The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present, but the most direct link of all was the political survival of the Empire.  Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away.  The marvellous system of Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in the throes of dissolution.  Within a century of its final codification by Justinian’s commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was now replaced by more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued with Mosaic principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of the New Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the Lex Talionis.  The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and elaborated by Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps districts were the only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age.  Yet the tradition of order lived on.  The army itself preserved Roman discipline and technique to a remarkable degree, and the military districts were already becoming the basis for a reconstituted civil government.  The wealth of Latin technicalities incorporated in the Greek style of ninth-century officialdom witnesses to this continuity with the past and to the consequent political superiority of the Romaic Empire over contemporary western Europe.

Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently secure field for its future development.  In the Balkan peninsula the Slav had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching from Avlona to Salonika.  East of Salonika the empire still controlled little more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military highway linking them with each other and with Constantinople.  But beyond the Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia as far as Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both of the Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.

A new Greek nation had in fact come into being, and it found itself in touch with new neighbours, whom the Ancient Greek had never known.  Eastward lay the Armenians, reviving, like the Greeks, after the ebb of the Arab flood, and the Arabs themselves, quiescent within their natural bounds and transfusing the wisdom of Aristotle and Hippokrates into their native culture.  Both these peoples were sundered from the Orthodox Greek by religion[1] as well as by language, but a number of nationalities established on his opposite flank had been evangelized from Constantinople and followed the Orthodox patriarch in his schism with Rome.  The most important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter was the Bulgarian kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from the Danube and the Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople and Salonika.  It had been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic nomads from the trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely absorbed in the Slavonic population which they had endowed with their name and had preserved by political consolidation