In the cities there was intellectual life: Salonica, Nicaea, Smyrna, and other centres of population had in times past vied with the capital in general culture and still retained something of their attachment to it. To the last hour of the empire there was, as we have seen, general and absorbing interest in the question of the Union of the Churches. But interest in other questions which had once kept religious thought from stagnation had largely died out. The more pressing questions of life interested the citizens. Moreover, the people believed that all questions of Christian belief had been settled. The Creed was final and had no more need of revision than the style of the Parthenon. The practices adopted from Paganism had become so generally accepted as to pass without dispute. Iconoclasts and Paulicians can hardly be said to have left any representatives. A Pagan Christianity with a Pantheism accepting holy springs, miraculous pictures, miracle-working relics, had become the accepted form of faith, a form which we of the twentieth century find it as difficult to understand as the earlier belief which had regarded the emperor as divinity. One of the difficulties of the student of political and social history of the thirteenth and two following centuries is that of being unable to get glimpses of personal characteristics or domestic life. The men who figure in contemporary writings are too often little better than dummies who move and turn, but do not suggest vitality. An historical novel of the period written upon the lines of Scott or Dumas, of Kingsley or Charles Reade, or better still, anything corresponding to Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales,’ would be of priceless value in giving indications not merely of what was the environment of a Constantinopolitan but of the characteristics of an individual of the period. The writers on whom we have to depend are mostly Churchmen, who describe the persons of whom they write as if they felt bound to make them correspond with one of half a dozen approved models. The absence of better indications may be accounted for. The subjects of the empire during the century and a half preceding 1453 lived in the midst of alarms. Its boundaries had been constantly changing and continually narrowing. Disaster followed disaster; usurpations, dynastic struggles, inroads of Genoese and Venetians; struggles with them and between them; ever encroaching Turks, battles, triumphs, defeats, hopes of final success, but territory still decreasing; hope of aid from the West or from Tamerlane; illusions all: finally the last siege and extinction. The writers in the midst of such times thought they had more important matter to deal with than the depiction of scenes of domestic character or delineations of prominent persons. CHAPTER IX