recovered their cohesion, and the end did not arrive for two centuries and a half, yet the strength of the system was gone, and paralysis crept more and more over the enfeebled frame. In accordance with the provisions of the partition treaty, a Latin emperor was set up at Constantinople, and Baldwin, count of Flanders, was elected to the office ; Latin kingdoms were established in different provinces, one at Thessalonica, which was of short duration, another at Athens under the family of De la Roche, and a third in the Peloponnesus under Champlitte and Villehardouin, which was called the principality of Achaia or the Morea. Of the occupation of the last-named of these countries an account is given in one of the most curious of mediaeval Greek poems, The Book of the Conquest, the French original of which also exists. But even the districts which remained in the hands of the Greeks did not continue united. An independent empire was established at Trebizond on the Black Sea by a scion of the house of Comnenus. Another principality was founded in Epirus, the despot of which, after overthrowing the Latin state of Thessalonica, established at that place an empire of his own. But the headquarters of the legitimate Greek monarchy were at Nicæa, the original capital of the Seljuk sultans in Asia Minor. Theodore Lascaris, a man of no mean ability, who had been acknowledged as emperor before the capture of Constantinople, having taken up his abode in that place, succeeded in maintaining himself in opposition to the crusaders, the Seljuks of Iconium, and the Greeks of Trebizond ; and his 