The Story of Mankind
by Hendrik van Loon
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Frontispiece caption =
THE SCENE OF OUR HISTORY IS LAID UPON A LITTLE PLANET,
LOST IN THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE.

THE STORY OF MANKIND
BY HENDRIK VAN LOON

To JIMMIE
``What is the use of a book without pictures?'' said Alice.

FOREWORD

For Hansje and Willem:

WHEN I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of
mine who gave me my love for books and pictures promised
to take me upon a memorable expedition. I was to go with
him to the top of the tower of Old Saint Lawrence in Rotterdam.

And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that
of Saint Peter opened a mysterious door. ``Ring the bell,''
he said, ``when you come back and want to get out,'' and with
a great grinding of rusty old hinges he separated us from the
noise of the busy street and locked us into a world of new and
strange experiences.

For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phenomenon
of audible silence. When we had climbed the first
flight of stairs, I added another discovery to my limited
knowledge of natural phenomena--that of tangible darkness. A
match showed us where the upward road continued. We went
to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had
lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly
we had plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with
the roof of the church, and it was used as a storeroom. Covered
with many inches of dust, there lay the abandoned symbols
of a venerable faith which had been discarded by the good
people of the city many years ago. That which had meant life
and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and rub-
bish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved
images and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between
the outspread arms of a kindly saint.

The next floor showed us from where we had derived our
light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made
the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of
pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars and the air was
filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the
town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed
by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking
of horses' hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing
sound of the patient steam which had been set to do the work
of man in a thousand different ways--they had all been
blended into a softly rustling whisper which provided a beautiful
background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons.

Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And
after the first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel
his way with a cautious foot) there was a new and even greater
wonder, the town-clock. I saw the heart of time. I could hear
the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid seconds--one--two--three--
up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise when all the wheels
seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped off eternity.
Without pause it began again--one--two--three--until
at last after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels
a thunderous voice, high above us, told the world that it was
the hour of noon.

On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and
their terrible sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made
me turn stiff with fright when I heard it in the middle of the
night telling a story of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it
seemed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which
it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of
Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in
an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who
twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the
country-folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear
what the big world had been doing. But in a corner--all alone
and shunned by the others--a big black bell, silent and stern,
the bell of death.

Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and
even more dangerous than those we had climbed before, and
suddenly the fresh air of the wide heavens. We had reached
the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us the city--
a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling hither
and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business,
and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the
open country.

It was my first glimpse of the big world.

Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have
gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard
work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climbing
a few stairs.

Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the
land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind
friend the watchman, who lived in a small shack, built in a
sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock
and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he
enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and
thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost
fifty years before and he had rarely read a book, but he
had lived on the top of his tower for so many years that he had
absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him
on all sides.

History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him.
``There,'' he would say, pointing to a bend of the river, ``there,
my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of
Orange cut the dikes to drown the land and save Leyden.''
Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse, until the broad
river ceased to be a convenient harbour and became a wonderful
highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp upon
that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the
sea might be free to all.

Then there were the little villages, clustering around the
protecting church which once, many years ago, had been the
home of their Patron Saints. In the distance we could see the
leaning tower of Delft. Within sight of its high arches,
William the Silent had been murdered and there Grotius had
learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still further
away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home
of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of
many an emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to
know as Erasmus.

Finally the silver line of the endless sea and as a contrast,
immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys
and houses and gardens and hospitals and schools and railways,
which we called our home. But the tower showed us
the old home in a new light. The confused commotion of the
streets and the market-place, of the factories and the workshop,
became the well-ordered expression of human energy
and purpose. Best of all, the wide view of the glorious past,
which surrounded us on all sides, gave us new courage to face
the problems of the future when we had gone back to our daily
tasks.

History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time
has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy
task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit
of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are
strong and it can be done.

Here I give you the key that will open the door.

When you return, you too will understand the reason for
my enthusiasm.
                                   HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON.

CONTENTS

1. THE SETTING OF THE STAGE
2. OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
3. PREHISTORIC MAX BEGINS TO MAKE THINGS FOR HIMSELF
4. THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD
       OF HISTORY BEGINS
5. THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE
6. THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
7. MESOPOTAMIA, THE SECOND CENTRE OF EASTERN CIVILISATION
8. THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US
       THE STORY OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC
       MELTING-POT
9. THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
10. THE PHOENICIANS, WHO GAVE US OUR ALPHABET
11. THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE SEMITIC AND THE
       EGYPTIAN WORLD
12. THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION
       OF OLD ASIA INTO THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
13. MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE OF THE HELLENES WAS
       TAKING POSSESSION OF GREECE
14. THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY STATES
15. THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO TRY THE DIFFICULT
       EXPERIMENT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT
16. HOW THE GREEKS LIVED
17. THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST FORM OF PUBLIC
       AMUSEMENT
18. HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST AN ASIATIC INVASION AND
DROVE THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN SEA
19. HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR
FOR THE LEADERSHIP OF GREECE
20. ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD
EMPIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
21. A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 TO 20
22. THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF
AFRICA AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE WEST
COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF
THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE WAS DESTROYED
23. HOW ROME HAPPENED
24. HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME, AFTER CENTURIES OF UNREST AND
REVOLUTION, BECAME AN EMPIRE
25. THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM THE GREEKS CALLED
JESUS
26. THE TWILIGHT OF ROME
27. HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
28. AHMED, THE CAMEL DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE
ARABIAN DESERT, AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED
THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF
ALLAH, THE ``ONLY TRUE GOD''
29. HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE ~ RANKS, CAME TO BEAR
THE TITLE OF EMPEROR AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD IDEAL
OF WORLD-EMPIRE
30. WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE TENTH CENTURY PRAYED THE LORD
TO PROTECT THEM FROM THE FURY OF THE NORSEMEN
31. HOW CENTRAL EUROPE, ATTACKED FROM THREE SIDES, BECAME
AN ARMED CAMP AND WHY EUROPE WOULD HAVE PERISHED
WITHOUT THOSE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS AND ADMINISTRATORS
WHO WERE PART OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
32. CHIVALRY
33. THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE
AGES, AND HOW IT LED TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN THE
POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS
34. BUT ALL THESE DIFFERENT QUARRELS WERE FORGOTTEN WHEN
THE TURKS TOOK THE HOLY LAND, DESECRATED THE HOLY
PLACES AND INTERFERED SERIOUSLY WITH THE TRADE FROM
EAST TO WEST. EUROPE WENT CRUSADING
35. WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES SAID THAT CITY AIR
IS FREE AIR
36. HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED THEIR RIGHT
TO BE HEARD IN THE ROYAL COUNCILS OF THEIR COUNTRY
37. WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT OF THE
WORLD IN WHICH THEY HAPPENED TO LIVE
38. HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A
BUSY CENTRE OF TBADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN
PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE
COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA
39. PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY JUST BECAUSE THEY
WERE ALIVE. THEY TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE
OLDER AND MORE AGREEABLE CIVILISATION OF ROME AND
GREECE AND THEY WERE 80 PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS
THAT THEY SPOKE OF A RENAISSANCE OR RE-BIRTH OF
CIVILISATION
40. THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION
TO THEIR NEWLY DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED
THEIR HAPPINES9 IN POETRY AND IN SCULPTURE AND
IN ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING, AND IN THE BOOKS THEY
PRINTED
41. BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN THROUGH THE BONDS OF
THEIR NARROW ~IEDIIEVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO HAVE
MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDERINGS. THE EUROPEAN WORLD
HAD GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBITIONS. IT WAS THE
TIME OF THE GREAT VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
42. CONCERNING BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS
43. THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST COMPARED TO A
GIGANTIC PENDULUM WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND
BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE AND THE ARTISTIC
AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE WERE FOLLOWED
BY THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE
RELIGIOITS ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION
44. THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES
45. HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
AND THE LESS DIVINE BUT MORE REASONABLE RIGHT OF
PARLIAMENT ENDED DISASTROUSLY FOR KING CHARLES II
46. IN FRANCE, ON THE OTHER HAND, THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
CONTINUED WITH GREATER POMP AND SPLENDOR THAN EVER
BEFORE AND THE AMBITION OF THE RULER WAS ONLY TEMPERED
BY THE NEWLY INVENTED LAW OF THE BALANCE OF POWER
47. THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS MUSCOVITE EMPIRE WHICH SUDDENLY
BURST UPON THE GRAND POLITICAL STAGE OF EUROPE
48. RUSSIA AND SWEDEN FOUGHT MANY WARS TO DECIDE WHO
SHALL BE THE LEADING POWER OF NORTHEASTERN EUROPE
49. THE EXTRAORDINARY RISE OF A LITTLE STATE IN A DREARY PART
OF NORTHERN GERMANY, CALLED PRUSSIA
50. HOW THE NEWLY FOUNDED NATIONAL OR DYNASTIC STATES OF
EUROPE TRIED TO MAKE THEMSELVES RICH AND WHAT WAS
MEANT BY THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM
51. AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE HEARD
STRANGE REPORTS OF SOMETHING WHICH HAD HAPPENED IN
THE WILDERNESS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT. THE
DESCENDANTS OF THE MEN WHO HAD PUNISHED KING CHARLES
FOR HIS INSISTENCE UPON HIS DIVINE RIGHTS ADDED A
NEW CHAPTER TO THE OLD STORY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-
GOVERNMENT
62. THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION PROCLAIMS THE PRINCIPLES
OF LIBERTY, FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY UNTO All THE PEOPLE
OF THE EARTH
53. NAPOLEON
54. AS SOON AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN SENT TO ST. HELENA, THE
RULERS WHO SO OFTEN HAD BEEN DEFEATED BY THE HATED
CORSICAN MET AT VIENNA AND TRIED TO UNDO THE MANY
CHANCES WHICH HAD BEEN BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
55. THEY TRIED TO ASSURE THE WORLD AN ERA OF UNDISTURBED
PEACE BY SUPPRESSING ALL NEW IDEAS. THEY MADE THE
POLICE-SPY THE HIGHEST FUNCTIONARY IN THE STATE AND
SOON THE PRISONS OF AIL COUNTRIES WERE FILLED WITH
THOSE WHO CLAIMED THAT PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO
GOVERN THEMSELVES AS THEY SEE FIT
56. THE LOVE OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, HOWEVER, WAS TOO
STRONG TO BE DESTROYED IN THIS WAY. THE SOUTH AMERICANS
WERE THE FIRST TO REBEL AGAINST THE REACTIONARY
MEASURES OF THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA. GREECE AND BELGIUM
AND SPAIN AND A LARGE NUMBER OF OTHER COUNTRIES
OF THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT FOLLOWED SUIT AND THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS FILLED WITH THE RUMOR OF MANY
WARS OF INDEPENDENCE
57. BUT WHITE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE FIGHTING FOR THEIR
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY LIVED
HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS,
WHICH HAD MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM-ENGINE OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT
STAVE OF MAN
58. THE NEW ENGINES WERE VERY EXPENSIVE AND ONLY PEOPLE
OF WEALTH COULD AFFORD THEM. THE OLD CARPENTER OR
SHOEMAKER WHO HAD BEEN HIS OWN MASTER IN HIS LITTLE
WORKSHOP WAS OBLIGED TO HIRE HIMSELF OUT TO THE OWNERS
OF THE BIG MECHANICAL TOOLS, AND WHITE HE MADE
MORE MONEY THAN BEFORE, HE LOST HIS FORMER INDEPENDENCE
AND HE DID NOT LIKE THAT
59. THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION OF MACHINERY DID NOT BRING
ABOUT THE ERA OF HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY WHICH HAD
BEEN PREDICTED BY THE GENERATION WHICH SAW THE STAGE
COACH REPLACED BY THE RAILROAD. SEVERAL REMEDIES
WERE SUGGESTED, BUT NONE OF THESE QUITE SOLVED THE
PROBLEM
60. BUT THE WORLD HAD UNDERGONE ANOTHER CHANGE WHICH WAS
OF GREATER IMPORTANCE THAN EITHER THE POLITICAL OR THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS. AFTER GENERATIONS OF OPPRESSION
AND PERSECUTION, THE SCIENTIST HAD AT LAST GAINED
LIBERTY OF ACTION AND HE WAS NOW TRYING TO DISCOVER
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS WHICH GOVERN THE UNIVERSE
61. A CHAPTER OF ART
62. THE LAST FIFTY YEARS, INCLUDING SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS
AND A FEW APOLOGIES
63. THE GREAT WAR, WHICH WAS REALLY THE STRUGGLE FOR A
NEW AND BETTER WORLD
64.ANIMATED CHRONOLOGY
65.CONCERNING THE PICTURES

66.AN HISTORICAL READING LIST FOR CHILDREN

67.INDEX

THE STORY OF MANKIND

HIGH Up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there
stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles
wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this
rock to sharpen its beak.

When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day
of eternity will have gone by.

THE SETTING OF THE STAGE

WE live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark.

Who are we?

Where do we come from?

Whither are we bound?

Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing
this question mark further and further towards that distant
line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer.

We have not gone very far.

We still know very little but we have reached the point
where (with a fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many
things.

In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best
belief) the stage was set for the first appearance of man.

If we represent the time during which it has been possible for
animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length,
then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which
man (or a creature more or less resembling man) has lived
upon this earth.

Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for
the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the
reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or
dogs or horses or any of the other animals, who, all in their
own way, have a very interesting historical development behind
them.

In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was (as far
as we now know) a large ball of flaming matter, a tiny cloud of
smoke in the endless ocean of space. Gradually, in the course
of millions of years, the surface burned itself out, and was covered
with a thin layer of rocks. Upon these lifeless rocks the
rain descended in endless torrents, wearing out the hard
granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that lay hidden between
the high cliffs of the steaming earth.

Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the
clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few
small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of
the eastern and western hemispheres.

Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been
dead, gave birth to life.

The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea.

For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents.
But during all that time it was developing certain habits that
it might survive more easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some
of these cells were happiest in the dark depths of the lakes and
the pools. They took root in the slimy sediments which had
been carried down from the tops of the hills and they became
plants. Others preferred to move about and they grew
strange jointed legs, like scorpions and began to crawl along
the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things
that looked like jelly-fishes. Still others (covered with scales)
depended upon a swimming motion to go from place to place
in their search for food, and gradually they populated the ocean
with myriads of fishes.

Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had
to search for new dwelling places. There was no more room
for them at the bottom of the sea. Reluctantly they left the
water and made a new home in the marshes and on the mud-
banks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day the
tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the rest
of the time, the plants made the best of their uncomfortable
situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded
the surface of the planet. After centuries of training, they
learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in
the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees
and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which
attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the
birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth
had become covered with green pastures, or lay dark under the
shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too
had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe
with lungs as well as with gills. We call such creatures amphibious,
which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the land
and in the water. The first frog who crosses your path can tell you
all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian.

Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted
themselves more and more to life on land. Some became reptiles
(creatures who crawl like lizards) and they shared the
silence of the forests with the insects. That they might move
faster through the soft soil, they improved upon their legs
and their size increased until the world was populated with
gigantic forms (which the hand-books of biology list under
the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus)
who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who could have
played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens.

Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in
the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred
feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose
of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from
branch to branch. And so they changed a part of their skin
into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides of
their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually
they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made
their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and
developed into true birds.

Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles
died within a short time. We do not know the reason. Perhaps
it was due to a sudden change in climate. Perhaps they
had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor
crawl, and they starved to death within sight but not within
reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the
million year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over.

The world now began to be occupied by very different
creatures. They were the descendants of the reptiles but they
were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the
``mammae'' or the breasts of the mother. Wherefore modern
science calls these animals ``mammals.'' They had shed the
scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird,
but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals however
developed other habits which gave their race a great advantage
over the other animals. The female of the species
carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were
hatched and while all other living beings, up to that time, had
left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat,
and the attacks of wild beasts, the mammals kept their young
with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were
still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young
mammals were given a much better chance to survive, because
they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know
if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take
care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how to
catch mice.

But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you
know them well. They surround you on all sides. They are
your daily companions in the streets and in your home, and you
can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zoological
garden.

And now we come to the parting of the ways when man
suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and
dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the
destiny of his race.

One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in
its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its
fore-feet for the purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of
practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After innumerable
attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the
body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every
child has to learn anew although the human race has been
doing it for over a million years.)

This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to
both, became the most successful hunter and could make a
living in every clime. For greater safety, it usually moved
about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to
warn its young of approaching danger and after many hundreds
of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises
for the purpose of talking.

This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your
first ``man-like'' ancestor.

OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS

WE know very little about the first ``true'' men. We have
never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an
ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones.
These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals
that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth.
Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to
the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have
taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our
earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy.

The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very
ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much
smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the
biting wind of the cold winter had coloured his skin a dark
brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too,
were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but
strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey.
His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a
wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He
wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the
rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke
and their lava.

He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the
pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the
pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or
he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his
own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase,
he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a
rabbit. These he would eat raw for he had never discovered
that food tasted better when it was cooked.

During the hours of day, this primitive human being
prowled about looking for things to eat.

When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and
his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders,
for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and
when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking
for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and
they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where
you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy
because it was full of fear and misery.

In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the
sun, and during the winter his children would freeze to death
in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself, (and hunting
animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their
ankles) he had no one to take care of him and he must die a
horrible death.

Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their
strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he
endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it
pleased him to hear the sound of his voice. In due time he
learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow
beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain little
shrieks which came to mean ``there is a tiger!'' or ``here come
five elephants.'' Then the others grunted something back at
him and their growl meant, ``I see them,'' or ``let us run away
and hide.'' And this was probably the origin of all language.

But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know
so very little. Early man had no tools and he built himself
no houses. He lived and died and left no trace of his existence
except a few collar-bones and a few pieces of his skull.
These tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was
inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from
all the other animals--who had probably developed from another
unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on
its hind-legs and use its fore-paws as hands--and who were
most probably connected with the creatures who happen to be
our own immediate ancestors.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.

PREHISTORIC MAN

PREHISTORIC MAN BEGINS TO MAKE
THINGS FOR HIMSELF.

EARLY man did not know what time meant. He kept
no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries or the hour
of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or even years.
But in a general way he kept track of the seasons for he had
noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild
spring--that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits
ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and
that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves
from the trees and a number of animals were getting ready
for the long hibernal sleep.

But now, something unusual and rather frightening had
happened. Something was the matter with the weather. The
warm days of summer had come very late. The fruits had
not ripened. The tops of the mountains which used to be covered
with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy
burden of snow.

Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different
from the other creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came
wandering down from the region of the high peaks. They
looked lean and appeared to be starving. They uttered sounds
which no one could understand. They seemed to say that
they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the
old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay
more than a few days there was a terrible battle with claw-like
hands and feet and whole families were killed. The others fled
back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard.

But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All
the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than
they ought to have been.

Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a
tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A
gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were
being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thunderstorms
torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite suddenly
tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them
while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling
wood. And then it began to snow.

It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and
the animals fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted
his young upon his back and followed them. But he could not
travel as fast as the wilder creatures and he was forced to
choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to
have preferred the former for he has managed to survive the
terrible glacial periods which upon four different occasions
threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth.

In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself
lest he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover
them with branches and leaves and in these traps he caught
bears and hyenas, which he then killed with heavy stones and
whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family.

Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many
animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now
followed their example, drove the animals out of their warm
homes and claimed them for his own.

Even so, the climate was too severe for most people and
the old and the young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius
bethought himself of the use of fire. Once, while out hunting,
he had been caught in a forest-fire. He remembered that he
had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus far fire
had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree
was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smouldering
branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into
a cozy little room.

And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It
was not rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered
that meat tasted better when cooked and he then and there
discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the
other animals and began to prepare his food.

In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people
with the cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day
and night against cold and hunger. They were forced to invent
tools. They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and how
to make hammers. They were obliged to put up large stores
of food for the endless days of the winter and they found that
clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the
rays of the sun. And so the glacial period, which had threatened
to destroy the human race, became its greatest teacher
because it forced man to use his brain.

HIEROGLYPHICS

THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF
WRITING AND THE RECORD OF
HISTORY BEGINS

THESE earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great
European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things.
It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have
given up the ways of savages and would have developed a
civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came an end to
their isolation. They were discovered.

A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to
cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way
to the wild people of the European continent. He came from
Africa. His home was in Egypt.

The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had
dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house.
And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in
their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of
the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the
human race.

The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were
excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built
temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which
served as the earliest models for the churches in which we worship
nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved
such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time
that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most
important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve
speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented
the art of writing.

We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines
that we take it for granted that the world has always been
able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most
important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written
documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can only teach
their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who,
because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can
make use of the experience of those generations of cats and
dogs that have gone before.

In the first century before our era, when the Romans came
to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pictures
which seemed to have something to do with the history
of the country. But the Romans were not interested in ``anything
foreign'' and did not inquire into the origin of these queer
figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of
the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the
papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had
understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several
years before. Egypt deprived of its independence had
become a store-house filled with important historical documents
which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use
to either man or beast.

Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land
of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the
name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare
for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did
not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But,
quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the
problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.

One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary
life of his little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the
Nile) decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among
the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold! he found a stone
which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt
it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of
black basalt was different from anything that had ever been
discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was
in Greek. The Greek language was known. ``All that is
necessary,'' so he reasoned, ``is to compare the Greek text with
the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.''

The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than
twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French
professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the
Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In
the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning
of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from
overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had
become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is
better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River.
We possess a written record which covers four thousand years
of chronicled history.

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means
``sacred writing'') have played such a very great role in
history, (a few of them in modified form have even found their
way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something
about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago
to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming
generations.

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every
Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to
strange messages writter{sic} in the form of little pictures which
tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters
there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to
understand the meaning of such messages.

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The
clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long
before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object
which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now.

Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were
examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics.
Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with
a saw. ``Very well,'' you would say, ``that means of course that
a farmer went out to cut down a tree.'' Then you take another
papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age
of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture
of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle
saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But
what?

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved.
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what
we now call ``phonetic writing''--a system of characters which
reproduce the ``sound'' (or phone) of the spoken word and
which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words
into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes
and pothooks.

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw.
The word ``saw'' either means a certain tool which you will find
in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb
``to see.''

This is what had happened to the word during the course
of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool
which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it
had become the past participle of a verb. After several hundred
years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and
the picture {illust.} came to stand for a single letter, the
letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here
is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in
hieroglyphics. {illust.}

The {illust.} either means one of these two round objects
in your head, which allow you to see or it means ``I,'' the person
who is talking.

A {illust.} is either an insect which gathers honey, or it
represents the verb ``to be'' which means to exist. Again, it
may be the first part of a verb like ``be-come'' or ``be-have.''
In this particular instance it is followed by {illust.} which
means a ``leaf'' or ``leave'' or ``lieve'' (the sound of all three
words is the same).

The ``eye'' you know all about.

Finally you get the picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe
It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics
developed.

You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.

``I believe I saw a giraffe.''

Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it
during thousands of years until they could write anything they
wanted, and they used these ``canned words'' to send messages
to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the
history of their country, that future generations might benefit
by the mistakes of the past.

THE NILE VALLEY

THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE
VALLEY OF THE NILE

THE history of man is the record of a hungry creature in
search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has
travelled to make his home.

The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at
an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert
of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had
flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms.
Together these invaders had formed a new race which called
itself ``Remi'' or ``the Men'' just as we sometimes call America
``God's own country.'' They had good reason to be grateful
to a Fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land.
In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a
shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grainfields
and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most
fertile clay.

In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and
made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first
large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all
the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated
system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from
the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even
more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout
the land.

While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend
sixteen hours out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself
and the members of his tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the
inhabitant of the Egyptian city found himself possessed of a
certain leisure. He used this spare time to make himself many
things that were merely ornamental and not in the least bit
useful.

More than that. One day he discovered that his brain was
capable of thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing
to do with the problems of eating and sleeping and finding a
home for the children. The Egyptian began to speculate upon
many strange problems that confronted him. Where did the
stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which
frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise
with such regularity that it was possible to base the calendar
upon the appearance and the disappearance of the annual
floods? Who was he, himself, a strange little creature surrounded
on all sides by death and sickness and yet happy and
full of laughter?

He asked these many questions and certain people obligingly
stepped forward to answer these inquiries to the best of
their ability. The Egyptians called them ``priests'' and they
became the guardians of his thoughts and gained great respect
in the community. They were highly learned men who were
entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written records.
They understood that it is not good for man to think only of
his immediate advantage in this world and they drew his attention
to the days of the future when his soul would dwell
beyond the mountains of the west and must give an account
of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty God who was the Ruler of
the Living and the Dead and who judged the acts of men
according to their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much
of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the
Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation
for the Hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile
into a land devoted to the Dead.

In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that
no soul could enter the realm of Osiris without the possession
of the body which had been its place of residence in this world.
Therefore as soon as a man was dead his relatives took his
corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was soaked in a
solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The
Persian word for pitch was ``Mumiai'' and the embalmed body
was called a ``Mummy.'' It was wrapped in yards and yards
of specially prepared linen and it was placed in a specially
prepared coffin ready to be removed to its final home. But
an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was surrounded
by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to
while away the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues
of cooks and bakers and barbers (that the occupant of this
dark home might be decently provided with food and need not
go about unshaven).

Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the
western mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward
they were obliged to build their cemeteries in the desert. The
desert however is full of wild animals and equally wild robbers
and they broke into the graves and disturbed the mummy or
stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To prevent
such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small
mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds
gradually grew in size, because the rich people built higher
mounds than the poor and there was a good deal of competition
to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The
record was made by King Khufu, whom the Greeks called
Cheops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His
mound, which the Greeks called a pyramid (because the
Egyptian word for high was pir-em-us) was over five hundred
feet high.

It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three
times as much space as that occupied by the church of St.
Peter, the largest edifice of the Christian world.

During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were
busy carrying the necessary stones from the other side of the
river--ferrying them across the Nile (how they ever managed
to do this, we do not understand), dragging them in many instances
a long distance across the desert and finally hoisting
them into their correct position. But so well did the King's
architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow
passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the
stone monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the
weight of those thousands of tons of stone which press upon
it from all sides.

THE STORY OF EGYPT

THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT

THE river Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was
a hard taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its
banks the noble art of ``team-work.'' They depended upon
each other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their
dikes in repair. In this way they learned how to get along
with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association quite
easily developed into an organised state.

Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neighbours
and he became the leader of the community and their
commander-in-chief when the envious neighbours of western
Asia invaded the prosperous valley. In due course of time
he became their King and ruled all the land from the Mediterranean
to the mountains of the west.

But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the
word meant ``the Man who lived in the Big House'') rarely
interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields.
Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his King
than he thought just, he accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he
accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris.

It was different however when a foreign invader came
and robbed him of his possessions. After twenty centuries of
independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, called the
Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred years they were
the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were highly un-
popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who
came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long
wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign
usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants.

But shortly after the year 1700 B.C. the people of Thebes
began a revolution and after a long struggle the Hyksos were
driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more.

A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of
western Asia, Egypt became part of the empire of Sardanapalus.
In the seventh century B.C. it became once more an
independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in
the city of Sais in the Delta of the Nile. But in the year 525
B.C., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession of
Egypt and in the fourth century B.C., when Persia was conquered
by Alexander the Great, Egypt too became a Macedonian
province. It regained a semblance of independence
when one of Alexander's generals set himself up as king of a
new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies,
who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria.

Finally, in the year 89 B.C., the Romans came. The last
Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country.
Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman
generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps. Twice she
was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her Roman
conquerors. But in the year 30 B.C., Augustus, the nephew
and heir of Caesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share
his late uncle's admiration for the lovely princess. He destroyed
her armies, but spared her life that he might make her
march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war. When
Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by taking poison.
And Egypt became a Roman province.

MESOPOTAMIA

MESOPOTAMIA--THE SECOND CENTRE OF
EASTERN CIVILISATION

I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid
and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed
of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way off, in the distance, far
beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will see something
green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between two
rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the
land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia--
the ``country between the rivers.''

The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the
Babylonians called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was
known as the Diklat). They begin their course amidst the
snows of the mountains of Armenia where Noah's Ark found
a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern
plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf.
They perform a very useful service. They turn the arid
regions of western Asia into a fertile garden.

The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had
offered them food upon fairly easy terms. The ``land between
the rivers'' was popular for the same reason. It was a
country full of promise and both the inhabitants of the northern
mountains and the tribes which roamed through the
southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and
most exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the
mountaineers and the desert-nomads led to endless warfare.
Only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and
that will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very
strong race of men who were capable of creating a civilisation
which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt.

THE SUMERIANS

THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY
TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA
AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC
MELTING-POT

THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries.
Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and
stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian
bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward
and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a
voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not
visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile
a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the
ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most
curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of
the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of
baked clay.

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was
not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first
``cuneiform inscriptions'' (so-called because the letters were
wedge-shaped and wedge is called ``Cuneus'' in Latin) were
brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr.
Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-
master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four
letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian
King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous
inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-
writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings,
the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The
Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of
scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they
had been developed. A few examples will show you what I
mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into
a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however was too
cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of
``heaven'' was added to that of star the picture was simplified
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle.
In the same way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.}
and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.} The sun
was originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.}
If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an
{illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our
ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries
it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and
the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races
which forced their way into the fertile valley.

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and
conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They
were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They
had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of
hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial
little hills on top of which they built their altars. They
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded
their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers
have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad
stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another.
We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians
but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-
sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later
date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of
Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile
in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of BabIlli,
or towers of Babel.

In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had
entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-
powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the
desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are
known as the ``Semites,'' because in the olden days people believed
them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians
were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another
Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself
a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who
gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state
the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the
Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-
ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not
carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers
of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians
and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast
and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and
Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until
the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when
the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and
made that city the most important capital of that day.
Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged
the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy
and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which
were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a
crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and
overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years
later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great,
who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many
Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next came the Romans
and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the second
centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness
where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.

MOSES

THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE
JEWISH PEOPLE

SOME time during the twentieth century before our era,
a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left
its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth
of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within
the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They had been driven
away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward
looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they
might set up their tents.

This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as
we call them, the Jews. They had wandered far and wide,
and after many years of dreary peregrinations they had been
given shelter in Egypt. For more than five centuries they
had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted country
had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told
you in the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves
useful to the foreign invader and had been left in the
undisturbed possession of their grazing fields. But after a
long war of independence the Egyptians had driven the
Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had
come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank
of common slaves and they had been forced to work on the
royal roads and on the Pyramids. And as the frontiers were
guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for
the Jews to escape.

After many years of suffering they were saved from their
miserable fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long
time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to appreciate
the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept
away from cities and city-life and had refused to let themselves
be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign
civilisation.

Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways
of the patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian
troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen
into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. During
his long and lonely life in the desert, he had learned to
revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the
Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds
depended for life and light and breath. This God, one
of the many divinities who were widely worshipped in western
Asia, was called Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses,
he became the sole Master of the Hebrew race.

One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews.
It was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets
of rough-hewn stone. That afternoon, the top of the mountain
was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from
the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! there stood
engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken
unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and
the blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment,
Jehovah was recognised by all the Jews as the Highest Master
of their Fate, the only True God, who had taught them how
to live holy lives when he bade them to follow the wise lessons
of his Ten Commandments.

They followed Moses when he bade them continue their
journey through the desert. They obeyed him when he told
them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might
keep well in the hot climate. And finally after many years of
wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and
prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country
of the ``Pilistu'' the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who
had settled along the coast after they had been driven away
from their own island. Unfortunately, the mainland, Palestine,
was already inhabited by another Semitic race, called the
Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into the valleys
and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple
in a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace.
As for Moses, he was no longer the leader of his people. He
had been allowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from
afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes for all time. He had
worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah. Not only had
he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free and
independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews
the first of all nations to worship a single God.

THE PHOENICIANS

THE PHOENICIANS WHO GAVE US OUR
ALPHABET

THE Phoenicians, who were the neighbours of the Jews,
were a Semitic tribe which at a very early age had settled along
the shores of the Mediterranean. They had built themselves
two well-fortified towns, Tyre and Sidon, and within a short
time they had gained a monopoly of the trade of the western
seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and
Spain and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar
to visit the Scilly islands where they could buy tin. Wherever
they went, they built themselves small trading stations, which
they called colonies. Many of these were the origin of modern
cities, such as Cadiz and Marseilles.

They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a
good profit. They were not troubled by a conscience. If we
are to believe all their neighbours they did not know what the
words honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a well-filled
treasure chest the highest ideal of all good citizens. Indeed
they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single
friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations
one service of the greatest possible value. They gave
us our alphabet.

The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing,
invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks
as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business men
and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters.
They set to work and invented a new system of writing which
was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few
pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of
the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed
the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed
and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short
and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters.

In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the
AEgean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few
letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy.
The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught
them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild
barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why
this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin
and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-
script of the Sumerians.

THE INDO-EUROPEANS

THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER
THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN
WORLD

THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia
had existed almost thirty centuries and the venerable
races of the Fertile Valley were getting old and tired. Their
doom was sealed when a new and more energetic race appeared
upon the horizon. We call this race the Indo-European race,
because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the
ruling class in the country which is now known as British India.

These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites
but they spoke a different language which is regarded as the
common ancestor of all European tongues with the exception
of Hungarian and Finnish and the Basque dialects of Northern
Spain.

When we first hear of them, they had been living along the
shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day
they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in
search of a new home. Some of them had moved into the
mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had
lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and
that is why we call them Aryans. Others had followed the
setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of
Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece
and Rome.

For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the
leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great
teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow
the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea.

Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western
Asia and there they had founded the half-independent communities
of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose
names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In
the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had
established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this
perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan,
made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon
a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the
undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.

Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians
push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon
found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo-
European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe
and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands
of the AEgean Sea.

These difficulties led to the three famous wars between
Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King
Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula.
They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to
get a foothold upon the European continent.

But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens
proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies
of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the
Asiatic rulers to return to their base.

It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient
teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great
many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the
struggle between east and west has continued until this very
day.

THE AEGEAN SEA

THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED
THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO
THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE

WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his
father told him the story of Troy. He liked that story
better than anything else he had ever heard and he made
up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave home,
he would travel to Greece and ``find Troy.'' That he was the
son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did
not bother him. He knew that he would need money but
he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging afterwards.
As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune
within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to
equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia
Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.

In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high
mound covered with grainfields. According to tradition it had
been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann,
whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge,
wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began
to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his
trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he
was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried
town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy
of which Homer had written. Then something very interesting
occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone
hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects,
which people had generally associated with the prehistoric
men who had lived in these regions before the coming of
the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very
costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was
unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of
the AEgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men
who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek
tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their
civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of originality.
And this proved to be the case. In the late seventies of
the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae, ruins
which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their
antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a
small round enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful
treasure-trove, which had been left behind by those mysterious
people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and
who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that
the Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like
giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with
mountain peaks.

A very careful study of these many relics has done away
with some of the romantic features of the story. The makers
of these early works of art and the builders of these strong
fortresses were no sorcerers, but simple sailors and traders.
They had lived in Crete, and on the many small islands of the
AEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they had
turned the AEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange
of goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly
developing wilderness of the European mainland.

For more than a thousand years they had maintained an
island empire which had developed a very high form of art.
Indeed their most important city, Cnossus, on the northern
coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its insistence upon
hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained
and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians
had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto
unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous
for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The
cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain
and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so
greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given
rise to the story of the ``labyrinth,'' the name which we give
to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is
almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has
closed upon our frightened selves.

But what finally became of this great AEgean Empire and
what caused its sudden downfall, that I can not tell.

The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no
one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their
history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct
the record of their adventures from the ruins which the
AEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the
AEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised race
which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe.
Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were
responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the AEgean
civilisation were none other than certain tribes of wandering
shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky peninsula
between the Adriatic and the AEgean seas and who are
known to us as Greeks.

THE GREEKS

MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE
OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING
POSSESSION OF GREECE

THE Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning
to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the
wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several centuries,
when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along
the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in
search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes,
after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According
to the old myths these were the only two human beings who
had escaped the great flood, which countless years before had
destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown
so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God, who lived
on Mount Olympus.

Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides,
the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest
ancestors, said that they ``did not amount to very much,'' and
this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They
lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild
dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect
for other people's rights, and they killed the natives of the
Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole
their farms and took their cattle and made their wives and
daughters slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage
of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance-
guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus.

But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw
the castles of the AEgeans and those they did not attack for
they feared the metal swords and the spears of the AEgean
soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with
their clumsy stone axes.

For many centuries they continued to wander from valley
to valley and from mountain side to mountain side Then the
whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had
come to an end.

That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The
Greek farmer, living within sight of the AEgean colonies,
was finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours.
He discovered that he could learn many useful things from
the men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae, and
Tiryns.

He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered
the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the
AEgeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. He
came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began
to build little boats for his own use.

And when he had learned everything the AEgeans could
teach him he turned upon his teachers and drove them back
to their islands. Soon afterwards he ventured forth upon the
sea and conquered all the cities of the AEgean. Finally in the
fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged
Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon
the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece,
of the AEgean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy,
the last great commercial stronghold of the older civilisation,
was destroyed in the eleventh century B.C. European history
was to begin in all seriousness.

THE GREEK CITIES

THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY
STATES

WE modern people love the sound of the word ``big.'' We
pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the ``biggest''
country in the world and possess the ``biggest'' navy and grow
the ``biggest'' oranges and potatoes, and we love to live in
cities of ``millions'' of inhabitants and when we are dead we
are buried in the ``biggest cemetery of the whole state.''

A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk,
would not have known what we meant. ``Moderation in all
things'' was the ideal of his life and mere bulk did not impress
him at all. And this love of moderation was not merely a
hollow phrase used upon special occasions: it influenced the
life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of
their death. It was part of their literature and it made them
build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the
clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets
of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the theatre
and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to
sin against the iron law of good taste or good sense.

The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians
and in their most popular athletes. When a powerful
runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer
on one foot than any other man in Hellas the people drove him
from the city because he prided himself upon an accomplish-
ment at which he could be beaten by any common goose.
``That is all very well,'' you will say, ``and no doubt it is a
great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection,
but why should the Greeks have been the only people to develop
this quality in olden times?'' For an answer I shall
point to the way in which the Greeks lived.

The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the ``subjects''
of a mysterious Supreme Ruler who lived miles and
miles away in a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the
masses of the population. The Greeks on the other hand,
were ``free citizens'' of a hundred independent little ``cities''
the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large
modern village. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he
was a Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of
other people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular
moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when
a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban
he spoke of a small town, which was both his home and his
country and which recognised no master but the will of the
people in the market-place.

To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was
born; where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and
seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where he had
grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls,
whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own
schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his father
and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high
city-walls where his wife and children lived in safety. It was
a complete world which covered no more than four or five
acres of rocky land. Don't you see how these surroundings
must have influenced a man in everything he did and said and
thought? The people of Babylon and Assyria and Egypt
had been part of a vast mob. They had been lost in the multitude.
The Greek on the other hand had never lost touch with
his immediate surroundings. He never ceased to be part of a
little town where everybody knew every one else. He felt
that his intelligent neighbours were watching him. Whatever
he did, whether he wrote plays or made statues out of marble
or composed songs, he remembered that his efforts were going
to be judged by all the free-born citizens of his home-town who
knew about such things. This knowledge forced him to strive
after perfection, and perfection, as he had been taught from
childhood, was not possible without moderation.

In this hard school, the Greeks learned to excel in many
things. They created new forms of government and new forms
of literature and new ideals in art which we have never been
able to surpass. They performed these miracles in little villages
that covered less ground than four or five modern city
blocks.

And look, what finally happened!

In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Macedonia
conquered the world. As soon as he had done with
fighting, Alexander decided that he must bestow the benefits
of the true Greek genius upon all mankind. He took it away
from the little cities and the little villages and tried to make
it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of
his newly acquired Empire. But the Greeks, removed from
the familiar sight of their own temples, removed from the well-
known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets, at once
lost the cheerful joy and the marvellous sense of moderation
which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while
they laboured for the glory of their old city-states. They became
cheap artisans, content with second-rate work. The day
the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and
were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit
died. And it has been dead ever since.

GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT

THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO
TRY THE DIFFICULT EXPERIMENT OF
SELF-GOVERNMENT

IN the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and
equally poor. Every man had owned a certain number of
cows and sheep. His mud-hut had been his castle. He had
been free to come and go as he wished. Whenever it was necessary
to discuss matters of public importance, all the citizens
had gathered in the market-place. One of the older men of the
village was elected chairman and it was his duty to see that
everybody had a chance to express his views. In case of war,
a particularly energetic and self-confident villager was chosen
commander-in-chief, but the same people who had voluntarily
given this man the right to be their leader, claimed an equal
right to deprive him of his job, once the danger had been
averted.

But gradually the village had grown into a city. Some
people had worked hard and others had been lazy. A few
had been unlucky and still others had been just plain dishonest
in dealing with their neighbours and had gathered wealth.
As a result, the city no longer consisted of a number of men
who were equally well-off. On the contrary it was inhabited
by a small class of very rich people and a large class of very
poor ones.

There had been another change. The old commander-in-
chief who had been willingly recognised as ``headman'' or
``King'' because he knew how to lead his men to victory, had
disappeared from the scene. His place had been taken by the
nobles--a class of rich people who during the course of time
had got hold of an undue share of the farms and estates.

These nobles enjoyed many advantages over the common
crowd of freemen. They were able to buy the best weapons
which were to be found on the market of the eastern Mediterranean.
They had much spare time in which they could prac-
tise the art of fighting. They lived in strongly built houses
and they could hire soldiers to fight for them. They were
constantly quarrelling among each other to decide who should
rule the city. The victorious nobleman then assumed a sort of
Kingship over all his neighbours and governed the town until
he in turn was killed or driven away by still another ambitious
nobleman.

Such a King, by the grace of his soldiers, was called a
``Tyrant'' and during the seventh and sixth centuries before
our era every Greek city was for a time ruled by such Tyrants,
many of whom, by the way, happened to be exceedingly capa-
ble men. But in the long run, this state of affairs became
unbearable. Then attempts were made to bring about reforms
and out of these reforms grew the first democratic government
of which the world has a record.

It was early in the seventh century that the people of
Athens decided to do some housecleaning and give the large
number of freemen once more a voice in the government as
they were supposed to have had in the days of their Achaean
ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to provide
them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against
the aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortunately
he was a professional lawyer and very much out of touch
with ordinary life. In his eyes a crime was a crime and when
he had finished his code, the people of Athens discovered that
these Draconian laws were so severe that they could not
possibly be put into effect. There would not have been rope
enough to hang all the criminals under their new system of
jurisprudence which made the stealing of an apple a capital
offence.

The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer.
At last they found some one who could do that sort of thing
better than anybody else. His name was Solon. He belonged
to a noble family and he had travelled all over the world and
had studied the forms of government of many other countries.
After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set
of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of
moderation which was part of the Greek character. He tried
to improve the condition of the peasant without however destroying
the prosperity of the nobles who were (or rather who
could be) of such great service to the state as soldiers. To protect
the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the judges
(who were always elected from the class of the nobles because
they received no salary) Solon made a provision whereby a
citizen with a grievance had the right to state his case before
a jury of thirty of his fellow Athenians.

Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman
to take a direct and personal interest in the affairs of the city.
No longer could he stay at home and say ``oh, I am too busy
today'' or ``it is raining and I had better stay indoors.'' He
was expected to do his share; to be at the meeting of the town
council; and carry part of the responsibility for the safety and
the prosperity of the state.

This government by the ``demos,'' the people, was often far
from successful. There was too much idle talk. There were
too many hateful and spiteful scenes between rivals for official
honor. But it taught the Greek people to be independent and
to rely upon themselves for their salvation and that was a very
good thing.

GREEK LIFE

HOW THE GREEKS LIVED

BUT how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time
to look after their families and their business if they were
forever running to the market-place to discuss affairs of state?
In this chapter I shall tell you.

In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recognised
only one class of citizens--the freemen. Every Greek
city was composed of a small number of free born citizens, a
large number of slaves and a sprinkling of foreigners.

At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were
needed for the army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to
confer the rights of citizenship upon the ``barbarians'' as they
called the foreigners. But this was an exception. Citizenship
was a matter of birth. You were an Athenian because your
father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you.
But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if you
were born of non-Athenian parents, you remained a ``foreigner''
until the end of time.

The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a
king or a tyrant, was run by and for the freemen, and this
would not have been possible without a large army of slaves
who outnumbered the free citizens at the rate of six or five
to one and who performed those tasks to which we modern
people must devote most of our time and energy if we wish to
provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments.
The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick
making of the entire city. They were the tailors and the carpenters
and the jewelers and the school-teachers and the bookkeepers
and they tended the store and looked after the factory
while the master went to the public meeting to discuss questions
of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the latest
play of AEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas
of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon
the omnipotence of the great god Zeus.

Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modem club. All the
freeborn citizens were hereditary members and all the slaves
were hereditary servants, and waited upon the needs of their
masters, and it was very pleasant to be a member of the
organisation.

But when we talk about slaves. we do not mean the sort of
people about whom you have read in the pages of ``Uncle
Tom's Cabin.'' It is true that the position of those slaves who
tilled the fields was a very unpleasant one, but the average
freeman who had come down in the world and who had been
obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miserable
a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were
more prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For
the Greeks, who loved moderation in all things, did not like to
treat their slaves after the fashion which afterward was so
common in Rome, where a slave had as few rights as an engine
in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild animals
upon the smallest pretext.

The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution,
without which no city could possibly become the home of a truly
civilised people.

The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are
performed by the business men and the professional men. As
for those household duties which take up so much of the time
of your mother and which worry your father when he comes
home from his office, the Greeks, who understood the value of
leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible minimum
by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity.

To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich
nobles spent their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked
all the comforts which a modern workman expects as his natural
right. A Greek home consisted of four walls and a roof.
There was a door which led into the street but there were no
windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping quarters
were built around an open courtyard in which there was a
small fountain, or a statue and a few plants to make it look
bright. Within this courtyard the family lived when it did not
rain or when it was not too cold. In one corner of the yard the
cook (who was a slave) prepared the meal and in another
corner, the teacher (who was also a slave) taught the children
the alpha beta gamma and the tables of multiplication and in
still another corner the lady of the house, who rarely left her
domain (since it was not considered good form for a married
woman to be seen on the street too often) was repairing her
husband's coat with her seamstresses (who were slaves,) and
in the little office, right off the door, the master was inspecting
the accounts which the overseer of his farm (who was a slave)
had just brought to him.

When dinner was ready the family came together but the
meal was a very simple one and did not take much time. The
Greeks seem to have regarded eating as an unavoidable evil
and not a pastime, which kills many dreary hours and eventually
kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and on
wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They
drank water only when nothing else was available because
they did not think it very healthy. They loved to call on each
other for dinner, but our idea of a festive meal, where everybody
is supposed to eat much more than is good for him, would
have disgusted them. They came together at the table for
the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water,
but as they were moderate people they despised those who
drank too much.

The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room
also dominated their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean
and well groomed, to have their hair and beards neatly cut,
to feel their bodies strong with the exercise and the swimming
of the gymnasium, but they never followed the Asiatic fashion
which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns. They
wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as
a modern Italian officer in his long blue cape.

They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they
thought it very vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives)
in public and whenever the women left their home they were as
inconspicuous as possible.

In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of moderation
but also of simplicity. ``Things,'' chairs and tables and
books and houses and carriages, are apt to take up a great
deal of their owner's time. In the end they invariably make
him their slave and his hours are spent looking after their
wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The
Greeks, before everything else, wanted to be ``free,'' both in
mind and in body. That they might maintain their liberty, and
be truly free in spirit, they reduced their daily needs to the
lowest possible point.

THE GREEK THEATRE

THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST
FORM OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENT

AT a very early stage of their history the Greeks had begun
to collect the poems, which had been written in honor of
their brave ancestors who had driven the Pelasgians out of
Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy. These poems were
recited in public and everybody came to listen to them. But
the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost
a necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these
recited heroic tales. It had such a curious origin that I must
tell you something about it in a separate chapter

The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every
year they held solemn processions in honor of Dionysos the
God of the wine. As everybody in Greece drank wine (the
Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming
and sailing) this particular Divinity was as popular as a God
of the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land.

And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the
vineyards, amidst a merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures
who were half man and half goat), the crowd that joined the
procession used to wear goat-skins and to hee-haw like real
billy-goats. The Greek word for goat is ``tragos'' and the
Greek word for singer is ``oidos.'' The singer who meh-mehed
like a goat therefore was called a ``tragos-oidos'' or goat singer,
and it is this strange name which developed into the modern
word ``Tragedy,'' which means in the theatrical sense a piece
with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy (which really means
the singing of something ``comos'' or gay) is the name given
to a play which ends happily.

But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masqueraders,
stamping around like wild goats, ever develop into the
noble tragedies which have filled the theatres of the world for
almost two thousand years?

The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is
really very simple as I shall show you in a moment.

The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and
attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side
of the road and laughed. But soon this business of tree-hawing
grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dullness an evil only
comparable to ugliness or sickness. They asked for something
more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet from
the village of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved
a tremendous success. He made one of the members of the
goat-chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the
leader of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade
playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was allowed
to step out of line. He waved his arms and gesticulated
while he spoke (that is to say he ``acted'' while the others merely
stood by and sang) and he asked a lot of questions, which the
bandmaster answered according to the roll of papyrus upon
which the poet had written down these answers before the
show began.

This rough and ready conversation--the dialogue--which
told the story of Dionysos or one of the other Gods, became
at once popular with the crowd. Henceforth every Dionysian
procession had an ``acted scene'' and very soon the ``acting''
was considered more important than the procession and the
meh-mehing.

AEschylus, the most successful of all ``tragedians'' who wrote
no less than eighty plays during his long life (from 526 to 455)
made a bold step forward when he introduced two ``actors''
instead of one. A generation later Sophocles increased the
number of actors to three. When Euripides began to write
his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth century, B.C.,
he was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristophanes
wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun at
everybody and everything, including the Gods of Mount Olympus,
the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders
who were lined up behind the principal performers
and who sang ``this is a terrible world'' while the hero in the
foreground committed a crime against the will of the Gods.

This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a
proper setting, and soon every Greek city owned a theatre, cut
out of the rock of a nearby hill. The spectators sat upon
wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our present orchestra
where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat).
Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors and the
chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where
they made up with large clay masks which hid their faces and
which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed
to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping. The Greek
word for tent is ``skene'' and that is the reason why we talk
of the ``scenery'' of the stage.

When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the
people took it very seriously and never went to the theatre to
give their minds a vacation. A new play became as important
an event as an election and a successful playwright was
received with greater honors than those bestowed upon a general
who had just returned from a famous victory.

THE PERSIAN WARS

HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE
AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND DROVE
THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN
SEA

THE Greeks had learned the art of trading from the
AEgeans who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians. They
had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern. They had
even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general
use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In the sixth
century before our era they had established themselves firmly
along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away
trade from the Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoenicians
of course did not like but they were not strong enough to
risk a war with their Greek competitors. They sat and waited
nor did they wait in vain.

In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe
of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and
had conquered the greater part of western Asia. The Persians
were too civilised to plunder their new subjects. They
contented themselves with a yearly tribute. When they
reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek
colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over-
Lords and pay them a stipulated tax. The Greek colonies
objected. The Persians insisted. Then the Greek colonies
appealed to the home-country and the stage was set for a
quarrel.

For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the
Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and
bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the
patient slaves of the mighty Persian Kings.

Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because
their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the
AEgean. But here their old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped
forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians. If the
Persian King would provide the soldiers, the Phoenicians would
guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to
Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and
Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe.

As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers
to the Greeks asking for ``earth and water'' as a token of their
submission. The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into
the nearest well where they would find both ``earth and water''
in large abundance and thereafter of course peace was impossible.

But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their children
and when the Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops
was near Mount Athos, the Storm-God blew his cheeks until
he almost burst the veins of his brow, and the fleet was destroyed
by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all
drowned.

Two years later they returned. This time they sailed
straight across the AEgean Sea and landed near the village of
Marathon. As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent
their army of ten thousand men to guard the hills that
surrounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they
despatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta
was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her
assistance. The other Greek cities followed her example with
the exception of tiny Plataea which sent a thousand men. On
the twelfth of September of the year 490, Miltiades, the Athenian
commander, threw this little army against the hordes of the
Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of
arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disorganised
Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to resist
such an enemy.

That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow
red with the flames of burning ships. Anxiously they waited
for news. At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the
road that led to the North. It was Pheidippides, the runner.
He stumbled and gasped for his end was near. Only a few
days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He
had hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had taken
part in the attack and later he had volunteered to carry the
news of victory to his beloved city. The people saw him fall
and they rushed forward to support him. ``We have won,''
he whispered and then he died, a glorious death which made him
envied of all men.

As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land
near Athens but they found the coast guarded and disappeared,
and once more the land of Hellas was at peace.

Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks
were not idle. They knew that a final attack was to be expected
but they did not agree upon the best way to avert the danger.
Some people wanted to increase the army. Others said that
a strong fleet was necessary for success. The two parties led by
Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles (the leader of the
bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was
done until Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his
chance and he built all the ships he could and turned the Piraeus
into a strong naval base.

In the year 481 B.C. a tremendous Persian army appeared
in Thessaly, a province of northern Greece. In this hour of
danger, Sparta, the great military city of Greece, was elected
commander-in-chief. But the Spartans cared little what happened
to northern Greece provided their own country was not
invaded, They neglected to fortify the passes that led into
Greece.

A small detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been
told to guard the narrow road between the high mountains and
the sea which connected Thessaly with the southern provinces.
Leonidas obeyed his orders. He fought and held the pass with
unequalled bravery. But a traitor by the name of Ephialtes
who knew the little byways of Malis guided a regiment of Persians
through the hills and made it possible for them to attack
Leonidas in the rear. Near the Warm Wells--the Thermopylae
--a terrible battle was fought.

When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead
under the corpses of their enemies.

But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece
fell into the hands of the Persians. They marched upon
Athens, threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis and
burned the city. The people fled to the Island of Salamis. All
seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the year 480
Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the
narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the
mainland and within a few hours he destroyed three quarters
of the Persian ships.

In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught.
Xerxes was forced to retire. The next year, so he decreed,
would bring a final decision. He took his troops to Thessaly
and there he waited for spring.

But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of
the hour. They left the safe shelter of the wall which they had
built across the isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership
of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius the Persian
general. The united Greeks (some one hundred thousand men
from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred thou-
sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy
Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows.
The Persians were defeated, as they had been at Marathon, and
this time they left for good. By a strange coincidence, the
same day that the Greek armies won their victory near Plataea,
the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy's fleet near Cape Mycale
in Asia Minor.

Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end.
Athens had covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought
bravely and well. If these two cities had been able to come to
an agreement, if they had been willing to forget their little
jealousies, they might have become the leaders of a strong and
united Hellas.

But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm
to slip by, and the same opportunity never returned.

ATHENS vs. SPARTA

HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG
AND DISASTROUS WAR FOR THE LEADERSHIP
OF GREECE

ATHENS and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people
spoke a common language. In every other respect they were
different. Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city
exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at
the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other
hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the
surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought.
Athens was a city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp
where people were soldiers for the sake of being soldiers. The
people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or
listen to the wise words of a philosopher. The Spartans, on the
other hand, never wrote a single line that was considered literature,
but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight, and they
sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of military preparedness.

No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success
of Athens with malicious hate. The energy which the defence of
the common home had developed in Athens was now used for
purposes of a more peaceful nature. The Acropolis was rebuilt
and was made into a marble shrine to the Goddess Athena.
Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far and
wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to
make the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more
worthy of their home. At the same time he kept a watchful
eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected Athens
with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day.

An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led
to the final conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens
and Sparta continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for
Athens.

During the third year of the war the plague had entered
the city. More than half of the people and Pericles, the great
leader, had been killed. The plague was followed by a period
of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A brilliant young fellow
by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of the
popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan
colony of Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and
everything was ready. But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street
brawl and was forced to flee. The general who succeeded him
was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then he lost his
army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into the
stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and
thirst.

The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens.
The city was doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered
in April of the year 404. The high walls were demolished.
The navy was taken away by the Spartans. Athens ceased to
exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it had
conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that wonderful
desire to learn and to know and to investigate which
had distinguished her free citizens during the days of greatness
and prosperity did not perish with the walls and the
ships. It continued to live. It became even more brilliant.

Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece.
But now, as the home of the first great university the city began
to influence the minds of intelligent people far beyond
the narrow frontiers of Hellas.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES
A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND
WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION

WHEN the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of
the Danube to look for pastures new, they had spent some
time among the mountains of Macedonia. Ever since, the
Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations
with the people of this northern country. The Macedonians
from their side had kept themselves well informed about conditions
in Greece.

Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished
their disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that
Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by
the name of Philip. He admired the Greek spirit in letters and
art but he despised the Greek lack of self-control in political
affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste its
men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the
difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then
he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he
meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes
had paid the Greeks one hundred and fifty years before.

Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start
upon this well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the
destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son Alexander, the
beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers.

Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the
year 334 B.C. Seven years later he reached India. In the
meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek
merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped
by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the
Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king--he had
overthrown the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild
Babylon--he had led his troops into the heart of the
Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a Macedonian
province and dependency. Then he stopped and announced
even more ambitious plans.

The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence
of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek
language--they must live in cities built after a Greek model.
The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The military
camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the
newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the
flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old
palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.

Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay
of a higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish
ambitions and his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable
service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of
ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves.
But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world
brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.

They maintained their independence until the Romans
added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The
strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek,
part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the
Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got
such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its influence
in our own lives this very day.

A SUMMARY

A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20

THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been
looking eastward. But from this time on, the history of Egypt
and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must
take you to study the western landscape.

Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to
ourselves what we have seen.

First of all I showed you prehistoric man--a creature very
simple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I
told you how he was the most defenceless of the many animals
that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents,
but being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to
hold his own.

Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold
weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was
obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished
to survive. Since, however, that ``wish to survive'' was (and is)
the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to
the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to
work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage
to exist through the long cold spells which killed many
ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable
once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of
things which gave him such great advantages over his less intelligent
neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious
one during the first half million years of man's residence upon
this planet) became a very remote one.

I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly
plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not
well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile
rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of
civilisation.

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, ``the land between the
rivers,'' which was the second great school of the human race.
And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the AEgean
Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old
east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.

Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes,
who thousands of years before had left the heart of
Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed
their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since
then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told
you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states,
where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured
(that is a big word, but you can ``figure out'' what it means)
into something quite new, something that was much nobler and
finer than anything that had gone before.

When you look at the map you will see how by this time
civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt,
and by way of Mesopotamia and the AEgean Islands it moves
westward until it reaches the European continent. The first
four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians
and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember
that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples)
have carried the torch that was to illuminate the world.
They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become
the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the
Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward
along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves
the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when
the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.

This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict
between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises
the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-
Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of
the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon
which our modern society is based.

I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold
of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a
great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words
fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to
our story and give you an account of the famous war between
Carthage and Rome.

ROME AND CARTHAGE

THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE
NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE
INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE
WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH
OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE
WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE
WAS DESTROYED

THE little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood
on a low hill which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of
water ninety miles wide which separates Africa from Europe.
It was an ideal spot for a commercial centre. Almost too ideal.
It grew too fast and became too rich. When in the sixth century
before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed
Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the Mother
Country and became an independent state--the great western
advance-post of the Semitic races.

Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits
which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the
Phoenicians. It was a vast business-house, protected by a
strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life.
The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies
were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of
rich men, The Greek word for rich is ``ploutos'' and the Greeks
called such a government by ``rich men'' a ``Plutocracy.'' Carthage
was a plutocracy and the real power of the state lay in
the hands of a dozen big ship-owners and mine-owners and
merchants who met in the back room of an office and regarded
their common Fatherland as a business enterprise which ought
to yield them a decent profit. They were however wide awake
and full of energy and worked very hard.

As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her
neighbours increased until the greater part of the African
coast, Spain and certain regions of France were Carthaginian
possessions, and paid tribute, taxes and dividends to the mighty
city on the African Sea.

Of course, such a ``plutocracy'' was forever at the mercy of
the crowd. As long as there was plenty of work and wages
were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented,
allowed their ``betters'' to rule them and asked no embarrassing
questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when no ore
was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and
stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were
grumblings and there was a demand that the popular assembly
be called together as in the olden days when Carthage had
been a self-governing republic.

To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged
to keep the business of the town going at full speed. They
had managed to do this very successfully for almost five hun-
dred years when they were greatly disturbed by certain rumors
which reached them from the western coast of Italy. It was
said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had suddenly
risen to great power and was making itself the acknowledged
leader of all the Latin tribes who inhabited central Italy.
It was also said that this village, which by the way was called
Rome, intended to build ships and go after the commerce of
Sicily and the southern coast of France.

Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The
young rival must be destroyed lest the Carthaginian rulers
lose their prestige as the absolute rulers of the western
Mediterranean. The rumors were duly investigated and in a
general way these were the facts that came to light.

The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civilisation.
Whereas in Greece all the good harbours faced eastward
and enjoyed a full view of the busy islands of the AEgean,
the west coast of Italy contemplated nothing more exciting
than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The country
was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants
and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession
of their hills and their marshy plains.

The first serious invasion of this land came from the north.
At an unknown date certain Indo-European tribes had managed
to find their way through the passes of the Alps and had
pushed southward until they had filled the heel and the toe of
the famous Italian boot with their villages and their flocks.
Of these early conquerors we know nothing. No Homer sang
their glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome
(written eight hundred years later when the little city had become
the centre of an Empire) are fairy stories and do not belong
in a history. Romulus and Remus jumping across each
other's walls (I always forget who jumped across whose wall)
make entertaining reading, but the foundation of the City of
Rome was a much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a thousand
American cities have done, by being a convenient place
for barter and horse-trading. It lay in the heart of the plains
of central Italy The Tiber provided direct access to the sea.
The land-road from north to south found here a convenient
ford which could be used all the year around. And seven little
hills along the banks of the river offered the inhabitants a safe
shelter against their enemies who lived in the mountains and
those who lived beyond the horizon of the nearby sea.

The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a
rough crowd with an unholy desire for easy plunder. But they
were very backward. They used stone axes and wooden
shields and were no match for the Romans with their steel
swords. The sea-people on the other hand were dangerous
foes. They were called the Etruscans and they were (and
still are) one of the great mysteries of history. Nobody knew
(or knows) whence they came; who they were; what had driven
them away from their original homes. We have found the remains
of their cities and their cemeteries and their waterworks
all along the Italian coast. We are familiar with their inscriptions.
But as no one has ever been able to decipher the Etruscan
alphabet, these written messages are, so far, merely annoying
and not at all useful.

Our best guess is that the Etruscans came originally from
Asia Minor and that a great war or a pestilence in that country
had forced them to go away and seek a new home elsewhere.
Whatever the reason for their coming, the Etruscans played a
great role in history. They carried the pollen of the ancient
civilisation from the east to the west and they taught the
Romans who, as we know, came from the north, the first principles
of architecture and street-building and fighting and art
and cookery and medicine and astronomy.

But just as the Greeks had not loved their AEgean teachers,
in this same way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters.
They got rid of them as soon as they could and the opportunity
offered itself when Greek merchants discovered the
commercial possibilities of Italy and when the first Greek
vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they
stayed to instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the
Roman country-side (and who were called the Latins) quite
willing to learn such things as might be of practical use. At
once they understood the great benefit that could be derived
from a written alphabet and they copied that of the Greeks.
They also understood the commercial advantages of a well-
regulated system of coins and measures and weights. Eventually
the Romans swallowed Greek civilisation hook, line and
sinker.

They even welcomed the Gods of the Greeks to their
country. Zeus was taken to Rome where he became known as
Jupiter and the other divinities followed him. The Roman Gods
however never were quite like their cheerful cousins who had
accompanied the Greeks on their road through life and through
history. The Roman Gods were State Functionaries. Each
one managed his own department with great prudence and a
deep sense of justice, but in turn he was exact in demanding the
obedience of his worshippers. This obedience the Romans rendered
with scrupulous care. But they never established the
cordial personal relations and that charming friendship which
had existed between the old Hellenes and the mighty residents
of the high Olympian peak.

The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of government,
but being of the same Indo-European stock as the people
of Hellas, the early history of Rome resembles that of
Athens and the other Greek cities. They did not find it difficult
to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the ancient
tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from
the city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the
nobles, and it took many centuries before they managed to
establish a system which gave every free citizen of Rome a
chance to take a personal interest in the affairs of his town.

Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over
the Greeks. They managed the affairs of their country without
making too many speeches. They were less imaginative
than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce of action to a
pound of words. They understood the tendency of the multi-
tude (the ``plebe,'' as the assemblage of free citizens was called)
only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They
therefore placed the actual business of running the city into
the hands of two ``consuls'' who were assisted by a council of
Elders, called the Senate (because the word ``senex'' means an
old man). As a matter of custom and practical advantage the
senators were elected from the nobility. But their power had
been strictly defined.

Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of
struggle between the poor and the rich which had forced
Athens to adopt the laws of Draco and Solon. In Rome this
conflict had occurred in the fifth century B. C. As a result the
freemen had obtained a written code of laws which protected
them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the
institution of the ``Tribune.'' These Tribunes were city-
magistrates, elected by the freemen. They had the right to protect
any citizen against those actions of the government officials
which were thought to be unjust. A consul had the right to
condemn a man to death, but if the case had not been absolutely
proved the Tribune could interfere and save the poor
fellow's life.

But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little
city of a few thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of
Rome lay in the country districts outside her walls. And it
was in the government of these outlying provinces that Rome
at an early age showed her wonderful gift as a colonising
power.

In very early times Rome had been the only strongly fortified
city in central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable
refuge to other Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of
attack. The Latin neighbours had recognised the advantages
of a close union with such a powerful friend and they had tried
to find a basis for some sort of defensive and offensive alliance.
Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians,
even Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of submission
on the part of the ``barbarians,'' The Romans did nothing of
the sort. They gave the ``outsider'' a chance to become partners
in a common ``res publica''--or common-wealth.

``You want to join us,'' they said. ``Very well, go ahead
and join. We shall treat you as if you were full-fledged citizens
of Rome. In return for this privilege we expect you to
fight for our city, the mother of us all, whenever it shall be
necessary.''

The ``outsider'' appreciated this generosity and he showed
his gratitude by his unswerving loyalty.

Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign
residents had moved out as quickly as they could. Why defend
something which meant nothing to them but a temporary
boarding house in which they were tolerated as long as they
paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates
of Rome, all the Latins rushed to her defence. It was their
Mother who was in danger. It was their true ``home'' even if
they lived a hundred miles away and had never seen the walls
of the sacred Hills.

No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In
the beginning of the fourth century B.C. the wild Gauls forced
their way into Italy. They had defeated the Roman army near
the River Allia and had marched upon the city. They had
taken Rome and then they expected that the people would
come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened.
After a short time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by
a hostile population which made it impossible for them to obtain
supplies. After seven months, hunger forced them to withdraw.
The policy of Rome to treat the ``foreigner'' on equal
terms had proved a great success and Rome stood stronger than
ever before.

This short account of the early history of Rome shows you
the enormous difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy
state, and that of the ancient world which was embodied in the
town of Carthage. The Romans counted upon the cheerful
and hearty co-operation between a number of ``equal citizens.''
The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt
and western Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and therefore
unwilling) obedience of ``Subjects'' and when these failed
they hired professional soldiers to do their fighting for them.

You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear
such a clever and powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of
Carthage was only too willing to pick a quarrel that they might
destroy the dangerous rival before it was too late.

But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that
it never pays to rush matters. They proposed to the Romans
that their respective cities draw two circles on the map and
that each town claim one of these circles as her own ``sphere
of influence'' and promise to keep out of the other fellow's
circle. The agreement was promptly made and was broken just
as promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their
armies to Sicily where a rich soil and a bad government invited
foreign interference.

The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War)
lasted twenty-four years. It was fought out on the high seas
and in the beginning it seemed that the experienced Car-
thaginian navy would defeat the newly created Roman fleet.
Following their ancient tactics, the Carthaginian ships would
either ram the enemy vessels or by a bold attack from the side
they would break their oars and would then kill the sailors of
the helpless vessel with their arrows and with fire balls. But
Roman engineers invented a new craft which carried a boarding
bridge across which the Roman infantrymen stormed the
hostile ship. Then there was a sudden end to Carthaginian
victories. At the battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated.
Carthage was obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part
of the Roman domains.

Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in
quest of copper) had taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage
(in quest of silver) thereupon occupied all of southern Spain.
This made Carthage a direct neighbour of the Romans. The
latter did not like this at all and they ordered their troops to
cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian army of occupation.

The stage was set for the second outbreak between the two
rivals. Once more a Greek colony was the pretext for a war.
The Carthaginians were besieging Saguntum on the east coast
of Spain. The Saguntians appealed to Rome and Rome, as
usual, was willing to help. The Senate promised the help of
the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took
some time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had
been destroyed. This had been done in direct opposition to
the will of Rome. The Senate decided upon war. One Roman
army was to cross the African sea and make a landing on Carthaginian
soil. A second division was to keep the Carthaginian
armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing to the
aid of the home town. It was an excellent plan and everybody
expected a great victory. But the Gods had decided
otherwise.

It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ
and the Roman army which was to attack the Carthaginians in
Spain had left Italy. People were eagerly waiting for news of
an easy and complete victory when a terrible rumour began to
spread through the plain of the Po. Wild mountaineers, their
lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of thousands of
brown men accompanied by strange beasts ``each one as big as
a house,'' who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow
which surrounded the old Graian pass through which Hercules,
thousands of years before, had driven the oxen of Geryon on
his way from Spain to Greece. Soon an endless stream of
bedraggled refugees appeared before the gates of Rome, with
more complete details. Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, with
fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand horsemen and thirty-
seven fighting elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees. He had
defeated the Roman army of Scipio on the banks of the Rhone
and he had guided his army safely across the mountain passes
of the Alps although it was October and the roads were thickly
covered with snow and ice. Then he had joined forces with
the Gauls and together they had defeated a second Roman
army just before they crossed the Trebia and laid siege to
Placentia, the northern terminus of the road which connected
Rome with the province of the Alpine districts.

The Senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual,
hushed up the news of these many defeats and sent two fresh
armies to stop the invader. Hannibal managed to surprise
these troops on a narrow road along the shores of the Trasimene
Lake and there he killed all the Roman officers and most
of their men. This time there was a panic among the people
of Rome, but the Senate kept its nerve. A third army was
organised and the command was given to Quintus Fabius Maximus
with full power to act ``as was necessary to save the state.''

Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost.
His raw and untrained men, the last available soldiers, were
no match for Hannibal's veterans. He refused to accept battle
but forever he followed Hannibal, destroyed everything eatable,
destroyed the roads, attacked small detachments and generally
weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops by a
most distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare.

Such methods however did not satisfy the fearsome crowds
who had found safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted
``action.'' Something must be done and must be done quickly.
A popular hero by the name of Varro, the sort of man who
went about the city telling everybody how much better he could
do things than slow old Fabius, the ``Delayer,'' was made
commander-in-chief by popular acclamation. At the battle of
Cannae (216) he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman
history. More than seventy thousand men were killed. Hannibal
was master of all Italy.

He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other,
proclaiming himself the ``deliverer from the yoke of Rome''
and asking the different provinces to join him in warfare upon
the mother city. Then once more the wisdom of Rome bore
noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and Syracuse, all
Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer,
found himself opposed by the people whose friend he pretended
to be. He was far away from home and did not like
the situation. He sent messengers to Carthage to ask for fresh
supplies and new men. Alas, Carthage could not send him
either.

The Romans with their boarding-bridges, were the masters
of the sea. Hannibal must help himself as best he could.
He continued to defeat the Roman armies that were sent out
against him, but his own numbers were decreasing rapidly and
the Italian peasants held aloof from this self-appointed
``deliverer.''

After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal
found himself besieged in the country which he had just
conquered. For a moment, the luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal,
his brother, had defeated the Roman armies in Spain. He had
crossed the Alps to come to Hannibal's assistance. He sent
messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and ask the other
army to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unfortunately the
messengers fell into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal
waited in vain for further news until his brother's head, neatly
packed in a basket, came rolling into his camp and told him
of the fate of the last of the Carthaginian troops.

With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio
easily reconquered Spain and four years later the Romans
were ready for a final attack upon Carthage. Hannibal was
called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried to organise
the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle
of Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. Hannibal fled to
Tyre. From there he went to Asia Minor to stir up the Syrians
and the Macedonians against Rome. He accomplished very
little but his activities among these Asiatic powers gave the
Romans an excuse to carry their warfare into the territory of
the east and annex the greater part of the AEgean world.

Driven from one city to another, a fugitive without a home,
Hannibal at last knew that the end of his ambitious dream had
come. His beloved city of Carthage had been ruined by the
war. She had been forced to sign a terrible peace. Her navy
had been sunk. She had been forbidden to make war without
Roman permission. She had been condemned to pay the Romans
millions of dollars for endless years to come. Life offered
no hope of a better future. In the year 190 B.C. Hannibal took
poison and killed himself.

Forty years later, the Romans forced their last war upon
Carthage. Three long years the inhabitants of the old Phoenician
colony held out against the power of the new republic.
Hunger forced them to surrender. The few men and women
who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city was
set on fire. For two whole weeks the store-houses and the pal-
aces and the great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was
pronounced upon the blackened ruins and the Roman legions
returned to Italy to enjoy their victory.

For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained
a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been
destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great
inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed.

THE RISE OF ROME

HOW ROME HAPPENED

THE Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it.
It ``happened.'' No famous general or statesman or cut-
throat ever got up and said ``Friends, Romans, Citizens, we
must found an Empire. Follow me and together we shall conquer
all the land from the Gates of Hercules to Mount Taurus.''

Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished
statesmen and cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over
the world. But the Roman empire-making was done without
a preconceived plan. The average Roman was a very matter-
of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about government. When
someone began to recite ``eastward the course of Roman Empire,
etc., etc.,'' he hastily left the forum. He just continued
to take more and more land because circumstances forced him
to do so. He was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both
by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to stay
at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend
himself and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask
for aid in a distant country then the patient Roman marched
many dreary miles to defeat this dangerous foe and when this
had been accomplished, he stayed behind to adminster{sic} his
newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands of
wandering Barbarians and become themselves a menace to
Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated and yet to the
contemporaries it was so very simple, as you shall see in a moment.

In the year 203 B.C. Scipio had crossed the African Sea
and had carried the war into Africa. Carthage had called Hannibal
back. Badly supported by his mercenaries, Hannibal
had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had asked for his
surrender and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings of
Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter.

The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the Empire
of Alexander the Great) just then were contemplating an
expedition against Egypt. They hoped to divide the rich Nile
valley between themselves. The king of Egypt had heard of
this and he had asked Rome to come to his support. The stage
was set for a number of highly interesting plots and counter-
plots. But the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang
the curtain down before the play had been fairly started.
Their legions completely defeated the heavy Greek phalanx
which was still used by the Macedonians as their battle formation.
That happened in the year 197 B.C. at the battle in the
plains of Cynoscephalae, or ``Dogs' Heads,'' in central Thessaly.

The Romans then marched southward to Attica and informed
the Greeks that they had come to ``deliver the Hellenes
from the Macedonian yoke.'' The Greeks, having learned
nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their new freedom
in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once more
began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good
old days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less
love for these silly bickerings of a race which they rather despised,
showed great forebearance. But tiring of these endless
dissensions they lost patience, invaded Greece, burned down
Corinth (to ``encourage the other Greeks'') and sent a Roman
governor to Athens to rule this turbulent province. In this
way, Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which protected
Rome's eastern frontier.

Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the Kingdom of
Syria, and Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown
great eagerness when his distinguished guest, General Han-
nibal, explained to him how easy it would be to invade Italy
and sack the city of Rome.

Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who
had defeated Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was
sent to Asia Minor. He destroyed the armies of the Syrian
king near Magnesia (in the year 190 B.C.) Shortly afterwards,
Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia Minor
became a Roman protectorate and the small City-Republic of
Rome was mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon
the Mediterranean.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CENTURIES
OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BECAME
AN EMPIRE

WHEN the Roman armies returned from these many victorious
campaigns, they were received with great jubilation.
Alas and alack! this sudden glory did not make the country any
happier. On the contrary. The endless campaigns had ruined
the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard work of Empire
making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the
successful generals (and their private friends) who had used
the war as an excuse for wholesale robbery.

The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity
which had characterised the lives of her famous men. The
new Republic felt ashamed of the shabby coats and the high
principles which had been fashionable in the days of its grandfathers.
It became a land of rich people ruled by rich people
for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to
disastrous failure, as I shall now tell you.

Within less than a century and a half. Rome had become
the mistress of practically all the land around the Mediterranean.
In those early days of history a prisoner of war lost
his freedom and became a slave. The Roman regarded war as
a very serious business and he showed no mercy to a conquered
foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and
children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves.
And a like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and
Macedonia and Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt
against the Roman power.

Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of
machinery. Nowadays a rich man invests his money in factories.
The rich people of Rome (senators, generals and war-
profiteers) invested theirs in land and in slaves. The land
they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces. The
slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to
be cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries
before Christ there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the
landowners worked their slaves until they dropped dead in their
tracks, when they bought new ones at the nearest bargain-counter
of Corinthian or Carthaginian captives.

And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer!

He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her
battles without complaint. But when he came home after ten,
fifteen or twenty years, his lands were covered with weeds and
his family had been ruined. But he was a strong man and
willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited
for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together
with his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners
who worked their estates with slaves could underbid him all
along the line. For a couple of years he tried to hold his own.
Then he gave up in despair. He left the country and he went
to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as he had been
before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands
of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy
hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt
to get sick and die from terrible epidemics. They were all
profoundly discontented. They had fought for their country and
this was their reward. They were always willing to listen to
those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public
grievance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a
grave menace to the safety of the state.

But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders.
``We have our army and our policemen,'' they argued, ``they
will keep the mob in order.'' And they hid themselves behind
the high walls of their pleasant villas and cultivated their
gardens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a Greek
slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters.

In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish
service to the Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daughter
of Scipio Africanus, had been married to a Roman by the
name of Gracchus. She had two sons, Tiberius and Gaius.
When the boys grew up they entered politics and tried to bring
about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown
that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by
two thousand noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been
elected a Tribune, tried to help the freemen. He revived two
ancient laws which restricted the number of acres which a single
owner might possess. In this way he hoped to revive the
valuable old class of small and independent freeholders. The
newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state.
There were street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the
popular Tribune. Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he
entered the assembly and was beaten to death. Ten years later
his brother Gaius tried the experiment of reforming a nation
against the expressed wishes of a strong privileged class. He
passed a ``poor law'' which was meant to help the destitute
farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman
citizens into professional beggars.

He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts
of the empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right
sort of people. Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he
too was murdered and his followers were either killed or exiled.
The first two reformers had been gentlemen. The two who
came after were of a very different stamp. They were
professional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the
other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following.

Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the victor
in a great battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teutons
and the Cimbri had been annihilated, was the popular hero
of the disinherited freemen.

Now it happened in the year 88 B.C. that the Senate of
Rome was greatly disturbed by rumours that came from Asia.
Mithridates, king of a country along the shores of the Black
Sea, and a Greek on his mother's side, had seen the possibility
of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire. He began his
campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman
citizens who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and
children. Such an act, of course, meant war. The Senate
equipped an army to march against the King of Pontus and
punish him for his crime. But who was to be commander-in-
chief? ``Sulla,'' said the Senate, ``because he is Consul.''
``Marius,'' said the mob, ``because he has been Consul five times
and because he is the champion of our rights.''

Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be
in actual command of the army. He went west to defeat
Mithridates and Marius fled to Africa. There he waited
until he heard that Sulla had crossed into Asia. He then
returned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents,
marched on Rome and entered the city with his professional
highwaymen, spent five days and five nights, slaughtering the
enemies of the Senatorial party, got himself elected Consul and
promptly died from the excitement of the last fortnight.

There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having
defeated Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return
to Rome and settle a few old scores of his own. He was as
good as his word. For weeks his soldiers were busy executing
those of their fellow citizens who were suspected of democratic
sympathies. One day they got hold of a young fellow who
had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were
going to hang him when some one interfered. ``The boy is too
young,'' he said, and they let him go. His name was Julius
Caesar. You shall meet him again on the next page.

As for Sulla, he became ``Dictator,'' which meant sole and
supreme ruler of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome
for four years, and he died quietly in his bed, having spent the
last year of his life tenderly raising his cabbages, as was the
custom of so many Romans who had spent a lifetime killing
their fellow-men.

But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they
grew worse. Another general, Gnaeus Pompeius, or Pompey,
a close friend of Sulla, went east to renew the war against the
ever troublesome Mithridates. He drove that energetic potentate
into the mountains where Mithridates took poison and
killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a Roman
captive. Next he re-established the authority of Rome over
Syria, destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia,
trying to revive the myth of Alexander the Great, and at last
(in the year 62) returned to Rome with a dozen ship-loads of
defeated Kings and Princes and Generals, all of whom were
forced to march in the triumphal procession of this enormously
popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty
million dollars in plunder.

It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed
in the hands of a strong man. Only a few months before, the
town had almost fallen into the hands of a good-for-nothing
young aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had gambled
away his money and hoped to reimburse himself for his losses by
a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer, had discovered
the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Catiline
to flee. But there were other young men with similar ambitions
and it was no time for idle talk.

Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge
of affairs. He became the leader of this Vigilante Committee.
Gaius Julius Caesar, who had made a reputation for himself
as governor of Spain, was the second in command. The
third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of Crassus.
He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been
a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon
an expedition against the Parthians and was killed.

As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he
decided that he needed a little more military glory to become
a popular hero. He crossed the Alps and conquered that part
of the world which is now called France. Then he hammered
a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine and invaded the land
of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and visited England.
Heaven knows where he might have ended if he had not been
forced to return to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had
been appointed dictator for life. This of course meant that
Caesar was to be placed on the list of the ``retired officers,'' and
the idea did not appeal to him. He remembered that he had
begun life as a follower of Marius. He decided to teach the
Senators and their ``dictator'' another lesson. He crossed the
Rubicon River which separated the province of Cis-alpine Gaul
from Italy. Everywhere he was received as the ``friend of the
people.'' Without difficulty Caesar entered Rome and Pompey
fled to Greece Caesar followed him and defeated his followers
near Pharsalus. Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and
escaped to Egypt. When he landed he was murdered by order
of young king Ptolemy. A few days later Caesar arrived.
He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians and
the Roman garrison which had remained faithful to Pompey,
attacked his camp.

Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to
the Egyptian fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning
vessels fell on the roof of the famous library of Alexandria
(which was just off the water front,) and destroyed it. Next
he attacked the Egyptian army, drove the soldiers into the
Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new government
under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word
reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates,
had gone on the war-path. Caesar marched northward, defeated
Pharnaces in a war which lasted five days, sent word of
his victory to Rome in the famous sentence ``veni, vidi, vici,''
which is Latin for ``I came, I saw, I conquered,'' and returned
to Egypt where he fell desperately in love with Cleopatra, who
followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of the
government, in the year 46. He marched at the head of not
less than four different victory-parades, having won four
different campaigns.

Then Caesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his
adventures, and the grateful Senate made him ``dictator'' for
ten years. It was a fatal step.

The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the
Roman state. He made it possible for freemen to become
members of the Senate. He conferred the rights of citizenship
upon distant communities as had been done in the early days
of Roman history. He permitted ``foreigners'' to exercise
influence upon the government. He reformed the administration
of the distant provinces which certain aristocratic families
had come to regard as their private possessions. In short he
did many things for the good of the majority of the people but
which made him thoroughly unpopular with the most powerful
men in the state. Half a hundred young aristocrats formed a
plot ``to save the Republic.'' On the Ides of March (the fifteenth
of March according to that new calendar which Caesar
had brought with him from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when
he entered the Senate. Once more Rome was without a master.

There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of
Caesar's glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The
other was Octavian, Caesar's grand-nephew and heir to his
estate. Octavian remained in Rome, but Antony went to Egypt
to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had fallen in love, as
seems to have been the habit of Roman generals.

A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Actium,
Octavian defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and
Cleopatra was left alone to face the enemy. She tried very
hard to make Octavian her third Roman conquest. When she
saw that she could make no impression upon this very proud
aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman province.

As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did
not repeat the mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how
people will shy at words. He was very modest in his demands
when he returned to Rome. He did not want to be a ``dictator.''
He would be entirely satisfied with the title of ``the Honourable.''
But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed
him as Augustus--the Illustrious--he did not object and a few
years later the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser,
while the soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their
Commander-in-chief referred to him as the Chief, the Imperator or
Emperor. The Republic had become an Empire, but the average
Roman was hardly aware of the fact.

In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the
Roman people had become so well established that he was made
an object of that divine worship which hitherto had been reserved
for the Gods. And his successors were true ``Emperors''--the
absolute rulers of the greatest empire the world had
ever seen.

If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired
of anarchy and disorder. He did not care who ruled him provided
the new master gave him a chance to live quietly and
without the noise of eternal street riots. Octavian assured his
subjects forty years of peace. He had no desire to extend the
frontiers of his domains, In the year 9 A.D. he had contem-
plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been
killed with all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that
the Romans made no further attempts to civilise these wild
people.

They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem
of internal reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two
centuries of revolution and foreign war had repeatedly killed
the best men among the younger generations. It had ruined
the class of the free farmers. It had introduced slave labor,
against which no freeman could hope to compete. It had
turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and
unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large
bureaucracy--petty officials who were underpaid and who were
forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for
their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence,
to blood-shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and
suffering of others.

Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our
era was a magnificent political structure, so large that Alexander's
empire became one of its minor provinces. Underneath
this glory there lived millions upon millions of poor and tired
human beings, toiling like ants who have built a nest underneath
a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some one
else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields.
They lived in stables. They died without hope.

It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the
founding of Rome. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus
was living in the palace of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged
upon the task of ruling his empire.

In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph
the Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of
Bethlehem.

This is a strange world.

Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open
combat.

And the stable was to emerge victorious.

JOSHUA OF NAZARETH

THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM
THE GREEKS CALLED JESUS

IN the autumn of the year of the city 783 (which would be
62 A.D., in our way of counting time) AEsculapius Cultellus, a
Roman physician, wrote to his nephew who was with the army
in Syria as follows:

My dear Nephew,

A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man
named Paul. He appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish
parentage, well educated and of agreeable manners. I had
been told that he was here in connection with a law-suit, an appeal
from one of our provincial courts, Caesarea or some such
place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described to
me as a ``wild and violent'' fellow who had been making
speeches against the People and against the Law. I found him
very intelligent and of great honesty.

A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia
Minor tells me that he heard something about him in Ephesus
where he was preaching sermons about a strange new God. I
asked my patient if this were true and whether he had told the
people to rebel against the will of our beloved Emperor. Paul
answered me that the Kingdom of which he had spoken was
not of this world and he added many strange utterances which
I did not understand, but which were probably due to his
fever.

His personality made a great impression upon me and I
was sorry to hear that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few
days ago. Therefore I am writing this letter to you. When
next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to find out something
about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet, who
seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much
excited about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who
openly talked of the new kingdom (whatever that means) have
been crucified. I would like to know the truth about all these
rumours and I am
                              Your devoted Uncle,
                                   AESCULAPIUS CULTELLUS.

Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the
VII Gallic Infantry, answered as follows:

My dear Uncle,

I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions.

Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There
have been several revolutions during the last century and there
is not much left of the old city. We have been here now for a
month and to-morrow we shall continue our march to Petra,
where there has been trouble with some of the Arab tribes. I
shall use this evening to answer your questions, but pray do
not expect a detailed report.

I have talked with most of the older men in this city but
few have been able to give me any definite information. A
few days ago a pedler came to the camp. I bought some of
his olives and I asked him whether he had ever heard of the
famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He said
that he remembered it very clearly, because his father had
taken him to Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see
the execution, and to show him what became of the enemies of
the laws of the people of Judaea. He gave me the address of
one Joseph, who had been a personal friend of the Messiah
and told me that I had better go and see him if I wanted to
know more.

This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an
old man. He had been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water
lakes. His memory was clear, and from him at last I got a
fairly definite account of what had happened during the
troublesome days before I was born.

Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the throne,
and an officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was governor of
Judaea and Samaria. Joseph knew little about this Pilatus.
He seemed to have been an honest enough official who left a
decent reputation as procurator of the province. In the year
755 or 756 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus was called to
Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young man (the
son of a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be planning a
revolution against the Roman government. Strangely enough
our own intelligence officers, who are usually well informed,
appear to have heard nothing about it, and when they investigated
the matter they reported that the carpenter was an
excellent citizen and that there was no reason to proceed against
him. But the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish faith, according
to Joseph, were much upset. They greatly disliked his
popularity with the masses of the poorer Hebrews. The
``Nazarene'' (so they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed that a
Greek or a Roman or even a Philistine, who tried to live a decent
and honourable life, was quite as good as a Jew who spent
his days studying the ancient laws of Moses. Pilatus does not
seem to have been impressed by this argument, but when the
crowds around the temple threatened to lynch Jesus, and kill
all his followers, he decided to take the carpenter into custody
to save his life.

He does not appear to have understood the real nature of
the quarrel. Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain
their grievances, they shouted ``heresy'' and ``treason'' and got
terribly excited. Finally, so Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for
Joshua (that was the name of the Nazarene, but the Greeks
who live in this part of the world always refer to him as Jesus)
to examine him personally. He talked to him for several
hours. He asked him about the ``dangerous doctrines'' which
he was said to have preached on the shores of the sea of Galilee.
But Jesus answered that he never referred to politics. He was
not so much interested in the bodies of men as in Man's soul.
He wanted all people to regard their neighbours as their
brothers and to love one single God, who was the father of all
living beings.

Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines
of the Stoics and the other Greek philosophers, does not appear
to have discovered anything seditious in the talk of Jesus.
According to my informant he made another attempt to save
the life of the kindly prophet. He kept putting the execution
off. Meanwhile the Jewish people, lashed into fury by their
priests, got frantic with rage. There had been many riots in
Jerusalem before this and there were only a few Roman soldiers
within calling distance. Reports were being sent to the
Roman authorities in Caesarea that Pilatus had ``fallen a victim
to the teachings of the Nazarene.'' Petitions were being
circulated all through the city to have Pilatus recalled, because
he was an enemy of the Emperor. You know that our governors
have strict instructions to avoid an open break with
their foreign subjects. To save the country from civil war,
Pilatus finally sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved
with great dignity and who forgave all those who hated him.
He was crucified amidst the howls and the laughter of the
Jerusalem mob.

That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his
old cheeks. I gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he
refused it and asked me to hand it to one poorer than himself.
I also asked him a few questions about your friend Paul. He
had known him slightly. He seems to have been a tent maker
who gave up his profession that he might preach the words of
a loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from
that Jehovah of whom the Jewish priests are telling us all
the time. Afterwards, Paul appears to have travelled much
in Asia Minor and in Greece, telling the slaves that they were
all children of one loving Father and that happiness awaits all,
both rich and poor, who have tried to live honest lives and have
done good to those who were suffering and miserable.

I hope that I have answered your questions to your satisfaction.
The whole story seems very harmless to me as far as
the safety of the state is concerned. But then, we Romans
never have been able to understand the people of this province.
I am sorry that they have killed your friend Paul. I wish that
I were at home again, and I am, as ever,
                         Your dutiful nephew,
                                   GLADIUS ENSA.

THE FALL OF ROME

THE TWILIGHT OF ROME

THE text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the
year in which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor
was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in
a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and
so gradual that most Romans did not realise how their old
world was coming to an end. They complained about the unrest
of the times--they grumbled about the high prices of food
and about the low wages of the workmen--they cursed the
profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and
the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually
rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the
first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their
purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to
their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a
free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the
big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had
outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish.

How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome
made a fine showing of outward glory. Well-paved roads connected
the different provinces, the imperial police were active
and showed little tenderness for highwaymen. The frontier
was closely guarded against the savage tribes who seemed to
be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole
world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a
score of able men were working day and night to undo the
mistakes of the past and bring about a return to the happier
conditions of the early Republic.

But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of
which I have told you in a former chapter, had not been
removed and reform therefore was impossible.

Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as
Athens and Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It
had been able to dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome
as the ruler of the entire civilised world was a political
impossibility and could not endure. Her young men were killed in
her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long military
service and by taxation. They either became professional
beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave
them board and lodging in exchange for their services and
made them ``serfs,'' those unfortunate human beings who are
neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part of the
soil upon which they work, like so many cows, and the trees.

The Empire, the State, had become everything. The common
citizen had dwindled down to less than nothing. As for
the slaves, they had heard the words that were spoken by Paul.
They had accepted the message of the humble carpenter of
Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters. On the
contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed
their superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs
of this world which had proved such a miserable place of abode.
They were willing to fight the good fight that they might enter
into the Kingdom of Heaven. But they were not willing to
engage in warfare for the benefit of an ambitious emperor who
aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in the land of
the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots.

And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by.
The first Emperors had continued the tradition of ``leadership''
which had given the old tribal chieftains such a hold upon
their subjects. But the Emperors of the second and third
centuries were Barrack-Emperors, professional soldiers, who
existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called Prae-
torians. They succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity,
murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out
of it as soon as their successors had become rich enough to bribe
the guards into a new rebellion.

Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of
the northern frontier. As there were no longer any native
Roman armies to stop their progress, foreign mercenaries had
to be hired to fight the invader. As the foreign soldier happened
to be of the same blood as his supposed enemy, he was
apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle. Finally,
by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle
within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon
these tribes complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax-
gatherers, who took away their last penny. When they got
no redress they marched to Rome and loudly demanded that
they be heard.

This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial residence.
Constantine (who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for
a new capital. He chose Byzantium, the gate-way for the
commerce between Europe and Asia. The city was renamed
Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When Constantine
died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient
administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder
lived in Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in
Constantinople and was master of the east.

Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation
of the Huns, those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more
than two centuries maintained themselves in Northern Europe
and continued their career of bloodshed until they were defeated
near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in the year 451.
As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun
to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save
themselves, were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The
Emperor Valens tried to stop them, but was killed near
Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years later, under
their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward
and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed
only a few palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less
respect for the venerable traditions of the city. Then the
Burgundians. Then the East Goths. Then the Alemanni.
Then the Franks. There was no end to the invasions. Rome
at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway robber
who could gather a few followers.

In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was
a sea-port and strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475,
Odoacer, commander of a regiment of the German mercenaries,
who wanted the farms of Italy to be divided among themselves,
gently but effectively pushed Romulus Augustulus, the
last of the emperors who ruled the western division, from his
throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome.
The eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs,
recognised him, and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was
left of the western provinces.

A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths,
invaded the newly formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered
Odoacer at his own dinner table, and established a Gothic
Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western part of the Empire.
This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century a
motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars
invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established
a new state of which Pavia became the capital.

Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter
neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered
time and again. The schools had been burned down. The
teachers had been starved to death. The rich people had been
thrown out of their villas which were now inhabited by evil-
smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into
decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come
to a standstill. Civilisation--the product of thousands of years
of patient labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and
Greeks and Romans, which had lifted man high above the
most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors, threatened to
perish from the western continent.

It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to
be the centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But
it hardly counted as a part of the European continent. Its
interests lay in the east. It began to forget its western origin.
Gradually the Roman language was given up for the Greek.
The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written
in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The
Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like
kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the
Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the
Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went
eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the
vast wilderness of Russia.

As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians.
For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were
the order of the day. One thing--and one thing alone--saved
Europe from complete destruction, from a return to the days
of cave-men and the hyena.

This was the church--the flock of humble men and women
who for many centuries had confessed themselves the followers
of Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been
killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be saved the
trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.

RISE OF THE CHURCH

HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE
CHRISTIAN WORLD

THE average intelligent Roman who lived under the Empire
had taken very little interest in the gods of his fathers.
A few times a year he went to the temple, but merely as a
matter of custom. He looked on patiently when the people
celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But he
regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as
something rather childish, a survival from the crude days of
the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man
who had mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans
and the other great philosophers of Athens.

This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The
government insisted that all people, Romans, foreigners,
Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, should pay a certain outward respect
to the image of the Emperor which was supposed to stand
in every temple, just as a picture of the President of the
United States is apt to hang in an American Post Office. But
this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally
speaking everybody could honour, revere and adore whatever
gods he pleased, and as a result, Rome was filled with all
sorts of queer little temples and synagogues, dedicated to the
worship of Egyptian and African and Asiatic divinities.

When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began
to preach their new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man,
nobody objected. The man in the street stopped and listened
Rome, the capital of the world, had always been full of wandering
preachers, each proclaiming his own ``mystery.'' Most of
the self-appointed priests appealed to the senses--promised
golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of their
own particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed
that the so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or
``anointed'') spoke a very different language. They did not
appear to be impressed by great riches or a noble position.
They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and meekness.
These were not exactly the virtues which had made
Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to
listen to a ``mystery'' which told people in the hey-day of their
glory that their worldly success could not possibly bring them
lasting happiness.

Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dreadful
stories of the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to
the words of the true God. It was never wise to take chances.
Of course the old Roman gods still existed, but were they
strong enough to protect their friends against the powers of
this new deity who had been brought to Europe from distant
Asia? People began to have doubts. They returned to listen
to further explanations of the new creed. After a while they
began to meet the men and women who preached the words of
Jesus. They found them very different from the average
Roman priests. They were all dreadfully poor. They were
kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain riches,
but gave away whatever they had. The example of their unselfish
lives forced many Romans to forsake the old religion.
They joined the small communities of Christians who met in
the back rooms of private houses or somewhere in an open field,
and the temples were deserted.

This went on year after year and the number of Christians
continued to increase. Presbyters or priests (the original
Greek meant ``elder'') were elected to guard the interests of
the small churches. A bishop was made the head of all the
communities within a single province. Peter, who had fol-
lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due
time his successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa)
came to be known as Popes.

The church became a powerful institution within the Empire.
The Christian doctrines appealed to those who despaired
of this world. They also attracted many strong men who
found it impossible to make a career under the Imperial gov-
ernment, but who could exercise their gifts of leadership among
the humble followers of the Nazarene teacher. At last the
state was obliged to take notice. The Roman Empire (I have
said this before) was tolerant through indifference. It allowed
everybody to seek salvation after his or her own fashion. But
it insisted that the different sects keep the peace among themselves
and obey the wise rule of ``live and let live.''

The Christian communities however, refused to practice any
sort of tolerance. They publicly declared that their God, and
their God alone, was the true ruler of Heaven and Earth,
and that all other gods were imposters. This seemed unfair
to the other sects and the police discouraged such utterances.
The Christians persisted.

Soon there were further difficulties. The Christians refused
to go through the formalities of paying homage to the emperor.
They refused to appear when they were called upon
to join the army. The Roman magistrates threatened to
punish them. The Christians answered that this miserable
world was only the ante-room to a very pleasant Heaven and
that they were more than willing to suffer death for their
principles. The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes
killed the offenders, but more often they did not. There was
a certain amount of lynching during the earliest years of the
church, but this was the work of that part of the mob which
accused their meek Christian neighbours of every conceivable
crime, (such as slaughtering and eating babies, bringing about
sickness and pestilence, betraying the country in times of danger)
because it was a harmless sport and devoid of danger, as
the Christians refused to fight back.

Meanwhile, Rome continued to be invaded by the Barbarians
and when her armies failed, Christian missionaries went
forth to preach their gospel of peace to the wild Teutons.
They were strong men without fear of death. They spoke a
language which left no doubt as to the future of unrepentant
sinners. The Teutons were deeply impressed. They still
had a deep respect for the wisdom of the ancient city of Rome.
Those men were Romans. They probably spoke the truth.
Soon the Christian missionary became a power in the savage
regions of the Teutons and the Franks. Half a dozen missionaries
were as valuable as a whole regiment of soldiers.
The Emperors began to understand that the Christian might
be of great use to them. In some of the provinces they were
given equal rights with those who remained faithful to the old
gods. The great change however came during the last half
of the fourth century.

Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Constantine
the Great, was emperor. He was a terrible ruffian,
but people of tender qualities could hardly hope to survive
in that hard-fighting age. During a long and checkered career,
Constantine had experienced many ups and downs. Once,
when almost defeated by his enemies, he thought that he would
try the power of this new Asiatic deity of whom everybody was
talking. He promised that he too would become a Christian
if he were successful in the coming battle. He won the victory
and thereafter he was convinced of the power of the Christian
God and allowed himself to be baptised.

From that moment on, the Christian church was officially
recognised and this greatly strengthened the position of the
new faith.

But the Christians still formed a very small minority of
all the people, (not more than five or six percent,) and in order
to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old
gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian,
a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan Gods
from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds during
a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established
the church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the
ancient temples were then closed. Then came the emperor
Justinian (who built the church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople),
who discontinued the school of philosophy at Athens
which had been founded by Plato.

That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man
had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own
dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules
of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass
by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery
and ignorance had swept away the established order of things.
There was need of something more positive and more definite.
This the Church provided.

During an age when nothing was certain, the church stood
like a rock and never receded from those principles which it
held to be true and sacred. This steadfast courage gained the
admiration of the multitudes and carried the church of Rome
safely through the difficulties which destroyed the Roman state.

There was however, a certain element of luck in the final
success of the Christian faith. After the disappearance of
Theodoric's Roman-Gothic kingdom, in the fifth century,
Italy was comparatively free from foreign invasion. The
Lombards and Saxons and Slavs who succeeded the Goths were
weak and backward tribes. Under those circumstances it was
possible for the bishops of Rome to maintain the independence
of their city. Soon the remnants of the empire, scattered
throughout the peninsula, recognised the Dukes of Rome (or
bishops) as their political and spiritual rulers.

The stage was set for the appearance of a strong man.
He came in the year 590 and his name was Gregory. He belonged
to the ruling classes of ancient Rome, and he had
been ``prefect'' or mayor of the city. Then he had become
a monk and a bishop and finally, and much against his will,
(for he wanted to be a missionary and preach Christianity to
the heathen of England,) he had been dragged to the Church
of Saint Peter to be made Pope. He ruled only fourteen
years but when he died the Christian world of western Europe
had officially recognised the bishops of Rome, the Popes, as
the head of the entire church.

This power, however, did not extend to the east. In
Constantinople the Emperors continued the old custom which had
recognised the successors of Augustus and Tiberius both as
head of the government and as High Priest of the Established
Religion. In the year 1453 the eastern Roman Empire was
conquered by the Turks. Constantinople was taken, and Constantine
Paleologue, the last Roman Emperor, was killed on
the steps of the Church of the Holy Sophia.

A few years before, Zoe, the daughter of his brother
Thomas, had married Ivan III of Russia. In this way did the
grand-dukes of Moscow fall heir to the traditions of Constantinople.
The double-eagle of old Byzantium (reminiscent of
the days when Rome had been divided into an eastern and a
western part) became the coat of arms of modern Russia.
The Tsar who had been merely the first of the Russian nobles,
assumed the aloofness and the dignity of a Roman emperor
before whom all subjects, both high and low, were inconsiderable
slaves.

The court was refashioned after the oriental pattern which
the eastern Emperors had imported from Asia and from Egypt
and which (so they flattered themselves) resembled the court
of Alexander the Great. This strange inheritance which the
dying Byzantine Empire bequeathed to an unsuspecting world
continued to live with great vigour for six more centuries,
amidst the vast plains of Russia. The last man to wear the
crown with the double eagle of Constantinople, Tsar Nicholas,
was murdered only the other day, so to speak. His body was
thrown into a well. His son and his daughters were all killed.
All his ancient rights and prerogatives were abolished, and the
church was reduced to the position which it had held in Rome
before the days of Constantine.

The eastern church however fared very differently, as we
shall see in the next chapter when the whole Christian world is
going to be threatened with destruction by the rival creed of
an Arab camel-driver.

MOHAMMED

AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME
THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT
AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST
CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD
FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE
ONLY TRUE GOD

SINCE the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said
nothing of the Semitic people. You will remember how they
filled all the chapters devoted to the story of the Ancient World.
The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews,
the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites, had been
the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries. They
had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had
come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who
had come from the west. A hundred years after the death of
Alexander the Great, Carthage, a colony of Semitic Phoenicians,
had fought the Indo-European Romans for the mastery
of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and destroyed
and for eight hundred years the Romans had been masters
of the world. In the seventh century, however, another
Semitic tribe appeared upon the scene and challenged the
power of the west. They were the Arabs, peaceful shepherds
who had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time
without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.

Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and
in less than a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe
and proclaimed the glories of Allah, ``the only God,'' and
Mohammed, ``the prophet of the only God,'' to the frightened
peasants of France.

The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah
(usually known as Mohammed, or ``he who will be praised,'';
reads like a chapter in the ``Thousand and One Nights.'' He
was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems to have been an
epileptic and he suffered from spells of unconsciousness when
he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel
Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him
all over Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish
merchants and with Christian traders, and he came to see that
the worship of a single God was a very excellent thing. His
own people, the Arabs, still revered queer stones and trunks
of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of thousands of
years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little square
building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends
of Hoo-doo worship.

Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He
could not well be a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time.
So he made himself independent by marrying his employer, the
rich widow Chadija. Then he told his neighbours in Mecca
that he was the long-expected prophet sent by Allah to save the
world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and when Mohammed
continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to kill him.
They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved no mercy.
Mohammed heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled to Medina
together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened
in the year 622. It is the most important date in Mohammedan
history and is known as the Hegira--the year of the Great Flight.

In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier
to proclaim himself a prophet than in his home city, where
every one had known him as a simple camel-driver. Soon he
was surrounded by an increasing number of followers, or
Moslems, who accepted the Islam, ``the submission to the will
of God,'' which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues.
For seven years he preached to the people of Medina. Then
he believed himself strong enough to begin a campaign against
his former neighbours who had dared to sneer at him and his
Holy Mission in his old camel-driving days. At the head of
an army of Medinese he marched across the desert. His followers
took Mecca without great difficulty, and having slaughtered
a number of the inhabitants, they found it quite easy to
convince the others that Mohammed was really a great prophet.

From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed
was fortunate in everything he undertook.

There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the
first place, the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers
was very simple. The disciples were told that they must love
Allah, the Ruler of the World, the Merciful and Compassionate.
They must honour and obey their parents. They
were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neighbours
and were admonished to be humble and charitable, to the
poor and to the sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain
from strong drink and to be very frugal in what they ate. That
was all. There were no priests, who acted as shepherds of
their flocks and asked that they be supported at the common
expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely
large stone halls without benches or pictures, where the faithful
could gather (if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss
chapters from the Koran, the Holy Book. But the average
Mohammedan carried his religion with him and never felt
himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations of an
established church. Five times a day he turned his face towards
Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple prayer. For the
rest of the time he let Allah rule the world as he saw fit and
accepted whatever fate brought him with patient resignation.

Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage
the Faithful to go forth and invent electrical machinery or
bother about railroads and steamship lines. But it gave every
Mohammedan a certain amount of contentment. It bade
him be at peace with himself and with the world in which he
lived and that was a very good thing.

The second reason which explains the success of the Moslems
in their warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the
conduct of those Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do
battle for the true faith. The Prophet promised that those
who fell, facing the enemy, would go directly to Heaven.
This made sudden death in the field preferable to a long but
dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans
an enormous advantage over the Crusaders who were in constant
dread of a dark hereafter, and who stuck to the good
things of this world as long as they possibly could. Incidentally
it explains why even to-day Moslem soldiers will charge
into the fire of European machine guns quite indifferent to
the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous
and persistent enemies.

Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now
began to enjoy his power as the undisputed ruler of a large
number of Arab tribes. But success has been the undoing of
a large number of men who were great in the days of adversity.
He tried to gain the good will of the rich people by a number
of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth.
He allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife
was a costly investment in those olden days when brides were
bought directly from the parents, four wives became a positive
luxury except to those who possessed camels and dromedaries
and date orchards beyond the dreams of avarice. A religion
which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters of the
high skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs
of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities.
It was a regrettable change from the original program and it
did very little good to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for
the prophet himself, he went on preaching the truth of Allah
and proclaiming new rules of conduct until he died, quite
suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632.

His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was
his father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers
of the prophet's life. Two years later, Abu-Bekr died and
Omar ibn Al-Khattab followed him. In less than ten years
he conquered Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine
and made Damascus the capital of the first Mohammedan world
empire.

Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed's
daughter, Fatima, but a quarrel broke out upon a point of
Moslem doctrine and Ali was murdered. After his death,
the caliphate was made hereditary and the leaders of the faithful
who had begun their career as the spiritual head of a religious
sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built
a new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of
Babylon and called it Bagdad, and organising the Arab horsemen
into regiments of cavalry, they set forth to bring the
happiness of their Moslem faith to all unbelievers. In the
year 700 A.D. a Mohammedan general by the name of Tarik
crossed the old gates of Hercules and reached the high rock
on the European side which he called the Gibel-al-tarik, the
Hill of Tarik or Gibraltar.

Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera,
he defeated the king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem
army moved northward and following the route of Hannibal,
they crossed the passes of the Pyrenees. They defeated the
Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt them near Bordeaux,
and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one
hundred years after the death of the prophet,) they were
beaten in a battle between Tours and Poitiers. On that
day, Charles Martel (Charles with the Hammer) the Frankish
chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan con-
quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained
themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the
Caliphate of Cordova, which became the greatest centre of
science and art of mediaeval Europe.

This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came
from Mauretania in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was
only after the capture of Granada, the last Moslem stronghold,
in the year 1492, that Columbus received the royal grant which
allowed him to go upon a voyage of discovery. The Mohammedans
soon regained their strength in the new conquests
which they made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as
many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ.

CHARLEMAGNE

HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE
FRANKS, CAME TO BEAR THE TITLE OF
EMPEROR AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD
IDEAL OF WORLD-EMPIRE

THE battle of Poitiers had saved Europe from the
Mohammedans. But the enemy within--the hopeless disorder
which had followed the disappearance of the Roman police
officer--that enemy remained. It is true that the new converts
of the Christian faith in Northern Europe felt a deep respect
for the mighty Bishop of Rome. But that poor bishop did
not feel any too safe when he looked toward the distant
mountains. Heaven knew what fresh hordes of barbarians were
ready to cross the Alps and begin a new attack on Rome. It
was necessary--very necessary--for the spiritual head of the
world to find an ally with a strong sword and a powerful
fist who was willing to defend His Holiness in case of danger.

And so the Popes, who were not only very holy but
also very practical, cast about for a friend, and presently
they made overtures to the most promising of the Germanic
tribes who had occupied north-western Europe after the fall
of Rome. They were called the Franks. One of their earliest
kings, called Merovech, had helped the Romans in the battle of
the Catalaunian fields in the year 451 when they defeated the
Huns. His descendants, the Merovingians, had continued to
take little bits of imperial territory until the year 486 when
king Clovis (the old French word for ``Louis'') felt himself
strong enough to beat the Romans in the open. But his
descendants were weak men who left the affairs of state to
their Prime minister, the ``Major Domus'' or Master of the
Palace.

Pepin the Short, the son of the famous Charles Martel,
who succeeded his father as Master of the Palace, hardly
knew how to handle the situation. His royal master was a
devout theologian, without any interest in politics. Pepin
asked the Pope for advice. The Pope who was a practical
person answered that the ``power in the state belonged to him
who was actually possessed of it.'' Pepin took the hint. He
persuaded Childeric, the last of the Merovingians to become
a monk and then made himself king with the approval of the
other Germanic chieftains. But this did not satisfy the shrewd
Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian
chieftain. He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface,
the great missionary of the European northwest, anointed
him and made him a ``King by the grace of God.'' It was
easy to slip those words, ``Del gratia,'' into the coronation
service. It took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out
again.

Pepin was sincerely grateful for this kindness on the part
of the church. He made two expeditions to Italy to defend
the Pope against his enemies. He took Ravenna and several
other cities away from the Longobards and presented them
to His Holiness, who incorporated these new domains into
the so-called Papal State, which remained an independent
country until half a century ago.

After Pepin's death, the relations between Rome and Aix-
la-Chapelle or Nymwegen or Ingelheim, (the Frankish Kings
did not have one official residence, but travelled from place to
place with all their ministers and court officers,) became more
and more cordial. Finally the Pope and the King took a step
which was to influence the history of Europe in a most profound
way.

Charles, commonly known as Carolus Magnus or Char-
lemagne, succeeded Pepin in the year 768. He had conquered
the land of the Saxons in eastern Germany and had
built towns and monasteries all over the greater part of northern
Europe. At the request of certain enemies of Abd-ar-
Rahman, he had invaded Spain to fight the Moors. But in
the Pyrenees he had been attacked by the wild Basques and
had been forced to retire. It was upon this occasion that Roland,
the great Margrave of Breton, showed what a Frankish
chieftain of those early days meant when he promised to be
faithful to his King, and gave his life and that of his trusted
followers to safeguard the retreat of the royal army.

During the last ten years of the eighth century, however,
Charles was obliged to devote himself exclusively to affairs of
the South. The Pope, Leo III, had been attacked by a band
of Roman rowdies and had been left for dead in the street.
Some kind people had bandaged his wounds and had helped
him to escape to the camp of Charles, where he asked for
help. An army of Franks soon restored quiet and carried Leo
back to the Lateran Palace which ever since the days of Constantine,
had been the home of the Pope. That was in December
of the year 799. On Christmas day of the next year,
Charlemagne, who was staying in Rome, attended the service
in the ancient church of St. Peter. When he arose from prayer,
the Pope placed a crown upon his head, called him Emperor of
the Romans and hailed him once more with the title of ``Augustus''
which had not been heard for hundreds of years.

Once more Northern Europe was part of a Roman Empire,
but the dignity was held by a German chieftain who could
read just a little and never learned to write. But he could
fight and for a short while there was order and even the rival
emperor in Constantinople sent a letter of approval to his
``dear Brother.''

Unfortunately this splendid old man died in the year 814.
His sons and his grandsons at once began to fight for the
largest share of the imperial inheritance. Twice the Carolingian
lands were divided, by the treaties of Verdun in the
year 843 and by the treaty of Mersen-on-the-Meuse in the
year 870. The latter treaty divided the entire Frankish Kingdom
into two parts. Charles the Bold received the western
half. It contained the old Roman province called Gaul where
the language of the people had become thoroughly romanized.
The Franks soon learned to speak this language and this
accounts for the strange fact that a purely Germanic land
like France should speak a Latin tongue.

The other grandson got the eastern part, the land which
the Romans had called Germania. Those inhospitable regions
had never been part of the old Empire. Augustus had
tried to conquer this ``far east,'' but his legions had been
annihilated in the Teutoburg Wood in the year 9 and the people had
never been influenced by the higher Roman civilisation. They
spoke the popular Germanic tongue. The Teuton word for
``people'' was ``thiot.'' The Christian missionaries therefore
called the German language the ``lingua theotisca'' or the
``lingua teutisca,'' the ``popular dialect'' and this word
``teutisca'' was changed into ``Deutsch'' which accounts for the name
``Deutschland.''

As for the famous Imperial Crown, it very soon slipped
off the heads of the Carolingian successors and rolled back onto
the Italian plain, where it became a sort of plaything of a
number of little potentates who stole the crown from each other
amidst much bloodshed and wore it (with or without the permission
of the Pope) until it was the turn of some more ambitious
neighbour. The Pope, once more sorely beset by his
enemies, sent north for help. He did not appeal to the ruler
of the west-Frankish kingdom, this time. His messengers
crossed the Alps and addressed themselves to Otto, a Saxon
Prince who was recognised as the greatest chieftain of the
different Germanic tribes.

Otto, who shared his people's affection for the blue skies
and the gay and beautiful people of the Italian peninsula,
hastened to the rescue. In return for his services, the Pope,
Leo VIII, made Otto ``Emperor,'' and the eastern half of
Charles' old kingdom was henceforth known as the ``Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation.''

This strange political creation managed to live to the ripe
old age of eight hundred and thirty-nine years. In the year
1801, (during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson,) it was
most unceremoniously relegated to the historical scrapheap.
The brutal fellow who destroyed the old Germanic Empire was
the son of a Corsican notary-public who had made a brilliant
career in the service of the French Republic. He was ruler
of Europe by the grace of his famous Guard Regiments, but
he desired to be something more. He sent to Rome for the
Pope and the Pope came and stood by while General Napoleon
placed the imperial crown upon his own head and proclaimed
himself heir to the tradition of Charlemagne. For history is
like life. The more things change, the more they remain
the same.

THE NORSEMEN

WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE TENTH CENTURY
PRAYED THE LORD TO PROTECT THEM
FROM THE FURY OF THE NORSEMEN

IN the third and fourth centuries, the Germanic tribes of
central Europe had broken through the defences of the Empire
that they might plunder Rome and live on the fat of the
land. In the eighth century it became the turn of the Germans
to be the ``plundered-ones.'' They did not like this at all, even
if their enemies were their first cousins, the Norsemen, who
lived in Denmark and Sweden and Norway.

What forced these hardy sailors to turn pirate we do not
know, but once they had discovered the advantages and pleasures
of a buccaneering career there was no one who could stop
them. They would suddenly descend upon a peaceful Frankish
or Frisian village, situated on the mouth of a river. They
would kill all the men and steal all the women. Then they
would sail away in their fast-sailing ships and when the soldiers
of the king or emperor arrived upon the scene, the robbers
were gone and nothing remained but a few smouldering
ruins.

During the days of disorder which followed the death of
Charlemagne, the Northmen developed great activity. Their
fleets made raids upon every country and their sailors established
small independent kingdoms along the coast of Holland
and France and England and Germany, and they even found
their way into Italy. The Northmen were very intelligent
They soon learned to speak the language of their subjects and
gave up the uncivilised ways of the early Vikings (or Sea-
Kings who had been very picturesque but also very unwashed
and terribly cruel.

Early in the tenth century a Viking by the name of Rollo
had repeatedly attacked the coast of France. The king of
France, too weak to resist these northern robbers, tried to
bribe them into ``being good.'' He offered them the province
of Normandy, if they would promise to stop bothering the rest
of his domains. Rollo accepted this bargain and became ``Duke
of Normandy.''

But the passion of conquest was strong in the blood of his
children. Across the channel, only a few hours away from the
European mainland, they could see the white cliffs and the
green fields of England. Poor England had passed through
difficult days. For two hundred years it had been a Roman
colony. After the Romans left, it had been conquered by the
Angles and the Saxons, two German tribes from Schleswig.
Next the Danes had taken the greater part of the country
and had established the kingdom of Cnut. The Danes had
been driven away and now (it was early in the eleventh century)
another Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was on the
throne. But Edward was not expected to live long and he
had no children. The circumstances favoured the ambitious
dukes of Normandy.

In 1066 Edward died. Immediately William of Normandy
crossed the channel, defeated and killed Harold of
Wessex (who had taken the crown) at the battle of Hastings,
and proclaimed himself king of England.

In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a
German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in
the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised
as King of England.

Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth
of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?

FEUDALISM

HOW CENTRAL EUROPE, ATTACKED FROM
THREE SIDES, BECAME AN ARMED CAMP
AND WHY EUROPE WOULD HAVE PERISHED
WITHOUT THOSE PROFESSIONAL
SOLDIERS AND ADMINISTRATORS WHO
WERE PART OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM

THE following, then, is the state of Europe in the year one
thousand, when most people were so unhappy that they welcomed
the prophecy foretelling the approaching end of the
world and rushed to the monasteries, that the Day of Judgement
might find them engaged upon devout duties.

At an unknown date, the Germanic tribes had left their old
home in Asia and had moved westward into Europe. By
sheer pressure of numbers they had forced their way into the
Roman Empire. They had destroyed the great western empire,
but the eastern part, being off the main route of the
great migrations, had managed to survive and feebly continued
the traditions of Rome's ancient glory.

During the days of disorder which had followed, (the true
``dark ages'' of history, the sixth and seventh centuries of our
era,) the German tribes had been persuaded to accept the
Christian religion and had recognised the Bishop of Rome
as the Pope or spiritual head of the world. In the ninth century,
the organising genius of Charlemagne had revived the
Roman Empire and had united the greater part of western
Europe into a single state. During the tenth century this
empire had gone to pieces. The western part had become a
separate kingdom, France. The eastern half was known as the
Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and the rulers of
this federation of states then pretended that they were the
direct heirs of Caesar and Augustus.

Unfortunately the power of the kings of France did not
stretch beyond the moat of their royal residence, while the
Holy Roman Emperor was openly defied by his powerful
subjects whenever it suited their fancy or their profit.

To increase the misery of the masses of the people, the
triangle of western Europe (look at page 128, please) was for ever
exposed to attacks from three sides. On the south lived the
ever dangerous Mohammedans. The western coast was ravaged
by the Northmen. The eastern frontier (defenceless except
for the short stretch of the Carpathian mountains) was at
the mercy of hordes of Huns, Hungarians, Slavs and Tartars.

The peace of Rome was a thing of the remote past, a dream
of the ``Good Old Days'' that were gone for ever. It was a
question of ``fight or die,'' and quite naturally people preferred
to fight. Forced by circumstances, Europe became an armed
camp and there was a demand for strong leadership. Both
King and Emperor were far away. The frontiersmen (and
most of Europe in the year 1000 was ``frontier'') must help
themselves. They willingly submitted to the representatives
of the king who were sent to administer the outlying districts,
PROVIDED THEY COULD PROTECT THEM AGAINST THEIR ENEMIES.

Soon central Europe was dotted with small principalities,
each one ruled by a duke or a count or a baron or a bishop, as
the case might be, and organised as a fighting unit. These
dukes and counts and barons had sworn to be faithful to the
king who had given them their ``feudum'' (hence our word
``feudal,'') in return for their loyal services and a certain
amount of taxes. But travel in those days was slow and the
means of communication were exceedingly poor. The royal
or imperial administrators therefore enjoyed great independence,
and within the boundaries of their own province they
assumed most of the rights which in truth belonged to the king.

But you would make a mistake if you supposed that the
people of the eleventh century objected to this form of
government. They supported Feudalism because it was a very
practical and necessary institution. Their Lord and Master
usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep
rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his
subjects. In case of danger the subjects found shelter behind
the walls of the baronial stronghold. That is why they tried
to live as near the castle as possible and it accounts for the
many European cities which began their career around a feudal
fortress.

But the knight of the early middle ages was much more
than a professional soldier. He was the civil servant of that
day. He was the judge of his community and he was the
chief of police. He caught the highwaymen and protected
the wandering pedlars who were the merchants of the eleventh
century. He looked after the dikes so that the countryside
should not be flooded (just as the first noblemen had done
in the valley of the Nile four thousand years before). He
encouraged the Troubadours who wandered from place to place
telling the stories of the ancient heroes who had fought in the
great wars of the migrations. Besides, he protected the churches
and the monasteries within his territory, and although he could
neither read nor write, (it was considered unmanly to know
such things,) he employed a number of priests who kept his
accounts and who registered the marriages and the births and
the deaths which occurred within the baronial or ducal domains.

In the fifteenth century the kings once more became strong
enough to exercise those powers which belonged to them because
they were ``anointed of God.'' Then the feudal knights lost
their former independence. Reduced to the rank of country
squires, they no longer filled a need and soon they became a
nuisance. But Europe would have perished without the ``feudal
system'' of the dark ages. There were many bad knights
as there are many bad people to-day. But generally speaking,
the rough-fisted barons of the twelfth and thirteenth century
were hard-working administrators who rendered a most useful
service to the cause of progress. During that era the noble
torch of learning and art which had illuminated the world of
the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans was burning
very low. Without the knights and their good friends, the
monks, civilisation would have been extinguished entirely, and
the human race would have been forced to begin once more
where the cave-man had left off.

CHIVALRY

CHIVALRY

IT was quite natural that the professional fighting-men of
the Middle Ages should try to establish some sort of organisation
for their mutual benefit and protection. Out of this need
for close organisation, Knighthood or Chivalry was born.

We know very little about the origins of Knighthood. But
as the system developed, it gave the world something which it
needed very badly--a definite rule of conduct which softened
the barbarous customs of that day and made life more livable
than it had been during the five hundred years of the Dark
Ages. It was not an easy task to civilise the rough frontiersmen
who had spent most of their time fighting Mohammedans
and Huns and Norsemen. Often they were guilty of backsliding,
and having vowed all sorts of oaths about mercy and
charity in the morning, they would murder all their prisoners
before evening. But progress is ever the result of slow and
ceaseless labour, and finally the most unscrupulous of knights
was forced to obey the rules of his ``class'' or suffer the consequences.

These rules were different in the various parts of Europe,
but they all made much of ``service'' and ``loyalty to duty.'' The
Middle Ages regarded service as something very noble and
beautiful. It was no disgrace to be a servant, provided you
were a good servant and did not slacken on the job. As for
loyalty, at a time when life depended upon the faithful per-
formance of many unpleasant duties, it was the chief virtue
of the fighting man.

A young knight therefore was asked to swear that he would
be faithful as a servant to God and as a servant to his King.
Furthermore, he promised to be generous to those whose need
was greater than his own. He pledged his word that he would
be humble in his personal behaviour and would never boast of
his own accomplishments and that he would be a friend of all
those who suffered, (with the exception of the Mohammedans,
whom he was expected to kill on sight).

Around these vows, which were merely the Ten Commandments
expressed in terms which the people of the Middle Ages
could understand, there developed a complicated system of
manners and outward behaviour. The knights tried to model
their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur's
Round Table and Charlemagne's court of whom the Troubadours
had told them and of whom you may read in many delightful
books which are enumerated at the end of this volume.
They hoped that they might prove as brave as Lancelot and
as faithful as Roland. They carried themselves with dignity
and they spoke careful and gracious words that they might be
known as True Knights, however humble the cut of their coat
or the size of their purse.

In this way the order of Knighthood became a school of those
good manners which are the oil of the social machinery. Chivalry
came to mean courtesy and the feudal castle showed the
rest of the world what clothes to wear, how to eat, how to ask
a lady for a dance and the thousand and one little things of
every-day behaviour which help to make life interesting and
agreeable.

Like all human institutions, Knighthood was doomed to
perish as soon as it had outlived its usefulness.

The crusades, about which one of the next chapters tells,
were followed by a great revival of trade. Cities grew overnight.
The townspeople became rich, hired good school teachers
and soon were the equals of the knights. The invention
of gun-powder deprived the heavily armed ``Chevalier'' of his
former advantage and the use of mercenaries made it impossible
to conduct a battle with the delicate niceties of a chess
tournament. The knight became superfluous. Soon he became
a ridiculous figure, with his devotion to ideals that had no
longer any practical value. It was said that the noble Don
Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights.
After his death, his trusted sword and his armour were sold
to pay his debts.

But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into
the hands of a number of men. Washington carried it during
the hopeless days of Valley Forge. It was the only defence
of Gordon, when he had refused to desert the people who had
been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his death in the
besieged fortress of Khartoum.

And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable
strength in winning the Great War.

POPE vs. EMPEROR

THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE
PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND HOW
IT LED TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN
THE POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS

IT is very difficult to understand the people of by-gone
ages. Your own grandfather, whom you see every day, is a
mysterious being who lives in a different world of ideas and
clothes and manners. I am now telling you the story of some
of your grandfathers who are twenty-five generations removed,
and I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write
without re-reading this chapter a number of times.

The average man of the Middle Ages lived a very simple
and uneventful life. Even if he was a free citizen, able to
come and go at will, he rarely left his own neighbourhood.
There were no printed books and only a few manuscripts.
Here and there, a small band of industrious monks taught
reading and writing and some arithmetic. But science and history
and geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and
Rome.

Whatever people knew about the past they had learned by
listening to stories and legends. Such information, which goes
from father to son, is often slightly incorrect in details, but
it will preserve the main facts of history with astonishing
accuracy. After more than two thousand years, the mothers of
India still frighten their naughty children by telling them that
``Iskander will get them,'' and Iskander is none other than
Alexander the Great, who visited India in the year 330 before
the birth of Christ, but whose story has lived through all these
ages.

The people of the early Middle Ages never saw a textbook
of Roman history. They were ignorant of many things
which every school-boy to-day knows before he has entered
the third grade. But the Roman Empire, which is merely a
name to you, was to them something very much alive. They
felt it. They willingly recognised the Pope as their spiritual
leader because he lived in Rome and represented the idea of
the Roman super-power. And they were profoundly grateful
when Charlemagne, and afterwards Otto the Great, revived
the idea of a world-empire and created the Holy Roman
Empire, that the world might again be as it always had been.

But the fact that there were two different heirs to the
Roman tradition placed the faithful burghers of the Middle
Ages in a difficult position. The theory behind the mediaeval
political system was both sound and simple. While the worldly
master (the emperor) looked after the physical well-being of
his subjects, the spiritual master (the Pope) guarded their
souls.

In practice, however, the system worked very badly. The
Emperor invariably tried to interfere with the affairs of the
church and the Pope retaliated and told the Emperor how
he should rule his domains. Then they told each other to mind
their own business in very unceremonious language and the
inevitable end was war.

Under those circumstances, what were the people to do,
A good Christian obeyed both the Pope and his King. But
the Pope and the Emperor were enemies. Which side should
a dutiful subject and an equally dutiful Christian take?

It was never easy to give the correct answer. When the
Emperor happened to be a man of energy and was sufficiently
well provided with money to organise an army, he was very
apt to cross the Alps and march on Rome, besiege the Pope
in his own palace if need be, and force His Holiness to obey
the imperial instructions or suffer the consequences.

But more frequently the Pope was the stronger. Then the
Emperor or the King together with all his subjects was
excommunicated. This meant that all churches were closed, that no
one could be baptised, that no dying man could be given absolution--
in short, that half of the functions of mediaeval government
came to an end.

More than that, the people were absolved from their oath of
loyalty to their sovereign and were urged to rebel against their
master. But if they followed this advice of the distant Pope
and were caught, they were hanged by their near-by Lege
Lord and that too was very unpleasant.

Indeed, the poor fellows were in a difficult position and
none fared worse than those who lived during the latter half of
the eleventh century, when the Emperor Henry IV of Germany
and Pope Gregory VII fought a two-round battle which
decided nothing and upset the peace of Europe for almost fifty
years.

In the middle of the eleventh century there had been a
strong movement for reform in the church. The election of the
Popes, thus far, had been a most irregular affair. It was to the
advantage of the Holy Roman Emperors to have a well-disposed
priest elected to the Holy See. They frequently came
to Rome at the time of election and used their influence for
the benefit of one of their friends.

In the year 1059 this had been changed. By a decree of
Pope Nicholas II the principal priests and deacons of the
churches in and around Rome were organised into the so-
called College of Cardinals, and this gathering of prominent
churchmen (the word ``Cardinal'' meant principal) was given
the exclusive power of electing the future Popes.

In the year 1073 the College of Cardinals elected a priest
by the name of Hildebrand, the son of very simple parents in
Tuscany, as Pope, and he took the name of Gregory VII.
His energy was unbounded. His belief in the supreme powers
of his Holy Office was built upon a granite rock of conviction
and courage. In the mind of Gregory, the Pope was not only
the absolute head of the Christian church, but also the highest
Court of Appeal in all worldly matters. The Pope who had
elevated simple German princes to the dignity of Emperor
could depose them at will. He could veto any law passed by
duke or king or emperor, but whosoever should question a
papal decree, let him beware, for the punishment would be
swift and merciless.

Gregory sent ambassadors to all the European courts to
inform the potentates of Europe of his new laws and asked
them to take due notice of their contents. William the Conqueror
promised to be good, but Henry IV, who since the age
of six had been fighting with his subjects, had no intention of
submitting to the Papal will. He called together a college of
German bishops, accused Gregory of every crime under the
sun and then had him deposed by the council of Worms.

The Pope answered with excommunication and a demand
that the German princes rid themselves of their unworthy ruler.
The German princes, only too happy to be rid of Henry, asked
the Pope to come to Augsburg and help them elect a new Emperor.

Gregory left Rome and travelled northward. Henry,
who was no fool, appreciated the danger of his position. At
all costs he must make peace with the Pope, and he must do
it at once. In the midst of winter he crossed the Alps and
hastened to Canossa where the Pope had stopped for a short
rest. Three long days, from the 25th to the 28th of January
of the year 1077, Henry, dressed as a penitent pilgrim
(but with a warm sweater underneath his monkish garb),
waited outside the gates of the castle of Canossa.
Then he was allowed to enter and was pardoned for
his sins. But the repentance did not last long.
As soon as Henry had returned to Germany, he behaved
exactly as before. Again he was excommunicated. For the
second time a council of German bishops deposed Gregory,
but this time, when Henry crossed the Alps he was at
the head of a large army, besieged Rome and forced Gregory
to retire to Salerno, where he died in exile. This first violent
outbreak decided nothing. As soon as Henry was back in
Germany, the struggle between Pope and Emperor was continued.

The Hohenstaufen family which got hold of the Imperial
German Throne shortly afterwards, were even more independent
than their predecessors. Gregory had claimed that the
Popes were superior to all kings because they (the Popes) at
the Day of Judgement would be responsible for the behaviour
of all the sheep of their flock, and in the eyes of God, a king
was one of that faithful herd.

Frederick of Hohenstaufen, commonly known as Barbarossa
or Red Beard, set up the counter-claim that the Empire
had been bestowed upon his predecessor ``by God himself''
and as the Empire included Italy and Rome, he began a campaign
which was to add these ``lost provinces'' to the northern
country. Barbarossa was accidentally drowned in Asia Minor
during the second Crusade, but his son Frederick II, a brilliant
young man who in his youth had been exposed to the civilisation
of the Mohammedans of Sicily, continued the war. The
Popes accused him of heresy. It is true that Frederick seems
to have felt a deep and serious contempt for the rough Christian
world of the North, for the boorish German Knights and
the intriguing Italian priests. But he held his tongue, went
on a Crusade and took Jerusalem from the infidel and was
duly crowned as King of the Holy City. Even this act did not
placate the Popes. They deposed Frederick and gave his
Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou, the brother of that
King Louis of France who became famous as Saint Louis.
This led to more warfare. Conrad V, the son of Conrad IV,
and the last of the Hohenstaufens, tried to regain the kingdom,
and was defeated and decapitated at Naples. But twenty years
later, the French who had made themselves thoroughly unpopular
in Sicily were all murdered during the so-called Sicilian
Vespers, and so it went.

The quarrel between the Popes and the Emperors was
never settled, but after a while the two enemies learned to
leave each other alone.

In the year 1278, Rudolph of Hapsburg was elected Emperor.
He did not take the trouble to go to Rome to be
crowned. The Popes did not object and in turn they kept
away from Germany. This meant peace but two entire centuries
which might have been used for the purpose of internal
organisation had been wasted in useless warfare.

It is an ill wind however that bloweth no good to some one.
The little cities of Italy, by a process of careful balancing,
had managed to increase their power and their independence
at the expense of both Emperors and Popes. When the rush
for the Holy Land began, they were able to handle the transportation
problem of the thousands of eager pilgrims who were
clamoring for passage, and at the end of the Crusades they
had built themselves such strong defences of brick and of gold
that they could defy Pope and Emperor with equal indifference.

Church and State fought each other and a third party--the
mediaeval city--ran away with the spoils.

THE CRUSADES

BUT ALL THESE DIFFERENT QUARRELS
WERE FORGOTTEN WHEN THE TURKS
TOOK THE HOLY LAND, DESECRATED THE
HOLY PLACES AND INTERFERED SERIOUSLY
WITH THE TRADE FROM EAST TO
WEST. EUROPE WENT CRUSADING

DURING three centuries there had been peace between Christians
and Moslems except in Spain and in the eastern Roman
Empire, the two states defending the gateways of Europe.
The Mohammedans having conquered Syria in the seventh
century were in possession of the Holy Land. But they regarded
Jesus as a great prophet (though not quite as great
as Mohammed), and they did not interfere with the pilgrims
who wished to pray in the church which Saint Helena, the
mother of the Emperor Constantine, had built on the spot of
the Holy Grave. But early in the eleventh century, a Tartar
tribe from the wilds of Asia, called the Seljuks or Turks,
became masters of the Mohammedan state in western Asia and
then the period of tolerance came to an end. The Turks took
all of Asia Minor away from the eastern Roman Emperors
and they made an end to the trade between east and west.

Alexis, the Emperor, who rarely saw anything of his Christian
neighbours of the west, appealed for help and pointed to
the danger which threatened Europe should the Turks take
Constantinople.

The Italian cities which had established colonies along the
coast of Asia Minor and Palestine, in fear for their possessions,
reported terrible stories of Turkish atrocities and Christian
suffering. All Europe got excited.

Pope Urban II, a Frenchman from Reims, who had been
educated at the same famous cloister of Cluny which had
trained Gregory VII, thought that the time had come for
action. The general state of Europe was far from satisfactory.
The primitive agricultural methods of that day (unchanged
since Roman times) caused a constant scarcity of food. There
was unemployment and hunger and these are apt to lead to
discontent and riots. Western Asia in older days had fed millions.
It was an excellent field for the purpose of immigration.

Therefore at the council of Clermont in France in the year
1095 the Pope arose, described the terrible horrors which the
infidels had inflicted upon the Holy Land, gave a glowing
description of this country which ever since the days of Moses
had been overflowing with milk and honey, and exhorted the
knights of France and the people of Europe in general to
leave wife and child and deliver Palestine from the Turks.

A wave of religious hysteria swept across the continent.
All reason stopped. Men would drop their hammer and saw,
walk out of their shop and take the nearest road to the east
to go and kill Turks. Children would leave their homes to ``go
to Palestine'' and bring the terrible Turks to their knees by
the mere appeal of their youthful zeal and Christian piety.
Fully ninety percent of those enthusiasts never got within
sight of the Holy Land. They had no money. They were
forced to beg or steal to keep alive. They became a danger
to the safety of the highroads and they were killed by the
angry country people.

The first Crusade, a wild mob of honest Christians, defaulting
bankrupts, penniless noblemen and fugitives from justice,
following the lead of half-crazy Peter the Hermit and Walter-
without-a-Cent, began their campaign against the Infidels by
murdering all the Jews whom they met by the way. They
got as far as Hungary and then they were all killed.

This experience taught the Church a lesson. Enthusiasm
alone would not set the Holy Land free. Organisation was
as necessary as good-will and courage. A year was spent in
training and equipping an army of 200,000 men. They were
placed under command of Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert, duke
of Normandy, Robert, count of Flanders, and a number of
other noblemen, all experienced in the art of war.

In the year 1096 this second crusade started upon its long
voyage. At Constantinople the knights did homage to the
Emperor. (For as I have told you, traditions die hard, and
a Roman Emperor, however poor and powerless, was still held
in great respect). Then they crossed into Asia, killed all the
Moslems who fell into their hands, stormed Jerusalem, massacred
the Mohammedan population, and marched to the Holy
Sepulchre to give praise and thanks amidst tears of piety and
gratitude. But soon the Turks were strengthened by the arrival
of fresh troops. Then they retook Jerusalem and in turn
killed the faithful followers of the Cross.

During the next two centuries, seven other crusades took
place. Gradually the Crusaders learned the technique of the
trip. The land voyage was too tedious and too dangerous.
They preferred to cross the Alps and go to Genoa or Venice
where they took ship for the east. The Genoese and the Venetians
made this trans-Mediterranean passenger service a very
profitable business. They charged exorbitant rates, and when
the Crusaders (most of whom had very little money) could not
pay the price, these Italian ``profiteers'' kindly allowed them
to ``work their way across.'' In return for a fare from Venice
to Acre, the Crusader undertook to do a stated amount of
fighting for the owners of his vessel. In this way Venice greatly
increased her territory along the coast of the Adriatic and in
Greece, where Athens became a Venetian colony, and in the
islands of Cyprus and Crete and Rhodes.

All this, however, helped little in settling the question
of the Holy Land. After the first enthusiasm had
worn off, a short crusading trip became part of the liberal
education of every well-bred young man, and there
never was any lack of candidates for service in Palestine.
But the old zeal was gone. The Crusaders, who
had begun their warfare with deep hatred for the
Mohammedans and great love for the Christian people
of the eastern Roman Empire and Armenia, suffered
a complete change of heart. They came to despise the
Greeks of Byzantium, who cheated them and frequently betrayed
the cause of the Cross, and the Armenians and all the
other Levantine races, and they began to appreciate the vir-
tues of their enemies who proved to be generous and fair
opponents.

Of course, it would never do to say this openly. But when
the Crusader returned home, he was likely to imitate the manners
which he had learned from his heathenish foe, compared
to whom the average western knight was still a good deal of a
country bumpkin. He also brought with him several new
food-stuffs, such as peaches and spinach which he planted in his
garden and grew for his own benefit. He gave up the barbarous
custom of wearing a load of heavy armour and appeared
in the flowing robes of silk or cotton which were the traditional
habit of the followers of the Prophet and were originally worn
by the Turks. Indeed the Crusades, which had begun as a
punitive expedition against the Heathen, became a course of
general instruction in civilisation for millions of young Europeans.

From a military and political point of view the Crusades
were a failure. Jerusalem and a number of cities were taken
and lost. A dozen little kingdoms were established in Syria
and Palestine and Asia Minor, but they were re-conquered by
the Turks and after the year 1244 (when Jerusalem became
definitely Turkish) the status of the Holy Land was the same
as it had been before 1095.

But Europe had undergone a great change. The people of
the west had been allowed a glimpse of the light and the sunshine
and the beauty of the east. Their dreary castles no
longer satisfied them. They wanted a broader life. Neither
Church nor State could give this to them.

They found it in the cities.

THE MEDIAEVAL CITY

WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
SAID THAT ``CITY AIR IS FREE AIR''

THE early part of the Middle Ages had been an era of
pioneering and of settlement. A new people, who thus far
had lived outside the wild range of forest, mountains and
marshes which protected the north-eastern frontier of the Roman
Empire, had forced its way into the plains of western
Europe and had taken possession of most of the land. They
were restless, as all pioneers have been since the beginning of
time. They liked to be ``on the go.'' They cut down the
forests and they cut each other's throats with equal energy.
Few of them wanted to live in cities. They insisted upon being
``free,'' they loved to feel the fresh air of the hillsides fill their
lungs while they drove their herds across the wind-swept pastures.
When they no longer liked their old homes, they pulled
up stakes and went away in search of fresh adventures.

The weaker ones died. The hardy fighters and the courageous
women who had followed their men into the wilderness
survived. In this way they developed a strong race of
men. They cared little for the graces of life. They were too
busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry. They had
little love for discussions. The priest, ``the learned man'' of the
village (and before the middle of the thirteenth century, a layman
who could read and write was regarded as a ``sissy'') was
supposed to settle all questions which had no direct practical
value. Meanwhile the German chieftain, the Frankish Baron,
the Northman Duke (or whatever their names and titles) occupied
their share of the territory which once had been part of
the great Roman Empire and among the ruins of past glory,
they built a world of their own which pleased them mightily
and which they considered quite perfect.

They managed the affairs of their castle and the surrounding
country to the best of their ability. They were as faithful
to the commandments of the Church as any weak mortal could
hope to be. They were sufficiently loyal to their king or emperor
to keep on good terms with those distant but always dangerous
potentates. In short, they tried to do right and to be
fair to their neighbours without being exactly unfair to their
own interests.

It was not an ideal world in which they found themselves.
The greater part of the people were serfs or ``villains,'' farm-
hands who were as much a part of the soil upon which they
lived as the cows and sheep whose stables they shared. Their
fate was not particularly happy nor was it particularly
unhappy. But what was one to do? The good Lord who ruled
the world of the Middle Ages had undoubtedly ordered everything
for the best. If He, in his wisdom, had decided that
there must be both knights and serfs, it was not the duty of
these faithful sons of the church to question the arrangement.
The serfs therefore did not complain but when they were too
hard driven, they would die off like cattle which are not fed
and stabled in the right way, and then something would be hastily
done to better their condition. But if the progress of the
world had been left to the serf and his feudal master, we would
still be living after the fashion of the twelfth century, saying
``abracadabra'' when we tried to stop a tooth-ache, and feeling
a deep contempt and hatred for the dentist who offered to help
us with his ``science,'' which most likely was of Mohammedan
or heathenish origin and therefore both wicked and useless.

When you grow up you will discover that many people do
not believe in ``progress'' and they will prove to you by the
terrible deeds of some of our own contemporaries that ``the
world does not change.'' But I hope that you will not pay
much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors
almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs.
Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts
developed into an understandable language. Writing--the art
of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations,
without which no progress is possible was invented only four
thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature
into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of
your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are
making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. Perhaps we
have paid a little too much attention to the mere physical comforts
of life. That will change in due course of time and we
shall then attack the problems which are not related to health
and to wages and plumbing and machinery in general.

But please do not be too sentimental about the ``good old
days.'' Many people who only see the beautiful churches and
the great works of art which the Middle Ages have left behind
grow quite eloquent when they compare our own ugly civilisation
with its hurry and its noise and the evil smells of backfiring
motor trucks with the cities of a thousand years ago.
But these mediaeval churches were invariably surrounded by
miserable hovels compared to which a modern tenement house
stands forth as a luxurious palace. It is true that the noble
Lancelot and the equally noble Parsifal, the pure young hero
who went in search of the Holy Grail, were not bothered by
the odor of gasoline. But there were other smells of the barnyard
variety--odors of decaying refuse which had been thrown
into the street--of pig-sties surrounding the Bishop's palace--
of unwashed people who had inherited their coats and hats
from their grandfathers and who had never learned the blessing
of soap. I do not want to paint too unpleasant a picture.
But when you read in the ancient chronicles that the King of
France, looking out of the windows of his palace, fainted at
the stench caused by the pigs rooting in the streets of Paris,
when an ancient manuscript recounts a few details of an epidemic
of the plague or of small-pox, then you begin to under-
stand that ``progress'' is something more than a catchword used
by modern advertising men.

No, the progress of the last six hundred years would not
have been possible without the existence of cities. I shall,
therefore, have to make this chapter a little longer than many
of the others. It is too important to be reduced to three or
four pages, devoted to mere political events.

The ancient world of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria
had been a world of cities. Greece had been a country of City-
States. The history of Phoenicia was the history of two cities
called Sidon and Tyre. The Roman Empire was the ``hinterland''
of a single town. Writing, art, science, astronomy, architecture,
literature, the theatre--the list is endless--have all
been products of the city.

For almost four thousand years the wooden bee-hive which
we call a town had been the workshop of the world. Then came
the great migrations. The Roman Empire was destroyed.
The cities were burned down and Europe once more became a
land of pastures and little agricultural villages. During the
Dark Ages the fields of civilisation had lain fallow.

The Crusades had prepared the soil for a new crop. It
was time for the harvest, but the fruit was plucked by the
burghers of the free cities.

I have told you the story of the castles and the monasteries,
with their heavy stone enclosures--the homes of the knights
and the monks, who guarded men's bodies and their souls.
You have seen how a few artisans (butchers and bakers and an
occasional candle-stick maker) came to live near the castle
to tend to the wants of their masters and to find protection
in case of danger. Sometimes the feudal lord allowed these
people to surround their houses with a stockade. But they
were dependent for their living upon the good-will of the
mighty Seigneur of the castle. When he went about they knelt
before him and kissed his hand.

Then came the Crusades and many things changed. The
migrations had driven people from the north-east to the west.
The Crusades made millions of people travel from the west to
the highly civilised regions of the south-east. They discovered
that the world was not bounded by the four walls of their little
settlement. They came to appreciate better clothes, more
comfortable houses, new dishes, products of the mysterious Orient.
After their return to their old homes, they insisted that they
be supplied with those articles. The peddler with his pack
upon his back--the only merchant of the Dark Ages--added
these goods to his old merchandise, bought a cart, hired a few
ex-crusaders to protect him against the crime wave which
followed this great international war, and went forth to do
business upon a more modern and larger scale. His career was
not an easy one. Every time he entered the domains of another
Lord he had to pay tolls and taxes. But the business
was profitable all the same and the peddler continued to make
his rounds.

Soon certain energetic merchants discovered that the goods
which they had always imported from afar could be made at
home. They turned part of their homes into a workgshop.{sic}
They ceased to be merchants and became manufacturers. They
sold their products not only to the lord of the castle and to the
abbot in his monastery, but they exported them to nearby towns.
The lord and the abbot paid them with products of their farms,
eggs and wines, and with honey, which in those early days was
used as sugar. But the citizens of distant towns were obliged
to pay in cash and the manufacturer and the merchant began to
own little pieces of gold, which entirely changed their position
in the society of the early Middle Ages.

It is difficult for you to imagine a world without money.
In a modern city one cannot possible live without money. All
day long you carry a pocket full of small discs of metal to
``pay your way.'' You need a nickel for the street-car, a dollar
for a dinner, three cents for an evening paper. But many
people of the early Middle Ages never saw a piece of coined
money from the time they were born to the day of their death.
The gold and silver of Greece and Rome lay buried beneath
the ruins of their cities. The world of the migrations, which
had succeeded the Empire, was an agricultural world. Every
farmer raised enough grain and enough sheep and enough
cows for his own use.

The mediaeval knight was a country squire and was rarely
forced to pay for materials in money. His estates produced
everything that he and his family ate and drank and wore on
their backs. The bricks for his house were made along the
banks of the nearest river. Wood for the rafters of the hall
was cut from the baronial forest. The few articles that had to
come from abroad were paid for in goods--in honey--in eggs
--in fagots.

But the Crusades upset the routine of the old agricultural
life in a very drastic fashion. Suppose that the Duke of Hildesheim
was going to the Holy Land. He must travel thousands
of miles and he must pay his passage and his hotel-bills.
At home he could pay with products of his farm. But he
could not well take a hundred dozen eggs and a cart-load of
hams with him to satisfy the greed of the shipping agent of
Venice or the inn-keeper of the Brenner Pass. These gentlemen
insisted upon cash. His Lordship therefore was obliged
to take a small quantity of gold with him upon his voyage.
Where could he find this gold? He could borrow it from the
Lombards, the descendants of the old Longobards, who had
turned professional money-lenders, who seated behind their
exchange-table (commonly known as ``banco'' or bank) were
glad to let his Grace have a few hundred gold pieces in exchange
for a mortgage upon his estates, that they might be repaid
in case His Lordship should die at the hands of the Turks.

That was dangerous business for the borrower. In the end,
the Lombards invariably owned the estates and the Knight
became a bankrupt, who hired himself out as a fighting man to
a more powerful and more careful neighbour.

His Grace could also go to that part of the town where the
Jews were forced to live. There he could borrow money at a
rate of fifty or sixty percent. interest. That, too, was bad
business. But was there a way out? Some of the people of the
little city which surrounded the castle were said to have money.
They had known the young lord all his life. His father and
their fathers had been good friends. They would not be
unreasonable in their demands. Very well. His Lordship's
clerk, a monk who could write and keep accounts, sent a note
to the best known merchants and asked for a small loan. The
townspeople met in the work-room of the jeweller who made
chalices for the nearby churches and discussed this demand.
They could not well refuse. It would serve no purpose to
ask for ``interest.'' In the first place, it was against the
religious principles of most people to take interest and in the
second place, it would never be paid except in agricultural
products and of these the people had enough and to spare.

``But,'' suggested the tailor who spent his days quietly sitting
upon his table and who was somewhat of a philosopher,
``suppose that we ask some favour in return for our money.
We are all fond of fishing. But his Lordship won't let us
fish in his brook. Suppose that we let him have a hundred
ducats and that he give us in return a written guarantee allowing
us to fish all we want in all of his rivers. Then he gets
the hundred which he needs, but we get the fish and it will be
good business all around.''

The day his Lordship accepted this proposition (it seemed
such an easy way of getting a hundred gold pieces) he signed
the death-warrant of his own power. His clerk drew up the
agreement. His Lordship made his mark (for he could not
sign his name) and departed for the East. Two years later
he came back, dead broke. The townspeople were fishing in
the castle pond. The sight of this silent row of anglers annoyed
his Lordship. He told his equerry to go and chase the crowd
away. They went, but that night a delegation of merchants
visited the castle. They were very polite. They congratulated
his Lordship upon his safe return. They were sorry his
Lordship had been annoyed by the fishermen, but as his Lordship
might perhaps remember he had given them permission
to do so himself, and the tailor produced the Charter which
had been kept in the safe of the jeweller ever since the master
had gone to the Holy Land.

His Lordship was much annoyed. But once more he was
in dire need of some money. In Italy he had signed his name
to certain documents which were now in the possession of Salvestro
dei Medici, the well-known banker. These documents
were ``promissory notes'' and they were due two months from
date. Their total amount came to three hundred and forty
pounds, Flemish gold. Under these circumstances, the noble
knight could not well show the rage which filled his heart and
his proud soul. Instead, he suggested another little loan. The
merchants retired to discuss the matter.

After three days they came back and said ``yes.'' They
were only too happy to be able to help their master in his
difficulties, but in return for the 345 golden pounds would he give
them another written promise (another charter) that they,
the townspeople, might establish a council of their own to be
elected by all the merchants and free citizens of the city, said
council to manage civic affairs without interference from the
side of the castle?

His Lordship was confoundedly angry. But again,
he needed the money. He said yes, and signed the charter.
Next week, he repented. He called his soldiers and went to
the house of the jeweller and asked for the documents which
his crafty subjects had cajoled out of him under the pressure
of circumstances. He took them away and burned them.
The townspeople stood by and said nothing. But when next
his Lordship needed money to pay for the dowry of his daughter.
he was unable to get a single penny. After that little
affair at the jeweller's his credit was not considered good.
He was forced to eat humble-pie and offer to make certain reparations.
Before his Lordship got the first installment of the stipulated sum,
the townspeople were once more in possession of all their old charters
and a brand new one which permitted them to build a ``city-hall''
and a strong tower where all the charters might be kept protected
against fire and theft, which really meant protected against
future violence on the part of the Lord and his armed followers.

This, in a very general way, is what happened during the
centuries which followed the Crusades. It was a slow process,
this gradual shifting of power from the castle to the city. There
was some fighting. A few tailors and jewellers were killed and
a few castles went up in smoke. But such occurrences were
not common. Almost imperceptibly the towns grew richer
and the feudal lords grew poorer. To maintain themselves
they were for ever forced to exchange charters of civic liberty
in return for ready cash. The cities grew. They offered an
asylum to run-away serfs who gained their liberty after they
had lived a number of years behind the city walls. They came
to be the home of the more energetic elements of the
surrounding country districts. They were proud of
their new importance and expressed their power in the
churches and public buildings which they erected
around the old market place, where centuries before
the barter of eggs and sheep and honey and salt
had taken place. They wanted their children to
have a better chance in life than they had enjoyed
themselves. They hired monks to come to their city and
be school teachers. When they heard of a man who could
paint pictures upon boards of wood, they offered him a pension
if he would come and cover the walls of their chapels and their
town hall with scenes from the Holy Scriptures.

Meanwhile his Lordship, in the dreary and drafty halls of
his castle, saw all this up-start splendour and regretted the
day when first he had signed away a single one of his sovereign
rights and prerogatives. But he was helpless. The townspeople
with their well-filled strong-boxes snapped their fingers
at him. They were free men, fully prepared to hold what they
had gained by the sweat of their brow and after a struggle
which had lasted for more than ten generations.

MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT

HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED
THEIR RIGHT TO BE HEARD IN THE
ROYAL COUNCILS OF THEIR COUNTRY

As long as people were ``nomads,'' wandering tribes of shepherds,
all men had been equal and had been responsible for the
welfare and safety of the entire community.

But after they had settled down and some had become rich
and others had grown poor, the government was apt to fall into
the hands of those who were not obliged to work for their living
and who could devote themselves to politics.

I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in
Mesopotamia and in Greece and in Rome. It occurred among
the Germanic population of western Europe as soon as order
had been restored. The western European world was ruled
in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven
or eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of
the German nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary
and very little actual power. It was ruled by a number of
kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The every-day government
was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets. Their
subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There
was hardly any middle class. But during the thirteenth century
(after an absence of almost a thousand years) the middle
class--the merchant class--once more appeared upon the his-
torical stage and its rise in power, as we saw in the last chapter,
had meant a decrease in the influence of the castle folk.

Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid
attention to the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the
new world of trade and commerce which grew out of the
Crusades forced him to recognise the middle class or suffer
from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer. Their
majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes) would
have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good
burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves.
They swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not
without a struggle.

In England, during the absence of Richard the Lion
Hearted (who had gone to the Holy Land, but who was spending
the greater part of his crusading voyage in an Austrian
jail) the government of the country had been placed in the
hands of John, a brother of Richard, who was his inferior in
the art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John had
begun his career as a regent by losing Normandy and the
greater part of the French possessions. Next, he had managed
to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent III, the famous
enemy of the Hohenstaufens. The Pope had excommunicated
John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated the Emperor
Henry IV two centuries before). In the year 1213 John had
been obliged to make an ignominious peace just as Henry IV
had been obliged to do in the year 1077.

Undismayed by his lack of success, John continued to abuse
his royal power until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner
of their anointed ruler and forced him to promise that he
would be good and would never again interfere with the ancient
rights of his subjects. All this happened on a little island in
the Thames, near the village of Runnymede, on the 15th of
June of the year 1215. The document to which John signed
his name was called the Big Charter--the Magna Carta. It
contained very little that was new. It re-stated in short and
direct sentences the ancient duties of the king and enumerated
the privileges of his vassals. It paid little attention to the
rights (if any) of the vast majority of the people, the peasants,
but it offered certain securities to the rising class of the
merchants. It was a charter of great importance because it defined
the powers of the king with more precision than had ever been
done before. But it was still a purely mediaeval document. It
did not refer to common human beings, unless they happened to
be the property of the vassal, which must be safe-guarded
against royal tyranny just as the Baronial woods and cows
were protected against an excess of zeal on the part of the
royal foresters.

A few years later, however, we begin to hear a very different
note in the councils of His Majesty.

John, who was bad, both by birth and inclination, solemnly
had promised to obey the great charter and then had broken
every one of its many stipulations. Fortunately, he soon died
and was succeeded by his son Henry III, who was forced to
recognise the charter anew. Meanwhile, Uncle Richard, the
Crusader, had cost the country a great deal of money and the
king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might pay his
obligations to the Jewish money-lenders. The large land-owners
and the bishops who acted as councillors to the king could
not provide him with the necessary gold and silver. The king
then gave orders that a few representatives of the cities be
called upon to attend the sessions of his Great Council. They
made their first appearance in the year 1265. They were supposed
to act only as financial experts who were not supposed
to take a part in the general discussion of matters of state, but
to give advice exclusively upon the question of taxation.

Gradually, however, these representatives of the ``commons''
were consulted upon many of the problems and the meeting
of noblemen, bishops and city delegates developed into a regular
Parliament, a place ``ou l'on parfait,'' which means in English
where people talked, before important affairs of state were
decided upon.

But the institution of such a general advisory-board with
certain executive powers was not an English invention, as
seems to ke the general belief, and government by a ``king and
his parliament'' was by no means restricted to the British Isles.
You will find it in every part of Europe. In some countries,
like France, the rapid increase of the Royal power after the
Middle Ages reduced the influence of the ``parliament'' to nothing.
In the year 1302 representatives of the cities had been
admitted to the meeting of the French Parliament, but five
centuries had to pass before this ``Parliament'' was strong
enough to assert the rights of the middle class, the so-called
Third Estate, and break the power of the king. Then they
made up for lost time and during the French Revolution, abolished
the king, the clergy and the nobles and made the representatives
of the common people the rulers of the land. In
Spain the ``cortex'' (the king's council) had been opened to the
commoners as early as the first half of the twelfth century.
In the Germain Empire, a number of important cities had obtained
the rank of ``imperial cities'' whose representatives must
be heard in the imperial diet.

In Sweden, representatives of the people attended the sessions
of the Riksdag at the first meeting of the year 1359. In
Denmark the Daneholf, the ancient national assembly, was re-
established in 1314, and, although the nobles often regained control
of the country at the expense of the king and the people,
the representatives of the cities were never completely deprived
of their power.

In the Scandinavian country, the story of representative
government is particularly interesting. In Iceland, the ``Althing,''
the assembly of all free landowners, who managed the
affairs of the island, began to hold regular meetings in the ninth
century and continued to do so for more than a thousand
years.

In Switzerland, the freemen of the different cantons defended
their assemblies against the attempts of a number of
feudal neighbours with great success.

Finally, in the Low Countries, in Holland, the councils of
the different duchies and counties were attended by representatives
of the third estate as early as the thirteenth century.

In the sixteenth century a number of these small provinces
rebelled against their king, abjured his majesty in a solemn
meeting of the ``Estates General,'' removed the clergy from
the discussions, broke the power of the nobles and assumed full
executive authority over the newly-established Republic of the
United Seven Netherlands. For two centuries, the representatives
of the town-councils ruled the country without a king,
without bishops and without noblemen. The city had become
supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the
land.

THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD

WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
THOUGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH
THEY HAPPENED TO LIVE

DATES are a very useful invention. We could not do without
them but unless we are very careful, they will play tricks
with us. They are apt to make history too precise. For example,
when I talk of the point-of-view of mediaeval man, I
do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476,
suddenly all the people of Europe said, ``Ah, now the Roman
Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle
Ages. How interesting!''

You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charlemagne
who were Romans in their habits, in their manners, in
their out-look upon life. On the other hand, when you grow
up you will discover that some of the people in this world have
never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man. All times
and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations
play tag with each other. But it is possible to study the minds
of a good many true representatives of the Middle Ages and
then give you an idea of the average man's attitude toward
life and the many difficult problems of living.

First of all, remember that the people of the Middle Ages
never thought of themselves as free-born citizens, who could
come and go at will and shape their fate according to their
ability or energy or luck. On the contrary, they all considered
themselves part of the general scheme of things, which included
emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes and swashbucklers,
rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves. They accepted
this divine ordinance and asked no questions. In this,
of course, they differed radically from modern people who accept
nothing and who are forever trying to improve their own
financial and political situation.

To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world
hereafter--a Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brimstone
and suffering--meant something more than empty words
or vague theological phrases. It was an actual fact and the
mediaeval burghers and knights spent the greater part of their
time preparing for it. We modern people regard a noble
death after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. After three score years of work and effort,
we go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well.

But during the Middle Ages, the King of Terrors with
his grinning skull and his rattling bones was man's steady
companion. He woke his victims up with terrible tunes on his
scratchy fiddle he sat down with them at dinner--he smiled
at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took a girl
out for a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising
yarns about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when
you were very young, instead of listening to the fairy stories
of Anderson and Grimm, you, too, would have lived all your
days in a dread of the final hour and the gruesome day of
Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the children of
the Middle Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks
and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes, their fear of
the future filled their souls with humility and piety, but often
it influenced them the other way and made them cruel and
sentimental. They would first of all murder all the women
and children of a captured city and then they would devoutly
march to a holy spot and with their hands gory with the blood
of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful heaven forgive
them their sins. Yea, they would do more than pray, they
would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the most
wicked of sinners. But the next day, they would once more
butcher a camp of Saracen enemies without a spark of mercy
in their hearts.

Of course, the Crusaders were Knights and obeyed a somewhat
different code of manners from the common men. But in
such respects the common man was just the same as his master.
He, too, resembled a shy horse, easily frightened by a
shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of excellent and faithful
service but liable to run away and do terrible damage when
his feverish imagination saw a ghost.

In judging these good people, however, it is wise to remember
the terrible disadvantages under which they lived.
They were really barbarians who posed as civilised people.
Charlemagne and Otto the Great were called ``Roman Emperors,''
but they had as little resemblance to a real Roman Emperor
(say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as ``King'' Wumba
Wumba of the upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers
of Sweden or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst
glorious ruins but who did not share the benefits of the
civilisation which their fathers and grandfathers had destroyed.
They knew nothing. They were ignorant of almost every fact
which a boy of twelve knows to-day. They were obliged to go
to one single book for all their information. That was the
Bible. But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the
history of the human race for the better are those chapters of
the New Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of
love, charity and forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy,
zoology, botany, geometry and all the other sciences, the venerable
book is not entirely reliable. In the twelfth century, a
second book was added to the mediaeval library, the great
encyclopaedia of useful knowledge, compiled by Aristotle, the
Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ. Why
the Christian church should have been willing to accord such
high honors to the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas
they condemned all other Greek philosophers on account of
their heathenish doctrines, I really do not know. But next to
the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the only reliable teacher
whose works could be safely placed into the hands of true
Christians.

His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout
way. They had gone from Greece to Alexandria. They had
then been translated from the Greek into the Arabic language
by the Mohammedans who conquered Egypt in the seventh
century. They had followed the Moslem armies into Spain and
the philosophy of the great Stagirite (Aristotle was a native of
Stagira in Macedonia) was taught in the Moorish universities
of Cordova. The Arabic text was then translated into Latin
by the Christian students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get
a liberal education and this much travelled version of the famous
books was at last taught at the different schools of northwestern
Europe. It was not very clear, but that made it all
the more interesting.

With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant
men of the Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things
between Heaven and Earth in their relation to the expressed
will of God. These brilliant men, the so-called Scholasts or
Schoolmen, were really very intelligent, but they had obtained
their information exclusively from books, and never from actual
observation. If they wanted to lecture on the sturgeon
or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments and
Aristotle, and told their students everything these good books
had to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons.
They did not go out to the nearest river to catch a sturgeon.
They did not leave their libraries and repair to the backyard
to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study
them in their native haunts. Even such famous scholars as
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire whether
the sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars of
Macedonia might not have been different from the sturgeons
and the caterpillars of western Europe.

When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like
Roger Bacon appeared in the council of the learned and began
to experiment with magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes
and actually dragged the sturgen and the caterpillar
into the lecturing room and proved that they were different
from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by
Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon
was going too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour
of actual observation was worth more than ten years with
Aristotle and that the works of that famous Greek might as
well have remained untranslated for all the good they had ever
done, the scholasts went to the police and said, ``This man is
a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to study
Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should
he not be contented with our Latin-Arabic translation which
has satisfied our faithful people for so many hundred years?
Why is he so curious about the insides of fishes and the insides
of insects? He is probably a wicked magician trying to upset
the established order of things by his Black Magic.'' And so
well did they plead their cause that the frightened guardians
of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word for more
than ten years. When he resumed his studies he had learned
a lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it
impossible for his contemporaries to read them, a trick which
became common as the Church became more desperate in its
attempts to prevent people from asking questions which would
lead to doubts and infidelity.

This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to
keep people ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic
hunters of that day was really a very kindly one. They firmly
believed--nay, they knew--that this life was but the preparation
for our real existence in the next world. They felt convinced
that too much knowledge made people uncomfortable,
filled their minds with dangerous opinions and led to doubt
and hence to perdition. A mediaeval Schoolman who saw one
of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the
Bible and Aristotle, that he might study things for himself, felt
as uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child
approach a hot stove. She knows that he will burn his little
fingers if he is allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him
back, if necessary she will use force. But she really loves
the child and if he will only obey her, she will be as good to him
as she possibly can be. In the same way the mediaeval guardians
of people's souls, while they were strict in all matters
pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night to render the
greatest possible service to the members of their flock. They
held out a helping hand whenever they could and the society
of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and
pious women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal
as bearable as possible.

A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But
the Good Lord of the Middle Ages who allowed the serf to
remain a slave all his life had bestowed an immortal soul upon
this humble creature and therefore he must be protected in his
rights, that he might live and die as a good Christian. When
he grew too old or too weak to work he must be taken care
of by the feudal master for whom he had worked. The serf,
therefore, who led a monotonous and dreary life, was never
haunted by fear of to-morrow. He knew that he was ``safe''--
that he could not be thrown out of employment, that he would
always have a roof over his head (a leaky roof, perhaps, but
roof all the same), and that he would always have something
to eat.

This feeling of ``stability'' and of ``safety'' was found in all
classes of society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans
established guilds which assured every member of a steady income.
It did not encourage the ambitious to do better than
their neighbours. Too often the guilds gave protection to
the ``slacker'' who managed to ``get by.'' But they established
a general feeling of content and assurance among the
labouring classes which no longer exists in our day of general
competition. The Middle Ages were familiar with the dangers
of what we modern people call ``corners,'' when a single rich
man gets hold of all the available grain or soap or pickled
herring, and then forces the world to buy from him at his own
price. The authorities, therefore, discouraged wholesale trading
and regulated the price at which merchants were allowed
to sell their goods.

The Middle Ages disliked competition. Why compete and
fill the world with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of pushing
men, when the Day of Judgement was near at hand, when
riches would count for nothing and when the good serf would
enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad knight was
sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno?

In short, the people of the Middle Ages were asked to surrender
part of their liberty of thought and action, that they
might enjoy greater safety from poverty of the body and poverty
of the soul.

And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They
firmly believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet--
that they were here to be prepared for a greater and more
important life. Deliberately they turned their backs upon a
world which was filled with suffering and wickedness and
injustice. They pulled down the blinds that the rays of the
sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the
Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was
to illumine their happiness in all eternity. They tried to close
their eyes to most of the joys of the world in which they lived
that they might enjoy those which awaited them in the near
future. They accepted life as a necessary evil and welcomed
death as the beginning of a glorious day.

The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the
future but had tried to establish their Paradise right here upon
this earth. They had succeeded in making life extremely pleasant
for those of their fellow men who did not happen to be
slaves. Then came the other extreme of the Middle Ages,
when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest clouds
and turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low,
for rich and poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was
time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, as
I shall tell you in my next chapter.

MEDIAEVAL TRADE

HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE
MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE OF
TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE
ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT
DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE
WITH ASIA AND AFRICA

THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should
have been the first to regain a position of great importance
during the late Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been
settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more
roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere else
in Europe.

The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere,
but there had been so much to destroy that more had been able
to survive. In the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and
as the head of a vast political machine, which owned land and
serfs and buildings and forests and rivers and conducted courts
of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal of money.
The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did
the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The
cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural
products of the north and the west must be changed into actual
cash before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome.

This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative
abundance of gold and silver. Finally, during the Crusades,
the Italian cities had become the point of embarkation
for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an almost unbelievable
extent.

And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same
Italian cities remained the distributing centres for those Oriental
goods upon which the people of Europe had come to depend
during the time they had spent in the near east.

Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was
a republic built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the
mainland had fled during the invasions of the barbarians in the
fourth century. Surrounded on all sides by the sea they had
engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt had been very
scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been high.
For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of
this indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, because
people, like sheep, fall ill unless they get a certain amount
of salt in their food). The people had used this monopoly to
increase the power of their city. At times they had even dared
to defy the power of the Popes. The town had grown rich and
had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade with the
Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry
passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could
not pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the
Venetians who were for ever increasing their colonies in the
AEgean Sea, in Asia Minor and in Egypt.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had
grown to two hundred thousand, which made Venice the biggest
city of the Middle Ages. The people were without influence
upon the government which was the private affair of a
small number of rich merchant families. They elected a senate
and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the city were
the members of the famous Council of Ten,--who maintained
themselves with the help of a highly organised system of secret
service men and professional murderers, who kept watch upon
all citizens and quietly removed those who might be dangerous
to the safety of their high-handed and unscrupulous Committee
of Public Safety.

The other extreme of government, a democracy of very
turbulent habits, was to be found in Florence. This city
controlled the main road from northern Europe to Rome and used
the money which it had derived from this fortunate economic
position to engage in manufacturing. The Florentines tried to
follow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests and members
of the guilds all took part in the discussions of civic affairs.
This led to great civic upheaval. People were forever being divided
into political parties and these parties fought each other
with intense bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated
their possessions as soon as they had gained a victory in the
council. After several centuries of this rule by organised mobs,
the inevitable happened. A powerful family made itself master
of the city and governed the town and the surrounding country
after the fashion of the old Greek ``tyrants.'' They were called
the Medici. The earliest Medici had been physicians (medicus
is Latin for physician, hence their name), but later they had
turned banker. Their banks and their pawnshops were to be
found in all the more important centres of trade. Even today
our American pawn-shops display the three golden balls
which were part of the coat of arms of the mighty house of
the Medici, who became rulers of Florence and married their
daughters to the kings of France and were buried in graves
worthy of a Roman Caesar.

Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where
the merchants specialised in trade with Tunis in Africa and
the grain depots of the Black Sea. Then there were more than
two hundred other cities, some large and some small, each a perfect
commercial unit, all of them fighting their neighbours and
rivals with the undying hatred of neighbours who are depriving
each other of their profits.

Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been
brought to these distributing centres, they must be prepared
for the voyage to the west and the north.

Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where
they were reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in
turn served as the market places of northern and western
France.

Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient
road led across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for
the barbarians who had invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the
merchandise was carried to Basel. From there it drifted down
the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or it was taken to
Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers
and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by ``shaving''
the coins with which they paid their workmen), looked after
the further distribution to Nuremberg and Leipzig and the
cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the Island of Gotland)
which looked after the needs of the Northern Baltic and dealt
directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old commercial
centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in
the middle of the sixteenth century.

The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had
an interesting story of their own. The mediaeval world ate a
great deal of fish. There were many fast days and then people
were not permitted to eat meat. For those who lived away
from the coast and from the rivers, this meant a diet of eggs
or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth century a Dutch
fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so that it
could be transported to distant points. The herring fisheries
of the North Sea then became of great importance. But some
time during the thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for
reasons of its own) moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and
the cities of that inland sea began to make money. All the
world now sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish
could only be caught during a few months each year (the rest
of the time it spends in deep water, raising large families of
little herrings) the ships would have been idle during the rest
of the time unless they had found another occupation. They
were then used to carry the wheat of northern and central Russia
to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage
they brought spices and silks and carpets and Oriental rugs
from Venice and Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and Bremen.

Out of such simple beginnings there developed an important
system of international trade which reached from the
manufacturing cities of Bruges and Ghent (where the almighty
guilds fought pitched battles with the kings of France and
England and established a labour tyranny which completely
ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic
of Novgorod in northern Russia, which was a mighty city until
Tsar Ivan, who distrusted all merchants, took the town and
killed sixty thousand people in less than a month's time and
reduced the survivors to beggary.

That they might protect themselves against pirates and
excessive tolls and annoying legislation, the merchants of the
north founded a protective league which was called the
``Hansa.'' The Hansa, which had its headquarters in Lubeck,
was a voluntary association of more than one hundred cities.
The association maintained a navy of its own which patrolled
the seas and fought and defeated the Kings of England and
Denmark when they dared to interfere with the rights and the
privileges of the mighty Hanseatic merchants.

I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the wonderful
stories of this strange commerce which was carried on
across the high mountains and across the deep seas amidst
such dangers that every voyage became a glorious adventure.
But it would take several volumes and it cannot be done here.

Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle
Ages to make you curious to read more in the excellent books
of which I shall give you a list at the end of this volume.

The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a
period of very slow progress. The people who were in power
believed that ``progress'' was a very undesirable invention of
the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap-
pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce
their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights.
Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into
the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were
considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail
sentence of twenty years.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of
international commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile
had swept across the valley of ancient Egypt. It left behind
a fertile sediment of prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure
hours and these leisure hours gave both men and women a
chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in literature
and art and music.

Then once more was the world filled with that divine curiosity
which has elevated man from the ranks of those other
mammals who are his distant cousins but who have remained
dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and development I have
told you in my last chapter, offered a safe shelter to these
brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain
of the established order of things.

They set to work. They opened the windows of their
cloistered and studious cells. A flood of sunlight entered the
dusty rooms and showed them the cobwebs which had gathered
during the long period of semi-darkness.

They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gardens.

Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crumbling
town walls, and said, ``This is a good world. We are
glad that we live in it.''

At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new
world began.

THE RENAISSANCE

PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY
JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY
TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE
OLDER AND MORE AGREEABLE CIVILISATION
OF ROME AND GREECE AND THEY
WERE SO PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS
THAT THEY SPOKE OF A RENAISSANCE
OR RE-BIRTH OF CIVILISATION

THE Renaissance was not a political or religious movement.
It was a state of mind.

The men of the Renaissance continued to be the obedient
sons of the mother church. They were subjects of kings and
emperors and dukes and murmured not.

But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to
wear different clothes--to speak a different language--to live
different lives in different houses.

They no longer concentrated all their thoughts and their
efforts upon the blessed existence that awaited them in Heaven.
They tried to establish their Paradise upon this planet, and,
truth to tell, they succeeded in a remarkable degree.

I have quite often warned you against the danger that
lies in historical dates. People take them too literally. They
think of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignor-
ance. ``Click,'' says the clock, and the Renaissance begins and
cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an
eager intellectual curiosity.

As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible to draw such
sharp lines. The thirteenth century belonged most decidedly
to the Middle Ages. All historians agree upon that. But was
it a time of darkness and stagnation merely? By no means.
People were tremendously alive. Great states were being
founded. Large centres of commerce were being developed.
High above the turretted towers of the castle and the peaked
roof of the town-hall, rose the slender spire of the newly built
Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the world was in motion. The
high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hall, who had just become
conscious of their own strength (by way of their recently
acquired riches) were struggling for more power with their
feudal masters. The members of the guilds who had just become
aware of the important fact that ``numbers count'' were
fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hall. The
king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled
waters and caught many a shining bass of profit which they
proceeded to cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and
disappointed councillors and guild brethren.

To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening
when the badly lighted streets did not invite further political
and economic dispute, the Troubadours and Minnesingers told
their stories and sang their songs of romance and adventure
and heroism and loyalty to all fair women. Meanwhile youth,
impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the universities,
and thereby hangs a story.

The Middle Ages were ``internationally minded.'' That
sounds difficult, but wait until I explain it to you. We modern
people are ``nationally minded.'' We are Americans or Englishmen
or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English or French
or Italian and go to English and French and Italian universities,
unless we want to specialise in some particular branch
of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn
another language and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow.
But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely
talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians.
They said, ``I am a citizen of Sheffield or Bordeaux or Genoa.''
Because they all belonged to one and the same church they felt
a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could
speak Latin, they possessed an international language which
removed the stupid language barriers which have grown up
in modern Europe and which place the small nations at such
an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example, take the case
of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and laughter, who
wrote his books in the sixteenth century. He was the native
of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin and all the world
was his audience. If he were alive to-day, he would write in
Dutch. Then only five or six million people would be able to
read him. To be understood by the rest of Europe and America,
his publishers would be obliged to translate his books into
twenty different languages. That would cost a lot of money
and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble
or the risk.

Six hundred years ago that could not happen. The greater
part of the people were still very ignorant and could not read
or write at all. But those who had mastered the difficult art
of handling the goose-quill belonged to an international republic
of letters which spread across the entire continent and which
knew of no boundaries and respected no limitations of language
or nationality. The universities were the strongholds of
this republic. Unlike modern fortifications, they did not follow
the frontier. They were to be found wherever a teacher
and a few pupils happened to find themselves together. There
again the Middle Ages and the Renaissance differed from our
own time. Nowadays, when a new university is built, the
process (almost invariably) is as follows: Some rich man
wants to do something for the community in which he lives or
a particular religious sect wants to build a school to keep its
faithful children under decent supervision, or a state needs doc-
tors and lawyers and teachers. The university begins as a
large sum of money which is deposited in a bank. This money
is then used to construct buildings and laboratories and dormitories.
Finally professional teachers are hired, entrance examinations
are held and the university is on the way.

But in the Middle Ages things were done differently. A wise man
said to himself, ``I have discovered a great truth. I must impart my
knowledge to others.'' And he began to preach his wisdom
wherever and whenever he could get a few people to listen to him,
like a modern soap-box orator. If he was an interesting speaker, the
crowd came and stayed. If he was dull, they shrugged their shoulders
and continued their way.

By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear
the words of wisdom of this great teacher. They brought copybooks
with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose quill and
wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained.
The teacher and his pupils retired to an empty basement or
the room of the ``Professor.'' The learned man sat in his chair
and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the
University, the ``universitas,'' a corporation of professors and
students during the Middle Ages, when the ``teacher'' counted
for everything and the building in which he taught counted for
very little.

As an example, let me tell you of something that happened
in the ninth century. In the town of Salerno near Naples there
were a number of excellent physicians. They attracted people
desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a
thousand years (until 1817) there was a university of Salerno
which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great Greek doctor
who had practiced his art in ancient Hellas in the fifth
century before the birth of Christ.

Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany,
who early in the twelfth century began to lecture on theology
and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked
to the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed
with him stepped forward to explain their point of view. Paris
was soon filled with a clamouring multitude of Englishmen and
Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary
and around the old cathedral which stood on a little island in
the Seine there grew the famous University of Paris.
In Bologna in Italy, a monk by the name of Gratian had
compiled a text-book for those whose business it was to know
the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then
came from all over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas.
To protect themselves against the landlords and the innkeepers
and the boarding-house ladies of the city, they formed a corporation
(or University) and behold the beginning of the university
of Bologna.

Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We do
not know what caused it, but a number of disgruntled teachers
together with their pupils crossed the channel and found a
hospitable home in n little village on the Thames called Oxford,
and in this way the famous University of Oxford came into
being. In the same way, in the year 1222, there had been a split
in the University of Bologna. The discontented teachers (again
followed by their pupils) had moved to Padua and their proud city
thenceforward boasted of a university of its own. And so it went
from Valladolid in Spain to Cracow in distant Poland and from
Poitiers in France to Rostock in Germany.

It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these
early professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to
listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point
however, which I want to make is this--the Middle Ages and
especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the
world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation,
there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless
if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this
turmoil grew the Renaissance.

But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene
of the Mediaeval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of
whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This
man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer
who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of
day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors
while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis
of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but
often when he went to school, his frightened eyes would see the
puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare
that raged forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines,
the followers of the Pope and the adherents of the Emperors.

When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father
had been one before him, just as an American boy might become
a Democrat or a Republican, simply because his father
had happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. But after a
few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united under a single
head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered jealousies
of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghilbeiline.

He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a
mighty emperor might come and re-establish unity and order.
Alas! he hoped in vain. The Ghibellines were driven out of
Florence in the year 1802. From that time on until the day
of his death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the year
1321, Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of
charity at the table of rich patrons whose names would have
sunk into the deepest pit of oblivion but for this single fact,
that they had been kind to a poet in his misery. During the
many years of exile, Dante felt compelled to justify himself
and his actions when he had been a political leader in his
home-town, and when he had spent his days walking along
the banks of the Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the
lovely Beatrice Portinari, who died the wife of another man, a
dozen years before the Ghibelline disaster.

He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had
faithfully served the town of is birth and before a corrupt
court he had been accused of stealing the public funds and
had been condemned to be burned alive should he venture
back within the realm of the city of Florence. To clear
himself before his own conscience and before his contemporaries,
Dante then created an Imaginary World and with great
detail he described the circumstances which had led to
his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and lust
and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a
battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish
tyrants.

He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year
1300 he had lost his way in a dense forest and how he found
his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave
himself up for lost when a white figure appeared amidst the
trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher, sent
upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Beatrice,
who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her
true lover. Virgil then takes Dante through Purgatory and
through Hell. Deeper and deeper the path leads them until
they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen
into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners,
traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and
success by lies and by deceit. But before the two wanderers
have reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who
in some way or other have played a role in the history of his
beloved city. Emperors and Popes, dashing knights and
whining usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punishment
or awaiting the day of deliverance, when they shall
leave Purgatory for Heaven.

It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the
people of the thirteenth century did and felt and feared and
prayed for. Through it all moves the figure of the lonely
Florentine exile, forever followed by the shadow of his own
despair.

And behold! when the gates of death were closing upon
the sad poet of the Middle Ages, the portals of life swung
open to the child who was to be the first of the men of the
Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarca, the son of the
notary public of the little town of Arezzo.

Francesco's father had belonged to the same political party
as Dante. He too had been exiled and thus it happened that
Petrarca (or Petrarch, as we call him) was born away from
Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Montpellier
in France that he might become a lawyer like his father. But
the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He
wanted to be a scholar and a poet--and because he wanted to
be a scholar and a poet beyond everything else, he became one,
as people of a strong will are apt to do. He made long
voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in the cloisters
along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome.
Then he went to live in a lonely valley of the wild mountains
of Vaucluse, and there he studied and wrote and soon he had
become so famous for his verse and for his learning that both
the University of Paris and the king of Naples invited him
to come and teach their students and subjects. On the way
to his new job, he was obliged to pass through Rome. The
people had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten
Roman authors. They decided to honour him and in the
ancient forum of the Imperial City, Petrarch was crowned with
the laurel wreath of the Poet.

From that moment on, his life was an endless career of
honour and appreciation. He wrote the things which people
wanted most to hear. They were tired of theological
disputations. Poor Dante could wander through hell as much as
he wanted. But Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and the
sun and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed
to have been the stock in trade of the last generation. And
when Petrarch came to a city, all the people flocked out to
meet him and he was received like a conquering hero. If he
happened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the story teller,
with him, so much the better. They were both men of their
time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging
in forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still another
manuscript of Virgil or Ovid or Lucrece or any of the
other old Latin poets. They were good Christians. Of course
they were! Everyone was. But no need of going around with
a long face and wearing a dirty coat just because some day
or other you were going to die. Life was good. People were
meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Very well.
Take a spade and dig into the soil. What did you find?
Beautiful old statues. Beautiful old vases. Ruins of ancient
buildings. All these things were made by the people of the
greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world
for a thousand years. They were strong and rich and handsome
(just look at that bust of the Emperor Augustus!). Of
course, they were not Christians and they would never be
able to enter Heaven. At best they would spend their days
in purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit.

But who cared? To have lived in a world like that of
ancient Rome was heaven enough for any mortal being. And
anyway, we live but once. Let us be happy and cheerful for
the mere joy of existence.

Such, in short, was the spirit that had begun to fill the
narrow and crooked streets of the many little Italian cities.

You know what we mean by the ``bicycle craze'' or the
``automobile craze.'' Some one invents a bicycle. People who
for hundreds of thousands of years have moved slowly and
painfully from one place to another go ``crazy'' over the prospect
of rolling rapidly and easily over hill and dale. Then
a clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it
necessary to pedal and pedal and pedal. You just sit and
let little drops of gasoline do the work for you. Then everybody
wants an automobile. Everybody talks about Rolls-
Royces and Flivvers and carburetors and mileage and oil. Explorers
penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that
they may find new supplies of gas. Forests arise in Sumatra
and in the Congo to supply us with rubber. Rubber and oil
become so valuable that people fight wars for their possession.
The whole world is ``automobile mad'' and little children can
say ``car'' before they learn to whisper ``papa'' and ``mamma.''

In the fourteenth century, the Italian people went crazy
about the newly discovered beauties of the buried world of
Rome. Soon their enthusiasm was shared by all the people of
western Europe. The finding of an unknown manuscript became
the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a
grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays invents
a new spark-plug. The humanist, the scholar who devoted his
time and his energies to a study of ``homo'' or mankind (instead
of wasting his hours upon fruitless theological investigations),
that man was regarded with greater honour and a deeper respect
than was ever bestowed upon a hero who had just conquered
all the Cannibal Islands.

In the midst of this intellectual upheaval, an event occurred
which greatly favoured the study of the ancient philosophers
and authors. The Turks were renewing their attacks upon
Europe. Constantinople, capital of the last remnant of the
original Roman Empire, was hard pressed. In the year 1393
the Emperor, Manuel Paleologue, sent Emmanuel Chrysoloras
to western Europe to explain the desperate state of old Byzantium
and to ask for aid. This aid never came. The Roman
Catholic world was more than willing to see the Greek Catholic
world go to the punishment that awaited such wicked heretics.
But however indifferent western Europe might be to the fate
of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in the ancient
Greeks whose colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus
ten centuries after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn
Greek that they might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato.
They wanted to learn it very badly, but they had no books and
no grammars and no teachers. The magistrates of Florence
heard of the visit of Chrysoloras. The people of their city
were ``crazy to learn Greek.'' Would he please come and
teach them? He would, and behold! the first professor of
Greek teaching alpha, beta, gamma to hundreds of eager young
men, begging their way to the city of the Arno, living in stables
and in dingy attics that they night learn how to decline the verb
and enter into the companionship of
Sophocles and Homer.

Meanwhile in the universities, the old schoolmen, teaching
their ancient theology and their antiquated logic; explaining
the hidden mysteries of the old Testament and discussing the
strange science of their Greek-Arabic-Spanish-Latin edition of
Aristotle, looked on in dismay and horror. Next, they turned
angry. This thing was going too far. The young men were
deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to
go and listen to some wild-eyed ``humanist'' with his newfangled
notions about a ``reborn civilization.''

They went to the authorities. They complained. But one
cannot force an unwilling horse to drink and one cannot
make unwilling ears listen to something which does not really
interest them. The schoolmen were losing ground rapidly. Here
and there they scored a short victory. They combined forces
with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy a
happiness which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence,
the centre of the Great Rebirth, a terrible fight was fought
between the old order and the new. A Dominican monk, sour
of face and bitter in his hatred of beauty, was the leader of
the mediaeval rear-guard. He fought a valiant battle. Day
after day he thundered his warnings of God's holy wrath
through the wide halls of Santa Maria del Fiore. ``Repent,''
he cried, ``repent of your godlessness, of your joy in things
that are not holy!'' He began to hear voices and to see flaming
swords that flashed through the sky. He preached to the
little children that they might not fall into the errors of these
ways which were leading their fathers to perdition. He organised
companies of boy-scouts, devoted to the service of the
great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In a sudden moment
of frenzy, the frightened people promised to do penance
for their wicked love of beauty and pleasure. They carried
their books and their statues and their paintings to the market
place and celebrated a wild ``carnival of the vanities'' with holy
singing and most unholy dancing, while Savonarola applied his
torch to the accumulated treasures.

But when the ashes cooled down, the people began to realise
what they had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them destroy
that which they had come to love above all things. They
turned against him, Savonarola was thrown into jail. He was
tortured. But he refused to repent for anything he had done.
He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He
had willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to
share his own point of view. It had been his duty to eradicate
evil wherever he found it. A love of heathenish books and
heathenish beauty in the eyes of this faithful son of the Church,
had been an evil. But he stood alone. He had fought the
battle of a time that was dead and gone. The Pope in Rome
never moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he approved
of his ``faithful Florentines'' when they dragged Savonarola
to the gallows, hanged him and burned his body amidst
the cheerful howling and yelling of the mob.

It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola
would have been a great man in the eleventh century. In the
fifteenth century he was merely the leader of a lost cause.
For better or worse, the Middle Ages had come to an end when
the Pope had turned humanist and when the Vatican became
the most important museum of Roman and Greek antiquities.

THE AGE OF EXPRESSION

THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF
GIVING EXPRESSION TO THEIR NEWLY
DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED
THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY
AND IN SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITECTURE
AND IN PAINTING AND IN THE
BOOKS THEY PRINTED

IN the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent
seventy-two of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls
of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes near the good town of
Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Ysel. He
was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born
in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis.
At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where
Gerhard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of
Paris, Cologne and Prague, and famous as a wandering
preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers of the
Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who
tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ
while working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house-
painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent
school, that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught
the wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this school,
little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and
how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had
put his little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to
Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a
turbulent world which did not attract him.

Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden
death. In central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of
Johannus Huss, the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the
English reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the death
of their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake by order of
that same Council of Constance, which had promised him a safe-conduct
if he would come to Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope,
the Emperor, twenty-three cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops,
one hundred and fifty abbots and more than a hundred princes and
dukes who had gathered together to reform their church.

In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that
she might drive the English from her territories and just then was
saved from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc.
And no sooner had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy
were at each other's throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death
for the supremacy of western Europe.

In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of
Heaven down upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon,
in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the
far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the
Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final
crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.

But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never
heard. He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts and
he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little
volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has since
been translated into more languages than any other book
save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people
as ever studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the
lives of countless millions. And it was the work of a man
whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the simple
wish that ``he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little
corner with a little book.''

Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the
Middle Ages. Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the
victorious Renaissance, with the humanists loudly proclaiming
the coming of modern times, the Middle Ages gathered
strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks
gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straightforward
and honest men, by the example of their blameless
and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of
righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God. But
all to no avail. The new world rushed past these good people.
The days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of
``expression'' had begun.

Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use
so many ``big words.'' I wish that I could write this history in
words of one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot
write a text-book of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse
and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped. You
simply have to learn what those words mean or do without
mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually
be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of
Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now?

When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression,
I mean this: People were no longer contented to be the
audience and sit still while the emperor and the pope told
them what to do and what to think. They wanted to be actors
upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving ``expression''
to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be interested
in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo
Macchiavelli, then he ``expressed'' himself in his books which
revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient
ruler. If on the other hand he had a liking for painting, he
``expressed'' his love for beautiful lines and lovely colours in
the pictures which have made the names of Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Rafael and a thousand others household words wherever
people have learned to care for those things which express
a true and lasting beauty.

If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with
an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo
da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with
his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the
Lombardian plains and ``expressed'' his joy and interest in all
things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in
sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of
gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and
the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture
and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out
of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church
of St. Peter, the most concrete ``expression'' of the glories
of the triumphant church. And so it went.

All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with
men and women who lived that they might add their mite to
the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and
beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, Johann
zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann Gutenberg, had
just invented a new method of copying books. He had studied
the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual
letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that
they formed words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost
all his money in a law-suit which had to do with the original
invention of the press. He died in poverty, but the ``expression''
of his particular inventive genius lived after him.

Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in
Antwerp and Froben in Basel were flooding the world with
carefully edited editions of the classics printed in the Gothic
letters of the Gutenberg Bible, or printed in the Italian type
which we use in this book, or printed in Greek letters, or in
Hebrew.

Then the whole world became the eager audience of those
who had something to say. The day when learning had been
a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end. And the
last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world, when
Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his cheap and popular
editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and
Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and
philosophers and scientists, offered to become man's faithful
friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had
made all men free and equal before the printed word.

THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN
THROUGH THE BONDS OF THEIR NARROW
MEDIAEVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO
HAVE MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDERINGS.
THE EUROPEAN WORLD HAD
GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBITIONS.
IT WAS THE TIME OF THE GREAT
VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

THE Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travelling.
But very few people had ever ventured beyond the well-
known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffe. In the
thirteenth century the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice,
had wandered across the great Mongolian desert and after
climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their
way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty
emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name
of Marco, had written a book about their adventures, which
covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished
world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of
the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of
spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that
they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was
too far and too dangerous and so they stayed at home.

Of course, there was always the possibility of making the
voyage by sea. But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle
Ages and for many very good reasons. In the first place, ships
were very small. The vessels on which Magellan made his
famous trip around the world, which lasted many years, were
not as large as a modern ferryboat. They carried from twenty
to fifty men, who lived in dingy quarters (too low to allow any
of them to stand up straight) and the sailors were obliged to
eat poorly cooked food as the kitchen arrangements were very
bad and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the
least bit rough. The mediaeval world knew how to pickle herring
and how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods
and fresh vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as
soon as the coast had been left behind. Water was carried in
small barrels. It soon became stale and then tasted of rotten
wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing things. As
the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes
(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century
seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept
his discovery to himself) they often drank unclean water and
sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the
mortality on board the ships of the earliest navigators was
terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519 left
Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around
the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth
century when there was a brisk trade between western Europe
and the Indies, a mortality of 40 percent was nothing unusual
for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater
part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is caused
by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and
poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion.

Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea
did not attract the best elements of the population. Famous
discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama
travelled at the head of crews that were almost entirely composed
of ex-jailbirds, future murderers and pickpockets out
of a Job.

These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the
courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their
hopeless tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of
our own comfortable world can have no conception. Their
ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the middle
of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a
compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of
Arabia and the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect
maps. They set their course by God and by guess. If luck
was with them they returned after one or two or three years.
In the other case, their bleeched bones remained behind on
some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled
with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And
all the suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were
forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast
or the placid waters of an ocean that had lain forgotten since
the beginning of time.

Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages
long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating.
But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be
like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should
cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which
are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow
or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I
can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries.

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just ONE
THING--they wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the
empire of Cathay (China), to the island of Zipangu (Japan)
and to those mysterious islands, where grew the spices which
the mediaeval world had come to like since the days of the
Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the
introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very
quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of
pepper or nutmeg.

The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators
of the Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the
coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal
were full of that patriotic energy which their age-old
struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed. Such
energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels.
In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered
the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the
Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the
next century, the Portuguese had turned the tables on the
Mohammedans, had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and had
taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the Arabic city of Ta'Rifa
(a word which in Arabic means ``inventory'' and which by way
of the Spanish language has come down to us as ``tariff,'') and
Tangiers, which became the capital of an African addition to
Algarve.

They were ready to begin their career as explorers.

In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the
Navigator, the son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the
daughter of John of Gaunt (about whom you can read in
Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to make
preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern
Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited
by the Phoenicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it
as the home of the hairy ``wild man'' whom we have come to
know as the gorilla. One after another, Prince Henry
and his captains discovered the Canary Islands--re-discovered
the island of Madeira which a century before had been visited
by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had
been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards,
and caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on
the west coast of Africa, which they supposed to be the western
mouth of the Nile. At last, by the middle of the Fifteenth
Century, they saw Cape Verde, or the Green Cape, and the
Cape Verde Islands, which lie almost halfway between the
coast of Africa and Brazil.

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to
the waters of the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order
of Christ. This was a Portuguese continuation of the crusading
order of the Templars which had been abolished by
Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King
Philip the Fair of France, who had improved the occasion by
burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their
possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains
of his religious order to equip several expeditions which explored
the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and
spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a
search for the mysterious ``Presser John,'' the mythical Christian
Priest who was said to be the Emperor of a vast empire
``situated somewhere in the east.'' The story of this strange
potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the
twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried
to find ``Presser John'' and his descendants Henry took part
in the search. Thirty years after his death, the riddle was
solved.

In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land
of Prester John by sea, had reached the southernmost point
of Africa. At first he called it the Storm Cape, on account of
the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his
voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who understood
the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India
water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good
Hope.

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters
of credit on the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission
by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving
Egypt, he travelled southward. He reached Aden, and from
there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which
few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great,
eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the
coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the
island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie
halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid
a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea
once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of
Prester John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or
King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted Christianity
in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the Christian
missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers
and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies
by an eastern sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy.
Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to continue
the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others
said, ``No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we
shall reach Cathay.''

Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that
day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a
pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe,
invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great
Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second century of
our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of the
Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the
Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish
mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had con-
vinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets
which turned around the sun, a discovery which he did not venture
to publish for thirty-six years (it was printed in 1548,
the year of his death) from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a
Papal court which had been established in the thirteenth century
when the heresies of the Albigenses and the Waldenses
in France and in Italy (very mild heresies of devoutly pious
people who did not believe in private property and preferred
to live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment threatened the
absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the
roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts
and, as I said, they were now debating the respective
advantages of the eastern and the western routes.

Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese
mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son
of a wool merchant. He seems to have been a student at the
University of Pavia where he specialised in mathematics and
geometry. Then he took up his father's trade but soon we find
him in Chios in the eastern Mediterranean travelling on business.
Thereafter we hear of voyages to England but whether
he went north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship we
do not know. In February of the year 1477, Colombo (if we
are to believe his own words) visited Iceland, but very likely
he only got as far as the Faroe Islands which are cold enough
in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any one. Here
Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who
in the tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had
visited America in the eleventh century, when Leif's vessel
had been blown to the coast of Vineland, or Labrador.

What had become of those far western colonies no one
knew. The American colony of Thorfinn Karlsefne, the husband
of the widow of Leif's brother Thorstein, founded in the
year 1003, had been discontinued three years later on account
of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland, not a
word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440.
Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death.
which had just killed half the people of Norway. However
that might be, the tradition of a ``vast land in the distant west''
still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland, and
Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further information
among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands and
then went to Portugal where he married the daughter of one
of the captains who had served under Prince Henry the
Navigator.

From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself
to the quest of the western route to the Indies. He sent his
plans for such a voyage to the courts of Portugal and Spain.
The Portuguese, who felt certain that they possessed a monop-
oly of the eastern route, would not listen to his plans. In
Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose
marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were
busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada.
They had no money for risky expeditions. They needed every
peseta for their soldiers.

Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for
their ideas as this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo
(or Colon or Columbus, as we call him,) is too well known to
bear repeating. The Moors surrendered Granada on the second
of January of the year 1492. In the month of April of the
same year, Columbus signed a contract with the King and
Queen of Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left Palos
with three little ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom
were criminals who had been offered indemnity of punishment
if they joined the expedition. At two o'clock in the morning
of Friday, the 12th of October, Columbus discovered land. On
the fourth of January of the year 1493, Columbus waved farewell
to the 44 men of the little fortress of La Navidad (none
of whom was ever again seen alive) and returned homeward.
By the middle of February he reached the Azores where the
Portuguese threatened to throw him into gaol. On the fifteenth
of March, 1493, the admiral reached Palos and together with
his Indians (for he was convinced that he had discovered some
outlying islands of the Indies and called the natives red
Indians) he hastened to Barcelona to tell his faithful patrons
that he had been successful and that the road to the gold and
the silver of Cathay and Zipangu was at the disposal of their
most Catholic Majesties.

Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end
of his life, on his fourth voyage, when he had touched the mainland
of South America, he may have suspected that all was
not well with his discovery. But he died in the firm belief
that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia
and that he had found the direct route to China.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route,
had been more fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco da Gama
had been able to reach the coast of Malabar and return safely
to Lisbon with a cargo of spice. In the year 1502 he had
repeated the visit. But along the western route, the work of
exploration had been most disappointing. In 1497 and 1498
John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan
but they had seen nothing but the snowbound coasts and the
rocks of Newfoundland, which had first been sighted by the
Northmen, five centuries before. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine
who became the Pilot Major of Spain, and who gave his
name to our continent, had explored the coast of Brazil, but
had found not a trace of the Indies.

In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus,
the truth at last began to dawn upon the geographers of
Europe. Vasco Nunez de Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of
Panama, had climbed the famous peak in Darien, and had
looked down upon a vast expanse of water which seemed to
suggest the existence of another ocean.

Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships
under command of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de
Magellan, sailed westward (and not eastward since that route,
was absolutely in the hands of the Portuguese who allowed no
competition) in search of the Spice Islands. Magellan crossed
the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed southward.
He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point
of Patagonia, the ``land of the people with the big feet,'' and
the Fire Island (so named on account of a fire, the only sign of
the existence of natives, which the sailors watched one night).
For almost five weeks the ships of Magellan were at the mercy
of the terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the
straits. A mutiny broke out among the sailors. Magellan
suppressed it with terrible severity and sent two of his men
on shore where they were left to repent of their sins at leisure.
At last the storms quieted down, the channel broadened, and
Magellan entered a new ocean. Its waves were quiet and
placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico.
Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for
ninety-eight days without seeing land. His people almost
perished from hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested
the ships, and when these were all gone they chewed pieces of
sail to still their gnawing hunger.

In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called
it the land of the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the
natives stole everything they could lay hands on. Then further
westward to the Spice Islands!

Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Magellan
called them the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his
master Charles V, the Philip II of unpleasant historical memory.
At first Magellan was well received, but when he used
the guns of his ships to make Christian converts he was killed
by the aborigines, together with a number of his captains and
sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships
and continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the
famous Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor.
There, one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use,
remained behind with her crew. The ``Vittoria,'' under Sebastian
del Cano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the
northern coast of Australia (which was not discovered until
the first half of the seventeenth century when ships of the
Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable
land), and after great hardships reached Spain.

This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken
three years. It had been accomplished at a great cost both of
men and money. But it had established the fact that the earth
was round and that the new lands discovered by Columbus were
not a part of the Indies but a separate continent. From that
time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their energies to the
development of their Indian and American trade. To prevent
an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI (the
only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy
office) had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts
by a line of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of
longitude west of Greenwich, the so-called division of Tordesillas
of 1494. The Portuguese were to establish their colonies
to the east of this line, the Spaniards were to have theirs
to the west. This accounts for the fact that the entire American
continent with the exception of Brazil became Spanish and
that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese
until the English and the Dutch colonists (who had no respect
for Papal decisions) took these possessions away in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.

When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the
Rialto of Venice, the Wall street of the Middle Ages, there
was a terrible panic. Stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50
percent. After a short while, when it appeared that Columbus
had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian merchants
recovered from their fright. But the voyages of da Gama and
Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water-
route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice,
the two great commercial centres of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, began to be sorry that they had refused to listen
to Columbus. But it was too late. Their Mediterranean became
an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and
China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days
of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new
centre of commerce and therefore the centre of civilisation.
It has remained so ever since.

See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those
early days, fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the
Valley of the Nile began to keep a written record of history,
From the river Nile, it went to Mesopotamia, the land between
the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and Greece and
Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade and the cities
along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and
philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved
westward once more and made the countries that border upon
the Atlantic become the masters of the earth.

There are those who say that the world war and the suicide
of the great European nations has greatly diminished the
importance of the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to see civilisation
cross the American continent and find a new home in the
Pacific. But I doubt this.

The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in
the size of ships and a broadening of the knowledge of the navigators.
The flat-bottomed vessels of the Nile and the Euphrates
were replaced by the sailing vessels of the Phoenicians, the
AEgeans, the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Romans.
These in turn were discarded for the square rigged vessels of
the Portuguese and the Spaniards. And the latter were driven
from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the English and the
Dutch.

At present, however, civilisation no longer depends upon
ships. Aircraft has taken and will continue to take the place
of the sailing vessel and the steamer. The next centre of
civilisation will depend upon the development of aircraft and
water power. And the sea once more shall be the undisturbed
home of the little fishes, who once upon a time shared their deep
residence with the earliest ancestors of the human race.

BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS

CONCERNING BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS

THE discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had
brought the Christians of western Europe into close contact
with the people of India and of China. They knew of course
that Christianity was not the only religion on this earth. There
were the Mohammedans and the heathenish tribes of northern
Africa who worshipped sticks and stones and dead trees. But
in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new
millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want
to hear of Him, because they thought their own religion, which
was thousands of years old, much better than that of the West.
As this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of
the people of Europe and our western hemisphere, you ought
to know something of two men whose teaching and whose
example continue to influence the actions and the thoughts
of the majority of our fellow-travellers on this earth.

In India, Buddha was recognised as the great religious
teacher. His history is an interesting one. He was born in
the Sixth Century before the birth of Christ, within sight of the
mighty Himalaya Mountains, where four hundred years before
Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first of the great leaders of
the Aryan race (the name which the Eastern branch of the
Indo-European race had given to itself), had taught his people
to regard life as a continuous struggle between Ahriman,
and Ormuzd, the Gods of Evil and Good. Buddha's
father was Suddhodana, a mighty chief among the tribe of the
Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was the daughter of a
neighbouring king. She had been married when she was a very
young girl. But many moons had passed beyond the distant
ridge of hills and still her husband was without an heir who
should rule his lands after him. At last, when she was fifty
years old, her day came and she went forth that she might be
among her own people when her baby should come into this
world.

It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha
Maya had spent her earliest years. One night she was resting
among the cool trees of the garden of Lumbini. There her son
was born. He was given the name of Siddhartha, but we know
him as Buddha, which means the Enlightened One.

In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young
prince and when he was nineteen years old, he was married to
his cousin Yasodhara. During the next ten years he lived
far away from all pain and all suffering, behind the protecting
walls of the royal palace, awaiting the day when he should
succeed his father as King of the Sakiyas.

But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove
outside of the palace gates and saw a man who was old and
worn out with labour and whose weak limbs could hardly carry
the burden of life. Siddhartha pointed him out to his coachman,
Channa, but Channa answered that there were lots of
poor people in this world and that one more or less did not
matter. The young prince was very sad but he did not say
anything and went back to live with his wife and his father
and his mother and tried to be happy. A little while later he
left the palace a second time. His carriage met a man who
suffered from a terrible disease. Siddhartha asked Channa
what had been the cause of this man's suffering, but the coachman
answered that there were many sick people in this world
and that such things could not be helped and did not matter
very much. The young prince was very sad when he heard this
but again he returned to his people.

A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his
carriage in order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his
horses were frightened by the sight of a dead man whose rotting
body lay sprawling in the ditch beside the road. The young
prince, who had never been allowed to see such things, was
frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles. The
world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all
things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave
awaited us all and there was no escape.

That evening, when Siddhartha returned to his home, he
was received with music. While he was away his wife had
given birth to a son. The people were delighted because now
they knew that there was an heir to the throne and they
celebrated the event by the beating of many drums. Siddhartha,
however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had been
lifted and he had learned the horror of man's existence. The
sight of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream.

That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha
woke up and began to think of many things. Never again
could he be happy until he should have found a solution to the
riddle of existence. He decided to find it far away from all
those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room where
Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for
his faithful Channa and told him to follow.

Together the two men went into the darkness of the night,
one to find rest for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant
unto a beloved master.

The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for
many years were just then in a state of change. Their ancestors,
the native Indians, had been conquered without great difficulty
by the war-like Aryans (our distant cousins) and thereafter
the Aryans had been the rulers and masters of tens of
millions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves in
the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into
different classes and gradually a system of ``caste'' of the most
rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descendants
of the Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest
``caste,'' the class of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste
of the priests. Below these followed the peasants and the
business men. The ancient natives, however, who were called
Pariahs, formed a class of despised and miserable slaves and
never could hope to be anything else.

Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The
old Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of
wandering, had met with many strange adventures. These had
been collected in a book called the Veda. The language of
this book was called Sanskrit, and it was closely related to the
different languages of the European continent, to Greek and
Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The
three highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures.
The Pariah, however, the despised member of the lowest caste,
was not permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of
noble or priestly caste who should teach a Pariah to study the
sacred volume!

The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in
misery. Since this planet offered them very little joy, salvation
from suffering must be found elsewhere. They tried to
derive a little consolation from meditation upon the bliss of
their future existence.

Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian
people as the supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped
as the highest ideal of perfection. To become like Brahma, to
lose all desires for riches and power, was recognised as the most
exalted purpose of existence. Holy thoughts were regarded
as more important than holy deeds, and many people went
into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved
their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious
contemplation of the splendours of Brahma, the Wise, the
Good and the Merciful.

Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers
who were seeking the truth far away from the turmoil
of the cities and the villages, decided to follow their example.
He cut his hair. He took his pearls and his rubies and sent
them back to his family with a message of farewell, which the
ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single follower, the
young prince then moved into the wilderness.

Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains.
Five young men came to him and asked that they might
be allowed to listen to his words of wisdom. He agreed to be
their master if they would follow him. They consented, and
he took them into the hills and for six years he taught them
all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya Mountains.
But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was still
far from perfection. The world that he had left continued to
tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him and then
he fasted for forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots
of an old tree. At last he received his reward. In the dusk of
the fiftieth evening, Brahma revealed himself to his faithful
servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was called Buddha
and he was revered as the Enlightened One who had come to
save men from their unhappy mortal fate.

The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within
the valley of the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of
submission and meekness unto all men. In the year 488 before
our era, he died, full of years and beloved by millions of people.
He had not preached his doctrines for the benefit of a single
class. Even the lowest Pariah might call himself his disciple.

This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and
the merchants who did their best to destroy a creed which recognised
the equality of all living creatures and offered men the
hope of a second life (a reincarnation) under happier circumstances.
As soon as they could, they encouraged the people of
India to return to the ancient doctrines of the Brahmin creed
with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But
Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the
Enlightened One wandered across the valleys of the Himalayas,
and moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea
and preached the wisdom of their master unto the people of
Japan, and they faithfully obeyed the will of their great master,
who had forbidden them to use force. To-day more people
recognise Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their
number surpasses that of the combined followers of Christ and Mohammed.

As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his
story is a simple one. He was born in the year 550 B.C. He
led a quiet, dignified and uneventful life at a time when China
was without a strong central government and when the Chinese
people were at the mercy of bandits and robber-barons who
went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and murdering
and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into
a wilderness of starving people.

Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He
did not have much faith in the use of violence. He was a very
peaceful person. He did not think that he could make people
over by giving them a lot of new laws. He knew that the only
possible salvation would come from a change of heart, and he
set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing the character
of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide plains
of eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested
in religion as we understand that word. They believed in
devils and spooks as most primitive people do. But they had
no prophets and recognised no ``revealed truth.'' Confucius
is almost the only one among the great moral leaders who did
not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger
of a divine power; who did not, at some time or another, claim
that he was inspired by voices from above.

He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given
to lonely wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful
flute. He asked for no recognition. He did not demand that
any one should follow him or worship him. He reminds us
of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those of the Stoic
School, men who believed in right living and righteous thinking
without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of
the soul that comes with a good conscience.

Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his
way to visit Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the
founder of a philosophic system called ``Taoism,'' which was
merely an early Chinese version of the Golden Rule.

Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue
of supreme self-possession. A person of real worth, according
to the teaching of Confucius, did not allow himself to be
ruffled by anger and suffered whatever fate brought him with
the resignation of those sages who understand that everything
which happens, in one way or another, is meant for the best.

At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number
increased. Before his death, in the year 478 B.C., several of the
kings and the princes of China confessed themselves his disciples.
When Christ was born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of
Confucius had already become a part of the mental make-up
of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence their lives
ever since. Not however in its pure, original form. Most religions
change as time goes on. Christ preached humility and
meekness and absence from worldly ambitions, but fifteen
centuries after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was
spending millions upon the erection of a building that bore
little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem.

Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three
centuries the ignorant masses had made him into a real and
very cruel God and had buried his wise commandments under
a rubbish-heap of superstition which made the lives of the average
Chinese one long series of frights and fears and horrors.

Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring
their Father and their Mother. They soon began to be more
interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the
happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Deliberately
they turned their backs upon the future and tried to
peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the
ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than
disturb a cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of
a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the
barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly
grow. And they preferred hunger and famine to the desecration
of the ancestral grave.

At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite
lost their hold upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia.
Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd observations,
added a touch of common-sense philosophy to the soul of
every Chinaman and influenced his entire life, whether he was
a simple laundry man in a steaming basement or the ruler of vast
provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded palace.

In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised
Christians of the western world came face to face with
the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese
looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and contemplated
the venerable pictures of Confucius and did not in
the least know what to make of those worthy prophets with
their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that
these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented
something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the
respect of the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit
of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade in
spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the ``evil influence''
with bullets and grape-shot. That system had certain very
definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage
of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future.

THE REFORMATION

THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST
COMPARED TO A GIGANTIC PENDULUM
WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND
BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE
AND THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY
ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE
WERE FOLLOWED BY THE ARTISTIC AND
LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS
ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION

OF course you have heard of the Reformation. You think
of a small but courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the
ocean to have ``freedom of religious worship.'' Vaguely in the
course of time (and more especially in our Protestant countries)
the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of
``liberty of thought.'' Martin Luther is represented as the
leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is
something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed
to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the
German historian Ranke, we try to discover what ``actually
happened,'' then much of the past is seen in a very different
light.

Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely
bad. Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of
the honest chronicler to give a true account of all the good and
bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do
this because we all have our personal likes and dislikes. But
we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and must not allow
our prejudices to influence us too much.

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very
Protestant centre of a very Protestant country. I never saw
any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I felt
very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid.
I knew the story of the many thousand people who had been
burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition
when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their
Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real
to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It
might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholomew's
night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my
nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window, as
had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.

Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic
country. I found the people much pleasanter and much
more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former countrymen.
To my great surprise, I began to discover that there
was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much as a
Protestant.

Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation, did
not see things that way. They were always right and their
enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be
hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which
was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame.

When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500,
an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor
Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal disorder
of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number
of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of
all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle.
He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maxi-
milian of Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of
his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious
Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon France
but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The
child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of
the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles,
cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in
Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies
in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he
has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of
Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their
recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king
and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming.

As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is
never proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling
through her domains with the coffin containing the body
of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict
discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and
Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles
grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church,
but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy,
both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule
the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour.
Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from
Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always
at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon
the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much
stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed
man.

So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church,
the second great power in the world? The Church has changed
greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it started
out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of
a pious and righteous life. In the first place, the Church has
grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock
of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds
himself with artists and musicians and famous literary men.
His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in
which the saints look more like Greek Gods than is strictly
necessary. He divides his time unevenly between affairs of
state and art. The affairs of state take ten percent of his time.
The other ninety percent goes to an active interest in Roman
statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new summer
home, the rehearsal of a new play. The Archbishops and
the Cardinals follow the example of their Pope. The Bishops
try to imitate the Archbishops. The village priests, however,
have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves
aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty
and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where
the monks seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of simplicity
and poverty and live as happily as they dare without
causing too much of a public scandal.

Finally, there are the common people. They are much
better off than they have ever been before. They are more
prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to better
schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their
firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the
robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes
upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the
Reformation.

Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe,
and then you will understand how the revival of learning and
art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious interests.
The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread
to France. It was not quite successful in Spain, where
five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the
people very narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious
matters. The circle had grown wider and wider, but once the
Alps had been crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a change.

The people of northern Europe, living in a very different
climate, had an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely
with that of their southern neighbours. The Italians lived out
in the open, under a sunny sky. It was easy for them to laugh
and to sing and to be happy. The Germans, the Dutch, the
English, the Swedes, spent most of their time indoors, listening
to the rain beating on the closed windows of their comfortable
little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They
took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious
of their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about
matters which they considered holy and sacred. The ``humanistic''
part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient
authors, the grammar and the text-books, interested them
greatly. But the general return to the old pagan civilisation
of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the
Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror.

But the Papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost
entirely composed of Italians and they had turned the Church
into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and
the theatre, but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split
between the serious north and the more civilised but easy-going
and indifferent south was growing wider and wider all the
time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threatened
the Church.

There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the
Reformation took place in Germany rather than in Sweden
or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against
Rome. The endless quarrels between Emperor and Pope had
caused much mutual bitterness. In the other European countries
where the government rested in the hands of a strong
king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects
against the greed of the priests. In Germany, where a shadowy
emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good
burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and
prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums
of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which
were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance. The Germans
felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they did
not like it.

And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany
was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe books
were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manu-
script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household
book of many families where Latin was understood by the
father and by the children. Whole families began to read it,
which was against the law of the Church. They discovered that
the priests were telling them many things which, according to
the original text of the Holy Scriptures, were somewhat different.
This caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And
questions, when they cannot be answered, often cause a great
deal of trouble.