had passive strength enough to resist any waves for many a long year. Had it not been for a gang of wreckers who called themselves crusaders, it might be there still.
The rending process also took time, for the rivets of Roman organization did not "give" readily; and it was not completed till the Khalifs sat in Damascus at one end, and Charlemagne had been crowned at Rome at the other. Successive emperors might give special attention, now to one of the sections that tended to part, and now to the other. At first their attention was drawn to the East. Zeno and Anastasius regarded the West, subdued by Goths and Vandals, as lost already and irrecoverably; they might indeed, as opportunity offered, let loose a second horde of "barbarians" against those in possession, but no more. Thus Anastasius watched Theodoric go against Odoacer with much the feelings, one imagines, of a man who sees the pack of wolves who have been hunting him turn against the second pack that are already ravaging his flocks. The country was lost, and they "cut their losses." They would not run any risk of estranging the subjects who remained—the Monophysites of Syria and Egypt—to conciliate the "Dyophysites"[1] of Italy who were lost to them already.
Hence these two emperors are monophysite in sympathy; and under them that confession is dominant in the empire, till at last all the great patriarchates save Rome only are held by its followers. Roman Christians, abandoned by the empire, are loyal to an Arian ruler, and Rome anathematizes all the "Eastern Empire."
- ↑ A convenient term for those who held the doctrine of the "two natures" in some form: the alternative terms " Orthodox" and "Nestorian" both beg the question of the status of those so labelled.
