from the fate of their brethren further south.  This Bulgarian state included a large ‘Vlach’ element descended from those Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their original migration; while the main body of the ‘Rumans’, whom the same thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the Danube, had established itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains.  Like the Bulgars, this Romance population had chosen the Orthodox creed, and so had the purely Slavonic Serbs, who had replaced the Rumans in the basin of the Morava and the Bosnian hills, as far westward as the Adriatic coast.  Beyond, the heathen Magyars had pressed into the Danubian plains like a wedge, and cut off the Orthodox world from the Latin-Teutonic Christendom of the west; but it looked as though the two divisions of Europe were embarked upon the same course of development.  Both were evolving a system of strongly-knit nationalities, neither wholly interdependent nor wholly self-sufficient, but linked together in their individual growth by the ties of common culture and religion.  In both the darkness was passing.  The future of civilization seemed once more assured, and in the Orthodox world the new Greek nation seemed destined to play the leading part.

[Footnote 1:  The Armenians split off from the Catholic Church four centuries before the schism between the Roman and Orthodox sections of the latter.]

His cultural and political heritage from his ancient predecessors gave the Romaic Greek in this period of revival an inestimable advantage over his cruder neighbours, and his superiority declared itself in an expansion of the Romaic Empire.  In the latter half of the tenth century A.D. the nest of Arab pirates from Spain, which had established itself in Krete and terrorized the Aegean, was exterminated by the Emperor Nikiphoros Phokas, and on the eastern marches Antioch was gathered within the frontier at the Arabs’ expense, and advanced posts pushed across Euphrates.  In the first half of the eleventh century Basil, ‘Slayer of the Bulgars’, destroyed the Balkan kingdom after a generation of bitter warfare, and brought the whole interior of the peninsula under the sway of Constantinople.  His successors turned their attention to the cast again, and attracted one Armenian principality after another within the Imperial protectorate.  Nor was the revival confined to politics.  The conversion of the Russians about A.D. 1000 opened a boundless hinterland to the Orthodox Church, and any one who glances at a series of Greek ivory carvings or studies Greek history from the original sources, will here encounter a literary and artistic renaissance remarkable enough to explain the fascination which the barbarous Russian and the outlandish Armenian found in Constantinople.  Yet this renaissance had hardly set in before it was paralysed by an unexpected blow, which arrested the development of Modern Greece for seven centuries.