92 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. fourth crusade was only very exceptionally such that the position of a Byzantine emperor would have been considered enviable, or as the highest degree of earthly happiness. The situation con- tinually demanded men of a high sense of duty and understanding of their enormous task, men of great talents and excellent training for their vocation, men of great vigor and perseverance. By no means was the throne always occupied by men who excelled in the princely attributes mentioned, still less were they always men of such type as the circumstances, sometimes very difficult, would have required. During more than a millennium, from the ac- cession of Arcadius in 395 to the heroic death of Constantine XIII. in 1453, the Eastern Empire was governed by a succession of eighty-one em- perors. Of these eighty-one autocrats seventy- three can be assigned to one or other of the ten dynasties. Each of these dynasties comprises a group of persons who succeeded one another upon the throne either by right of blood, or by reason of the imperial will and the consent of the regnant family, of which they were the representatives and, in one sense, the members and perpetuators. The continuity of the ten Byzantine dynasties was broken only by seven
