tion which the
barbarous Russian and the outlandish Armenian found in Constantinople. Yet
this renaissance had hardly set in before it was paralysed by an
unexpected blow, which arrested the development of Modern Greece for seven
centuries.

Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror
from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish nomads
from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world
as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as slaves, then as
mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk
grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam. As champions
of the caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels encroachment on
the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic Empire's progress in
Armenia, and in A.D. 1071--five years after the Norman founded at Hastings
the strong government which has been the making of England--the Seljuk
Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd that heritage of strong
government which had promised so much to Greece.

Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement
there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a
miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after tribe
crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which
their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed
in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed
Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from
one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately
cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for
nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only
monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are
the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses built by the Seljuk sultans
themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best
witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced.
The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable. He imposed his
language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek
had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life,
though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk
and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake,
bridge, and village in the country