But that is to anticipate what happened later and must be considered later.  I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan and political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of the Crusade on the merely pagan and political side.  In one sentence, it meant that Rome had to recover what Byzantium could not keep.  But something further had happened as affecting Rome than anything that could be understood by a man standing as I have imagined myself standing, in the official area of Byzantium.  When I have said that the Byzantian civilisation seemed still to be reigning, I meant a curious impression that, in these Eastern provinces, though the Empire had been more defeated it has been less disturbed.  There is a greater clarity in that ancient air; and fewer clouds of real revolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun.  This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreign religion has successfully fought and ruled.  But indeed the enigma is also the explanation.  In the East the continuity of culture has only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done.  In the West it has been interrupted by positive things that Christendom itself has done.  In the West the past of Christendom has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars.  That, I incline to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void.  It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence of the experiments of parliament and popular representation, the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality.  In the East the civilisation lived on, or if you will, lingered on; in the West it died and was reborn.  But for a long time, it should be remembered, it must have seemed to the East merely that it died.  The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of barbaric war, while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous in the sun.  The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was stiffening and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not have revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle.  It was something else that was destined to reveal it.  The Crusades meant many things; but in this matter they meant one thing, which was like a word carried to them on the great west wind.  And the word was like that in an old Irish song:  “The west is awake.”  They heard in the distance the cries of unknown crowds and felt the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came the trampling of horses and the noise of harness and of horns of war; new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men full of hope crying out in the old Roman tongue “Id Deus vult,” Rome was risen from the dead.