It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element ... by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 160: The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the principle, however, does not carry us far.] [Footnote 161: Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (_Western Civilisation_, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof. Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?] [Footnote 162: Cp. Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i, 26, following Von Ihering.] [Footnote 163: Macaulay, _Lays of Ancient Rome_, pref. to _Virginia_. Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80-81.] [Footnote 164: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.] [Footnote 165: Cp. Cicero, _De Officiis_, i, 42.] [Footnote 166: Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.] [Footnote 167: Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 3]