fathers and forefathers had never known any other native land than Russia or Poland. Even the most ferocious of the anti-Semitic ministers and senators, however, have not ventured to bestow public approval on this remarkable idea—the idea of definitely conferring on all Russian and Polish Jews the status of permanent aliens incapable of naturalization.

Is there any hope for these victims of prejudice and bigotry? Perhaps revolution might emancipate the Jews of Russia. No legislation conferring genuine equality of rights on them will pass the Duma and Council of State. Few of the existing parties or groups favor equality of rights and opportunities. The moderate conservatives stand with the reactionaries on this question, and even some of the liberal groups are hardly to be depended on. Only the radicals and revolutionists have the courage of their principles and their "humanities." These are only a handful in practical politics.

Pressure from without, such as the United States has attempted to apply in connection with the Russian passport and treaty questions, is not, at present, likely to succeed. There is no probability that the government will alter its position. It believes that the Congress of the United States is wholly insincere and demagogical in demanding a treaty of residence and travel that shall be free from discrimination on any racial or religious ground. It believes that American politicians are willing to flatter and fool the Jewish voters, but by no means willing to offend Russia by insisting on equal treatment of all American citizens. It knows that to grant equality to American Jews traveling or doing business in Russia is to surrender the whole anti-Semitic position. It is the first step that is proverbially difficult, and the Russian official anti-Semitic cabal has no intention of permitting the first step to be taken. The American-Russian passport problem simply defies solution under the present order of things. If the American government does not yield, there will be no new treaty of commerce, residence and travel with Russia. This may be extremely inconvenient and unsatisfactory, but how can the United States weaken and yield after it has once taken the position that it cannot directly or indirectly permit and sanction discrimination by another government against certain of its law-abiding citizens merely because they are of this or that race or faith, or because they are too alert and successful (to adopt the Russian "economic" argument) in a fair and free field?

Russia must be made to feel that the position the United States has taken on the passport and treaty issue amounts to a declaration that

as long as Russia persists in discriminating against American Jews, the United States will maintain a sort of moral and legal boycott against her. This is exactly what the absence of a treaty means, and this is what the Russian government richly deserves at the hands of the American people. England and France, though repeatedly challenged by progressive men, have not dared take a similar position. They have not dared to protest against Russian oppression and persecution of the Jews, to proclaim a boycott against the Russian government. They have, in fact, acquiesced in discrimination, thus making a mockery of their professions and principles. But "military and diplomatic considerations" are allsufficient and all-controlling in Europe. No such situation exists here. The American attitude contributes to a sharp, definite formu-* lation of the Jewish problem in Russia and may in one way or another, sooner or later, prove a factor in forcing a just and civilized solution of that problem.

TREBIZOND, A LOST EMPIRE.

BY JOHN T. BRAMHALL.

F the empire of Trebizond was the creation of accident, as Dr. Finlay would have it, its history was, by another curious accident, made known to the world by the chance discovery by Professor Fallmerayer, the distinguished traveler and archeologist, of the Chronicle of Michael Panaretos in the remains of the library of Cardinal Bessarion at Venice. For prior to this discovery the history of this medieval empire was buried in the dust and ruins of the Dark Ages.

And how came the soldier and Bavarian liberal, Fallmerayer, to be interested in Venetian manuscripts?

Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer was the son of a peasant at Tschötsch, in the Tyrol, and was born at the close of 1790. Placed in the cathedral choir at Brixen he ran away, studied theology at Salzburg and entered the abbey of Kremsmünster. Some red tape however stood between him and holy orders, and after further studies we find him in the army fighting Napoleon. Battles and garrison life over, he is at Lindau, studying Greek and Oriental languages. Then he traveled in the East, delving into the musty manuscripts of the monasteries at Venice and Mount Athos. From the parchments of Cardinal Bessarion, with the aid of such information as he could find in the published histories of the period, he wrote his Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt (Munich, 1827). After visiting Trebizond in 1840 Fallmerayer published the results of his personal researches at Trebizond and Mount Athos in the Transactions of the history class of the Royal Academy of Munich. His Geschichte won for him the gold medal of Copenhagen, but his political activities as an opposition member of the "rump" parliament of Stuttgart caused him to lose his professorship in the university of Munich and to become an exile in Switzerland, and again a traveler in the East. He saw the Russian bear crouching in the Caucasus, and

knew the impending danger to the weak defenses of the sultan. He maintained with great vigor and pertinacity the theory that the capture of Constantinople by Russia was inevitable and would lead to the absorption of the whole of the Balkan and Grecian peninsula by the Russian empire, a consummation which would be a standing menace to the western Germanic nations. For the Greeks he had little love, regarding them as a degenerate mixture of Slav and Albanian rather than true Hellenes.

Cardinal Bessarion (1395-1472), patriarch of Constantinople and archbishop of Nicaea, was not only one of the most learned scholars of his time, but he was a man of a temper uncommon at that period, who loved the whole Christian church and labored to unite those of the East and the West. After visiting Rome, Paris and other capitals as a prince of the church, he so loved his own city on the shore of the Euxine and the eastern gate of Christendom that he left a eulogium of it in his own hand, "The Praise of Trebizond," which, after the capture of the city by Mahomet II, was deposited with his other manuscripts, valued at 30,000 crowns, in the library of St. Mark in Venice. By another accident Trebizond missed the honor of furnishing a pope to the church in the person of Bessarion, who was given a cardinal's hat by Pope Eugenius IV. The occasion, as related by Moreri, was as follows: "Several popes chose him for their legate but the legation of France cost him his life; for Sixtus IV having ordered him at the same time to visit the duke of Burgundy, the cardinal paid his first visit to the duke, which King Louis XI took so ill that as he presented himself to the audience, he put his hand upon his great beard and said unto him: Barbara Græca genus retinent quod habere solebant, and commanded him to dispatch his business. The resentment of this grieved him so that a little while after, returning to Rome, he died, and was interred in a chapel of the Church of St. Peter."

But the record that throws the strongest light upon the history of the lost empire of Trebizond is not the Eugenikos of Bessarion nor the Chronicle of Panaretos, but a later discovered work of one Critobulus, who styles himself "The Islander." His life of Mahomet II, who took the city and "empire" in 1461, was brought to light by Dr. Dethier some fifty years ago in the Seraglio library at Constantinople, and was translated by him. Herr Karl Müller also translated it and published it in 1883 (preface dated 1869). Nothing is known of Critobulus except what is contained in his life of Mahomet, and that is little. After the capture of Constantinople, when the archons of Imbros, Lemnos and Thrasos feared that

the Turkish admiral would shortly approach to annex these islands, messengers were sent to the admiral, and by offering a voluntary submission and paying him a large bribe succeeded in avoiding the general pillage which usually followed a Turkish conquest. Shortly afterwards Critobulus took service under the sultan and was made archon of Imbros, in which capacity he received the submission of Lemnos and other places. His history covers the first seventeen years of Mahomet's reign. It is dedicated to the sultan and is followed by an apology to his fellow Greeks for having written it. He wrote only a few years after the great siege of Constantinople, and the work, says Edwin Pears, bears evidence of great care and a desire to know the truth of what he relates. He writes as a Greek but also as a servant of the sultan. He expresses sympathy with his own people, extols their courage anl laments their misfortunes. In places his life of the sultan reads like the report of an able and courageous official, and Edwin Pears uses it as the nucleus of his Destruction of the Greek Empire.

The late Dr. Dethier, who devoted much time and study to the topography and archeology of Constantinople, compiled four volumes of documents relating to the siege, including the Critobulus, many of which were previously unknown.

Mahomet followed his conquest of the Byzantine capital with that of the ports of the Euxine eastward to Trebizond. The socalled empire of Trebizond, stretching along the southern shore of the Euxine, of varying length but in the time of its glory reaching from near to Batum on the east to a point within sight of the Bosporus and including a large portion of the old kingdom of Armenia, might have played an important part in the history of the Greek empire and of Christendom, of which it was the eastern outpost in Asia, but for the supine and unmanly character of its people as evidenced by the conduct of its rulers. We read that when the Latin invaders were on the point of capturing Constantinople two young Greek princes, grandsons of the unspeakable tyrant Andronicus Comnenus, escaped to Trebizond and defeated the Byzantine governor, while one of them, Alexis, being acclaimed emperor, took the high-sounding title of "Grand Comnenus and Emperor of the Faithful Romans." It seemed for a short while as if he, instead of the valorous Theodore of Nicæa, might take the lead of the Grecian peoples, and indeed Theodore had to arrange with the sultan of Konia (or, as he called himself, of Rum, that is, of the Romans) to prevent Alexis from extending his empire westward to Nicæa.