THE old or official religions of Greece and of Rome had lost most of their power long before Constantine first declared that Christianity was henceforth to be recognized as a religio licita and then proceeded to bestow the Imperial favor on the faith which his predecessors had persecuted. Hellenism had destroyed their influence over the cultivated classes, and other religions, coming from the East, had captivated the masses of the people. If temples, dedicated to the gods of Olympus, were ...

THE race which played the leading part in history after the break-up of the Roman Empire was the race known as the Teutons. Their early history is shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity which only begins to be lightened about the end of the second century of our era. Such information as we have we owe to Greeks and Romans; and what they give us is almost exclusively contemporary history, and the few fragmentary statements referring to earlier conditions, invaluable as they are to us, do not g...

This process of history may be said to have entered on its effective stage in the West with Alaric's invasion of Italy. But it had been present, as a potentiality and a menace, for many years before Alaric heard the voice that drew him steadily towards Rome. The frontier war along the limes was as old as the second century. The pressure of the population of the German forests upon the Roman world was so ancient and inveterate, and so much of that population had in one way or anoth...

THE first question that has to be considered in laying down the plan of a Medieval History is, Where to begin? Where shall we draw the line that separates it from Ancient History? Some would fix it at the death of Domitian, others at that of Marcus. Some would come down to Constantine, to the death of Theodosius, to the great barbarian invasion of 406, or to the end of the Western Empire in 476; and others again would go on to Gregory I, or even as late as Charlemagne. There is even someth...

ON 9 July 518 the Emperor Anastasius died, leaving nephews only as his heirs. The succession was therefore quite undecided. An obscure intrigue brought the Commander-in-Chief of the Guard, the comes excubitorum Justin, to the throne. This adventurer had found his way to Constantinople from the mountains of his native Illyricum in search of fortune, and now became, at the age of almost seventy years, the founder of a dynasty.The position of the new prince did not lack diffic...

The Arabs first invaded Asia Minor during the commotions of 641. In 642 a plan of Valentine for a combined attack on them was frustrated by his defeat; but Theodore and Procopius penetrated as far as Batnae, and an Armenian force occupied Amida and nearly reached Edessa before they were routed. In 643, Valentine having returned to Constantinople, the enemy again entered Asia Minor, and Arabissus capitulated to Umair. In 644 Muawiya, amir of Syria, took and plundered Euchaita; and in 646 af...

AT the accession of Clovis, who succeeded his father Childeric about the year 481, the Salian Franks had advanced as far as the Somme. Between the Somme and the Loire the suzerainty of the Roman Empire was still maintained. The various Gallo-Roman cities preserved a certain independence, while a Roman official, by name Syagrius, exercised a kind of protection over them. Syagrius was the son of Aegidius, the former magister militum, and he held the command by hereditary right. After the fal...

OUR knowledge of Mahomet, his life and his teaching, is derived entirely from documents which have been handed down by Muslims; no contemporary non-Muslim account is extant, and the testimony of later non-Muslim writers has as little claim to consideration as the statements in the Talmud concerning Christ. Among our authorities the Koran, for obvious reasons, occupies the foremost place. The pieces of which it is composed are acknowledged, alike by those who assert and by those who deny it...

The alluring dream of Charles the Great has vanished; after his death no temporal prince was found capable of carrying on his work, and it fell to ruins. Nevertheless, the root idea which had inspired him still persisted: the idea of the unity of the Christian world, bound together and grouped round a single head, ready to give battle to the infidel, and to undertake the conversion of the barbarians. But it was the Church which now appropriated the idea, and which alone, amidst the surroun...

THE term Viking is a derivative of the Old Norse Vik, a creek, bay or fiord, and means one who haunts such an opening and uses it as a base whence raids may be made on the surrounding country. The word is now commonly applied to those Norsemen, Danes and Swedes who harried Europe from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, and in such phrases as ‘the Viking age’, ‘Viking civilization’, is used in a still wider sense as a convenient term for Scandinavian civilization at a particular stage in...

IT was at his winter home at Doué, early in February 814, that Louis of Aquitaine received the news of his father's death, which had been immediately sent to him by his sisters and the magnates who had espoused his cause. It is a difficult matter to discern through the self-interested encomiums of biographers and the calumnies set afloat by political opponents, the real character of the man who had now taken over the burdensome heritage left by the Emperor Charles. Louis, who was at this t...

WHILE the Germans impressed their characteristic stamp on both the medieval and modern history of Western Europe, it was reserved for the Eastern Slays, the Russians, to build a great empire on the borderlands of Europe and Asia. But the work of civilization was far more difficult for the Russians than for the German race. The barbaric Germans settled in regions of an old civilization among the conquered Romans and Romanized peoples, whereas the geographical and ethnical surroundings enter...