Such, then, was the condition of the Christian Church and the Byzantine Empire at the close of the sixth century; to such a deplorable extent had barbarian encroachment, social corruption, and sectarian controversy undermined the foundation of both Church and State. In spite of its degradation, the latter represented the highest embodiment of mental culture and political organization which had survived the incessant depredations of barbarian armies and the demoralizing effects of generations of misrule; where the character of the monarch, both before and after his elevation to the throne, was dominated by the passions and infected with the vices of the most wicked and infamous of mankind. Throughout Europe the state of affairs was even more deplorable. The Goths were masters of the continent, and the Vandals, traversing the Spanish Peninsula and planting their victorious standards upon the northern coast of Africa, had, after the commission of atrocities which have made their name proverbial, driven the descendants of Hannibal and Hamilcar into the desert and the sea. The schools of Athens--that sole remaining seat of philosophical discussion and free inquiry in the world--had been suppressed, a hundred and fifty years before, by Justinian. The descendants of the Cæsars, stripped of their splendid inheritance and reduced to degrading vassalage, cowered beneath the scowling glances of the skin-clad savages who had issued in countless numbers from the forests of Germany and the shores of the Baltic. The effigies of the gods, the masterpieces of the skill of the Augustan age, had been tumbled from their pedestals, and the fetichism introduced by the strangers had been superseded by a corrupt form of Christianity scarcely less contemptible and fully as idolatrous. Rome had twice been sacked; Milan had been razed to the ground; prosperous seaports had fallen into decay; the fairest fields of Italy had been made desolate, her highways were overgrown with grass, her aqueducts were broken, her fertile Campagna, once the paradise of the capital, had become a pestilential marsh, whose vapors were freighted with disease and death. Among the miserable, half-famished, and turbulent population of the cities, riot and sedition were frequent, but were hardly noticed by the haughty barbarian ruler, so long as the outbreak did not seriously menace his life or his dignity. Civil war, relentless in atrocity, completed the devastation begun by barbaric conquest and servile tyranny. The army, filled with traitors, offered no warrant for the stability of government. Informers, that pest of a decadent state, swarmed in the Byzantine capital. Oppressive taxation, enforced by torture, impoverished the opulent. Promiscuous massacre, instituted upon the most frivolous pretexts, intimidated the poor. There was no loyalty, no sense of national honor, no appreciation of the mutual obligations of prince and people. The martial spirit which had been