And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the center of the empire.
The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws made a thousand miles away.
But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible successors to the glory of the imperial throne.
And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.
But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God and the strength and power of the organization which represented the divine will on earth.
How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.
While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.
The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible cost.
For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and carefree citizens.
And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall now try to show you.