+-----------------------------------------------------------_The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18) A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present

| TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1 to 500 |

| |

| Organisation of the Roman Empire. The Rise of Christianity. |

| Partition of the Empire. The Barbarian Invasion and Fall of the |

| Western Empire. Rise of the Franks |

+-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+

|A.D. | The East and Africa | Europe |A.D. |

| 1 | | Beginning of the Christian | 1 |

| | | Era. | |

| 50 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 50 |

| | | 96-180. | |

| 100 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 100 |

| 150 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 150 |

supremacy in Armenia. | civilisation in Gaul | |

Severus against | the West to Clodius | |

| 200 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 200 |

| 250 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 250 |

| 300 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 300 |

| 350 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 350 |

| 400 +-------------------------+------------------------------+ 400 |

| 450 +-------------------------+------------------------------+ 450 |

| 500 | | Rise of the Franks in Gaul, | 500 |

|A.D. | | under Clovis. |A.D. |

+-----+-------------------------+------------------------------+-----+

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.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

| TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 500 to 1000 |

| |

| Teutonic Races Dominate the West. Rise of Mohammed: extension of |

| Mohammedan Rule from Cordova to Kabul. Western Empire Revived |

| by Charlemagne and again by Otto |

+-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+

|A.D. | The East and Africa | Europe |A.D. |

| 500 | | Franks predominant on Rhine | 500 |

| 550 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 550 |

| 600 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 600 |

| | (622). | ITALY: North under Lombard | |

| 650 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 650 |

| 700 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 700 |

| 750 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 750 |

| | | (800). | |

| 800 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 800 |

| 850 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 850 |

| 900 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 900 |

| 950 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 950 |

|1000 | | dominion established in |1000 |

|A.D. | | Poland. |A.D. |

+-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+

[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.

The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18) A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present · 第 9 / 58 段