The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks

APPENDIX IV

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION ON GREEKS AND MOSLEMS RESPECTIVELY

In reading the contemporary authors of the period between the Latin and the Moslem conquests the following questions suggest themselves: What was the influence of the Orthodox Church upon the people of the capital and of the empire? What was its value as a national ethical force? and how did its influence as such a force compare with that of Islam?

Before attempting a reply to these questions certain facts must be noted. It must be remembered that the empire was composed of many races and languages. In the Balkan peninsula alone there were always at least half a dozen races with as many different forms of speech. In Asia Minor the component elements of the population were even still more numerous. The Church largely aided the State in the endeavour to keep these divergent elements under the rule of the empire. Her special task was to change the various races into Christians. But even when this task was completed to the extent of causing them all to profess Christianity they retained their racial characteristics and traditions. These characteristics, though widely various, may be classified in two categories. In other words, it may be said that among all the different populations of the empire there were two streams of tendency: the Hellenic and the Asiatic. The tendency and influence of each were markedly present in the church from the first days of the empire and continued until 1453. Greek influence left an indelible impress upon the Orthodox Church. But while it influenced the other races of the empire, the Greeks themselves fell to some extent under the Asiatic influence. Greek tendency was always to make of Christianity a philosophy rather than a religion. The opposite tendency, which I have called Asiatic and which corresponds fairly well to what Matthew Arnold called Hebraic, had less enduring results upon the population but was nevertheless constantly present. The two tendencies were constantly striving one against the other within the Church.

Greek influence (1) largely aided in the formation of a philosophical body of theology, (2) helped to perpetuate paganism and develop a paganistic tendency, and (3) deprived the Church of the religious enthusiasm which the Asiatic tendency might have provided and has often inspired. The service of the Greeks in reference to the formation of a body of theological philosophy is too completely recognised to require any notice. Greek influence helped to perpetuate paganism in various ways. It was naturally always most powerful in the Balkan peninsula, its chief centres being Athens and Salonica, but had great weight also in the western cities of Asia Minor. Greek polytheists in pre-Christian times were not opposed to the recognition of other gods than those worshipped by themselves. How this rational toleration, which was as utterly opposed to the exclusive spirit of Asiatic Christianity as to that of Islam itself, tended to perpetuate paganism will be best understood by recalling the early history of the later Roman empire. The population under the rule of New Rome had for the most part adopted the profession of Christianity because it was the religion of the State. Most people found little difficulty in conforming to the demands of the emperor and became Christians. Under such circumstances Christianity did not conquer paganism: it absorbed without destroying it. Just as in Central Asia many tribes who have come under the power of Russia have been ordered to elect whether they would declare themselves Christians or Moslems, so in the days of the early Christian emperors, and especially under the laws of Theodosius the choice was between a profession of the Court creed or remaining in some form of paganism where its professors would be subject to various disabilities and persecutions. The conformity which resulted was curious. The people became nominally Christians, but they brought with them into the Church most of their old superstitions. Their ancient deities were not discarded but were either secretly worshipped or came to be regarded as Christian saints: their festal days became the commemoration days of Christian events. I do not forget that something of the same kind went on in the Western Church and that the missionaries, finding themselves unable to persuade their converts to abandon their old observances, deftly adopted them into the Christian Church. But all that was done in this direction in the West was small in comparison with what went on in the East. St. George took the place of Apollo. St. Nicholas replaced Poseidon. The highest hill in every neighbourhood on the mainland and in every island of the Marmora and the Aegean had fittingly been crowned with a temple dedicated to the God of Day. The great dragon, Night, had been overcome by Helios. To this day it is almost universally true that all the peaks in question have an Orthodox church which has taken the place of the temple of Apollo and is dedicated to his successor, St. George.606 In like manner the temples built in fishing villages to Poseidon have almost invariably been dedicated to St. Nicholas. The episcopal staff of a Greek bishop has the two serpents’ heads associated with Aesculapius. The distribution of holy bread at funerals, the processions to shrines, to sacred groves, to Hagiasmas or holy wells, and numerous other customs of the Orthodox Church, are survivals or rudimentary forms of paganism.607

Asiatic influence was more powerful in Constantinople than in Greece. The explanation of this fact is to be found in the remoteness of Athens from the capital; in the greater intellectual life of Constantinople; in the presence of many leaders of thought from the cities in Asia Minor under Asiatic influence, and in the traditional Roman sentiment derived from the influence of Latin rulers, literature, and tradition. The iconoclastic movement towards the end of the eighth century was a genuine attempt to get rid of pagan practices. It failed because of the base character of some of its imperial supporters, because of the opposition of the less cultured western church, and because the Empress Irene, a native of Athens and brought up among the traditions of paganism which still lived on in what was then a remote part of the empire, placed herself at the head of the Hellenic party and with her strong will was able to prevent any reformation being accomplished.

But paganism in Greece and Asia Minor lived on long after the time of Irene. The Hellenistic influence struggled hard against the Asiatic or what was not unfitly called the Roman party. When we come to the last century of the empire’s history, we find its influence triumphant, and this to such an extent that we see Plethon and his school, as the representatives of a phase of Greek thought, dreaming of the restoration of paganism. I conclude, therefore, that Greek influence helped to perpetuate paganism or at least a paganistic tendency.

Greek influence deprived the Church of the religious enthusiasm which the study of the Old Testament has often inspired. It must always be remembered that the Greeks had the New Testament in a language they could understand. Every one recognises that a large part of the intellectual movement in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due to the translation of the sacred Scriptures into the vernacular. But there has been no period in the history of the Greek race since the compilation of the Christian record in which the Greeks have not had the advantage of a familiarity with the Gospels and the writings of St. Paul. They knew the New Testament well. Its Greek was colloquial. But they were less familiar with the Old Testament. Although frequent allusions are made to the stories in the older book by many writers during the later centuries of the Church’s history, the Septuagint was written in a language less understood by the people. Indications that the Old Testament influenced men’s conduct are lacking, and point either to a want of familiarity with it, or to some other cause which made its influence less than that which it has had on other peoples. The passionate zeal of our own Puritans, with their application of Jewish history to English politics; the political principles of the defenders of civil liberty in America; the fierce enthusiasm of the Scotch Covenanters, of the Dutch Protestants, and of the Boers, were all derived from the Old rather than from the New Testament. The influence of the more ancient book might have been great upon the Asiatic party if its writings had been as familiar as those of the New Testament. As it was, though its influence was undoubtedly felt, that derived from the New Testament became more powerful as the centuries went on, ultimately triumphed, and led to results which assist us to furnish an answer to the questions under examination.

What, then, was the general effect of the double stream of influence on the members of the Orthodox Church? The familiarity of the subjects of the empire with the text of the New Testament combined with the intellectual genius of the Greek race led them to take a delight in the study of the philosophical questions which the New Testament, and especially the writings of St. Paul, suggest. To take a keen interest in any metaphysical study is for any people a gain, and it is none the less so when the subject is theology. Now the interest of the population in theological questions was at all times absorbing.

When these questions were settled by the Church, the Asiatic influence made itself felt and produced a conservatism, a stubborn refusal to change or abandon any position, which the more fickle-minded or philosophical Greek could never have displayed. Each of the two tendencies exerted its influence upon the conduct of the Orthodox Church. Speaking generally, we may say that all its members were devotedly attached to their faith—or perhaps it would be more exact to say, to their creeds. Of political questions in the modern sense they knew little. In their ignorance of foreign nations, questions of external policy hardly interested them, but the intellectual life of the country—mostly confined to the great cities, to Nicaea, Salonica, Smyrna, and above all the capital—was fully awake to theological questions. While ready to discuss, they maintained every dogma and every article with a persistence which increased as the years rolled on. They took a keen interest in any question whenever any heretic appeared who attempted to throw doubt on what the Church had decided. They were ready to die for their faith.

The writers of the Greek Church show by abundant examples that they and the people believed in the existence of a God who lives and rules the world and the conduct of individuals. Their very superstitions afford sufficient evidence of such a belief. He was an avenging God. Black Death and Plague are described as the instruments of His vengeance. Omens and signs in a variety of forms were the means by which He, or some of the Hierarchy of Heaven, intimated to the faithful what was about to happen. The absence of omens was a sign of His displeasure or His abandonment of their cause.

The men who discussed the religious questions which arose during the later as well as the earlier centuries of the empire regarded them as tremendous realities. The discussions were not mere exchange of opinions or formulating of phrases: not mere academical disputations, among the learned of the time, of metaphysical abstractions, but were often careful attempts to solve the insoluble. The results were of supreme importance. If you believed aright, you would be saved. If you disbelieved or believed wrongfully, you would be damned in the next world and, as far as the believers could accomplish it, in this also. Unless the eagerness, the passion, the deadly Asiatic earnestness of the religious discussions or wranglings be realised, no true conception can be formed of fourteenth and fifteenth century life in Constantinople.

Contemporary writers supply abundant and indisputable evidence that, from the patriarch downwards, the members of the Greek Church attached overwhelming importance to the correctness of their orthodoxy. The utmost care about correct definitions was taken by the Church to check paganism. The miscreant was a worse offender than the man who disregarded the ordinary laws of morality. Souls were to be saved by right belief. As in the Western Church, whosoever would be saved, it was necessary before all things that he should accept the right formulas. But the Eastern gave greater prominence to the formulas than even the Western. While the Roman Church attached most importance to its Catholicity and to the necessity of propagating the faith, the Greek Church always prided itself rather on its Orthodoxy. If the question were whether the empire was Christian, and if the test of being a Christian nation were the jealous guardianship of every dogma in the precise manner that it had been formulated by the Councils of the Church, then the Orthodox Church, to which the inhabitants of the capital and empire belonged, would take a very high rank among Christian nations.

It is not possible to doubt that the keen interest taken in the discussion of religious questions quickened the intellectual development of the population, and in this respect the influence of the Church was purely beneficial. To suggest, as did the historians of the eighteenth century, that the Greeks were at once profoundly theological and profoundly vile is not only to ask that an indictment should be framed against a whole people, but is contrary to general experience and to fact. In spite of the occasional conjunction of theology and immorality in the same individual, the nation which takes a lively interest in the former is not likely to be addicted to the latter.

A strong and, I think, an unanswerable case might be made out to show that the religion of the Orthodox Church beneficially influenced the conduct of men and women in their individual capacity and in their relations one with another. All believed in the doctrine of eternal punishment and in the divine gifts granted to the Church by which punishment might be avoided. In their constant efforts to take advantage of the graces at the disposal of the Church, and in their endeavours to attain the ideal of Christian philosophy, men and women were led by their religion to be more moral, more honest, and more kindly one to another, than they would otherwise have been. The denunciations of those who had been guilty of unclean conduct, and the constant praise of almsgiving, lead to the conclusion that the Church had so far exercised influence for good. It had given the citizens of the empire a higher standard of family and social life. The very stubbornness which the Asiatic tendency supplied, and which led all to resist every attempt to change the formulas of the faith, came in itself to stand the population in good stead after 1453. Their wranglings on religious questions helped to form a public opinion which prevented any considerable number of Christians from abandoning their religion. We may safely conclude, therefore, that the Orthodox Church had aided in developing intellectual life, in raising and maintaining a high tone of morality, and in so attaching its members to their religion that when the time of trial came they remained faithful. It had done more. While accomplishing these objects it had raised a whole series of heterogeneous races to a higher level of civilisation and had largely contributed to make the empire the foremost and best educated state in Europe. It had checked the Greek tendency to attachment merely to the city or province and had made patriotism and brotherhood words of wider signification than they possessed in Greece.

It is when we pass from the influence of the Church on the conduct of the individual, to ask what was the value of its ethical teaching in regard to national life, whether it ever set before the nation a lofty national ideal, or whether it ever caused a wave of religious enthusiasm which influenced the nation as a whole, that we find the Orthodox Church during the later centuries of its history greatly lacking. Religion was to guide the conduct of the individual and to save him from eternal punishment. There was little or no conception of it as an aid to national righteousness. There was no inspiration for national action, such as a study of the Old Testament has often supplied. There was never any great religious fervour for the accomplishment of an object because it was believed to be the divine will. I am not thinking of such religious enthusiasm as led to the abolition of the slave trade or of slavery, to the temperance movement or to that for the diminution of crime and the reform of criminals or for the bettering the condition of the labouring classes and the like. These are social developments belonging to later years, which may be credited, in part at least, to the account of Christianity. It is in the contemporary religious movements of other portions of the Christian world that the measure of the national religious life of the empire must be taken. The series of Crusades enables a comparison of this kind to be fairly made, though other standards of comparison suggest themselves. The empire under the rule of Constantinople had a greater interest in checking the progress of the Moslems in Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor than had the Western nations. But in the whole course of Byzantine history, though the empire steadily resisted the Mahometan armies, there was no display of religious enthusiasm to lend its aid at any time comparable with that which was shown in the West. An Eastern Peter the Hermit could not have aroused the members of the Orthodox Church. No Godfrey de Bouillon could have found statesmen in the East to have espoused his cause. If leaders had been forthcoming, followers would have been wanting. Though the statesmen of the West were influenced by many motives to join in the Crusades, they, too, were largely under the sway of religious fervour. The nations of which they were the leaders did display such fervour for the accomplishment of objects which were believed to be in conformity with the divine will. As for the great mass of crusaders, it cannot be doubted that they took the cross mainly because they believed that they were doing the will of God. Absence of precaution, deficiency of organisation, unreasoning fanatical zeal, unreasonable and senseless haste to come into conflict with the infidel, the army of child crusaders, the sacrifices men made of their property, most of the incidents, indeed, which make up the narratives of the Crusades, show that the Soldiers of the Cross were steeped in religious fervour, and were in a condition of pious exaltation. They were, as they called themselves, an army of God. They were willing to face any danger, and to go to certain death for their Master’s cause.

The Greek was always ready to defend a dogma. He entertained a profound dislike and contempt for Christian heretics who were usually less well informed than he and were generally fanatically in earnest, but he was more tolerant of heresy than the men of the West, who in the Middle Ages bestowed on heretics a fanatical hatred and contempt greater even than that felt towards the infidel, and like that entertained in the present day towards anarchists as enemies of the human race.

No cause ever presented itself to the Greek as capable of arousing such fervour as the soldiers of the West displayed. Religion having become a New Testament philosophy, and the Old Testament inspiration in national life having been lost, there was little care for its propagation. The missionary age of the Orthodox Church in the empire, as soon as the Hellenic influence triumphed over the Asiatic, had passed away. Since the days of Cyril and Methodius, the great apostles of the ninth century, the Church could show few conversions and few serious attempts at conversion. That the Church should be orthodox was apparently enough. There was no attempt to enlarge its area. Christianity appeared to be regarded by one party as the best system of philosophy, and by the other, much as the Jew regarded his religion, as a sacred treasure to be kept for his own use and not to be offered to outside unbelievers. His religion in the later centuries never really moved the Greek to engage in missions. Except in regard to personal conduct, to almsgiving, kindness to his fellow-members of the Orthodox Church, and personal and commercial morality, he was incapable of religious sentiment. Something due to his race, something to his traditions, and something to his theological training, made Christianity, except as a philosophical system, sit lightly upon him and failed to make it a powerful national force. Then, as now, the Greek members of the Orthodox Church could not sympathise with or even comprehend the religious sentiment which has led the men of the West, whether acknowledging the jurisdiction of Rome or not, to undertake great movements, or even war, in defence of an object whose only recommendation was that it had right on its side.

In spite of the fact that in the empire and throughout Asia Minor nationality and religion were, as indeed they are to this day, always confounded or regarded as synonymous terms, Orthodox Christianity was unable to add a powerful religious sentiment to the defence of the empire. As a force inducing them to resist the encroachments of Islam, like that which influenced our fathers against Spain or the Ironsides against Charles, I doubt whether it was ever of much value. We have seen a patriarch writing apparently with great satisfaction that the Church was allowed to retain its liberty under Turkish rule. Throughout the long centuries of struggle against Islam, there were many Christians who transferred themselves to the jurisdiction of the sultans in order that they might live in peace. The individual aspect of Christianity was regarded, not the national.

It is when the influence of the Church upon the spirit of the population of the empire is compared with that of Mahometanism upon the Turkish hordes that its weakness as a dynamic force is most plainly seen. Mahometanism, like Christianity in Western lands and in Russia, is a missionary faith. Islam as a fighter’s religion, with its fatalism, its rewards of the most sensual pleasures that a barbarian is capable of conceiving, and its ennobling teaching that fighting the battles of the faith is fighting for God, has produced the most terrible armies that have ever come out from among any of the races among which its converts have been made. Islam in the twentieth century has spent much of its original force, because doubt as to its divine origin has entered into the hearts of its ablest members. Those among them who have seen or have otherwise learned the results of Christian civilisation instinctively and almost unconsciously judge the two religions by their fruits. Such men either become entirely neglectful of the ceremonious duties which their religion imposes, or, if they profess to have become more intent in their religious convictions than before, perform their ceremonies with a sub-consciousness that their religion is not better than that of the unbelievers. In whichever category they fall they lose their belief in the exclusively divine character of their creed. Nor do the studies in astronomy, medicine, geology, and other modern sciences fail to implant a similar and even a greater amount of scepticism in the Mahometan than they have done in the Christian mind. While visits to foreign countries and scientific studies are undertaken by few, their influence as a leaven is great.

In the centuries preceding the Moslem conquest of Constantinople scepticism was absent among both the Christian and Mahometan masses. The Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, more perhaps than at any other time, were full of the zeal of new converts. They were in a period of conquest which stimulated them. Many, perhaps most of them, believed in their divine mission. They were the chosen people, whose duty it was to give idolaters the choice of conversion to the one true faith or of death, to subdue all nations who accepted either the Old or the New Testament but refused to accept the prophethood of Mahomet, and to treat them as rayahs or cattle. Their spiritual pride caused them to think of those who professed any form of Christianity as being inferior and divinely predestined to occupy a hopelessly lower plane, as having only the privilege that their lives should be spared so long as they paid tribute and accepted subjection. Their central, overpowering belief was that they had a mission from God and the Prophet, and the result of such belief was fearlessness of danger. It was their duty to kill idolaters and subjugate Christians. Whatever happened to them in the fulfilment of this duty was not their business but God’s. He would bring about the predestined victory or the temporary defeat; but in either case it was well with them. If they lived, the plunder of their enemies was their reward; if they died, then heaven and the houris.

When this attitude of mind is compared with that which existed among the members of the Orthodox Church, we see at once great divergences between the two forms of faith as national ethical forces. On the one hand, the student of comparative religions must give that Church credit for having aided the growth of the population in the Christian virtues, for having given them an inspiration enabling them to suffer and to hope, for having preserved learning, developed national intelligence, cultivated exact thought, for having promoted philosophical studies and in various ways guarded the treasures of classic times until the rest of Europe was ready to receive them. On the other hand, such student, while recognising that Mahometanism prevents progress by assigning an inferior position to woman, by inculcating a spirit of fatalism which mischievously affects almost every act of the believer’s life and keeps the Turkish race in poverty, and by presenting a lower ideal of life, will have to admit that its influence as a religious force, with its ever-present sense of a Supreme Power, omnipotent to save or to destroy, was far greater than that of the Orthodox Church, and that the Church failed to supply the stimulus of a national inspiration comparable with that of the hostile creed, or with that furnished by Christianity to the men of the West.

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