Note 115 — Chapter III · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF WESTERN ASIA.

Islam has, moreover, been represented as a reaction against that Byzantine ecclesiasticism,115 which looked upon the emperor and his court as a copy of the Divine Majesty on high, and the emperor himself as not only the supreme earthly ruler of Christendom, but as High-priest also.116 Under Justinian this system had been hardened into a despotism that pressed like an iron weight upon clergy and laity alike. In 532 the widespread dissatisfaction in Constantinople with both church and state, burst out into a revolt against the government of Justinian, which was only suppressed after a massacre of 35,000 persons. The Greens, as the party of the malcontents was termed, had made open and violent protest in the circus against the oppression of the emperor, crying out, “Justice has vanished from the world and is no more to be found. But we will become Jews, or rather we will return again to Grecian paganism.”117 The lapse of a century had removed none of the grounds for the dissatisfaction that here found such violent expression, but the heavy hand of the Byzantine government prevented the renewal of such an outbreak as that of 532 and compelled the malcontents to dissemble, though in 560 some secret heathens were detected in Constantinople and punished.118 On the borders of the empire, however, at a distance from the capital, such malcontents were safer, and the persecuted heretics, and others dissatisfied with the Byzantine state-church, took refuge in the East, and here the Muslim armies would be welcomed by the spiritual children of those who a hundred years before had desired to exchange the Christian religion for another faith.