But let us not attach too harsh a meaning to "anarchy." There were a hundred rulers, it is true, great dukes and barons, each supreme in his own district; but because they held power by the sword against a savage enemy, their subjects had to be a strong, independent race, with arms in their hands, which they would use against their chiefs as well as the foreigners if there was great oppression. In this fiery school, Armenia learned the sternest lessons of self-help and discipline. With no interference from outsiders to fear, and no help from them to be got, it became even more confirmed in its own independent isolated ways, a world to itself as it has been ever since. Its cultivators tilled their fields as they had done for so many centuries, and its scholars read such books as they had, and wrote such as their own minds furnished. But vast numbers of its hardy sons took service in the Greek armies, and became the bone and sinew of the defense of Asia Minor against the caliphs; not only so, but they rose by hundreds to the highest commands in the empire, both civil and military. They formed the best "society" in Constantinople itself; and to crown all, a score of emperors and empresses in four different lines, including the most illustrious ones that ever sat on the throne from Constantine down, and who ruled the empire for two hundred and seventy-seven years, were Armenians. It is within the truth, and can be justified from the greatest of English historians, to say that for four centuries the Byzantine Empire was not a Greek but an Armenian empire. Armenians by blood filled all the great offices of state, commanded the armies, occupied the throne for nearly three hundred years, preserved the empire from external invasion and internal disintegration. It was the accession of an Armenian dynasty that turned it from a decaying power to one that expanded steadily for two centuries, from one falling into anarchy to one the glory of the world for scientific organizations; and it was the final overthrow of Armenian influence that ruined the empire, being followed almost at once by the loss of half its territory and the richest part, and the break-up of its system of civil administration. Everywhere in the time of Byzantine glory you find the list full of Armenian names. The appearance of "Bardas" as the name of generals or civil magnates is always proof of Armenian blood, and that name is monotonously common; it is the Greek form of "Vartan," though now and then they make it "Bardanes." One of the greatest conquerors in Byzantine history, John Kurkuas, was an Armenian, from a family which supplied three generations of statesmen and generals, and two great emperors. And this is part of what the immortal historian of "Greece Under Foreign Domination," George Finlay, has to say:--