thought out principles. The Empire was then exposed to constant danger from Bulgaria, to inroads of the Magyars, and to attacks of the Russians. The key to the diplomatic system, designed to meet these dangers, was the cultivation of friendly relations with the Petchenegs, who did not menace the provinces either by land or sea and could be incited to act against Russians, Bulgarians or Magyars. The system is explained in the treatise (known as De administrando imperio) composed by the emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos (c. 950). The series of these northern states was completed by the kingdom of the Khazars (between the Caucasus and the Don), with which the Empire had been in relation since the time of Heraclius, who, to win its co-operation against Persia, promised his daughter in marriage to the king. Afterwards the Khazars gave two empresses to New Rome (the wives of Justinian II. and Constantine V.). Their almost civilized state steered skilfully between the contending influences of Islam and Christianity, and its kings adopted the curious means of avoiding suspicion of partiality for either creed by embracing the neutral religion of the Jews. Commercial and political relations with the Khazars were maintained through the important outpost of the Empire at Cherson in the Crimea, which had been allowed to retain its republican constitution under a president (πρωτεύων) and municipal board (ἄρχοντες), though this freedom was limited by the appointment of a strategos in 833, a moment at which the Khazars were seriously threatened by the Petchenegs. The danger to be feared from the Khazars was an attack upon Cherson, and it seems probable that this was a leading consideration with Leo III. when he wedded his son Constantine V. to a Khazar princess. In the 9th century it was an object of the government to maintain the Khazars (whose army consisted mainly of mercenaries) against the Petchenegs; and hence, if it should become necessary to hold the Khazars in check, the principle was to incite against them not the Petchenegs, but other less powerful neighbours, the Alans of the Caucasus, and the people of “Black Bulgaria” on the middle Volga (a state which survived till the Mongol conquest).
For this systematic diplomacy it was necessary to collect information about the peoples whom it concerned. The ambassadors sent to the homes of barbarous peoples reported everything of interest they could discover. We owe to Priscus a famous graphic account of the embassy which he accompanied to the court of Attila. We possess an account of an embassy sent to the Turks in Central Asia in the second half of the 6th century, derived from an official report. Peter the Patrician in Justinian's reign drew up careful reports of his embassies to the Persian court. When foreign envoys came to Constantinople, information was elicited from them as to the history and domestic politics of their own countries. It can be shown that some of the accounts of the history and customs of neighbouring peoples, stored in the treatise of Constantine Porphyrogennetos referred to above (furnishing numerous facts not to be found anywhere else), were derived from barbarian ambassadors who visited Constantinople, and taken down by the imperial secretaries. We may conjecture with some probability that the famous system of the Relazioni, which the Venetian government required from its ambassadors, goes back originally to Byzantine influence.
Bibliography-1. General works: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Finlay's History of Greece (ed., Tozer; vols. i.-iv., 1877); Hopf, Geschichte Griechenlands (in Ersch and Gruber, Enzylclopädie (1 Sekt., vols. lxxxv., lxxxvi., 1876-78)); Hertzberg, Geschichte der Byzantiner und des osmanischen Reiches bis gegen Ende des 16 Jahrhunderts (1883); Paparrhegopulos, Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ ἔθνους (5 vols., 2nd ed., 1887-88); Oman, The Byzantine Empire (1892) (a popular sketch); Gelzer, Abriss der byzantinischen Kaisergeschichte, in Krumbacher's Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (ed. ii., 1897) (a summary but original outline). 2. Works dealing with special periods, or branches of the subject: Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (vol. ii., 1887) (Diocletian to Theodosius the Great); Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (8 vols., 1879-99) (to A.D. 800); Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, A.D. 395-800 (2 vols., 1889); Diehl, Justinien (1901); Diehl, L'Afrique byzantine (1896); Pernice, L'Imperatore Eraclio (1905); Rambaud, L'Empire grec au dixième siècle (1870); Schlumberger, Nicéphore Phocas (1 vol.) and L'Épopée byzantine (3 vols., 1890-1905; 4 vols., finely illustrated, covering the period 960-1057); Gay, L'Italie méridionale et l'empire byzantin, 867-1071 (1904); Neumann, Die Weltstellung des byzantinischen Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen (1894); Meliarakes, Ἱστορία τοῦ Βασιλείου τῆς Νικαίας καὶ τοῦ δεσποτάτου τῆς Ἠπείρου (1898); Gerland, Geschichte des lateinischen Kaiserreiches von Konstantinopel (part i., 1905); Fallmerayer, Geschichte des Kaisertums Trapezunt (1827); Norden, Das Papsttum und Byzanz (1903); Pears, The Fall of Constantinople, being the story of the Fourth Crusade (1885), and The Destruction of the Greek Empire (1903).
- (J. B. B.)
ROMANES, GEORGE JOHN (1848-1894), British biologist, was born at Kingston, Canada, on the 20th of May, 1848, being the third son of the Rev. George Romanes, D.D., professor of Greek at the university of that town. He was educated in England, going in 1867 to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He early formed an intimate friendship with Charles Darwin, whose theories he did much during his life to popularize and support. When studying under Sir J. Burdon Sanderson at University College, London, in 1874-76, he began a series of researches on the nervous and locomotor systems of the Medusae and Echinodermata, which provided him with material for his Croonian lecture in 1876. Subsequently he continued the inquiry, partly in conjunction with Professor J. Cossar Ewart, and the results were published in Jelly-fish, Star-fish and Sea-urchins (1885). Meantime he had also been devoting his attention to broader problems of biology. In 1881 he published Animal Intelligence, and in 1883 Mental Evolution in Animals, in which he traced the parallel development of intelligence in the animal world and in man. He followed up this line of argument in 1888 with Mental Evolution in Man, in which he maintained the essential similarity of the reasoning processes in the higher animals and in man, the highest of all. In 1892 he brought out an Examination of Weismannian, in which he upheld the theory of the heritability of acquired characters. In 1890 he left London and settled at Oxford, where he founded a lecture similar to the "Rede" of Cambridge, to be delivered annually on a scientific or literary topic. In 1893 he published the first part of Darwin and after Darwin, a work dealing with the development of the theory of organic evolution, and based on lectures, which he delivered as Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution in 1888-91; a second part appeared in 1895 after his death, which occurred at Oxford on the 23rd of May 1894.
Romanes was awarded the Burney prize at Cambridge in 1873 for an essay on "Christian Prayer and General Laws." Five years later, under the pseudonym "Physicus," he issued A Candid Examination of Theism, in which he showed himself out of accord with orthodox religious beliefs. In 1882 he published an article on the "Fallacy of Materialism," and in his Rede lecture of 1885 he appeared as a monist. Subsequently his views again changed in the direction of orthodoxy, as is shown by his Thoughts on Religion, written shortly before his death and published in 1895.
His Life and Letters, by his widow, appeared in 1896.
ROMANIN, SAMUELE (1808-1861), Venetian historian, was born of a poor Jewish family at Trieste. Being left an orphan at an early age, he provided for his younger brothers and sister by giving French and German lessons. In 1821 he settled in Venice, where he afterwards translated Hammer-Purgstall's Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches into Italian. He next published his own Storia dei Popoli Europei (Venice, 1843-44). He taught in a private school and was sworn interpreter in German to the courts of justice; on the expulsion of the Austrians in 1848 he was appointed professor of history by the provisional government, and he lectured on Venetian history at the Ateneo Veneto. In 1852 he began to publish his monumental Storia documentata di Venezia, but although he finished the work, carrying it down to the fall of the republic in 1798, he did not live to see the publication completed, as he died of apoplexy on the 9th of September 1861; among his papers were found all the documents which were to be added,
