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§ 2.

CHAP. I. bringing agricultural produce to market, is greater in Greece than in most other countries; and it would be considered by proprietors of whole provinces as an unprofitable sacrifice. Their neglect consequently pro

duced the abandonment of the cultivation of the soil in a great part of the country, and its conversion into pasture land. From provinces in this condition the Byzantine government often derived very little revenue, for the large proprietors found facilities of gaining exemption from taxation, and the impoverished condition of the farmers or colons rendered the tribute insignificant. The defence of a province so situated became a matter of no interest to the central power at Constantinople, and it was abandoned to the invaders without a struggle. In Greece, the great proprietors seem to have been left to defend themselves against the intrusion or invasion of the Sclavonian nomades without assistance, and the progress of the first Sclavonian colonists may have been facilitated by the numbers of agricultural slaves of Sclavonian race whom they found established in the country. The Sclavonian lands were the great slave marts of the age. Such was the internal state of preparation in Greece to encounter the enemy when the Sclavonians attacked the Byzantine empire as a warlike and conquering race.

The earliest steps by which the Sclavonians colonised the Hellenic soil are unnoticed in history. Like the subsequent increase in the number of the Greeks which expelled or absorbed them, its very causes pass unrecorded, and the greater part of what we know is learned by inferences drawn from incidental notices connected with other facts. Strange to say, this remarkable revolution in the population of Greece excited very little attention among modern historians until recently; and the great vicissitudes that took place in the numbers of the Greek population of the Byzantine empire in Europe, during

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different periods of the middle ages, is a subject which CHAP. I. has not yet been carefully investigated.1

The fabric of the ancient world was broken in pieces during the reign of Justinian, and Greece presented the spectacle of ruined cities and desolate fields. Procopius, in recording one of the great irruptions of the Hunnish armies, whose course was followed by Sclavonian auxiliaries and subjects, mentions that the barbarians passed the fortifications at Thermopylæ, and spread their ravages over all the continent inhabited by the Greeks, as far as the isthmus of Corinth. This notice places the commencement of the hostile incursions of the Sclavonians into Greece as early as the year 540.2 But the colonisation of great part of the Hellenic soil by a foreign race is a fact first noticed long after its occurrence, and whose extent is proved more convincingly by its consequences than by the testimony of historians. In the adulatory work of Procopius on the buildings of Justinian, the conversion of a large part of Greece into pasture lands, by the repeated ravages of the barbarians, is incidentally revealed; and the necessity of constructing forts, for the protection of the population engaged in the regular agricultural operations of husbandry, is distinctly stated. The fourth book is filled with an enumeration of forts and castles constructed and repaired for no other object.

1 Colonel Leake, in his Researches in Greece, published in 1814, first pointed out the proofs we have of the long residence of the Sclavonians in every part of Greece, and cited the principal Byzantine authorities which certify the political importance of these colonies, p. 379. Professor Fallmerayer became the champion of Sclavonianism, in his History of the Morea, in 1830; and he has ever since defended the cause with great eloquence, learning, and wit, but with some exaggeration. It was Colonel Leake who first observed that the Sclavonian names of places in Greece are often the same as those of places in the most distant parts of Russia. By means of this discovery, Fallmerayer endeavours to exterminate the ancient Greeks.

2 Procopius, De Bello Persico, lib. ii. c. 4, p. 95, (Paris edit.) He mentions frequent incursions of the Sclavonians into Illyria and Thrace; and in alluding to this very expedition in the secret history, he connects the Huns, Sclavonians, and Antes, together as allies, (c. 18, p. 54.) Several Byzantine historians speak of irruptions of the Huns and Sclavonians, in a united body, into Thrace in 559.-Malalas, 235; Theophanes, 197; Cedrenus, 386; Clinton, Fasti Romani, i. 810.

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CHAP. I. The care, too, which the emperor devoted to fortifying the isthmus of Corinth, when he found that the greater part of the Peloponnesian cities were not in a state of defence, affords strong proof of the danger of an irruption of barbarous tribes, even into that secluded citadel of the Hellenic race.1 The particular mention of the fortifications necessary to protect the fertile land on the river Rhechios, in Macedonia, and the construction of the city of Kastoria, to replace the ruined Diocletianopolis, while they prove the desertion of great part of Chalcidice and Upper Macedonia by the ancient inhabitants, prepare us for finding these districts occupied by a new race of emigrants.2 Now, it is precisely in these districts that we find the Sclavonians first forming the mass of the inhabitants within the limits once occupied by the Hellenic race.3 In these cases of colonisation, as in many others afterwards, it is possible that the Sclavonians occupied their new settlements without any opposition on the part of the Roman government; and though their countrymen continued to ravage and depopulate the provinces of the empire as enemies, these peaceable settlers may have been allowed to retain their establishments as subjects and tributaries. It is certain that the Goths, and other Teutonic people who invaded the Eastern Empire, were nothing more than tribes of warriors, who, like the Dorians, the Romans, and the Othoman Turks, became great nations from the extent of their conquests, not from their original numerical strength. But the Sclavonian race, on the contrary, had for ages formed the bulk of the population in the wide-extended territories that spread from the shores of the Adriatic to the sources of the Dnieper and the Volga. In a considerable portion of the countries in which they subsequently appear as

Procopius, De Ædificiis, lib. iv. c. 2, p. 71.

2 Ibid. lib. iv. c. 3-4. The Rhechios is supposed to be the river that flows from the Lake Bolbe to the Gulf of Strymon.

3 Tafel, De Thessalonicâ ejusque Agro. Proleg. Ivii.

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SCLAVONIAN COLONISATION OF GREECE.

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conquerors, a kindred race seems to have cultivated the CHAP. I.
soil, even under the Roman government; but at what
period the Sclavonians began to force themselves south-
ward into the territories once occupied by the Illyrians
and the Thracians, is a question of too much obscurity to
be examined in this sketch.

The successive decline of the Roman, Gothic, and
Hunnish empires, in the provinces along the Danube,
allowed the hitherto subject Sclavonians to assume inde-
pendence, and form themselves into warlike bands, in
imitation of their masters. The warlike and agricultural
Sclavonians from that time became as distinct as if they
belonged to two different nations. A contrast soon arose
in their state of civilisation; and this, added to the
immense extent, and disconnected and diversified form of
the territory over which the Sclavonian race was scattered,
prevented it from ever uniting, so as to form one empire.
The Sclavonians always make their appearance in the
history of Greece as small independent hordes, or as the
subjects of the Huns, Avars, or Bulgarians, and never,
except in the Illyrian provinces, form independent states,
with a permanent political existence. Their ravages as
enemies are recorded, their peaceful immigrations as friends
and clients pass unnoticed. No inconsiderable part of
those provinces of the Eastern Empire that were desolated
by the repeated inroads of the northern nations were
nevertheless repeopled by Sclavonian colonists, who, often
fearing to devote themselves to husbandry, lest they
should invite fresh incursions, confined their attention to
pasturing cattle, and adopted a nomadic life as the only
method of securing their property. In this way they
became, according to the vicissitudes of the times, the
serfs or the enemies of their Greek neighbours in the
walled towns. It was a characteristic of the Sclavonian
colonists, in the Byzantine empire, for a long period, that
they had an aversion to agriculture, and followed it only

§ 2.

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CHAP. I. On a small scale, deriving their principal support from cattle. The great extent of the Sclavonian colonies in Macedonia, at the end of the seventh century, is testified by the number that the Emperor Justinian II. was able to transport into Asia. On one occasion, a colony of upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand souls was settled on the shores of the Hellespont, collected from the tribes established in Thrace and the neighbourhood of Thessalonica. 2

In order to understand correctly how far the diminution of the Greek and Roman races might proceed in the countries between the Adriatic and the Danube, while a numerous population of subject people continued to inhabit the country, it is only necessary to compare it with the rapid extinction of the Goths in Italy, and of the Vandals in Africa, about the same period. In the Cis-Danubian provinces, neither the Greek nor the Roman element appears to have impregnated the whole mass of the inhabitants and both peoples, were always in the position of dominant races—liable consequently to that incessant diminution that sooner or later inevitably destroys all privileged orders. The progress of depopulation in the Roman empire is, however, attested from an earlier period by numerous laws, many of which prove the rapid diminution, in the members of the municipalities forcing the government to adopt regulations for the purpose of keeping every class of society in its own sphere and place. The steady diminution of the Greek race, from the time of Justinian I. to that of Leo. III. the Isaurian, is testified by the whole history of the period;

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1 Institutions Militaires de l'Empereur Leon le Philosophe, traduites par Joly de Maizeroy, tome ii. p. 117. Tactica, c. xviii. § 99. Imp. Mauricii Ars Militaris, p. 272, (edit. Scheffer.) The spirit of the warlike Sclavonians, at the period they poured their conquering armies into the Eastern Empire, is described in Menander, Corpus Hist. Byzantinæ, p. 406, edit. Bonn; p. 165, edit. Paris.

2 Theophanes, p. 304, 305, 364. Thirty thousand troops were raised in this colony shortly after its establishment.

3 Codex Justinianeus, x. 32; xviii. xix. xx. xxi. l.

Even he who quitted his

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