The history of the empire of the Grand-Comneni of Trebizond forms a most instructive episode in the immemorial struggle between the East and the West. It was Fallmerayer who may be said to have given this history as a new possession to knowledge in his admirable Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt, Munich 1827, followed by the Original-Fragmente, cited above. These sources have been utilised by Finlay in his History of Greece and Trebizond; but it is to be regretted that Fallmerayer himself did not rewrite his Geschichte after his later discoveries of new and important material. The outline of the subject may, perhaps, be presented in the following brief notice. The further one pursues one's studies of the countries west of India, whether in the camp or in the library, the larger looms the stately fabric of the Roman Empire of the East, and the more is felt the need of a work dealing comprehensively with this great subject. Our historians have allowed their interest to be absorbed by Europe; upon Asia and the rule of the Cæsars over some of the fairest portions of her vast territories for a period, which, commencing with the Roman Republic, may be said to extend down to the suppression of the despots of Trebizond by the Ottoman Turks in the latter half of the fifteenth century, they have scarcely bestowed more than an impatient glance. The period covers the bloom and fall of at least six great Asiatic dynasties--the Arsakids, Sasanians, Arab caliphs, Seljuk Turks, shahs of Kharizme, Tartar khans. It comes to an end among the ruins of Asiatic prosperity, when the Turkomans are pasturing their flocks among the débris of civilisation, and the Ottoman sultans, deriving their origin from a nomad Turkish tribe, are being carried to their zenith by the former subjects of the Cæsars, severed in the corps of Janissaries from their Western culture and Christian religion, and living only with the breath of their Mohammedan and Oriental king. This startling revolution in the political and economical condition of Asia, the effects of which are operative at the present day, may be traced back to the decisive blow which was struck at the Roman Empire of the East by the victory of the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, over the Cæsar Romanus near Melazkert in Armenia in the year 1071. The three centuries of imperial rule in Asia which succeeded this event reveal few and spasmodic interruptions to the inclined plane of Western relapse. Then the darkness finally closes in; Constantinople falls (1453), and Western commerce is expelled from the Black Sea.