It seems difficult to understand how the taking of Constantinople could have any effect on our literature.  I will try to explain, but in order to do so clearly I must go back to the time of the Romans.

All of you have read English history, and there you read of the Romans.  You know what a clever and conquering people they were, and how they subdued all the wild tribes who lived in the countries around them.  Besides conquering all the barbarians around them, the Romans conquered another people who were not barbarians, but who were in some ways more civilized than themselves.  These were the Greeks.  They had a great literature, they were more learned and quite as skilled in the arts of peace as the Romans.  Yet in 146 B.C., long before the Romans came to our little island, Greece became a Roman province.

Nearly five hundred years later there sat upon the throne an Emperor named Constantine.  And he, although Rome was still pagan, became a Christian.  He was, besides, a great and powerful ruler.  His court was brilliant, glittering with all the golden splendor of those far-off times.  But although Rome was still pagan, Greece, a Roman province, had become Christian.  And in this Christian province Constantine made up his mind to build a New Rome.

In those days the boundaries of Greece stretched far further than they do now, and it was upon the shores of the Bosphorus that Constantine built his new capital.  There was already an ancient town there named Byzantium, but he transformed it into a new and splendid city.  The Emperor willed it to be called New Rome, but instead the people called it the city of Constantine, and we know it now as Constantinople.

When Constantinople was founded it was a Roman city.  All the rulers were Roman, all the high posts were filled by Romans, and Latin was the speech of the people.  But in Constantinople it happened as it had happened in England after the Conquest.  In England, for a time after the Conquest, the rulers were French and the language was French, but gradually all that passed away, and the language and the rulers became English once more.  So it was in Constantinople.  By degrees it became a Greek city, the rulers became Greek, and Greek was the language spoken.

In building a second capital Constantine had weakened his Empire.  Soon it was split in two, and there arose a western and an eastern Empire.  As time went on the Western Empire with Rome at its head declined and fell, while the Eastern Empire with Constantinople as its capital grew great.  But it grew into a Greek Empire.  Even very clever people cannot tell the exact date at which the Roman Empire came to an end and the Greek or Byzantine Empire, as it is called, began.  So we need not trouble about that.  All that is needful for us to understand now it that Constantinople was a Christian city, a Greek city, and a treasure-house of Greek learning and literature.