since followed a destiny of separation. Europe is divided into many countries, each of them a vast camp bristling with armies and arsenals. Civilization has continued hag-ridden by war even to our own day, and, during at least seven hundred of the years that followed Charlemagne, mankind made no greater progress in the arts and sciences than the ancients had sometimes achieved in a single century. We do indeed believe that at last we have entered on an age of rapid advance, that individualism has justified itself. The wider personal liberty of to-day is worth all that the race has suffered for it. Yet the retardation of wellnigh a thousand years has surely been a giant price to pay.

This mighty change in the course of Teutonic destiny, this breakdown of the Frankish empire, was wrought by two destroying forces, one from within, one from without. From within came the insubordination, the still savage love of combat, the natural turbulence of the race. It is conceivable that, had Charlemagne been followed on the throne by a son and then a grandson as mighty as he and his immediate ancestors, the course of the whole broad earth would have been altered. The Franks would have grown accustomed to obey; further conquest abroad would have insured peace at home; the imperial power would have become strong as in Roman days, when the most feeble emperors could not be shaken. But the descendants of Charlemagne sank into a decline. He himself had directed the fighting energy of the Franks against foreign enemies. His son and successor had no taste for war, and so allowed his idle subjects time to quarrel with him and with one another. The next generation, under the grandsons of Charlemagne, devoted their entire lives to repeated and furious civil wars, in which the empire fell apart, the flower of the Frankish race perished, and the strength of its dominion was sapped to nothingness.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Decay of Frankish Empire, page 22.]

There were three of these grandsons, and, when their struggle had left them thoroughly exhausted, they divided the empire into three. Their treaty of Verdun (843) is often quoted as beginning the modern kingdoms of Germany, France, and Italy. The division was in some sense a natural one, emphasized by differences of language and of race. Italy was peopled by descendants of the ancient Italians, with a thin intermingling of Goths and Lombards; France held half-Romanized Gauls, with a very considerable percentage of the Frankish blood; while Germany was far more barbaric than the other regions. Its people, whether Frank or Saxon, were all pure Teuton, and still spoke in their Teutonic or German tongue.

The Franks themselves, however, did not regard this as a breaking of their empire. They looked on it as merely a family affair, an arrangement made for the convenience of government among the descendants of the great Charles. So firm had been that mighty hero's grasp upon the national imagination, that the Franks accepted as matter of course that his family should bear rule, and rallied round the various worthless members of it with rather pathetic loyalty, fighting for them one against the other, reuniting and redividing the various fragments of the empire, until the feeble Carlovingian race died out completely.

It is thus evident that there was a strong tendency toward union among the Franks. But there was also an outside influence to disrupt their empire. Charlemagne had not carried far enough their career of conquest. He subdued the Teutons within the limits of Germany, but he did not reach their weaker Scandinavian brethren to the north, the Danes and Norsemen. He chastised the Avars, a vague non-Aryan people east of Germany, but he could not make provision against future Asiatic swarms. He humbled the Arabs in Spain, but he did not break their African dominion. From all these sources, as the Franks grew weaker instead of stronger, their lands became exposed to new invasion.

Let us take a moment to trace the fortunes of these outside races, though the main destiny of the future still lay with Teutonic Europe.

In speaking of the followers of Mahomet, we might perhaps at this period better drop the term Arabs, and call them Saracens. They were thus known to the Christians; and their conquests had drawn in their train so many other peoples that in truth there was little pure Arab blood left among them. The Saracens, then, had begun to lose somewhat of their intense fanaticism. Feuds broke out among them. Different chiefs established different kingdoms or "caliphates," whose dominion became political rather than religious. Spain had one ruler, Egypt[2] another, Asia a third. In the eleventh century an army of Saracens invaded India[3] and added that strange and ancient land to their domain. Europe they had failed to conquer; but their fleets commanded the Mediterranean. They held all its islands, Sicily, Crete, Sardinia, and Corsica. They plundered the coast towns of France and Italy. There was a Saracenic ravaging of Rome.

[Footnote 2: See Conquest of Egypt by the Fatimites, page 94.]

[Footnote 3: See Mahometans in India, page 151.]

On the whole, however, the wave of Mahometan conquest receded. In Spain the remnants of the Christian population, Visigoths, Romans, and still older peoples, pressed their way down from their old-time, secret mountain retreats and began driving the Saracens southward.[4] The decaying Roman Empire of the East still resisted the Mahometan attack; Constantinople remained a splendid city, type and picture of what the ancient world had been.

[Footnote 4: See Decline of the Moorish Power in Spain, page 296.]

While the Saracens were thus laying waste the Frankish empire along its Mediterranean coasts, a more dangerous enemy was assailing it from the east. Toward the end of the ninth century the Magyars, an Asiatic, Turanian people, burst on Europe, as the Huns had done five centuries before. Indeed, the Christians called these later comers Huns also, and told of them the same extravagant tales of terror. The land which the Magyars settled was called Hungary. They dwell there and possess it even to this day, the only instance of a Turanian people having permanently established themselves in an Aryan continent and at the expense of Aryan neighbors.

From Hungary the Magyars soon advanced to the German border line, and made fierce plundering inroads upon the more civilized regions beyond. They came on horseback, so that the slower Teutons could never gather quickly enough to resist them. The marauding parties, as they learned the wealth and weakness of this new