ABSTRACT

It is the habit of contemporaries, when their attention is diverted to the glories of the past, to recall with critical distaste the uncouth conditions of living that accompanied them. The radiance of the Roi Soleil is dimmed at recollection of the uses to which the stairs of Versailles were habitually put. The English Renascence is more sullied by the prospect of Henry VIII’s single cambric shirt than by all the executions of Bloody Mary. And to what purpose Parthenon and Colosseum, when prosperous citizens beneath them lived in mud huts and stone cubicles ? Through all the history of Europe, it is only in the case of Constantinople that these nervous queries do not arise. The amenities of life were proportionate to the Empire’s wealth. And there is no more remarkable proof of the unique position occupied in history by mediæval Greek civilisation than the size of the Byzantine budgets, which have remained, computed on the bullion value of their gold alone, without precedent until the present age. This wealth was the great auxiliary condition of the Empire’s stability. It remains to discover whence it was derived; what its amount; and of what nature its international consequence.