The fierce Bulgars and the Slavs of the north of the peninsula had not yet emerged from barbarism. The various colonies of Wallachs, of Huns, and of other races which were settled in the empire and were compelled to obey its rule, had little or no sympathy with the people by whom they were surrounded. All the peoples, races, and tongues of the empire regarded Constantinople, with its prosperity, its immense trade, and its luxury, with a certain rivalry or jealousy often amounting to hostility. The community of feeling arising either from patriotism or religion, winch has always been present in the great protracted struggles of nations, hardly existed in the Byzantine empire. Its territory was too widespread in an age when communication was slow for any such common sentiment to exert a powerful influence over the mass of the population.

The isolation of peoples of various races and languages was never, under its rule, so complete as it is now under that of the Ottoman Turks, where Greek, Turk, and Bulgarian live side by side without intermarriage and almost without intercourse. On the contrary, the empire had show a wonderful capacity for assimilating the various races which had flowed into it; but these races had come in such numbers and were of such widely different composition that the process was far from complete during the period we have been considering, when it was necessary for the nation to put forth all her strength. A large portion of her army was continually engaged in keeping order among the diverse peoples and the discordant elements of which her population was formed.

Normans of Sicily

We have seen that the attacks made upon her from without were of a formidable nature. While those from the Normans of Sicily and from the Italian states were of a kind which have fallen to the ordinary lot of nations, those from the East were of an altogether extraordinary and exceptional character. Two broad streams of Asiatic barbarians, one to the north and the other to the south of the Black Sea, were flowing in upon Europe during the century and a half preceding 1200, and the Eastern empire alone had to resist on behalf of Europe.

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