Dissension among the Bulgarians led to their collapse, and Greece enjoyed a complete freedom from barbarian inroads for the next forty years, with the exception of a passing invasion by the Uzes, a Turkish tribe, who left no mark upon the country. Athens at this period was regarded by the Byzantine officials who were sent there as the uttermost ends of the earth, though at Constantinople Philhellenism had a worthy representative in the historian and philosopher Psellos, who constantly manifested a deep interest in “the muse of Athens.” A more curious figure, typical of that monastic age, was the Cappadocian monk Meletios, who established himself on the confines of Attica and Bœotia, and by means of his miracles gained great influence there. We find him descending from his solitary mountain to Athens to rescue a band of Roman pilgrims, who had taken refuge there and had been threatened with death by the bigoted Athenians. We hear of the convents which he founded in various parts of Greece, and it was to him that the land was largely indebted for the plague of monks, many of them merely robbers in disguise, which checked civic progress and injured all national life in the next century. Worse than this, the final separation of the Greek and Latin Churches in 1053, by kindling a fanatical hatred between West and East, brought countless woes upon the Levant, and was one of the causes of the Latin invasions which culminated in the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 1204. There now appeared, for the first time in the history of Greece, that vigorous race which in the same century conquered our own island. The Normans of Italy, under their redoubtable leader, Robert Guiscard, resolved to emulate the doings of William the Conqueror by subduing the Byzantine Empire, which seemed to those daring spirits an easy prey. They began by the annexation of the Byzantine provinces of Apulia and Calabria, and then turned their eyes across the Adriatic to the opposite coast. An excuse was easily found for this invasion. One of Guiscard’s daughters had been engaged to the son of the Emperor Michael VII. But the revolution, which overthrew Michael, sent his son into a monastery, and thus provided Guiscard with an opportunity of posing as the champion of the fallen dynasty. An impostor, who masqueraded as the deposed Emperor, implored his aid in the cause of legitimacy, and the great Pope, who then occupied the throne under the name of Gregory VII, bade the godly help in the contest against the schismatic Greeks. After long preparations Guiscard appeared in 1081 off Corfù, which surrendered to the Norman invader, and then directed his forces against the walls of Durazzo, now a crumbling Albanian fortress, then “the Western key of the empire.” Menaced at the same moment by the Turks in Asia and the Normans in Europe, the Emperor Alexios I made peace with the former and then set out to the relief of Durazzo. But he did not trust to a land force