From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Per cedere al Pastor si fece Greco,[57]

New Rome—notwithstanding all its wars and vicissitudes, all its changes of race and religion, all its changes of laws and customs and institutions—has been the continuous seat of empire for sixteen centuries. This is something that is without parallel in the history of our race.

Rome was the local center of empire for barely four centuries.... The royal cities that once flourished in the valleys of the Ganges, the Euphrates or the Nile were all abandoned after some centuries of splendor, and have long lost their imperial rank. Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, Athens, had periods of glory but no great continuity of empire. London and Paris have been great capitals for at most a few centuries; and Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg are things of yesterday in the long roll of human civilization.[58]

This exceptional continuity in Constantinople may, it has been asserted, “be ultimately traced to its incomparable physical and geographical capabilities.”

But while I contemplated the capital of Constantine as it lay bathed in the tremulous and ethereal atmosphere of an autumn afternoon and recalled its past history, enveloped in the mist of years—a history which then seemed more like a confused and troubled dream than a veritable record of stirring and vivid actualities—I presently lost sight of the wars and sieges and conquests of which this Castle of the Cæsars has so frequently been the theater and thought of its rather as the erstwhile home of art and literature, as the renowned center of religion and culture.

Among its ecclesiastical rulers were some of the brightest luminaries of the Eastern Church. There was the scholarly St. John Chrysostom, “the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit.”[59] There was the illustrious St. Gregory Nazienzus, whom Villeman calls the greatest Oriental poet of Christendom. There was Photius, “whose learning and width of culture was astonishing and whose library-catalogue is the envy of modern scholars.” And there were those two learned women, the Empress Eudocia and the Princess Anna Comnena, who, as Gibbon phrases it, “cultivated in the purple, the arts of rhetoric and philosophy.”[60]

It was in Constantinople that, at the command of Justinian, was framed the famous Code that bears his name—the most important of all monuments of jurisprudence and which, notwithstanding subsequent modifications, is still the basis of all legislation throughout the civilized world.

It was here that Byzantine art took its highest flights. Santa Sophia was but one of the churches of New Rome from which western artists and architects drew their inspiration. We see this in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto and in the countless Italian edifices which exhibit the evidence of Byzantine influence.

And it was here, in the libraries and monasteries, that was preserved that precious heritage of Greek thought and Greek genius, which, at a later age, was to be transferred to Western Europe, and which, through the activity of Byzantine scholars, was to be the foundation of the Renaissance. During the period immediately preceding the Conquest of Constantinople there was, declares Gibbon, “more books and more knowledge within the walls of Constantinople than could be dispersed over the extensive countries of the West.”[61]

“When the arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses” from the Queen City of the East, Greek learning sought an asylum on the banks of the Arno and the Tiber. Among the first of Greek scholars to find a congenial home in the land of Dante and Petrarch were Janon Lascaris and Manuel Chrysoloras. They were received with open arms in the universities of the Peninsula and lectured with signal success to vast numbers of eager and enthusiastic students of every age and condition. But nowhere were they and others of their countrymen of a later date[62] accorded a more cordial welcome than in the palaces of the Medici and at the courts of Leo X and Nicholas V. Under such illustrious patrons, Greek letters flourished amazingly and quickly prepared the way for the great humanistic movement that culminated in the literary triumphs of Politian, Reuchlin, and Erasmus.