prepared, Henry deliberately defied and insulted the Hungarians, and so provoked from them a combined national invasion, which he met and completely overthrew in the battle of Merseburg (933). A generation later the Huns felt themselves strong enough to try again; but Henry's son, Otto the Great, repeated the chastisement. He then formed a boundary colony or "East-mark" from which sprang Austria; and this border kingdom was always able to keep the weakened Huns in check.

At the same time there was growing up in Russia a Slavic civilization, which received Christianity[11] from the South as it had received Teutonic dominion from the North, and so developed along very similar lines to Western Europe. The Russian states served as a barrier against later Asiatic hordes; and this, combined with the civilizing of the last remnants of the Scandinavians in the North, and the fading of Saracenic power in the South, left the tottering civilization of the West free from further barbarian invasion. We shall find destruction threatened again in later ages by Tartar and by Turk; but the intruders never reach beyond the frontier. The Teutons and the half-Romanized ancients with whom they had assimilated were left to work out their own problems. All the ingredients, even to the last, the Northmen, had been poured into the caldron. There remains to see what the intermingling has brought forth.

[Footnote 11: See Conversion of Vladimir the Great.]

We have here, then, somewhere about the middle of the tenth century, a date which may be regarded as marking a distinctly new era. The ceaseless work of social organization and improvement, which seems so strong an instinct of the Aryan mind, had been recommenced again and again from under repeated deluges of barbarism. To-day for nearly a thousand years it has progressed uninterrupted, except by disturbances from within; nor does it appear possible, with our present knowledge of science and of the remoter corners of the globe, that our civilization will ever again be even menaced by the other races.

Chronologists frequently adopt as a convenient starting-point for this modern development the year 962, in which Otto the Great, conqueror of the Huns, felt himself strong enough to march a German army to Rome and assume there the title of emperor, which had been long in abeyance. To be sure, there was still an Emperor of the East in Constantinople, but nobody thought of him; and, to be sure, the power of Otto and the later emperors was purely German, with scarce a pretence of extending beyond their own country and sometimes Italy. Yet here was at least one restored influence that made toward unity and, by its own devious and erratic ways, toward peace.

It must not be supposed, of course, that there was no more war. But, as it became a private affair between relatives, or at least acquaintances, its ravages were greatly reduced. It was accepted as the "pastime of gentlemen," "the sport of kings;" and though we may quote the phrases to-day with kindling sarcasm, yet they open a very different vision from that of the older inroads by unknown hordes, frenzied with the passion and the purpose of the brute. The usefulness of the common people was recognized, and they were allowed to continue to live and cultivate the ground; while all the great dukes and even the lesser nobles, having secured as many castles as possible, intrenched themselves in their strongholds and defied all comers.

They asserted their right of "private war" and attacked each other upon every conceivable provocation, whether it were the disputed succession to some vast estate or the ravage spread by a reckless cow in a foreign field. Indeed, it is not always easy to distinguish these private wars from mere robberies or plundering expeditions; and it is not probable that the wild barons exercised any very delicate discrimination. Even Otto the Great had little real influence or authority over such lords as these. His immediate successors found themselves with even less.

In short, it was the golden age of feudalism, of the individual feudal lords. In Italy there was no central authority whatever, nor among the little Christian states gradually arising in Spain. In France and England the title of king was but a name. France was really composed of a dozen or more independent counties and dukedoms. For a while its lords elected a king as the Germans did; and gradually the title became hereditary in the Capet family, the counts of Paris, who had fought most valiantly against the Northmen. But the entire power of these so-called kings lay in their own estates, in the fact that they were counts of Paris, and by marriage or by force were slowly adding new possessions to their old. Any other noble might have been equally fortunate in his investments, and wrested from them their purely honorary title. In fact, there was more than once a king of Aquitaine.

Yet, in 1066, William the Conqueror was able to form for a moment a strong and centralized monarchy in England.[12] With him we reach the period of the second Northmen, or now Norman, outbreak. The marauders had grown polished, but not peaceful, in their French home. They had become more numerous and more restless, until we find them again taking to their ships and seeking newer lands to master. Only they go now as a civilizing as well as a devastating influence.

[Footnote 12: See Norman Conquest of England.]

Most famed of their undertakings, of course, was William's Conquest of England. But we find them also sailing along the Spanish coast, entering the Mediterranean, seizing the Balearic Isles, making out of Sicily and most of Southern Italy a kingdom which lasted until 1860, and finally ravaging the Eastern Empire, and entering Constantinople itself.[13] Last and mightiest of the wandering races, they accomplished what all their predecessors had failed to do.

[Footnote 13: See Decline of the Byzantine Empire, page 353.]

In England, William, with the shrewdness of his race, recognized the tendencies of the age, and erected a state so planned that there could be no question as to who was master. He gave fiefs liberally to his followers; but he took care that the gifts should be in small and scattered parcels. No one man controlled any region sufficiently extensive to give him the faintest chance of defying the King. William had the famous Domesday Book[14] compiled, that he might know just what every freeman in his dominions owned and for what he could be held accountable. The England of the later days of the Conqueror seemed far advanced upon our modern ways.

[Footnote 14: See Completion of the Domesday Book,