Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere

Chapter Six

Lev Gumilev

Part 2

The Phases of an Upsurge of Drive

The birth of an ethnos. The simplest version of the beginning of ethnogenesis is the rise of a new ethnos on the background of a described static state that cannot alter of itself. (1) None of the members of the ethnos want such a change; (2) none of them can even imagine it; (3) in order to change the character of the process a powerful, purposive energy impulse is needed that no self-awareness can create because that would contradict the law of the conservation of energy. Nevertheless ethnoi do arise from time to time. Let us see how.

Several ethnoi with different systems of economy and a different culture five alongside one another in one territory. They are habituated to each other; there are constant but insignificant conflicts between them and, as a rule, these pass without marked consequences. Since the fluctuations occur within quite regular limits there is homeostasis.

But now the population of the region passes into a dynamic state, i.e. begins to develop. The first stage of development is a breaking of the established relationships, like an explosion. That always happens as follows: a certain number of persons appear in one or two generations who are not resigned to the limitations that their grandfathers willingly put up with. They demand a place in the sun corresponding to their talents, energy, feats, and successes, but not previously accorded them, and determined only by accidents of birth in some one family. The first of them perish because the collective resists them, but if the process goes on long enough, there proves to be a sufficient number of these hothead, desperate, foolhardy, reckless malcontents to rally and impose their will on people of the old disposition. The foundation of the old temple rests on the bones of martyrs and victims. So it was with the founding of Rome, when the Latin emigrants gathered on the seven hills for war with the kings of Alba Longa; such were the 'faithful' of the robber-shepherd David, who united the remnants of the twelve much battered Jewish tribes in a strong kingdom with a centralized authority, religion, and ethnic self-awareness. In both cases the slaveowning formation was preserved. The above-listed did not differ in any way from the companions of Muhammed, the Mohajeers and Ansars, and the Zulus, the heroic soldiers of Chaka, Dingaan, and Cetywayo, and the Matabele on the banks of the Zambezi. To them all were similar not only the war bands of the Vikings but also the barons of the early Carolingians, Charlemagne's counts, and the knights who were the prototypes of the literary images of the knights of the Round Table; they after all also broke with the accustomed way of life and regarded that not as a sin but as a feat.

Here is a brilliant example of drive and change of the ethnic stereotype of behaviour. In the twelfth century the Great Steppe was inhabited by various peoples whose social life was regulated by tribal and clan norms and standards of life that had arisen after the disintegration of the military-democratic formations, the hordes. More than half of the nomads professed Nestorian Christianity, but the Mongols in Transbaikalia and Eastern Mongolia had their own religion. In this initial condition there gradually took place a process of the isolation of so-called 'men of long will' from the tribes, i.e. of those with most drive who did not accommodate themselves to tribal life. At first they sought sustenance in the hills and steppes, but inevitably had to resort to robbery, and then their death was decided in advance. Later they began to form small bands, and finally rallied around Temujin, an impoverished member of the noble clan of Borjigins, who had been orphaned at the age of nine. In the second half of the twelfth century Temujin, thanks to skilful, artful diplomacy and organizing talent, succeeded in creating first a small horde and then uniting the whole Great Steppe up to the Urals, and in reconciling the tribes conquered by force of arms to his authority, so that they took part in distant campaigns on equal terms with the Mongols.

The direction of their dominant was suggested by the need to react to an extremely difficult and all the time worsening situation. The Chinese and Central Asian Muslims were behaving toward the Turks and Mongols in the same way as the North American colonists did toward the Indians. The Chinese and Muslims systematically attacked the nomads with the aim of physically exterminating them, sparing only the small children, whom they sold into slavery. Therefore the nomads, guided by clan categories of blood feud and collective responsibility, had an instinctive but conscious need to fight the aggressors.

The steppe, united by Temujin, proved strong enough, answering blow by blow, to defeat their perennial enemies and (what is especially impressive) Christians and pagans acted hand in hand. The later campaigns of Genghis-khan's heirs were provoked by exceptionally hostile acts by the Chinese national Sting Empire, the splinter groups of the broken Khorezmites of Jelal ud-din, the Russian dukes who took the side of the Kipchaks (Polovtsy), and the Hungarians, who wiped out a Mongol embassy. The Mongols kept part of the conquered lands thanks to the fact that there were groups among the local population who considered an alliance with the Mongol khans salutary for themselves. Such were the Armenians in the Near East, who were under pressure from Muslims, and Alexander Nevsky in Russia, who was defending the Russian land against Catholics (Swedes, Germans, and their allies). The vast territories and diverse populations could not constitute a single whole, and broke up into several states in which the local population gradually assimilated the small bands of Mongol conquerors, creating new ethnoi with a different social system and a different culture: the Tatars of the Golden Horde, i.e. the Volga urban population, of various tribes, of course, united by loyalty to the Genghisite khans; the steppe Nogai in the west and the eastern nomads united in Kazakh tribal unions (juses); the Uzbeks, Oirats , Buryats, and remnants of the Khalkha Mongols and Berguts.

These examples of' the rise of an ethnic system are clear because they are simple. The cruel drought of the tenth century A.D. depopulated the Great Steppe for a century, which was peopled again during the next moistening of the arid zone in the eleventh century. The process of readaptation led to an increase in the population of the steppes but not to integration of it. Only a drive impulse rallied the isolated tribes of the Pacific maritime taiga and the Transbaikalian steppe into two powerful creative ethnoi, the Jurchens in the cast and the Mongols in Transbaikalia. Integration proceeded relatively easily since it arose on the basis of a homeostatic state of the primordial ethnic substrata. The expansion of the new ethnoi was resisted in the main by foreigners. In spite of their immense preponderance in number and technique they were defeated. That does not mean, of course, that victory of the Mongols was preordained, because the Aztecs and the Zulus suffered defeat in similar situations. The Mongols simply knew how to exploit the opportunity for victory, but that is already not ethnogenesis but political history.

The case is rather more complicated when a new dynamic state arises not from a static one but from a dynamic one that has already covered a considerable stretch of evolution. Such a situation occurred in the first century A.D. when, on the limes of the Roman Empire, at the junction of the Hellenic, Hebrew, and Syrian ethnoi there arose a population equally similar and equally foreign to all those listed above. This was a Christian community that gave 'unto Caesar the things that are Caesars', did not distinguish in its milieu between Greek and Jew, and was hated by everyone around it because its ethnic dominant was foreign and incomprehensible to them.

From the tiny Christian community of the first century A.D. arose later the huge ethnos and culture we call Byzantine. The mechanism of the forming of the Christian ethnos differs outwardly from those considered above, but wits identical with them in essence [+30]. The preachers and martyrs, apologists and contemplators, behaved just like Roland who died in the gorge of Roncesvalles, Leonidas of Sparta at Thermopylae, and many other heroes. The tactics of behaviour were changed, but the psychological pattern was the same, and also the results – the creation of a new collective of people with an original culture, i.e. a new ethnos that three hundred years later, having supported the leprous tyrant and murderer Constantine, gave him victory and the diadem, contenting itself only with getting the right to legal existence. And then, front A.D. 313, the new ethnos 'Romaic Christians' became fact of' world historical importance.

The upsurge of drive. The 'dynamic' phase of ethnogenesis is always linked with expansion, just as heated gas expands. The Byzantine Christians were no exception. But preaching monks rather than soldiers and merchants carried their invincible energy beyond their i native land. Egyptian hermits had already in the third century A.D. left the Thebaid and gone preaching in the west through pagan Rome and Druidic Britannia to the green island of Erin whose inhabitants never knew Roman despotism and civilization.

In the fifth century A.D. an independent Christian church arose in Ireland that categorically did not recognize either the Pope of Rome or the western Church calendar, because their tradition had been brought from the east where a new formation – Byzantium had arisen.

The Byzantine ethnos had no ancestors. That does not mean, of course, that the people who comprised it were not descended from Pithecanthropus, but an ethnos is not a stock of people but a dynamic system arising in historical time, with an impulse of drive as a necessary component in the initial moment of ethnogenesis, a process that smashes an old culture.

In the Mediterranean there was a single Hellenistic culture in antiquity that had absorbed in the process of its development Latium and the Phoenician cities. Ethnically it resembles the WestEuropean because the main Hellenic core did not exhaust all the variants of the diverse Hellenistic culture. Rome, Carthage, and Pella, of course, had their own local features and were independent ethnoi, but in the superethnic sense came within the orbit of Hellenistic culture. There is nothing new in that, incidentally, but it is important for me as a starting point. Roman domination encouraged ethnic levelling but the equalizing of Greek and Latin led to almost the whole population of the Mediterranean merging into one ethnos. But in the first century A.D. new people appeared in the Roman Empire who formed a new entity in the next two centuries. They counterposed themselves to the 'pagans', i.e. to all the rest, and in fact distinguished themselves from them by the character of their behaviour. Obviously the common denominator was not an ideological or political attribute, but an ethnological, i.e. a behavioural one, which was really new and unaccustomed for the Hellenistic culture. It was foreign to the Jews, too, incidentally, who had not by any means merged with the Romans and Greeks, but were not persecuted for their faith.

Members of the Christian communities constituted the nucleus of the 'Byzantine' ethnos, and how that came about we shall now see.

In A.D. 330 the Emperor Constantine transferred his capital to the little town of Byzantium and converted it into luxurious Constantinople. People with drive flowed there from all over the place. Many Goths settled in Thrace on the pretext of service in the armies. Slavs broke the Danubian line of fortifications and settled in the Balkan Peninsula, including the Peloponnese. Syrians were spread from the valley of the Po to the bends of the Huangho. By the sixth century a multi-lingual, multi-tribal but monolithic ethnos had been created to which I arbitrarily attach the name Byzantine. Greek – a heritage of antiquity – was only the state and generally accepted language, but at home everyone spoke his mother tongue. Very soon this 'Byzantine' ethnos became a superethnos because its charm conquered Armenians and Georgians, Isaurians and Slavs, Alans and Crimean Goths.

The history of Byzantium has been interpreted either as a continuation of the history of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), or as the creation of a Christian 'Greek Empire' (Uspensky, Kulakovsky), or as an East-European version of the feudal formation. All these aspects illuminated various aspects of Byzantine history, but the problem of the originality of Byzantine culture remained unsolved. My point of view also does not pretend to a universal description of Byzantium as an entity, but it fills a lacuna in the ethnic history of Europe.

I shall give the name 'Byzantium' to the phenomenon that arose after the impulse of drive of the first and second centuries A.D. in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, which took shape as a church, with all its deviations and currents, and found a stereotype of relationships with the secular authorities. This integral entity was much broader than the boundaries of the Eastern Roman Empire and survived it by many centuries. One may dispute the title, but it is not worth the trouble, because it is comprehensible and settles the problem by a posing of the matter that is constructive for further argument and discussion.

Second Rome or Anti-Rome? If we were to describe the descending limb of the curve of ethnogenesis, the task would be easy. We would establish a progressing simplification of the ethno-social system, a lowering of its resistivity and infiltration by foreign elements. But when we have to describe the ascending limb, then it is much more complicated. With mounting drive the dominant is not found immediately. Certain directions of development begin, struggling more fiercely with one another than with their natural opponent, the departing traditions of the dying superethnos.

But, in spite of that, all resisting systems operate the same as regards the previous one, even when they take on its defence. Julian the Apostate tried to restore the Roman faith, and replaced Christ by Mithra. But Mithraism was a religion as foreign to the Romans as Christianity; these religions penetrated Rome at the same time, under Nero; the devotees of Mithraism were not the Roman nobili but the Illyrian soldier emperors; and mainly legionaries torn from their homes and native lands, and more often foreigners, were initiated into Mithraic mysteries. Even if Julian had been victorious and had rooted out Christianity, he would have consolidated, not the posterity of the god Quirinus and the she-wolf, but a system that would be more correctly understood as Anti-Rome, only in another style than that created by the Christian communities.

They worked away gradually over three centuries, uniting elements with drive that had fallen out of the decrepit system, which did not give them an outlet in creativity for their unruly passions. The Christian communities were the most impulsive force in the Empire.

But since the Roman Empire was a single cultural-social political entity, even with the administrative division in 'East' and 'West', regional populations with both drive and sub-drive coexisted in it that exchanged entropy and negative entropy with one another. In other words, bearers of the tradition of the antique decline of morals lived side by side with vigorous myth-creators, initiators of new traditions. Territorial division would have been good for them, but there was nowhere for them to go, because Rome so offended the surrounding ethnoi that they began to detest all Romans. That is why the superseding of one ethnos, the Roman, by another, the Byzantine, took place over the whole territory of the Roman Empire and was such an agonizing process.

Therefore one can only arbitrarily suggest a date as the 'beginning' of the new process of ethnogenesis and the first phase of its formation.

In the middle of the first century A.D. the preaching of the Apostle Paul laid the beginning of consortia that had not yet emerged from the initial ethnic substrata, but the Romans already saw some sort of entity in them, though they perceived it as a variety of Judaism.

In the middle of the second century, thanks to the activity of St. Justin Martyr, the Christians emerged as a special subethnos categorically dissociated from Judaism; contemporaries counted the gnostics as Christians.

In the early fourth century the Christians were an ethnos within the Roman superethnos that Constantine was forced to recognize. Nevertheless, the Eastern Roman Empire created by him was not yet Byzantium in the ethnological sense of the term; it should rather be understood as a field of the rivalry of Church Christianity and the Mithraists, Neoplatonists, Donatists, Arians, and other subdivisions of the new ethnic element being created before the eyes of the historian and becoming obvious to contemporaries.

Once the warlike, and later on freedom-loving ethnoi of the West, after their conquest by the Romans, supplied brave horsemen and skilled archers to the legions, but by the fourth century A.D. even that was finished. Everything was swept away by irreversible processes of 'drive entropy. Not only the Gallo-Romans and the Britons, but also the Batavians, Frisians, Iberians, and Numidians, in spite of the existence of personal qualities like courage, physical strength, hardiness and endurance, etc., did not have the additional quality that would have enabled them defend their property, families, and life from enemies. The rich, cultured Alans behaved the same way on the eastern frontiers of the region, which enabled them to be conquered by the savage, but not numerous Hunni.

The 'last Romans', who were still encountered in blessed Italy, settled by newcomer Asiatics, were the most craven of all.

The valiant Thracians and Illyrians had already squandered their drive in the third century A.D. The mechanism of that was simple. Courageous, energetic youths had joined the legions for 'careers and fortune', while the passive types had started families in the homeland. So the extreme attribute was separated from the population.

In the fourth century the most efficient and disciplined Roman troops consisted of members of Christian communities. Even Julian the Apostate was compelled to employ them. But they categorically refused to fight against their fellow-believers for example the Bagaudae rebels in Gaul at the end of the third century. Such principledness is sometimes inconvenient, but it made the legionaries, brought up in the strict rules of the Christian communities, more reliable than the demoralized citizens of the Roman world who did not believe in Jupiter and Mars and had long ago lost any notion of fidelity and conscience.

It is a waste of time to try and find an explanation of the difference that arose between the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire in social system. It had been quite unified already in the second century A.D. And (he racial composition of file population could not have been of any significance because tile inhabitants of Greece and Syria were already regarded in Rome in the first century as degenerate descendants of once powerful ancestors. And that was justified.

But in the fourth century the inhabitants of the towns, but not of the villages, of the East took the initiative. Indeed, people with drive, oppressed by the tedium of village life, gathered in the towns, The results of the impulse of drive told in the same fourth century. In the place of citizens of the Roman Empire, in Asia Minor, the Balkans, and Syria, where the new ethnos had taken shape that I arbitrarily call Byzantine – barbarians were repulsed, a vast city, Constantinople, was built, crafts were established, trade was organized not only with neighbours but even with China, and – the main point – the landscape of Syria, Asia Minor Thrace, and Macedonia was preserved. The extensive economy obviously curbed to some extent the tendency to despoliation inherent in migrants, who proved in Byzantium to be subject to existing laws and customs.

Even in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople, in spite of its population exceeding a million, nature was not annihilated. The city was buried in the greenery of gardens, carefully watered, which fed the families of the inhabitants. The Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora supplied the population with fish; grain was imported from Egypt, where the soil was annually renewed by the floods of the Nile, and from black-earth 'Scythia' (the steppes of the northern coast of the Black Sea). It was proved that a culture could be created, crafts developed, and magnificent structures erected without despoiling nature. That was achieved because the surplus energy (drive) of the Byzantines was expended on theological disputes and dissensions, which did them much harm, but were harmless as regards the surrounding nature.

Decomposition and regeneration. But everything happened differently in the West. The development of engineering (roads, aqueducts, gigantic galleys) made it possible to ensure supplies for the two-million population of Rome. Grain was brought there from Sicily and North Africa, wine from Greece and Provence, wool from Spain. Only fresh meat and flowers were then not amenable to transportation, therefore Italy was turned into a pasture for cattle, and plantation of violets, because ladies have always loved flowers. Rome produced nothing, only consumed. But whereas the Roman officials in the first and second centuries A.D. had known how to organize the exploitation of the provinces and to reward their fleeced population by establishing a firm order and certain rule of law (far from always observed), in the third and fourth centuries it was no longer a matter of that. The soldier emperors converted the country into an arena of civil war for power. And because the legionaries had to be rewarded, there was a general confiscation of the rich latifundists and squeezing of money from the poor landworkers. The latter in turn ravished the land of the parcels , trying to subsist today, because it was terrible and senseless to think of tomorrow's punishments. The population steadily declined in numbers, and those who remained alive lost the will to resist. It was not the vital forces of an ethnos but the social structure and state traditions that held together the grandiose structure of the Roman Empire at that time. It could not long continue.

The weakened West easily submitted to the booming East; after the last attempts at resistance in A.D. 393-394, led by the Frank Arbogast, it was converted into a periphery of Byzantium, already administratively formed into an Orthodox empire. That measure was carried out by Theodosius and had most important consequences: the ethnos formed on the ideas of Christ expanded so far that it became a superethnos, and the currents of Christian thought became a symbol of self-asserting ethnoi, hostile to centralized authorities, lay and spiritual.

The Goths retained Arianism, condemned in A.D. 381 by the Oecumenical Council of Constantinople. By that they distinguished themselves from the Byzantine entity. The Berbers of Numidia supported the Donatists not even as heretics but simply as schismaties – and Africa passed out of the hands of the Emperors of Rome. But the descendants of the pagans of Gaul and Spain appealed to the Oecumenical Church for the support and expected aid from the imperial authorities – alas, without success. The East, too, lacked military forces.

In that super-difficult situation there lived, conquered, and died Actius Flavius, son of a Roman and a German woman, who defended Gaul against the hordes of the Huns and Germans, but was murdered by the Emperor Valentinian personally during a business talk. Neither Aetius nor Valentinian had anything of the Roman about them, but the former was courageous and clever, while the latter was an envious take and lecher. There are various people in any superethnos, but there proved to be more like Actius in the East than in the West. That is why vile crimes, which were also frequent in Constantinople, did not ruin that city, while Rome was sacked by the Vandals immediately after the death of Actius in A.D. 455. If there had been real Romans there they would have defended their Eternal City.

Some people suggest that 'the barbarians, having destroyed the Roman Empire, did not annihilate the Roman people but merged with them'. Is that so? Look at the demographic facts: in the first century A.D. the population of Italy was seven or eight million, and around 600 A.D. four or rive million, a halving in spite of the influx of Langobards, Heruli, Rugi, Goths, and immigrants from Syria and Asia Minor, i.e. Christian Semites. It was the last-named who constituted the bulk of the population of the towns of Northern Italy (Milan, Verona, Padua, Ravenna, and Aquileia) when the Latin population of Italy had been steeply reduced because the majority of the male population belonging to the lower orders had served in the legions after the reforms of Marius and returned so exhausted that they did not acquire families. The rich, the nobili and the equites, had concubines from the slave women or went in for unnatural practices. The Roman matrons, too, were not behind them in that. So the almost halving of the population, together with the recorded immigration from the north and the east, indicates a change of ethnos in Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The old ethnos disappeared and in its place an ethnic conglomerate appeared.

When the Goths and the Langobards conquered the Apennine Peninsula, it was sparsely populated. That is why they succeeded in subordinating it. I have dwelt on this example in such detail so as to explain the whole complexity of the problem of ethnogenesis, which cannot be answered without studying history.

It was not like that on the eastern frontiers of the former empire, where the Christian stream proved viable and gave rise to an entity that had no name for itself. On the basis of the early Christian communities (which had grown rapidly by the fifth century A.D. over the whole extent of the Roman Empire and a number of neighbouring countries) an ethnos was created that called itself by the old word 'Romaic' (but I have already spoken about this in detail above). From the sixth century Macedonia, Thrace, and the Peloponnese had been settled by Slavs, the Epirus by Albanians, the south of Asia Minor by Isaurians, its centre by Galatians, the north by Lazi (Georgians), the east by Assyrians, and Syria, although it had a Greek substratum, but only in the towns, and it was not numerous. The native Greek population held out for a longer time on the islands, but Crete and Cyprus were conquered by Arabs in the eighth century, and their Greek population was sold on the slave markets. So there remained the urban population of Constantinople, which had a very motley population but employed Greek as the generally spoken and literary language.

So, can one consider the Byzantine ethnos a continuation of the Roman or Hellenic, although it had received a rich cultural heritage (languages with a rich literature, towns with water mains, gardens, and fortresses on the boundaries)? The new people used some of these goods; some they scorned, and some they lost with sorrow. But the whole mood of the 'Byzantines' – Roman Christians – was different than that of the Greeks and Latins. And the chief thing is that, with the cardinal change of tire ethnic dominant, the system's tense of drive grew and did not fall.

The new ethnos, which arose from Christian confessional consortia, displayed an energy quite lost, it would seem, in the Roman Empire. This energy pushed Egyptian monks of the Thebaid, and Syrian dogmatists from the banks of the Orontes and Euphrates, to Ireland, India, Central Asia, and even China. It was a spiritual-intellectual expansion, the more surprising that it was not supported and reinforced by the force of weapons, and did not pursue any practical aims or material interests. The reasons for this activity lay in it itself. It was an act for the sake of the self-satisfaction of being aware of doing one's duty. This sincerity affected the hearts of the people addressed, and ensured the preachers of the new religion a success that immeasurably surpassed the actual expenditure of energy from the preachers' high drive.

But within the Empire that same feature impelled people to religious disputes that passed into political discord. Why was it necessary for a dispute about the relation of God the Father and God the Son to entail bloody excesses that yielded no real benefit for either the Orthodox or the Arians? On the contrary, the Byzantines of the fourth to sixth centuries sacrificed economic and political benefits for the sake of principles, most of which proved unviable and disappeared.

But a certain part was preserved, and that seemingly the most valuable. These were principles that antiquity had not known, that the Christian West did not master, and that the Muslim East altered to its own key. Byzantium included spiritual elements, especially conscience, in its constitutional system, elements without which it was very difficult to build internal relationships, and found means of combining them with the needs of the state. The state did not lose by that.

Byzantium did not know the ulcer that corroded Western Europe, viz., the struggle of the secular and spiritual powers. Beginning with Constantine the Great, the emperor, on succeeding to the throne, received the rank of deacon I hanks to which he could take part in Church councils and dictate decisions to them that were considered binding because 'the emperor is the supreme master of the creeds for the churches'. [+31] That put the Patriarch in second place, but gave him opportunities the Pope of Rome did riot have. For the emperor wits not just a sovereign autocrat but also a man, sinful and weak. The Patriarch, as confessor, could impose a church penance on him, forbid him to enter a church, refuse a marriage or a divorce. The emperor, true, commanded the army but it could not go into battle without the blessing of the Patriarch. And if the emperor had a bureaucratic administration, the Patriarch was obeyed by an army of monks and theologians. The forces – spiritual and secular – counterbalanced one another, so that the new ethnic entity was strong. But culture?

Overheating of drive. Both trends of antique thought, the natural philosophy that gave rise to Hellenistic geography, and the ethics of the Socratics, Stoics, and Epicureans, had ceased to be actual for people who believed in resurrection of the dead. Existence beyond the grave was considered just as incontestable as real life; consequently a concern arose for saving one's soul after death. That seemed more important than preserving the present short life, because the afterlife was represented as eternal, and there was practical sense in ensuring happiness for oneself in it. Eternal salvation from the griefs and sorrows of the world was best ensured by a martyr's death, so that some African Donatists, called 'circumcellions' (i.e. 'vagrant monks'), formed bands of fanatics who, encountering a solitary wayfarer, would demand that he kill them for the glory of Christ. A person could beg to be spared from this obligation, because it was terrible for him, say, to kill even a chicken, but they gave the unfortunate the choice of killing them or being killed himself. For the circumcellions could commit any deed because a martyr's death atoned all sins. And the poor creature was forced to take a cudgel from them and bash their brains out in turn. And they died in expectation of eternal bliss.

That movement was wiped out by the persecutions of St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa.

In Syria and Egypt fanaticism took less acute forms – monasticism. People subjected themselves to tortures, deprivations, fasting, and celibacy, for the sake of eternal bliss. Those who stayed in the desert – hermits – did not cause anyone trouble, but the vagrant monks, of whom there were many, were a constant worry for the governors of the provinces, and even the emperors, because they were afraid of nothing and no one, depended on no one, and acted extremely impetuously by instinct, not always without harm for neighbours. This was an extreme degree of drive that did not submit either to true reason or to the force of circumstances. The monks therefore rapidly perished, but that was what they wanted.

Fortunately for young Byzantium, the fanatics were in the minority for all that. The leading role in the Church and state was taken by people with drive but who had not lost their reason. For them, too, the doctrine of salvation was important, but they wanted to understand it. While the Church was hunted and