Chapter V: Part 5

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Again the empire was partitioned, and then, for a brief while before the end of the fourth century, united again under Theodosius. But the end was at hand. For a few years the great general Stilicho held the Teutonic Goths at bay in Italy, while Vandals and Sueves poured through Gaul into Spain. Then, early in the fifth century, Stilicho died. Alaric led his conquering hordes to the gates of Rome, and sacked the Eternal City. His successor, Ataulf, took his Goths away, to drive the Vandals out of Spain into Africa, and set up a great western kingdom on their own account. But after the Goths, fresh barbarians swarmed in--Tartar Huns under Attila, who wrought huge devastation and then vanished for ever; then fresh Teutonic armies, which took possession of Italy, though in the East the Empire still held its own. And in Gaul the (German) Franks under their king, Clovis (Chlodwig, Ludwig), established the dominion which was to give its name to France when the Frankish element had almost passed out of the country. Far-away Britain had already been abandoned, and was falling a prey to the Saxons and the Angles, the “English” who were driving the earlier Celtic inhabitants before them into the mountain fastnesses of the west and north. Again, in the East, in the sixth century, the empire centred at Byzantium asserted its power. Justinian is memorable for that great codification of Roman Law on which the legal systems of half the jurists in Europe have been based. His reign is famous also for the exploits of his brilliant general, Belisarius, who destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa, restored the Imperial rule in Italy, and recovered provinces in Asia which had been in danger of falling into the grip of the now aggressive rulers of Persia. But in the West, the success was only temporary. Under pressure of Tartar or Slavonic hosts from the East, a fresh Teutonic swarm, the Lombards, entered Italy and mastered the North. The significance of Rome now lay in the supremacy of her pontificate, unacknowledged in the East.

In Spain, the Gothic supremacy gave promise of an orderly and just government. In the wide realms of the Franks anarchy and bloodshed were almost ceaseless. In neither did the dominant Teutons drive out the older Iberian and Celtic populations, as the English were doing in the open lands of the northern island. In both, the German institutions were developing into that feudal system which was utterly incompatible with the maintenance of a strong central rule, since it enabled a powerful vassal to bid defiance to his nominal suzerain. Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries progress was stayed in ancient Gaul; in Spain it was to be revolutionised by a new invader.

[Sidenote: Islam in Being]

Eastward, at the end of the sixth century, the Slavonic wave was surging upon the empire’s northern frontier; in Asia, Persia was again forcing her way towards the Mediterranean. Both were checked by the Emperor Heraclius early in the seventh century. But, meantime, a new Power had come into being. Mohammed had arisen. Inspired by the fanatical fervour of Islam, the warriors of Arabia, soon to be known as the Saracens, swept all before them. They did not at first make Europe their objective; the Caliphs carried their conquering arms over Western Asia, into Egypt, and along the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. Then they began to beat against the empire itself. The eighth century had hardly opened when they poured into Spain; dissensions among the Gothic chiefs gave them prompt victory. They swept up to the Pyrenees; but their advance was stayed by Charles Martel, the virtual lord of the Frankish kingdom. On the East their armies assailed Constantinople, but were disastrously repulsed by the Emperor Leo the Isaurian.

Now, for the first time, Papal sanction was demanded and obtained for a change of dynasty. The last Merovingian king of the Franks was deposed in favour of Pepin, the son of Charles Martel. He was succeeded by his son, Karl, a German of the Germans, despite the French form of his popular title Charlemagne.

[Sidenote: Charlemagne and His Empire]

During his long reign the Moors in Spain were driven back beyond the Ebro; the Saxon tribes across the Rhine were forced to submit and to accept Christianity; the Lombard oppressors of Italy were vanquished; and on the Pope’s initiative, Charlemagne himself was acclaimed and crowned at Rome as emperor and successor of the Cæsars. All of the West that remained to Byzantium was Southern Italy. The revived empire came into being on Christmas Day, A.D. 800.

The great dominion and the organisation constructed by Charlemagne fell into divisions after his death. The lands east of the Rhine remained German; on the west, the Teutonic forces yielded to the Latinised Celtic spirit. Slowly France and Germany emerged. In England the supremacy among the rival peoples passed from the Angles of Northumbria or of the Midlands to the Saxon house of Wessex. Hungary was held by the Mongolian Avars, presently to be displaced by their Magyar kinsmen; otherwise Eastern Europe, Illyria, as well as the Trans-Danube districts, was being gradually possessed by the Slavonic races. Their westward movement was decisively stayed in the tenth century by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, who, for the second time, revived the “Holy Roman Empire” in the West in a form which effectively translated it into the “German Empire.” Meanwhile, the Vikings from the north first ravaged the western coasts, then wrung great provinces from the kings of England, and of “Francia,” preparing for the day when the Norman spirit should set the tone of Western Europe.

[Sidenote: Birth of Feudalism in Europe]

In the Eastern Mohammedan world the Saracen dominion was passing to Tartar races--to the Seljuk Turks or the Ghaznavid Turks, and later to the Ottomans; the genuine Saracens had seen their greatest days in the times of Harun-al-Raschid, when the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne was being dismembered. Europe in the eleventh century had passed, or was passing, into what is distinctively known as the Feudal Period, or later Middle Ages. Everywhere it became the object of the great rulers to establish a strong central government, and of the Papacy to establish a supremacy over all governments. Feudalism and the Papacy were the rivals of the centralising tendency.

[Sidenote: England and France]

In England, where a Norman dynasty and Norman aristocracy established themselves, the unifying process was astonishingly rapid. The country was comparatively shielded from Papal interposition by distance. A series of vigorous and able monarchs prevented pure feudalism from ever getting developed; it resulted that in the thirteenth century baronage and people made common cause in imposing not feudalism, but constitutional control over the kings. In France, the victory of the crown over feudalism was far slower; the feudatories were too powerful, and among them were the kings of England, as dukes or counts of great territories within France. The Hundred Years’ War was, in fact, not so much a contest for the French crown as a struggle between the French kings and their mightiest vassals. It was not till the English had been finally expelled that Louis XI. was enabled to make the crown supreme in France. There, as in England, the monarchy never submitted to the Papacy; it was so far victorious in that struggle that in the fourteenth century the seat of the Roman pontificate was transferred to Avignon, and the Pontiff himself became literally the creature of France.

[Sidenote: Christendom and the Crusades]

Spain and Byzantium alike remained for the most part outside the general European current. They were the buffers between Christendom and Islam. In the Spanish Peninsula the Moors were held more or less at bay, but the land was not freed from their dominion till the close of the fifteenth century. Byzantium held the Turks at bay till the middle of the same century; then she fell for ever. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Christendom carried on against Islam the long contest of the Crusades; but the warriors who took part in those wars neither fought nor organised as though themselves forming an organic body; the Christian hosts in Palestine were mere miscellaneous gatherings, united only in the temporary fits of enthusiasm. The Holy Sepulchre was gained, but within a century it was lost again; the crusading cause was one to which not states, but individuals only, devoted themselves. Conquest would have been possible only if the Crusaders had gone forth prepared to make their own homes in Asia. The East could not be held by garrisons with no abiding interest there.

Islam, then, held, and more than held, its own against the West; while during these same centuries it swept east and south through the passes of the Punjab into India, establishing Turk and Afghan kingdoms over most of the great peninsula; though the vast bulk of the population there held to the Hinduism which, born of the earlier Brahmanism, had almost expelled the Buddhist religion, which, however, had established itself permanently in Further India and China.

[Sidenote: Empire, Feudalism, & Papacy]

The might of Islam could have been overthrown only by a united Christendom, and for that the disintegrating forces were too great. England and, more slowly, France freed themselves from feudalism. But Christendom required one head. If the Papacy had stood by the empire, feudalism might have been broken down, and the emperor have become that head. But the Papacy aimed at supremacy for itself--the spiritual power was at war with the temporal. Anti-imperial factions claimed the support of the Church; the efforts at consolidation of the great Hohenstaufen Emperors, Barbarossa and Frederick II., were unsuccessful. The empire itself became only a congeries of kingdoms and dukedoms, counties, bishoprics, free cities, and leagues of cities, under the Austrian house of Hapsburg; while Rome, mighty from the days of Gregory VII. to Innocent III., lost its prestige in the captivity at Avignon and by the Great Schism which followed. In England Wycliffe’s voice was raised; on the south-east of the empire the Hussite wars raged, premonitory of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: End of the Middle Ages]

In 1453 Constantinople fell, and the Turk was permanently established in the east of Europe. As a counterstroke, in the west, not forty years later, the Moorish dominion in Spain was wiped out, Spain emerging as a united Christian kingdom. Before the end of the century Columbus and Gama had discovered America, and virtually rediscovered India. Across the ocean a new, almost unlimited field for expansion, for enterprise, for rivalry had been opened to the European peoples. Already in the realms of intellect old forgotten knowledge had been gradually recovered by the Renascence, the revival of learning and letters; with the intellectual expansion and the invention of the printing press paths to new knowledge were being opened. Men were shaking themselves free from the shackles of authority and tradition. Hence, the sixteenth century witnessed that revolt of half Western Christendom from Rome which we call the Reformation; in its essence, though by no means in its form at the first, a revolt against the interposition of any human authority between the individual man and his Maker. With that revolt political and national divisions were inextricably blended, while the whole was complicated by the new conditions of political supremacy created by the New World.

[Sidenote: Growth of Modern Nations]

The next two centuries, then, saw France, already a consolidated state, develop into the first military Power under the most absolute monarch in Europe--through a stage of prolonged religious strife which ended by establishing the tolerationist Bourbon, Henry IV., on the throne, through the rule of the two great cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, to the intolerant autocracy of Louis XIV., with a close aristocracy no longer in opposition to the crown but allied to it.

In England the development was on different lines. There we find an absolutist movement, the outcome of the Wars of the Roses. But however autocratic the Tudors were, they held by constitutional forms, and preserved the intense loyalty of their people. On Elizabeth’s death, a century-old matrimonial alliance placed the sceptres of England and Scotland in a single hand.

Then, on the theory of Divine right, the Crown attempted to override the constitution; the Civil War gave the power neither to king nor parliament, but to a military dictator. On his death the country reverted to a compromise between Crown and Parliament; the Stuarts, again, with the aid of their cousin, the autocrat of France, attempted to recover absolutism. They were driven from the country, and constitutionalism--in effect, government by an oligarchy of landowners--was decisively established. The religious problem had found a decisively Protestant solution at an early stage; but Anglicanism and Puritanism soon grew mutually intolerant; it was only with the Revolution of 1688 that toleration and constitutionalism definitely triumphed together.

[Sidenote: Europe in Development]

Meanwhile, in the reign of Elizabeth, England had asserted her intellectual eminence by giving birth to Shakespeare and to Bacon; and had decisively displaced Spain from the rulership of the seas. In the next century her colonisation of North America counterbalanced the Spanish dominion in the south and centre of the Western Hemisphere, though it was not unchallenged by France. In the East a great commercial rivalry had grown up between English, Dutch, and French--a rivalry still to be fought out.

[Sidenote: Collision of the Dynasties]

In the early years of the sixteenth century matrimonial alliances had joined Spain, the Low Countries, and the empire under a single ruler, a Hapsburg of the (Austrian) Imperial house. The vast dominion was extended by the acquisition of the golden territories of the American continent. The Empire passed to one Hapsburg branch, Spain and her dependencies to another. In the empire, a temporary _modus vivendi_ was established between Roman Catholics and Protestants; but Spain, the colossus which threatened to dominate Europe, was split by the revolt of the Netherlands, and her power shaken to its foundations by the collision with England. In the sixteenth century, Germany was devastated by the religious Thirty Years’ War; Austria emerged only as the chief among a number of German states, and Holland won a naval and commercial position second only to that of England. The Ottoman Turks, still aggressive, were still held in check. In India, a Turkish dynasty known as the Moguls (Mughàls, Mongols) extended its sway from Kabul to the mouth of the Ganges, and almost to Cape Comorin.

At the opening of the eighteenth century the aggressive Continental policy of Louis XIV. involved Europe in the “War of the Spanish Succession.” The French king’s armies were shattered by repeated blows at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene, but he finally obtained his primary object, the recognition of his grandson as king of Spain. The threat of a Hapsburg domination passed into the threat of a Bourbon domination. In the east of Europe a final limit was set to the Ottoman aggression. In Britain, the incorporation of Scotland was completed, formally by the Union of 1707, effectively by the suppression of Jacobitism in 1746.

[Sidenote: Settling Down of the Powers]

From 1739 to 1763 Europe was again plunged into wars, with an eight years’ interval. The motives of those wars, and of the combinations of states on either side, were complicated; the results were simple. Prussia, under Frederick the Great, emerged as a first-class Power; France lost her North American Colonies to Great Britain; the British East India Company defeated the attempt of the French to establish a paramount influence with the native princes, the Mogul Empire having broken up into a congeries of practically independent satrapies; and the British themselves became established as a territorial Power by the conquest of Bengal. Russia also, organised at the beginning of the century by Peter the Great, had taken her place definitely among the great Powers.

During the next twenty years (1763-1783) Poland was absorbed by her neighbours. The British Empire was sundered by the revolt of the older American Colonies, which were established as the United States of America; while Canada remained loyal. By this time the whole of Europe was practically governed by absolute monarchies; but a cataclysm was at hand. France became the scene of a tremendous revolution. Crown and aristocracy were toppled into the abyss.

[Sidenote: Napoleon and the Revolution]

France proclaimed herself the liberator of the peoples; the monarchs of Europe combined to suppress the proletariat. During the last decade of the century one revolutionary constitution after another was set up in Paris, while the revolutionary armies shattered monarchical armies, and turned the “liberated” peoples into subject dependencies of the Republic. On the seas, however, Britain successfully asserted her supremacy. Of the commanders of the Republic, the most brilliant was the Corsican Bonaparte. He dreamed of making Egypt the basis for achieving an Asiatic empire, and thence overwhelming Europe; but the dream was shattered when he found himself isolated by Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir in the Battle of the Nile. Returning to Paris, he transformed the republic into an empire; he set up his brothers or his generals as rulers over half the kingdoms in Europe; he dictated terms to every government except Britain. Britain annihilated his fleets, and fought and beat his generals in the Spanish Peninsula. He conquered the kings, but the nations rose against him, and overthrew him; his last effort was crushed at Waterloo.

Absolutism was reinstated, but the proletariats had learnt to demand freedom. Steam-power and steam-traction so changed the conditions of production as to revolutionise the relations between labour and capital, and between the landed and the manufacturing interests. In Great Britain political power passed from the landowners to the manufacturers with the great Reform Bill of 1832, and from the wealthy to the labouring classes with the Franchise Bills of 1867 and 1884. Every monarchy has been compelled to submit to limitations of its own powers more or less copied from Britain.

[Sidenote: The World as it is]

Britain herself, not untaught by the breach with America, has learned to establish responsible government in her Colonies, making them virtually free states; and among those states the idea of federation has taken root and is bearing fruit. In India, challenged by one native race after another, she has extended her sway over the whole peninsula, and has abolished the anomaly of governing her great dependency through a trading company. In the West her kinsmen have raised the United States into a mighty nation.

In Europe France has passed through monarchy and republic and second empire into a stable republic; Italy has revolted against foreign rulers, and become a united nation; the small peoples of the Balkan Peninsula have now achieved by arms their liberty from Turkish rule. Prussia has won the hegemony of the German states, and established a new German Empire. Russia, the bogey of the West, and of Britain in particular, has shown her weakness in collision with the sudden development of Japan.

Finally, the Dark Continent has been explored and partitioned: in the south, after a sharp conflict, British and Dutch are on the way to become a united people; in the north, Egypt has been reorganised under British administration. We end, as we began, with the land of the Pyramids.

ARTHUR D. INNES.

A TIME-TABLE OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD

FROM THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY TO THE PRESENT DAY

Showing at a glance the fate of all nations, their rise, their sway, their decline, and their successors

On this double-page are shown the empires of the ancient world to
the rise of Rome, and on the succeeding double-page the ruling
powers from Rome until the present day. The chronology is in
divisions of a hundred years, except the first four, which, for
convenience of space, are shown in longer periods

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The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18)Chapter V: Part 5

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