Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/220

 enjoyed almost a monopoly of the trade. Hence Byzantine commerce suffered severely during a Persian war, and strenuous efforts would be made to supply the deficiency of silk by stimulating its importation along the circuitous routes. Such attempts, however, invariably proved ineffective until the invention of the compass and the discovery of the south-*east passage opened the navigation of the globe between the nations of the East and West.

IV. In general condition the Byzantine people exhibit, almost uniformly in every age, a picture of oppressed humanity, devoid of either spirit or cohesion to nerve them for a struggle to be free. With the experience of a thousand years, the wisdom of Roman statesmen and jurists failed to evolve a political system which could insure stability to the throne or prosperity to the nation. Seditious in the cities, abject in the country, ill-disciplined in the camp, unfaithful in office, the subjects of the Empire never rose in the social scale, but languished through many centuries to extinction, the common grave of Grecian culture and Roman prowess.

In the rural districts almost all the inhabitants, except the actual landowners, were in a state of virtual slavery. The labourers who tilled the soil were usually attached, with their offspring, to each particular estate in the condition of slaves or serfs. They could neither quit the land of their own free will, nor could they be alienated from it by the owner, but, if the demesne were sold, they were forced to pass with it to the new master. The position of a serf was nominally*