Constantinople now became again a source of civilisation to ruder peoples. The Servians and other Slavs called upon its help to protect them from the terrible Simeon of Bulgaria. In the ninth century, Methodius and Cyril had converted the Southern Slavs to Orthodox Christianity. In the tenth, Greek missions, radiating from the great monasteries on Mount Athos, secured the Christianising of Bulgaria. In the next century, the distant Russians received their faith from the same source. Thus Slavonic Europe became for the most part Orthodox rather than Catholic. Never was the influence of Constantinople more widely felt than in carrying out this great work.
The restful if inglorious age of Leo the Philosopher and Constantine Porphyrogenitus gave the Greek Empire time to recruit its energies for the more stirring times of their successors. From 959 to 1025 a period of conquest and military glory followed upon the quiet times that we have described. Before the change came over the spirit of the Eastern Empire, the best chances of aggression in west and north had slipped unnoticed away. During the reigns of Leo and Constantine, the Saxon kings of the Germans were building up a great state in Germany and Italy, and before long the growing material prosperity of Italy was to raise up commercial rivals who ultimately tapped the very springs of Byzantine trading supremacy. The consolidated and Christianised states of the barbarians on the north were less likely to send out bands of conquerors and marauders, but were harder to conquer than their heathen and savage fathers. But the east was sinking into worse confusion than ever. The old political and religious unity of Islam was a thing of the past. What spirit now remained to the Mohammedan world was to be found in North Africa under the Fatimite Caliphs of Cairoan, or in Spain under the Ommeyad Caliphs of Cordova. [Sidenote: Changes in the Mohammedan East.] While these rebels and schismatics still showed some remnants of the old conquering energy of Islam, the orthodox Abbasside Caliphs of Bagdad were sunk in indolence and decay. Their provinces successively revolted. The Bowides, sons of a Persian fisherman, captured Bagdad in 945, and ruled Persia and lower Mesopotamia for more than a century as the _Emirs-ul-Omra_ of the puppets that they still allowed to pretend to act as successors of the Prophet. In Egypt and southern Syria, the Ikshidites, a Turkish dynasty, now established themselves. But the only Mohammedan power that now actually met the Eastern Empire on its south-eastern frontier was that of the Hamdanides, who about 930 occupied northern Mesopotamia and afterwards conquered northern Syria and Cilicia. This dynasty split into two and was represented by the Ameers of Aleppo and Mosul. The new Mohammedan states were all the precarious creations of adventurers’ swords, and were generally at war with each other.