the longed-for Frederick, is to be a genuine king's son, the offspring of the ruling race, and not an upstart. Such an one could only be expected, where enduring dynasties and dynastic attachments were almost unknown, and the name Porphyrogenitus (born in the purple) was a rare distinction.

Yet this Byzantine expectation of a Deliverer, called from the deepest poverty to the imperial dignity, of a beggar (Twxos) whom God was to raise up out of penury (and revias), for a long time kept its ground. We find it in the tenth century in Nicephorus, the biographer of Andreas Salo.1 This long-expected One was to lead the Byzantine empire into a golden age, to humble the sons of Hagar (the Arabs) and burn them up with their children. From the twelfth year of his reign all taxes are to cease. Illyricum (Bulgaria) and Egypt will again become kingdoms, and at last he will also tame the blondhaired nations (the Germans and Franks), and bear the sceptre for three and thirty years. Thus are the wishes of the Greeks transformed into prophecies. But the prophecy, in a characteristic way, goes on to say, that a period of darkness, and governments loaded with crime, will follow right after this brilliant dominion. There is to be a sudden transition from a time

1 Acta Sanctorum, maji. vi, Append. p. 96.

of shining virtue and moral purity to an era in which all manner of shameless crimes will abound,—a revolution, the only cause of which (in correspondence with the Byzantine absolutism) is to be the personality, the will and the example of the monarch. In the principal city of the empire they already believed, as a prophetic certainty, that Constantinople, the city dedicated to the Virgin, and by her shielded, would never be sacked by foes. It will, they say, be beleaguered, but the enemy will raise the siege in disgrace. 1 This delusion was indeed destroyed by the Latin conquest in the year 1204. There is also a later Sibylline prediction, 2 probably devised before the year 1453. Here it is said that the crimes of Byzantium, the blood there shed, and its sins against nature will rise up before God; the enemy will hurl himself against the city, annihilate its splendor and glory, desecrate its sanctuaries and women, give up its buildings to the flames, and make its woes resound abroad. Then, in obscure words, there is an intimation of a future revolution.

In the last times of the dying empire, such prophecies produced very injurious effects; they confused

1 This was announced by Andreas Salo, ubi supra, 96.

2 To be found in Wolf's collection, Lectiones Memorabiles (Lauingen, 1600), vol. i, p. 71.

and disheartened the people. In a cloister of Constantinople there was found a tablet, which, like the other Byzantine predictions, was ascribed to the emperor Leo the Philosopher (886-911). This showed in two columns the succession of the emperors and the patriarchs; every name had its own compartment, and it was found that there was only a single empty one left, so that the present emperor Constantine was to be the last. On the other hand there was another prophecy, intended to inspire the Byzantines with confidence, which likewise had pernicious effects. It ran thus: When the Turks have forced their way into the city as far as the column of Justinian, then an angel will suddenly appear and annihilate all of them. The actual result of their firm belief in this miraculous deliverance was, that the people abandoned all part in the defence, leaving it to the garrison alone, which was altogether too weak.1 A remarkable example of the influence of these Byzantine prophecies even upon highly cultivated and acute minds, is found in the zealous Aristotelian, Georgius of Trapezium, one of the most learned of the Greeks, driven into Italy by the Turkish conquests. The old vaticination about an emperor and universal monarch, to be raised up

1 Laonicus Chalcondylus, 8, 215, p. 406, ed. Bonn. Leonard. Chiens. ap. Bzovium, Annal. Eccles. ann. 1453.

among the Ishmaelites, led him in the year 1469 at Rome, where he was a public teacher, to the conviction that the present Sultan, Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, was this very Ishmaelite,who would soon be converted to the Christian faith, and, as the emperor Immanuel and sole monarch of the world, would call all nations to the true faith; and this conversion of the world was to take place of itself, without any special effort on the part of Christians. In Rome this harmless hope was imputed to him as a mischievous transgression; for it was thought that he must also mean that his "righteous emperor," in accordance with the wide spread occidental expectations about the coming emperor, would set on foot a general slaughter of the clergy. But Georgius did not at all mean this; the Byzantine prophecies knew nothing about such a bloody destruction of the clergy; for in the Eastern Church the relation of the clergy to the laity was not so perverted and inimical as it then was in the West. The unhappy man was seized by the Roman authorities, despoiled of his property and put in prison, until at last king Alphonso of Naples took his part and supported him until his death in 1483.1

1 See about him, Aretin's Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur, ix, 837.

IV. The Prophecy about Rome.

ONE city has furnished ampler materials than many a great empire to inspire the spirit of prophecy. The city of Rome for two thousand years has stood alone and unapproached, as one of the great factors in the world's history; and, though it has been the grave. of nations, yet it still draws men to it by a magnetic power, an enticing object which every one longs to see once in his life. In the most extraordinary manner, the views held about the duration of this city, and the high protection it enjoyed, have in the course of time been totally transformed. Under heathen rule Rome was believed to be eternal, and the name "Eternal City," ruler of the world, was applied to it as a matter of course in poetry, history, and even in public life.

Under the christian emperors also, until the end of the fifth century, Rome retained its name “Eternal City," at least among heathen writers. Ammianus Marcellinus said: "It shall live as long as there are men." This name was offensive to the Christians; for they thought that the "name of blasphemy" (Rev. 1 Rerum Gestarum, 1. 16, c. 10, 14.