[41] [It is found in Theophanes.[d]]
CHAPTER VII
LEO THE ISAURIAN TO JOANNES ZIMISCES
[717-969 A.D.]
With the accession of Leo the Isaurian to the throne of Constantinople a new era opens in the history of the Eastern Empire. The progress of society had been deliberately opposed by imperial legislation. The legislators of the empire were persuaded that each order and profession of its citizens should be fixed by hereditary succession, and an attempt had been made to divide the population into castes. But the political laws not only impoverished but depopulated the empire, and threatened the dissolution of the very elements of society. Under their operation the Western Empire became the prey of the smaller northern nations, and the Eastern Empire was on the verge of being overrun by the Saracen invaders.[a]
Leo III mounted the throne, and under his government the empire not only ceased to decline, but even began to regain much of its early vigour. Reformed modifications of the old Roman authority developed new energy in the empire. Great political reforms, and still greater changes in the condition of the people, mark the eighth century as an epoch of transition.
When Leo III was proclaimed emperor, it seemed as if no human power could save Constantinople from falling as Rome had fallen. The Saracens considered the sovereignty of every land in which any remains of Roman civilisation survived, as within their grasp. Leo, an Isaurian,[42] and an iconoclast, consequently a foreigner and a heretic, ascended the throne of Constantine, and arrested the victorious career of the Mohammedans. He then reorganised the whole administration so completely in accordance with the new exigencies of Eastern society, that the reformed empire outlived for many centuries every government contemporary with its establishment.
The Eastern Roman Empire, thus reformed, is called by modern historians the Byzantine Empire; and the term is well devised to mark the changes effected in the government, after the extinction of the last traces of the military monarchy of ancient Rome. The social condition of the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire had already undergone a considerable change during the century which elapsed from the accession of Heraclius to that of Leo.