And the incessant labours of foreign scholars are beginning to filter even into the ideas of the general reader. Russian and Greek monasteries have preserved unknown and precious chronicles; and Armenian, Saracen, and Persian manuscripts have lately been added to our annals. The terrible Corpus of Byzantine histories becomes less heartbreaking in its dryness and its affectation, with all the light that modern scholarship has thrown upon that record of romantic and tremendous events, too often told by official annalists with pedantic dulness and cold-blooded commonplace. Krause, Hopf, Heyd, Gfrorer, in Germany; Sabatier, Rambaud, Schlumberger, Drapeyron, Bayet, in France; Byzantios, and Paspates, in Greece, have given a new life to this vast repertory of a thousand years of varying fortune.
Constantinople has received a new impulse
At the same time, the local archaeology of Constantinople has received a new impulse. The political and economic changes which resulted from the course of events, from the Crimean War of 1853 1:0 the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, have opened Constantinople much as Japan was opened thirty years ago. European scholars and resident Greeks have been enabled to study the remains; the Sultan has formed a most interesting museum under Hamdi Bey, a Turkish archaeologist guided tour ephesus; and Dr. Paspates, a Greek antiquarian, has attempted in the cuttings and works of the new railway, almost wholly to reconstruct Byzantine topography.
The vague and somewhat traditional localisation repeated by Banduri, Ducange, Gyllius, Busbecq, and the rest, has now been corrected by scientific inspection of ruins and partial excavation. The ingenious labours of Labarte, Salzenberg, Schlumberger, Bayet, Mordtmann, Riant, and others,1 have been tested by some new excavations on the spot. No one could well deal with Byzantine antiquities without examining the works of the late Dr. Paspates, especially of the Byzantine Palaces, which is now accessible to the English reader in the new translation of Mr. Metcalfe (1893)-
We have all been unjust to this Byzantine empire; and its restoration to its true place in the story of human civilisation is beyond doubt the great lacuna of our current histories. What they tell us is mainly the story of its last four hundred years — when the Eastern empire was dying under the mortal blows inflicted on it as it stood between the fanaticism of the East and the jealousy of the West. Of the seven centuries from Theodosius to the Crusades we hear little save Palace intrigues, though these years were the true years of glory in Byzantine history.. This was the period when she handed down, and handed down alone, the ancient world to the modern; when Constantinople was the greatest and most civilised city in Europe, the last refuge of law, arts, and learning, the precursor of the Crusades in defending Christian civilisation by four centuries.
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