Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed.  Turkish nomads from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world as the vigour of the Arabs waned.  First they came as slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam.  As champions of the caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels encroachment on the Moslem border.  They challenged the Romaic Empire’s progress in Armenia, and in A.D. 1071—­five years after the Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the making of England—­the Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to Greece.

Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia.  The Arab could make no lodgement there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a miniature reproduction of his original environment.  Tribe after tribe crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out.  The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay.  The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required.  The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced.  The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable.  He imposed his language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life, though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought.  Turk and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake, bridge, and village in the country took on a Turkish name, and a new nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the supreme enemy, of the race.

This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire’s doom.  Robbed of its Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at least as destructive as its eastern foes.  The brutal regime of the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more.  It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers,