of trade began to flow to the south, and quitting Constantinople passed directly from Bagdad to the cities of Italy. Then the sustenance of the money-changers gradually failed. From the reign of Michael VI. effigies of the saints were engraved upon the coin, and after the revolution led by Alexius Comnenus, in 1081, the execution degenerated and debasement began. This revolution marked the beginning of the end. Immediately preceding the crusades, and attended by sharp distress, it was probably engendered by an alteration in the drift of foreign exchanges. Certainly the currency contracted sharply, and the gold money soon became so bad that Alexius had to stipulate to pay his debts in the byzants of his predecessor Michael.78 For the next hundred years, as the Italian cities rose, the Empire languished, and with the thirteenth century, when Venice established its permanent silver standard by coining the “grosso,” Constantinople crumbled into ruin.
In architecture the same phenomena appear, only differently clothed. Though the Germans, who swarmed across the Danube, often surged against the walls of Constantinople, they never became the ruling class of the community, because they were of the imaginative type. Money retained its supremacy, and while it did so energy expressed itself through the economic mind. Though Justinian was of barbarian blood, the nephew of a barbarian shepherd, the aristocracy about him, which formed the core of society, was neither imaginative nor devotional. Hardly Christian, it tended toward paganism or scepticism. The artists were of the subject caste, and they earned their living by gratifying the tastes of the nobles; but the nobles loved magnificence and gorgeous functions; hence all Byzantine architecture favoured display, and nowhere more so than in Saint Sophia. “Art delighted in representing Christ in all the splendour of power… To glorify him the more all the magnificence of the imperial court was introduced into heaven… Christ no longer appeared under the benevolent aspect of the good shepherd, but in the superb guise of an oriental monarch: he is seated on a throne glittering with gold and precious stones.”79 Here then lay the impassable gulf between Byzantium and Paris; while Byzantium remained economic and materialistic, Paris passed into the glory of an imaginative age.
The Germans who overran the Roman territory were of the same race as the Greeks, the Latins, or the Gauls, but in a different stage of development. They tilled farms and built villages and perhaps fortresses, but they were not consolidated, and had neither nations nor federations. They were substantially in the condition in which the common family had been, when it divided many centuries before, and their minds differed radically from the minds of the inhabitants of the countries beyond the Danube and the Rhine. They were infinitely more imaginative, and, as the flood of emigration poured down from the north, the imagination came more and more to prevail.
Although the lowest of existing savages are relatively advanced, they suggest that the strongest passion of primeval man must have been fear; and fear, not so much of living things, as of nature, which seemed to him resolutely hostile. Against wild beasts, or savages like himself, he might prevail by cunning or by strength; but against drought and famine, pestilence and earthquake, he was helpless, and he regarded these scourges as malevolent beings, made like himself, only more formidable. His first and most pressing task was to mollify them, and above the warrior class rose the sacred caste, whose function was to mediate between the visible and the invisible world.
Originally these intercessors appear to have been sorcerers, rather than priests, for spirits were believed to be hostile to man; and perhaps the first conception of a god may have been reached through the victory of a clan of sorcerers in fight. As Statius said eighteen hundred years ago, “Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.”80 Probably the early wizards won their power by the discovery of natural secrets, which, though they could be transmitted to their descendants, might also be discovered by strangers. The later discoverers would become rival medicine men, and battle would be the only test by which the orthodoxy of the competitors could be determined. The victors would almost certainly stigmatize the beings the vanquished served, as devils who tormented men. There is an example of this process in the eighteenth chapter of 1 Kings: —
“And Elijah … said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.”
Then Elijah proposed that each side should dress a bullock, and lay it on wood, and call upon their spirit; and the one who sent down fire should be God. And all the people answered that it was well spoken. And Jezebel’s prophets took their bullock and dressed it, and called on “Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us!” But nothing came of it.
Then Elijah mocked them, “and said, Cry aloud: … either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.”
And they cried aloud, and cut themselves with knives till “blood gushed out upon them. And … there was neither voice, nor any to answer.” Then Elijah built his altar, and cut up his bullock and laid him on wood, and poured twelve barrels of water over the whole, and filled a trench with water.
And “the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
“And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God.
“And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.”
The Germans of the fourth century were a very simple race, who comprehended little of natural laws, and who therefore referred phenomena they did not understand to supernatural intervention. This intervention could only be controlled by priests, and thus the invasions caused a rapid rise in the influence of the sacred class. The power of every ecclesiastical organization has always rested on the miracle, and the clergy have always proved their divine commission as did Elijah. This was eminently the case with the mediæval Church. At the outset Christianity was socialistic, and its spread among the poor was apparently caused by the pressure of competition; for the sect only became of enough importance to be persecuted under Nero, contemporaneously with the first signs of distress which appeared through the debasement of the denarius. But socialism was only a passing phase, and disappeared as the money value of the miracle rose, and brought wealth to the Church. Under the Emperor Decius, about 250, the magistrates thought the Christians opulent enough to use gold and silver vessels in their service, and, by the fourth century, the supernatural so possessed the popular mind, that Constantine not only allowed himself to be converted by a miracle, but used enchantment as an engine of war.
In one of his marches, he encouraged the belief that he saw a luminous cross in the sky, with the words “By this conquer.” The next night Christ appeared to him, and directed him to construct a standard bearing the same design, and, armed with this, to advance with confidence against Maxentius.
The legend, preserved by Eusebius, grew up after the event; but, for that very reason, it reflects the feeling of the age. The imagination of his men had grown so vivid that, whether he believed or not, Constantine found it expedient to use the Labarum as a charm to ensure victory. The standard supported a cross and a mystic monogram; the army believed its guards to be invulnerable, and in his last and most critical campaign against Licinius, the sight of the talisman not only excited his own troops to enthusiasm, but spread dismay through the enemy.
The action of the Milvian Bridge, fought in 312, by which Constantine established himself at Rome, was probably the point whence nature began to discriminate decisively against the monied type in Western Europe. Capital had already abandoned Italy; Christianity was soon after officially recognized, and during the next century the priest began to rank with the soldier as a force in war.
Meanwhile, as the population sank into exhaustion, it yielded less and less revenue, the police deteriorated, and the guards became
See treaty with Bohemund. Anna Comnena, xiii. 7.
