Basil, being of European birth and not an Asiatic like the preceding emperors, was naturally an orthodox image-worshipper. He showed his bigotry by a fierce persecution of the Paulicians, an Asiatic sect of heretics accused of Manicheanism, whom the Iconoclast emperors had been wont to tolerate. Basil’s oppression drove many of them over the Saracen frontier, where they took refuge with the Moslems and maintained themselves by plundering the borders of the empire. Among the other transactions of his nineteen years of reign [867-886], the only one deserving notice is the final loss of Sicily. The Saracens of Africa, who had held a footing in the island ever since the time of Michael II., now finished their work by storming Syracuse in 878. XVII. THE LITERARY EMPERORS AND THEIR TIME. (A.D. 886-963.) The eighty years which followed the death of Basil the Macedonian were the most uneventful and monotonous in the whole history of the empire. They are entirely taken up by the two long reigns of Leo the Wise and Constantine Porphyrogenitus,(25) the son and grandson of the founder of the dynasty. Basil had been a mere adventurer, an ignorant and uneducated but capable upstart. His successors—strange issue from such a stock—were a pair of mild, easy-going, and inoffensive men of literature. They wrote no annals with their sword, though the times were not unpropitious for military enterprise, but devoted themselves to the pen, and have left behind them some of the most useful and interesting works in Byzantine literature. If the times had been harder it is doubtful whether Leo VI. and Constantine VII. would have been strong enough to protect their throne. But the period 880-960 was less troubled by foreign wars than any other corresponding period in the history of the East-Roman state. The empire of the Caliphs was breaking up in the East—the empire of Charles the Great had already broken up in the West—the Bulgarians and other neighbours of the realm on the north were being converted to Christianity, and settling down into quiet. The only troubles to which the East-Roman realm was exposed were piratical raids of the Russians on the north and the Saracens of Africa on the south. These were vexatious, but not dangerous. An active and warlike emperor would probably have found the time propitious for conquest from his neighbours, but Leo and Constantine were quiet, unenterprising men, who dwelt contentedly in the palace, and seldom or never took the field.