University of Virginia Library
D21 .W44 1923
ALD
KOMNLO iit
X 00 444 bb.
A short history of the world /ve
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UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
FROM THE BOOKS
OF
EMILY DINWIDDIE
1879-1949i
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hie ee oe eeA SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLDq Mr. WELLS has also written the follow-
ing novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMON
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
q The following fantastic and imaginative
romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in
ne Volume under the title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
q A Series of books on Social, Religious,
and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE
WORLD .
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF
PEACE
q And two little books about children’s
play, called
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARSA Short
History of [he World
BY
H. G. WELLS
ILLUSTRATED
THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS CORPORATION
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
192%
Published by arrangement with the Maemillan Company
ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyricut, 1922,
By H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1922.PREFACE
Tuts SuHort History or THE WoRLD is meant to be read straight-
forwardly almost as a novel is read. It gives in the most general
way an account of our present knowledge of history, shorn of elabora-
tions and complications. It has been amply illustrated and every-
thing has been done to make it vivid and clear. From it the reader
should be able to get that general view of history which is so neces-
sary a framework for the study of a particular period or the history
of a particular country. It may be found useful as a preparatory
excursion before the reading of the author’s much fuller and more
explicit Outline of History is undertaken. But its especial end is
to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study
the maps and time charts of that Outline in detail, who wishes to
refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great
adventure of mankind. It is not an abstract or condensation of
that former work. Within its aim the Outline admits of no further
condensation. This is a much more generalized History, planned
and written afresh.
H. G. WELLS.CHAPTER
I
Me
VIE
VII.
VITI.
IX.
xe
x1:
XII.
XIII.
SIV.
DV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XGT.
SOT.
XXIIT.
XXIV.
XXYV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
CONTENTS
THe WoRLD IN SPACE. ‘ : : i:
Tue Wor.xp IN TIME : : : ‘
Tue BEGINNINGS OF LIFE : :
Tue AGE oF FISHES
Tue AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS
Tue AcE or REPTILES
Tue First Brrps AND THE First MAMMALS
Tue AGE or MAMMALS
Monxkrys, APES AND SUB-MEN
Tur NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN
Tue First Trur MEN
PRIMITIVE THOUGHT
Tue BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION
PrimitivE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS
SuMERIA, EARLY Ecypt AND WRITING
PRIMITIVE NoMADIC PEOPLES
Tue First SEA-GOING PEOPLES
Ecyrt, BABYLON AND ASSYRIA
Tue PrimitIvE ARYANS
Tue Last BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF
Darius I
Tue Earty History oF THE JEWS
PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA
THE GREEKS
Tue Wars OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS
Tue SPLENDOUR OF GREECE
Tue Empire oF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Tue Museum AND LipraARy AT ALEXANDRIA
vii
109
115
122
127
134
139
145
150viii
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XX XIII.
XXXIV.
XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXXVIT.
XXX VIII.
XX XIX.
XL.
XLI.
XLI.
XLII.
XLIV.
XLV.
XLVI.
XLVITI.
XLVIII.
XLIX.
L.
LI.
LI.
LIII.
LIV.
LV.
Contents
Tue Lire or GAutaMA BuppDHA
Kine AsoKa
ConFucius AND Lao TsE ; ,
Rome Comes into History
RoME AND CARTHAGE 5
Tue GrRowTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA
Tue Common Man’s LIFE UNDER THE EARLY RoMAN
EMPIRE : :
Reticious DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE RoMAN EMPIRE
Tue TEACHING OF JESUS :
Tur DEVELOPMENT OF DocTRINAL CHRISTIANITY
Tue BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO EAST AND
WEsT
Tue Huns AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE .
Ture ByZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES
Ture DyNAsTIES OF Suy AND TANG IN CHINA
MuHAMMAD AND ISLAM
Tue Great Days oF THE ARABS
Tue DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM
Tue CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF Papat DOMINION
RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM
Ture Moncot ConQuEstTs
Tue INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
Tue REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH
Tue Emprror CHARLES V
THE oF GRAND
Ace oF PouiticAL EXPERIMENTS;
MonARCHY AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM
IN EUROPE
Tur New Empires OF THE EvROPEANS IN ASIA AND
OVERSEAS
Tue AMERICAN War OF INDEPENDENCE . é :
Tur FRENcH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF
MonarRcHY IN FRANCE ; : : : :
PAGE
156
163
167
174
180
185
196
201
208
214
229
227
233
238
Q45
248
253
258
267
277
287
294
304
309
318
329
335
341CHAPTER
Vik
LVII.
LVILII.
LIX.
LX.
LXI.
LXII.
LXIII.
LXIV.
LXV.
LXVI.
LXVII.
Contents
Tur Uneasy PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE
Fatt or NAPOLEON
THe DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
Tue InpustTRIAL REVOLUTION
THE DkrEvVELOPMENT OF MoprerRN POLITICAL AND
SocraL IDEAS
Tur EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES
Tue Rise ofr GERMANY TO PREDOMINANCE IN EUROPE
NEw
RAILWAY.
THE OvERSEAS EMPIRES OF STEAMSHIP AND
EvuROPEAN AGGRESSION IN AsIA, AND THE RISE OF
JAPAN
Tue British EMPIRE IN 1914
Ture AGE or ARMAMENT IN EUROPE, AND THE GREAT
War or 1914-18
THe REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN Russia
THE PouiticAL AND SocIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE
WoRLD
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
INDEX
1X
PAGE
349
355
365
370
382
390
399
405
409
415
421
429
439Luminous Spiral Clouds of Matter : :
Nebula seen Edge-on ; : : ; :
The Great Spiral Nebula. : ; ; :
A Dark Nebula ‘ ‘ : :
Another Spiral Nebula : ; :
Landscape before Life ;
Marine Life in the Cambrian Period
Fossil Trilobite ,
Early Paleozoic Fossils of various epee cies of neon
Fossilized Footprints of a Labyrinthodont, Cheirotherium
Pterichthys Milleri
Fossil of Cladoselache :
Sharks and Ganoids of the Devonian Pe riod
A Carboniferous Swamp
Skull of a Labyrinthodont, Capitosaurus
Skeleton of a Labyrinthodont: The Eryops
A Fossil Ichthyosaurus : : ;
A Pterodactyl . : : ; : :
The Diplodocus . :
Fossil of Archeopteryx ; ; : : :
Hesperornis in its Native Seas. : ; ;
The Ki-wi : . :
Slab of Marl Rich in Cainozoic Fossils ‘ :
Titanotherium Robustum . : ; : ;
Skeleton of Giraffe-camel
Skeleton of Early Horse
Comparative Sizes of Brains of mine eros acd Dinos eras
A Mammoth
Flint Implements from Biltdewn Revon : : :
A Pithecanthropean Man . : : : :
The Heidelberg Man . ; : ; : : :
The Piltdown Skull . é : : : ° ;
A Neanderthaler
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
c
~
a
Mm ¢
~}
~ ¢
OO
c
~~
we
e c aa
ww WN QY
ww
46
46
47xil List of Illustrations
Europe and Western Asia 50,000 years ago . : . Map
Comparison of Modern Skull and Rhodesian Skull
Altamira Cave Paintings
Later Paleolithic Carvings .
Bust of Cro-magnon Man
Later Paleolithic Art
Relics of the Stone Age
Gray’s Inn Lane Flint Implement
Somaliland Flint Implement
Neolithic Flint Implements
Australian Spearheads
Neolithic Pottery ; : ; ‘
Relationship of Human Races ‘ : , . Map
A Maya Stele
European Neolithic Warrior
Babylonian Brick
Egyptian Cylinder Seals of First Dy ety
The Sakhara Pyramids
The Pyramid of Cheops: Scene from Span
The Temple of Hathor
Pottery and Implements of the fake Dw eller TS
A Lake Village
Flint Knives of 4500 B.c.
Egyptian Wall Paintings of Nomads
Egyptian Peasants Going to Work
Stele of Naram Sin
The Treasure House at Myc cene .
The Palace at Cnossos
Temple at Abu Simbel
Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak . : : .°
The Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
Frieze of Slaves
The Temple of Horus, E afi
Archaic Amphora
The Mound of Nippur : ; : : :
Median and Chaldean Empires . : : ; : . Map
The Empire of Darius : ; : : : . Map
A Persian Monarch
The Ruins of Persepolis
The Great Porch of Xerxes
60 CO at = ~~
m SO © CO Cr C
82
COCO HOH DH SC
Csr 2 OS Cr
89
93
95
97
98
99
101
103
105
107
110
tel
112
113The Land of the Hebrews
Nebuchadnezzar’s Mound at Baby lon
The Ishtar Gateway, Babylon
Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II .
Captive Princes making Obeisance
Statue of Meleager
Ruins of Temple of Zeus
The Temple of Neptune, Pzestum
Greek Ships on Ancient Pottery
The Temple of Corinth
The Temple of Neptune at Cape Sunium
Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens .
The Acropolis, Athens
Theatre at Epidauros, Greece
The Caryatides of the Erechtheum
Athene of the Parthenon
Alexander the Great
Alexander’s Victory at Issus
The Apollo Belvedere
Aristotle
Statuette of Maitreya
The Death of Buddha
Tibetan Buddha
A Burmese Buddha
The Dhamékh Tower, Sarnath
A Chinese Buddhist Apostle
The Court of Asoka
Asoka Panel from Bharhut
The Pillar of Lions (Asokan)
Confucius
The Great Wall of ¢ hana
Early Chinese Bronze Bell .
The Dying Gaul
Ancient Roman Cisterns at Cc aethi ge
Hannibal
Roman Empire and its Alliances, 150 B.c.
The Forum, Rome
Ruined Coliseum in Tunis
Roman Arch at Ctesiphon
The Column of Trajan, Rome
List of Illustrations
Map
Map
117
118
120
124
bp
128
130
132
135
137
138
140
14]
141
142
143
146
147
148
152
153
154
158
159
160
164
165
165
166
169
171
172
175
Lad
181
183
188
189
190
193xiv List of Illustrations
PAGE
Glazed Jar of Han Dynasty : ; : : : LG
Vase of Han Dynasty ; : ‘ » Ios
Chinese Vessel in Bronze. . : . al99
A Gladiator (contemporary representation) . ; : . , 202
A Street in Pompeii. ; ; : . 204
The Coliseum, Rome . : : : : 20G
Interior of Coliseum . P : : : ; ; : AT
Mithras Sacrificing a Bull . : ~ 20
Isis and Horus . ’ : . a0]
Bust of Emperor Commodus ‘ : ; : : oe
Zarly Portrait of Jesus Christ. ~ BIG
Road from Nazareth to Tiberias . : ie
David’s Tower and Wall of Jerusalem . ; : . S18
A Street in Jerusalem : : : é - AS
The Peter and Paul Mosaic at Rome . : . 22S
Baptism of Christ (Ivory Panel) . : : : = 8220
Roman Empire and the Barbarians : ; . Map 228
Constantine’s Pillar, Constantinople —. : : ; . 1229
The Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople . : : eal
Head of Barbarian Chief. : : : ea
The Church of 5. Sophia, Constantinople. : ‘ : 230
Roof-work in $ Sophia : : ; s . 240
Justinian and his Court : ‘ : : ; een
The Rock-hewn Temple at Petra ‘ : : : one
Chinese Earthenware of Tang Dynasty , : : : . 246
At Prayer in the Desert : : : 3250
Looking Across the Sea of Sand . : : ; aot
Growth of Moslem Power . ; : ‘ . Map 254
The Moslem Empire . : ; . Map 54
The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem ; : : .. 255
Cairo Mosques . : : : f 2D6
Frankish Dominions of Martel . : ; : ; . Map 260
Statue of Charlemagne ; : ; : : co eG?
Europe at Death of Charlemagne : ‘ : 3 . Map 264
Crusader Tombs, Exeter Cathedral ‘ : ; ; : (4268
View of Cairo . : ‘ ; ; 2 . 269
The Horses of S. Mark, Venice . ‘ ; : ‘ F al
Courtyard in the Alhambra : : ‘ : ~ 93
Milan Cathedral (showing spires) ‘ : : : = 28
A Typical Crusader . : : : : : -2 280List of Illustrations
Burgundian Nobility (Statuettes) .
The Empire of Jengis Khan : . Map
Ottoman Empire before 1453 : : : . Map
Tartar Horsemen : .
Ottoman Empire, 1566 : : : . Map
An Early Printing Press
Ancient Bronze from Benin
Negro Bronze-work :
Early Sailing Ship (Italian Bey ing)
Portrait of Martin Luther ;
The Church Triumphant (Italian Ravolicn ore L 543)
Charles V (the Titian Portrait)
S. Peter’s, Rome: the High Altar
Cromwell Dissolves the Long Parliament
The Court at Versailles
Sack of a Village, French Rev alution
Central Europe after Peace of Westphalia, 1648 : : . Map
European Territory in America, 1750. : . Map
Europeans Tiger Hunting in India
Fall of Tippoo Sultan
George Washington
The Battle of Bunker Hill : ; ‘ :
The U.S.A., 1790 : ; : : , . Map
The Trial of Louis X VI
Execution of Marie Antoinette
Portrait of Napoleon .
Europe after the Congress of Vienna . . Map
Early Rolling Stock, Liverpool and Manc Hester Rava
Passenger Train in 1833
The Steamboat Clermont
Eighteenth Century Spinning Wheel
Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny
An Early Weaving Machine
An Incident of the Slave Trade
Early Factory, in Colebrookdale .
Carl Marx
' Electric Conveyor, in Goal Mine
Constructional Detail, Forth Bridge
American River Steamer. :
Abraham Lincoln
XV
PAGE
- 283-4
288
289
291
292
296
299
300
301
305
307
311
315
32]
3: 30)
331
332
337
338
339
344.
346
352
353
356
356
357
361
361
363
367
368
372
376
378
385
387Xvi List of Illustrations
Europe, 1848-71 . Map
Victoria Falls, Zambes! : : :
The British Empire, 1815. : : : : . Map
Japanese Soldier, Eighteenth Century .
A Street in Tokio
Overseas Empires of Europe, 1914 : ; : ‘ . Map
Gibraltar .
Street in Hong Kong .
British Tank in Battle
The Ruins of Ypres
Modern War: War Entanglements
A View in Petersburg under Bolshevik Rule .
Passenger Aeroplane in Flight
A Peaceful Garden in England
PAGE
391°
395
397
401
403
406
407
408
410
411
412
418
423
426A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLDSE Pe Tea TTA SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
I
Tue WorLD IN SPACE
HE story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly
known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the
history of little more than the last three thousand years.
What happened before that time was a matter of legend and specula-
tion. Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and
taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.c.,
though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the
spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise miscon-
ception was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew
Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected
therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious
teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which
we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of
time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be decep-
tion in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless
by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But that the
universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand
years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.
The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere
slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly
8.000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a
limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but
before that time it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which
now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky
and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its
I2
A Short History of the World
axis (which is about 24 miles shorter than its equatorial diameter)
every twenty-four hours, and that this is the cause of the alterna-
tions of day and night, that it circles about the sun in a slightly
distorted and slowly variable oval path in a year.
Its distance
from the sun varies between ninety-one and a half millions at its
nearest and ninety-four and a half million miles.
About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average
Photo: G. W. Ritchey
“LUMINOUS SPIRAL CLOUDS OF MATTER”
(Nebula photographed 1910)
distance of 239,-
000 miles. Earth
and moon are
not the only
bodies to travel
round the sun.
There are
the planets,
Mercury and
Venus, at dis-
tances of thirty-
six and sixty-
seven millions of
and_ be-
yond the circle
of the earth and
disregarding a
belt of numerous
smaller bodies,
the planetoids,
there are Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and
Neptune at
mean distances
of 141, 483, 886,
1,782, and 1,793
millions of miles
respectively.
These figures in
also
miles;millions of miles
are very difficult
for the mind to
grasp. It may
help the reader's
imagination — if
we reduce the
sun and planets
to a smaller,
more concelv-
able scale.
If, then,:.we
represent our
earth as a little
ball of one inch
diameter, the
sun would be a
big globe nine
feet across and
323 yards away,
that is about a
fifth of a mile,
four or five min-
utes walking.
The moon would
be a smal] pea
two feet and a
half from the
world. Between
earth and sun
there would be
the two inner
planets, Mer-
The World in Space
Photo: G. W. Ritchey
THE NEBULA SEEN EDGE-ON
Note the central core which, through millions of years, is cooling to solidity
cury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five
and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All round and
about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to
Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter4 A Short History of the World
nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller,
two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off.
Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and
drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The
nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away.
These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of
the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.
For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of
life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate
much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate
us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than five
miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space
is otherwise empty and dead.
The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest
recorded flight of an aeroplane 1s little more than four miles. Men
have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great
suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and
insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible
far below that level.II
Tue Wor.tp IN TIME
N the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interest-
ing speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and
origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a
summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle
mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the
physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet
to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork.
The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our
globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the earth
has had an independent existence as a spinning planet flying round
and round the sun for a longer period than 2,000,000,000 years. It
may have been much longer than that. This is a length of time
that absolutely overpowers the imagination.
Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and earth
and the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been
a great swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to
us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter,
the spiral nebulz, which appear to be in rotation about a centre.
It is supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets
were once such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone con-
centration into its present form. Through majestic ons that con-
centration went on until in that vast remoteness of the past for
which we have given figures, the world and its moon were distin-
guishable. They were spinning then much faster than they are
spinning now; they were at a lesser distance from the sun; they
travelled round it very much faster, and they were probably incan-
descent or molten at the surface. The sun itself was a much greater
blaze in the heavens.“SETI EE PE Ge Re ae ee
A Short History of the World
If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the
earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene
more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow
before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene.
Photo: G. W. Ritchey
THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA
No water would be visible because all the water there was would
still be superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous
and metallic vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean
of molten rock substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of
the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths
of flame. oe
Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, thisA DARK NEBULA
Taken in 1920 with the aid of the largest telescope in the world. One of the first photographs
taken by the Mount Wilson telescope
There are dark nebulz and bright nebule. Prof. Henry Norris
Russell, against the British
theory, holds that the dark nebulz preceded the bright nebulve
7Sa Te Ma aT SAE la PE ARN NB Sag aA ARR AN RE ca SR NS SE ah ES
8 A Short History of the World
: fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in
o the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead; great
| slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of
the molten sea, and sink under it, to be replaced by other floating
masses. The sun and moon growing now each more distant and
each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness across the
heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be
already cooled far below incandescence, and would be alternately
obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series of eclipses and full
moons.
And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time,
the earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we
live, until at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam
would begin to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall
hissing upon the first rocks below. For endless millenia the greater
part of the earth’s water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere,
but there would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing
Photo: G. W. Ritchey
ANOTHER SPIRAL NEBULAThe World in Time
iets.
- os fs _ se pe er ve. * oe : s
aa . L——— = Te. er
LANDSCAPE BEFORE LIFE
“Great lava-like masses of rock without traces of soil”
rocks below and pools and lakes into which these streams would be
carrying detritus and depositing sediment.
At last a condition of things must have
man might have stood up on earth and looked about him and
lived. If we could have visited the earth at that time we should
have stood on great lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil
a storm-rent sky. Hot and
or touch of living vegetation, under
violent winds, exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and
downpours of rain such as our milder, slower earth to-day knows
nothing of, might have assailed us. The water of the downpour
would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks,
coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as
they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas.
Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving
visibly across the sky, and in ‘ts wake and in the wake of the moon
would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And
been attained in which amS PUN AAR eg GAR ee NP ga a a ok ee oe er aed
10 A Short History of the World
the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth, would
then have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so
inexorably.
The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the
day lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon’s
pace in the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm dimin-
‘shed and the water in the first seas increased and ran together into
the ocean garment our planet henceforth wore.
But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were life-
less, and the rocks were barren.III
THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
S everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we possess of
life before the beginnings of human memory and tradition
is derived from the markings and fossils of living things in
the stratified rocks. We find preserved in shale and slate, lime-
stone, and sandstone, bones, shells, fibres, stems, fruits, footmarks,
scratchings and the like, side by side with the ripple marks of the
earliest tides and the pittings of the earliest rain-falls. It is by
the sedulous examination of this Record of the Rocks that the past
history of the earth’s life has been pieced together. That much
nearly everybody knows to-day. The sedimentary rocks do not
lie neatly stratum above stratum; they have been crumpled, bent,
thrust about, distorted and mixed together like the leaves of a
library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt, and it is only as
a result of many devoted lifetimes of work that the record has been
put into order and read. The whole compass of time represented
by the record of the rocks is now estimated as 1,600,000,000 years.
The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologists the
Azoic rocks, because they show no traces of life. Great areas of
these Azoic rocks lie uncovered in North America, and they are of
such a thickness that geologists consider that they represent a
period of at least half of the 1,600,000,000 which they assign to the
whole geological record. Let me repeat this profoundly significant
fact. Half the great interval of time since land and sea were first
distinguishable on earth has left us no traces of life. There are
ripplings and rain marks still to be found in these rocks, but no
marks nor vestiges of any living thing.
Then, as we come up the record, signs of past life appear and in-
crease. The age of the world’s history in which we find these past
VEEVO LL ES LS
str APASAIFG c i “
MARINE LIFE IN THE CAMBRIAN PERIOD
1 and 8, Jellyfishes; 2, Hyolithes (swimming snail); 3, Hymenocaris; 4, Proto-
spongia; 5, Lampshells (Obolella); 6, Orthoceras; 7, Trilobite (Paradoxides)
— see fossil on page 13; 9, Coral (Archeocyathus); 10, Bryograptus; 11, Tri-
lobite (Olenellus); 12, PalesterinaThe Beginnings of Life 13
traces is called by geologists the Lower Palzeozoic age. The first
indications that life was astir are vestiges of comparatively simple
and lowly things: the shells of small shellfish, the stems and flower-
like heads of zoophytes, seaweeds and the tracks and remains of
sea worms and crustacea. Very early appear certain creatures
rather like plant-lice, crawling creatures which could roll themselves
up into balls as the plant-lice
do, the trilobites. Later by a
few million years or so come
certain sea scorpions, more
mobile and powerful creatures
than the world had ever seen
before.
None of these creatures
were of very great size. Among
the largest were certain of the
sea scorpions, which measured
nine feet in length. There are
no signs whatever of land life
of any sort, plant or animal;
there are no fishes nor any
vertebrated creatures in this
part of the record. Essentially
all the plants and creatures S Ree tT Saka CU ETENPTESS:
which have left us their traces FOSSIL TRILOBITE (SLIGHTLY
from this period of the earth’s BS eae
history are shallow-water and intertidal beings. If we wished to
parallel the flora and fauna of the Lower Paleozoic rocks on the
earth to-day, we should do it best, except in the matter of size, by
taking a drop of water from a rock pool or scummy ditch and ex-
amining it under a microscope. The little crustacea, the small
shellfish, the zoophytes and alge we should find there would display
a quite striking resemblance to these clumsier, larger prototypes
that once were the crown of life upon our planet.
It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower Palzeozoic
rocks probably do not give us anything at all representative of the
first beginnings of life on our planet. Unless a creature has bones
: PGES oe ee aie r
ee Sys a
a[4 A Short History of the World
| or other hard parts, unless it wears a shell or is big enough and
heavy enough to make characteristic footprints and trails in mud,
it is unlikely to leave any fossilized traces of its existence behind.
To-day there are hundreds of thousands of species of small soft-
bodied creatures in our world which it is inconceivable can ever
EARLY PALZOZOIC FOSSILS OF VARIOUS SPECIES OF LINGULA
Species of this most ancient genus of shellfish still live to-day
(In Natural History Museum, London)
leave any mark for future geologists to discover. In the world’s
past, millions of millions of species of such creatures may have lived
and multiplied and flourished and passed away without a trace
remaining. The waters of the warm and shallow lakes and seas of
the so-called Azoic period may have teemed with an infinite varietyThe Beginnings of Life
Te a ~ - ye een a en — oe —
Victeek' ‘Pn are Thy : - PIT ees
FOSSILIZED FOOTPRINTS OF A LABYRINTHODONT CHEIROTHERIUM
In Natural History Museum, Lond
of lowly, jelly-like, shell-less and boneless creatures, and a multi-
tude of green scummy plants may have spread over the sunlit inter-
tidal rocks and beaches. The Record of the Rocks is no more a
complete record of life in the past than the books of a bank are a
record of the existence of everybody in the neighbourhood. It is
only when a species begins to secrete a shell or a spicule or a cara-
pace or a lime-supported stem, and so put by something for the
future, that it goes upon the Record. But in rocks of an age prior
to those which bear any fossil traces, graphite, a form of uncom-
bined carbon, is sometimes found, and some authorities consider
that it may have been separated out from combination through the
vital activities of unknown living things.IV
Tue AGE oF FISHES
N the days when the world was supposed to have endured for
only a few thousand years, it was supposed that the different
species of plants and animals were fixed and final; they had all
been created exactly as they are to-day, each species by itself. But
as men began to discover and study the Record of the Rocks this
belief gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed
and developed slowly through the course of ages, and this again
expanded into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a belief
that all species of life upon earth, animal and vegetable alike, are
descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very
simple ancestral form of life, some almost structureless living sub-
stance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas.
This question of Organic Evolution, like the question of the age
of the earth, has in the past been the subject of much bitter con-
troversy. ‘There was a time when a belief in organic evolution was
for rather obscure reasons supposed to be incompatible with sound
Christian, Jewish and Moslem doctrine. That time has passed,
and the men of the most orthodox Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and
Mohammedan belief are now free to accept this newer and broader
view of a common origin of all living things. No life seems to have
happened suddenly upon earth. Life grew and grows. Age by
age through gulfs of time at which imagination reels, life has been
growing from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime towards free-
dom, power and consciousness.
Life consists of individuals. These individuals are definite
things, they are not like the lumps and masses, nor even the limit-
less and motionless crystals, of non-living matter, and they have
two characteristics no dead matter possesses. They can assimilate
other matter into themselves and make it part of themselves, and
16The Age of Fishes 17
they can reproduce themselves. They eat and they breed. They
can give rise to other individuals, for the most part like themselves,
but always also a little different from themselves. There is a spe-
cific and family resemblance be-
tween an individual and its off-
spring, and there is an individual
difference between every parent
and every offspring it produces,
and this is true in every species
and at every stage of life.
Now scientific men are not able
to explain to us either why off-
spring should resemble nor why
they should differ from their par-
ents. But seeing that offspring do
at once resemble and differ, it is a
matter rather of common sense
than of scientific knowledge that,
if the conditions under which a
species live are changed, the species
should undergo some correlated
changes. Because in any genera-
tion of the species there must be a
number of individuals whose indi-
vidual differences make them better
adapted to the new conditions
under which the species has to
live, and a number whose individ-
ual differences make it rather
harder for them to live. And on
the whole the former sort will live
longer, bear more offspring, and
reproduce themselves more abun-
dantly than the latter, and so
SPECIMEN OF THE PTERICHTHYS
MILLERI OR SEA SCORPION SHOW-
ING BODY ARMOUR
generation by generation the average of the species will change 1n
the favourable direction. This pr
Selection, is not so much a scientific theory as a necessary deduc-
ocess, which is called Natural18 A Short History of the World
tion from the facts of reproduction and individual difference. There
may be many forces at work varying, destroying and preserving
species, about which science may still be unaware or undecided,
but the man who can deny the operation of this process of natural
selection upon life since its beginning must be either ignorant of
the elementary facts of life or incapable of ordinary thought.
Many scientific men have speculated about the first beginning
of life and their speculations are often of great interest, but there 1s
absolutely no definite knowledge and no
convincing guess yet of the way in which
life began. But nearly all authorities are
agreed that it probably began upon mud
or sand in warm sunlit shallow brackish
water, and that it spread up the beaches
to the intertidal lines and out to the open
waters.
That early world was a world of strong
tides and currents. An incessant destruc-
tion of individuals must have been going
on through their being swept up the
beaches and dried, or by their being swept
out to sea and sinking down out of reach
of airand sun. Early conditions favoured
the development of every tendency to root
7 and hold on, every tendency to form an
Nat. Hist. Mus. . .
BROIL ITICresnNOnnTCuLce skin and casing to protect the
A DEVONIAN SHARK stranded individual from immediate desic-
cation. From the very earliest any ten-
dency to sensitiveness to taste would turn the individual in the
direction of food, and any sensitiveness to light would assist it to
struggle back out of the darkness of the sea deeps and caverns or
to wriggle back out of the excessive glare of the dangerous shallows.
Probably the first shells and body armour of living things were
protections against drying rather than against active enemies.
But tooth and claw come early into our earthly history.
We have already noted the size of the earlier water scorpions.
For long ages such creatures were the supreme lords of life. ThenThe Age of Fishes 19
in a division of these Paleozoic rocks called the Silurian division,
which many geologists now suppose to be as old as five hundred
million years, there appears a new type of being, equipped with eyes
and teeth and swimming powers of an altogether more powerful
—
ae
By Alice Woodu ard
SHARKS AND GANOIDS OF THE DEVONIAN PERLOD
kind. These were the first known backboned animals, the sarliest
fishes. the first known Vertebrata.
atly in the next division of rocks, the
These fishes increase gre
They are so prevalent that
rocks known as the Devonian system.
this period of the Record of the Rocks has been called the Age of20 A Short History of the World
Fishes. Fishes of a pattern now gone from the earth, and fishes
allied to the sharks and sturgeons of to-day, rushed through the
waters, leapt in the air, browsed among the seaweeds, pursued and
preyed upon one another, and gave a new liveliness to the waters of
the world. None of these were excessively big by our present stand-
ards.. Few of them were more than two or three feet long, but there
were exceptional forms which were as long as twenty feet.
We know nothing from geology of the ancestors of these fishes.
They do not appear to be related to any of the forms that preceded
them. Zoologists have the most interesting views of their ancestry,
but these they derive from the study of the development of the eggs
of their still living relations, and from other sources. Apparently
the ancestors of the vertebrata were soft-bodied and perhaps quite
small swimming creatures who began first to develop hard parts as
teeth round and about their mouths. The teeth of a skate or dog-
fish cover the roof and floor of its mouth and pass at the lip into the
flattened toothlike scales that encase most of its body. As the
fishes develop these teeth scales in the geological record, they swim
out of the hidden darkness of the past into the light, the first verte-
brated animals visible in the record.V
Tur AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS
HE land during this Age of Fishes was apparently quite
lifeless. Crags and uplands of barren rock lay under the
sun and rain. There was no real soil—for as yet there
were no earthworms which help to make a soil, and no plants to
break up the rock particles into mould; there was no trace of
moss or lichen. Life was still only in the sea.
Over this world of barren rock played great changes of climate.
The causes of these changes of climate were very complex and they
have still to be properly estimated. The changing shape of the
earth’s orbit, the gradual shifting of the poles of rotation, changes
in the shapes of the continents, probably even fluctuations in the
warmth of the sun, now conspired to plunge great areas of the
earth’s surface into long periods of cold and ice and now again for
millions of years spread a warm or equable climate over this planet.
There seem to have been phases of great internal activity in the
world’s history, when in the course of a few million years accumu-
lated upthrusts would break out in lines of volcanic eruption and
upheaval and rearrange the mountain and continental outlines of
the globe, increasing the depth of the sea and the height of the
mountains and exaggerating the extremes of climate. And these
would be followed by vast ages of comparative quiescence, when
frost, rain and river would wear down the mountain heights and
carry great masses of silt to fill and raise the sea bottoms and
spread the seas, ever shallower and wider, over more and more of
the land. There have been “high and deep” ages in the world’s
history and “low and level” ages. The reader must dismiss from
his mind any idea that the surface of the earth has been growing
steadily cooler since its crust grew solid. After that much cooling
had been achieved, the internal temperature ceased to affect sur-
2X22 A Short History of the World
face conditions. There are traces of periods of superabundant ice
and snow, of “‘Glacial Ages,” that is, even in the Azoic period.
It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes, in a period
of extensive shallow seas and lagoons, that life spread itself out in
any effectual way from the waters on to the land. No doubt
A CARBONIFEROUS SWAMP
A Coal Seam in the Making
the earlier types of the forms that now begin to appear in great
abundance had already been developing in a rare and obscure
manner for many scores of millions of years. But now came their
opportunity.
Plants no doubt preceded animal forms in this invasion of the
land, but the animals probably followed up the plant emigrationThe Age of the Coal Swamps
very closely. The first problem that the plant had to solve was
the problem of some sustaining stiff support to hold up its fronds
to the sunlight when the buoyant water was withdrawn; the
second was the problem of getting water from the swampy ground
below to the tissues of the plant, now that it was no longer close
at hand. The two problems were solved by the development of
woody tissue which both
sustained the plant and
acted as water carrier to
the leaves. The Record
of the Rocks is suddenly
crowded by a vast variety
of woody swamp plants,
many of them of great size,
big tree mosses, tree ferns,
gigantic horsetails and the
like. And with these, age
by age, there crawled out
of the water a great variety
of animal forms. There
were centipedes and milli-
pedes; there were the first
primitive insects; there
were creatures related to
the ancient king crabs and — Nat, Hist, Mus
sea scorpions which _ be- ae Oe eon aeene
came the earliest spiders
and land scorpions, and presently there were vertebrated animals.
Some of the earlier insects were very large. There were dragon
flies in this period with wings that spread out to twenty-nine
inches.
In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted
themselves to breathing air. Hitherto all animals had breathed
air dissolved in water, and that indeed is what all animals still
have to do. But now in divers fashions the animal kingdom was
acquiring the power of supplying its own moisture where it was
needed. A man with a perfectly dry lung would suffocate to-day;24 A Short History of the World
his lung surfaces must be moist in order that air may pass through
them into his blood. The adaptation to air breathing consists in
all cases either in the development of a cover to the old-fashioned
gills to stop evaporation, or in the development of tubes or other
new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and moistened by
a watery secretion. The old gills with which the ancestral fish of
the vertebrated line had breathed were inadaptable to breathing
upon land, and in the case of this division of the animal kingdom
it is the swimming bladder of the fish which becomes a new, deep-
seated breathing organ, the lung. The kind of animals known as
amphibia, the frogs and newts of to-day, begin their lives in the
Cyt g
Bh
Syne wes oro apis s
Nat. Hist. Mus.
ETT das Sr
SKELETON OF A LABYRINTHODONT: THE ERYOPS
water and breathe by gills; and subsequently the lung, develop-
ing In the same way as the swimming bladder of many fishes do,
as a baglike outgrowth from the throat, takes over the business of
breathing, the animal comes out on land, and the gills dwindle and
the gill slits disappear. (AIl except an outgrowth of one gill slit,
which becomes the passage of the ear and ear-drum.) The animal
can now live only in the air, but it must return at least to the edge
of the water to lay its eggs and reproduce its kind.
All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and
piants belonged to the class amphibia. They were nearly all of
them forms related to the newts of to-day, and some of them at-
tained a considerable size. They were land animals, it is true, but
they were land animals needing to live in and near moist and
swampy places, and all the great trees of this period were equallyThe Age of the Coai Swamps 26
amphibious in their habits. None of them had yet developed
fruits and seeds of a kind that could fall on land and develop with
the help only of such moisture as dew and rain could bring. They
all had to shed their spores in water, it would seem, if they were to
germinate.
It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful sci-
ence, comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and wonderful
adaptations of living things to the necessities of existence in air.
All living things, plants and animals alike, are primarily water
things. For example all the higher vertebrated animals above the
fishes, up to and including man, pass through a stage in their de-
velopment in the egg or before birth in which they have gill slits
which are obliterated before the young emerge. The bare, water-
washed eye of the fish is protected in the higher forms from drying
up by eyelids and glands which secrete moisture. The weaker
sound vibrations of air necessitate an ear-drum. In nearly every
organ of the body similar modifications and adaptations are to be
detected, similar patchings-up to meet aerial conditions.
This Carboniferous age, this age of the amphibia, was an age
of life in the swamps and lagoons and on the low banks among
these waters. Thus far life had now extended. The hills and high
lands were still quite barren and lifeless. Life had learnt to breathe
air indeed, but it still had its roots in its native water; it still had
to return to the water to reproduce its kind.RD Nn OT ea ee
VI
Ture AGE or REPTILES
HE abundant life of the Carboniferous period was succeeded
by a vast cycle of dry and bitter ages. ‘They are represented
in the Record of the Rocks by thick deposits of sandstones
and the like, in which fossils are comparatively few. ‘The tempera-
ture of the world fluctuated widely, and there were long periods of
glacial cold. Over great areas the former profusion of swamp vege-
tation ceased, and, overlaid by these newer deposits, it began that
process of compression and mineralization that gave the world most
of the coal deposits of to-day.
But it is during periods of change that life undergoes its most
rapid modifications, and under hardship that it learns its hardest
lessons. As conditions revert towards warmth and moisture again
we find a new series of animal and plant forms established. We find
in the record the remains of vertebrated animals that laid eggs
which, instead of hatching out tadpoles which needed to live for a
time in water, carried on their development before hatching to a
stage so nearly like the adult form that the young could live in air
from the first moment of independent existence. Gulls had been
cut out altogether, and the gill slits only appeared as an embryonic
phase.
These new creatures without a tadpole stage were the Reptiles.
Concurrently there had been a development of seed-bearing trees,
which could spread their seed, independently of swamp or lakes.
There were now palmlike cycads and many tropical conifers, though
as yet there were no flowering plants and no grasses. There was a
great number of ferns. And there was now also an increased variety
of insects. There were beetles, though bees and butterflies had yet
to come. But all the fundamental forms of a new real land fauna
and flora had been laid down during these vast ages of severity.
20The Age of Reptiles 27
This new land life needed only the opportunity of favourable con-
ditions to flourish and prevail.
Age by age and with abundant fluctuations that mitigation came.
The still incalculable movements of the earth’s crust, the changes in
its orbit, the increase and diminution of the mutual inclination of
orbit and pole, worked together to produce a great spell of widely
diffused warm conditions. The period lasted altogether, it is now
supposed, upwards of two hundred million years. It is called the
Nat. Hist. Mus.
A FOSSIL ICHTHYOSAURUS, A MESOZOIC FISH-LIZARD
Found in the Lower Lias in Somersetshire
Mesozoic period, to distinguish it from the altogether vaster Palzo-
zoic and Azoic periods (together fourteen hundred millions) that
preceded it, and from the Cainozoic or new life period that inter-
vened between its close and the present time, and it is also called
the Age of Reptiles because of the astonishing predominance and
variety of this form of life. It came to an end some eighty million
years ago.
In the world to-day the genera of Reptiles are comparatively
few and their distribution is very limited. ‘They are more various,
it is true, than are the few surviving members of the order of the
amphibia which once in the Carboniferous period ruled the world.
We still have the snakes, the turtles and tortoises (the Chelonia),28 A Short History of the World
the alligators and crocodiles, and the lizards. Without exception
they are creatures requiring warmth all the year round; they cannot
stand exposure to cold, and it is probable that all the reptilian beings
of the Mesozoic suffered under the same limitation. It was a hot-
house fauna, living amidst a hothouse flora. It endured no frosts.
But the world had at least attained a real dry land fauna and flora
as distinguished from the mud and swamp fauna and flora of the
previous heyday of life upon earth.
All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more abundantly
represented then, great turtles and tortoises, big crocodiles and many
lizards and snakes, but in addition there was a number of series of
"Nat. Hist. Mus.
A PTERODACTYL
wonderful creatures that have now vanished altogether from the
earth. ‘There was a vast variety of beings called the Dinosaurs.
Vegetation was now spreading over the lower levels of the world,
reeds, brakes of fern and the like; and browsing upon this abun-
dance came a multitude of herbivorous reptiles, which increased in
size as the Mesozoic period rose to its climax. Some of these beasts
exceeded in size any other land animals that have ever lived; they
were as large as whales. The Dvzplodocus Carnegu for example
measured eighty-four feet from snout to tail; the Gigantosaurus
was even greater; it measured a hundred feet. Living upon these
monsters was a swarm of carnivorous Dinosaurs of a corresponding
size. One of these, the Tyrannosaurus, is figured and described in
many books as the last word in reptilian frightfulness.The Age of Reptiles
eS ak EE
Nat. Hist. Mus
A BIG SWAMP-INHABITING DINOSAUR, THE DIPLODOCUS, OVER EIGHTY FEET
FROM SNOUT TO TAIL-TIP
While these great creatures pastured and pursued amidst the
fronds and evergreens of the Mesozoic jungles, another now van-
ished tribe of reptiles, with a bat-like development of the fore limbs,
pursued insects and one another, first leapt and parachuted and
presently flew amidst the fronds and branches of the forest trees.
These were the Pterodactyls. These were the first flying creatures
with backbones; they mark a new achievement in the growing
powers of vertebrated life.
Moreover some of the reptiles were returning to the sea waters.
Three groups of big swimming beings had invaded the sea from
which their ancestors had come: the Mososaurs, the Plesiosaurs,
and Ichthyosaurs. Some of these again approached the propor-
tions of our present whales. The Ichthyosaurs seem to have been
quite seagoing creatures, but the Plesiosaurs were a type of animal
that has no cognate form to-day. The body was stout and big with
paddles, adapted either for swimming or crawling through marshes,
or along the bottom of shallow waters. The comparatively small30 A Short History of the World
head was poised on a vast snake of neck, altogether outdoing the
neck of the swan. Either the Plesiosaur swam and searched for
food under the water and fed as the swan will do, or it lurked under
water and snatched at passing fish or beast.
Such was the predominant land life throughout the Mesozoic age.
It was by our human standards an advance upon anything that had
preceded it. It had produced land animals greater in size, range,
power and activity, more “vital” as people say, than anything the
world had seen before. In the seas there had been no such advance
but a great proliferation of new forms of life. An enormous variety
of squid-like creatures with chambered shells, for the most part
coiled, had appeared in the shallow seas, the Ammonites. They
had had predecessors in the Paleozoic seas, but now was their age
of glory. To-day they have left no survivors at all; their nearest
relation is the pearly Nautilus, an inhabitant of tropical waters.
And a new and more prolific type of fish with lighter, finer scales
than the plate-like and tooth-like coverings that had hitherto pre-
vailed, became and has since remained predominant in the seas and
rivers.VII
Tue First Brrps AND THE First MAMMALS
N a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming
reptiles of that first great summer of life, the Mesozoic period,
has been sketched. But while the Dinosaurs lorded it over the
hot selvas and marshy plains and the Pterodactyls filled the for-
ests with their flutterings and possibly with shrieks and croakings
as they pursued the humming insect life of the still flowerless
shrubs and trees, some less conspicuous and less abundant forms
upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring certain
powers and learning certain lessons of endurance, that were to be
of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling generos-
ity of sun and earth began to fade.
A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles, small creatures
of the dinosaur type, seem to have been pushed by competition
and the pursuit of their enemies towards the alternatives of ex-
tinction or adaptation to colder conditions in the higher hills or by
the sea. Among these distressed tribes there was developed a new
type of scale — scales that were elongated into quill-like forms and
that presently branched into the crude beginnings of feathers.
These quill-like scales lay over one another and formed a heat-
retaining covering more efficient than any reptilian covering that
had hitherto existed. So they permitted an invasion of colder re-
gions that were otherwise uninhabited. Perhaps simultaneously
with these changes there arose in these creatures a greater solici-
tude for their eggs. Most reptiles are apparently quite careless
about their eggs, which are left for sun and season to hatch. But
some of the varieties upon this new branch of the tree of life were
acquiring a habit of guarding their eggs and keeping them warm
with the warmth of their bodies.
With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications
jt32 A Short History of the World
were going on that
made these crea-
tures, the primitive
birds, warm-blooded
and independent of
basking. The very
earliest birds seem
to have been sea-
birds living upon
fish, and their fore
limbs were not wings
but paddles rather
after the penguin
type. Phat pe-
culiarly primitive
bird, the New Zea-
land Ki-wi, has
feathers of a very
simple sort, and
neither flies nor ap-
pears to be de-
scended from flying
ancestors. In the
development of the
birds, feathers came before wings. But once the feather was devel-
oped the possibility of making a light spread of feathers led inevi-
tably to the wing. We know of the fossil remains of one bird at
least which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long reptilian tail,
but which also had a true bird’s wing and which certainly flew
and held its own among the pterodactyls of the Mesozoic time.
Nevertheless birds were neither varied nor abundant in Mesozoic
times. If a man could go back to typical Mesozoic country, he
might walk for days and never see or hear such a thing as a bird,
though he would see a great abundance of pterodactyls and insects
among the fronds and reeds.
And another thing he would probably never see, and that would
be any sign of a mammal. Probably the first mammals were in
Sete ie
Nat. Hist. Mus.
FOSSIL OF THE ARCHEOPTERYX; ONE OF THE
EARLIEST BIRDSexistence mil-
lions of years
before the first
thing one could
eall a bird, but
they were al-
together too
small and ob-
scure and re-
mote for atten-
tion.
The earliest
mammals, like
the earliest
birds, were
Grea uure's
driven by com-
petition and
pursuit into a
life of hardship
and adaptation
to cold. With
them also the
scale became
quill-like, and
was developed
into a heat-re-
taining cover-
ing; and they
The First Birds and the First Mammals
Gas
te Atay | naa
feast . ~ ae. AG
ae ¥ Sheed ALE B RODE LES
Svat et eee. Soe EE te BS ss SAGE Wo PAARGE
HESPERORNIS IN ITS NATIVE SEAS
too underwent modifications, similar in kind though different in de-
tail, to become warm-blooded and independent of basking. Instead
of feathers they developed hairs, and instead of guarding and in-
cubating their eggs they kept them warm and safe by retaining
them inside their bodies until they were almost mature.
Most of
them became altogether vivaparous and brought their young into
the world alive. And even after their young were born they tended
to maintain a protective and nutritive association with them. Most34 A Short History of the World
but not all mammals to-day have mamme and suckle their young.
Two mammals still live which lay eggs and which have not proper
mammee, though they nourish their young by a nutritive secretion of
the under skin; these are the duck-billed platypus and the echidna.
The echidna lays leathery eggs and then puts them into a pouch under
its belly, and so carries them about warm and safe until they hatch.
But just as a visitor to the Mesozoic world might have searched
for days and weeks before finding a bird, so, unless he knew exactly
where to go and look, he might have searched in vain for any traces
ofa mammal. Both birds and mammals would have seemed very ec-
centric and secondary and unimportant creatures in Mesozoic times.
The Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million
years. Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world
_ through that in-
eo conceivable
| length of time,
how safe and
eternal the sun-
shine and abun-
dance must have
seemed, how as-
sured the wal-
lowing prosper-
ity of the dino-
saurs and the
flapping abun-
dance of the fly-
ing lizards! And
then the mys-
terious rhythms
and accumulat-
ing forces of the
universe began
to turn against
that) quash -
eternal stability.
Photo:
~ rr
THE KI-WI, APTERYX, STILL FOUND IN NEW ZEALAND That run of luckNat. Hist. Mus.
SLAB OF LOWER PLIOCENE MARL
Discovered in Greece; it is rich in fossilized bones of early mammals
3536 A Short History of the World
for life was running out. Age by age, myriad of years after myriad
of years, with halts no doubt and retrogressions, came a change
towards hardship and extreme conditions, came great alterations of
level and great redistributions of mountain and sea. We find one
thing in the Record of the Rocks during the decadence of the long
Mesozoic age of prosperity that is very significant of steadily sus-
tained changes of condition, and that is a violent fluctuation of
living forms and the appearance of new and strange species. Under
the gathering threat of extinction the older orders and genera are
displaying their utmost capacity for variation and adaptation. The
Ammonites for example in these last pages of the Mesozoic chapter
exhibit a multitude of fantastic forms. Under settled conditions
there is no encouragement for novelties; they do not develop, they
are suppressed; what is best adapted is already there. Under novel
conditions it is the ordinary type that suffers, and the novelty that
may have a better chance to survive and establish itself. . . .
There comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may rep-
resent several million years. There is a veil here still, over even
the outline of the history of life. When it lifts again, the Age of
Reptiles is at an end; the Dinosaurs, the Plesiosaurs and Ichthyo-
saurs, the Pterodactyls, the innumerable genera and species of
Ammonite have all gone absolutely. In all their stupendous vari-
ety they have died out and left no descendants. The cold has
killed them. All their final variations were insufficient: they had
never hit upon survival conditions. The world had passed through
a phase of extreme conditions beyond their powers of endurance, a
slow and complete massacre of Mesozoic life has occurred, and we
find now a new scene, a new and hardier flora, and a new and hardier
fauna in possession of the world.
It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this new
volume of the book of life begins. The cycads and tropical conifers
have given place very largely to trees that shed their leaves to
avoid destruction by the snows of winter and to flowering plants
and shrubs, and where there was formerly a profusion of reptiles,
an Increasing variety of birds and mammals is entering into their
inheritance,VIII
Tue Ace oF MAMMALS
HE opening of the next great period in the life of the earth,
the Cainozoic period, was a period of upheaval and ex-
treme volcanic activity. Now it was that the vast masses
of the Alps and Himalayas and the mountain backbone of the
Rockies and Andes were thrust up, and that the rude outlines of
our present oceans and continents appeared. The map of the world
begins to display a first dim resemblance to the map of to-day. It
is estimated now that between forty and eighty million years have
elapsed from the beginnings of the Cainozoic period to the present
time.
At the outset of the Cainozoic period the climate of the world
was austere. It grew generally warmer until a fresh phase of great
abundance was reached, after which conditions grew hard again
and the earth passed into a series of extremely cold cycles, the
Glacial Ages, from which apparently it 1s now slowly emerging.
But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic change
at present to forecast the possible fluctuations of climatic condi-
tions that lie before us. We may be moving towards increasing
sunshine or lapsing towards another glacial age; voleanic activity
and the upheaval of mountain masses may be increasing or dimin-
ishing; we do not know; we lack sufficient science.
With the opening of this period the grasses appear; for the first
time there is pasture in the world; and with the full development
of the once obscure mammalian type, appear a numbe
ing grazing animals and of carnivorous types which prey
r of interest-
upon
these.
At first these early mammals seem to differ only in a few ch
acters from the great herbivorous and carnivorous reptiles that
ages before had flourished and then vanished from the earth. A
37
ar-38 A Short History of the World
careless observer might suppose that in this second long age of
warmth and plenty that was now beginning, nature was merely re-
peating the first, with herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to
parallel the herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs, with birds re-
placing pterodactyls and so on. But this would be an altogether
superficial comparison. The variety of the universe is infinite and
incessant; it progresses eternally; history never repeats itself and
no parallels are precisely true. The differences between the life of
the Cainozoic and Mesozoic periods are far profounder than the
resemblances.
The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the mental
life of the two periods. It arises essentially out of the continuing
contact of parent and offspring which distinguishes mammalian
and in a lesser degree bird life, from the life of the reptile. With
very few exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone.
The young reptile has no knowledge whatever of its parent; its
a ne,
ea ’ ¥ +4 0 pee ae,
eres iy ee ABtE? Warpwakb__
A MAMMAL OF THE EARLY CAINOZOIC PERIOD
The Titanotherium (Brontops) RobustumThe Age of Mammals 30
It may tolerate the existence of its fellows but it has no communi-
cation with them; it never imitates, never learns from them, is in-
capable of concerted action with them. Its life is that of an isolated
individual. But with the suckling and cherishing of young which
was distinctive of the new mammalian and avian strains arose the
possibility of learning by imitation, of communication, by warning
cries and other concerted action, of mutual control and instruction.
A teachable type of life had come into the world.
The earliest mammals of the Cainozoic period are but little
superior in brain size to the more active carnivorous dinosaurs, but
as we read on through the record towards modern times we find, in
ry tribe and race of the mammalian animals, a steady universal
eve
For instance we find at a comparatively
increase in brain capacity.
early stage that rhinoceros-like beasts appear. There is a creature,
the Titanotherium, which lived in the earliest division of this
It was probably very like a modern rhinoceros in its hab-
period.
But its brain capacity was not one tenth that of its
its and needs.
living successor.
The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring as
soon as suckling was over, but, once the capacity for mutual under-
standing has arisen, the advantages of continuing the association
are very great; and we presently find a number of mammalian
true social life and keeping
species displaying the beginnings of a
h other, imitating
together in herds, packs and flocks, watching eac
.ach other, taking warning from each other’s acts and cries. This
1t the world had not seen before among vertebrated
and fish may no doubt be found in swarms and
.d in quantities and similar condi-
but in the case of the social and
s not simply from a com-
is something th:
animals. Reptiles
shoals; they have been hatche
tions have kept them together
gregarious mammals the association arise
munity of external forces, it is sustained by an inner impulse. They
are not merely like one another and so found in the same places at
the same times; they like one another and so they keep together.
This difference between the reptile world and the world of our
m unable to pass. We can-
human minds is one our sympathies see
of a
in ourselves the swilt uncomplicated urgency
not conceive
fears and hates. We
reptile’s instinctive motives, its appetites,Me Si
Nat. Hist. Mus.
STENOMYLUS HITCHCOCKI—A GIRAFFE-CAMEL
: i Nat. Hist. Mus.
SKELETON OF PROTOHIPPUS VENTICOLUS — EARLY HORSE
40The Age of Mammals AI
cannot understand them in their simplicity because all our motives
are complicated; ours are balances and resultants and not simple
urgencies. But the mammals and birds have self-restraint and .
consideration for other individuals, a social appeal, a self-control |
that is, at its lower level, after our own fashion. We can in conse-
quence establish relations with almost all sorts of them. When
they suffer they utter cries and make moyements that rouse our
ae
a
MEOULLA OBLONSAT A ;
»
F ~ 7
; _ ofREBELLUM yor ’
c % , oraceeeeuM “
; " i :
,
p> -< %
' a ‘3a
iva
CEREBRAL_HEM SPHERES
a
CEREBR
; »
A E 4
9 Fag Ta LORE
7
Nat. Hist. Mus
COMPARATIVE SIZES OF BRAINS OF RHINOCEROS AND DINOCERAS
feelings. We can make understanding pets of them with a mutual i
recognition. They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us, |
domesticated and taught.
That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of Caino-
zoic times marks a new communication and interdependence of
individuals. It foreshadows the development of human societies of
which we shall soon be telling.
As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its flora and
fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world to-day42 A Short History of the World
increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and Titanotheres, the En-
telodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy brutes like nothing living,
disappeared. On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady
degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes,
camels, horses, elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the
existing world. The evolution of the horse is particularly legible
upon the geological record. We have a fairly complete series of
forms from a small tapir-like ancestor in the early Cainozoic. An-
other line of development that has now been pieced together with
some precision is that of the llamas and camels.xX
Monkeys, APES AND SUB-MEN
ATURALISTS divide the class Mammalia into a number of
orders. At the head of these is the order Primates, which
includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their
classification was based originally upon anatomical resemblanves
and took no account of any mental qualities.
Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to de-
cipher in the geological record. They are for the most part animals
which live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky
places like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and covered up
by sediment, nor are-most of them very numerous species, and so
they do not figure so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the
horses, camels and so forth do. But we know that quite early in
the Cainozoic period, that is to say some forty million years ago or
so, primitive monkeys and lemuroid creatures had appeared, poorer
in brain and not so specialized as their later successors.
The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period drew at
last to an end. It was to follow those other two great summers in
the history of life, the summer of the Coal Swamps and the vast sum-
mer of the Age of Reptiles. Once more the earth spun towards
an ice age. The world chilled, grew milder for a time and chilled
again. In the warm past hippopotami had wallowed through a lush
sub-tropical vegetation, and a tremendous tiger with fangs like
sabres, the sabre-toothed tiger, had hunted its prey where now the
journalists of Fleet Street go to and fro. Now came a bleaker age
and still bleaker ages. A great weeding and extinction of species
occurred. A woolly rhinoceros, adapted to a cold climate, and the
mammoth, a big woolly cousin of the elephants, the Arctic musk
ox and the reindeer passed across the scene. Then century by cen-
tury the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great Ice Age, crept
42
a9oan FS a ee a
Ce ie ee i kek Re a
AA A Short History of the World
| southward. In England it came almost down to the Thames, in
America it reached Ohio. There would be warmer spells of a few
thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold.
Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second,
Third and Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as Interglacial
periods. We live to-day in a world that is still impoverished and
scarred by that terrible winter. The First Glacial Age was coming
on 600,000 years ago; the Fourth Glacial Age reached its bitterest
A MAMMOTH
some fifty thousand years ago. And it was amidst the snows of
this long universal winter that the first man-like beings lived upon
our planet.
By the middle Cainozoie period there have appeared various
apes with many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones,
but it is only as we approach these Glacial Ages that we find traces
of creatures that we can speak of as “almost human.” These
traces are not bones but implements. In Europe, in deposits of this
period, between half a million and a million years old, we find flintsMonkeys, Apes and Sub-men 45
and stones that have evidently been chipped intentionally by some
handy creature desirous of hammering, scraping or fighting with the
sharpened edge. These things have been called “Eoliths”’ (dawn
stones). In Europe there are no bones nor other remains of the
creature which made these objects, simply the objects themselves.
For all the certainty we have it may have been some entirely un-
human but intelligent monkey. But at Trinil in Java, in accumula-
tions of this age, a piece of a skull and
various teeth and bones have been
found of a sort of ape man, with a
brain case bigger than that of any liv-
ing apes, which seems to have walked
erect. This creature is now called
Pithecanthropus erectus, the walking
ape man, and the little trayful of its
bones is the only help our imagina-
tions have as yet in figuring to our-
selves the makers of the Eoliths.
It is not until we come to sands
that are almost a quarter of a million
years old that we find any other par-
ticle of a sub-human being. But there
are plenty of implements, and they are
steadily improving in quality as we
read on through the record. ‘They
are no longer clumsy Eoliths; they
are now shapely instruments made "Nat. Hist. Mus.
al considerable skill. And they are FLINT IMPLEMENTS FOUND IN
¥ ith conside : rhe J PILTDOWN REGION
much bigger than the similar implements
afterwards made by true man. Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg,
appears a single quasi-human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-bone,
absolutely chinless, far heavier than a true human jaw-bone and
narrower, so that it is improbable the creature’s tongue could
have moved about for articulate speech. On the strength of this
jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this creature to have been a heavy,
almost human monster, possibly with huge limbs and hands, pos-
sibly with a thick felt of hair, and they call it the Heidelberg Man.A THEORETICAL RESTORATION OF THE PITHECAN-
THROPUS ERECTUS BY PROF. RUTOT
THE HEIDELBERG MAN
The Heidelberg Man, as modelled under the supervision of
Prof. Rutot
A Short History of the World
This jaw-bone is, I
think, one of the most
tormenting objects in
the world to our human
curiosity. To see it is
like looking through a
defective glass into the
past and catching just
one blurred and tantaliz-
ing glimpse of this Thing,
shambling through the
bleak wilderness, clam-
bering toavoid thesabre-
toothed tiger, watching
the woolly rhinoceros in
the woods. Then before
we can scrutinize the
monster, he vanishes.
Yet the soil is littered
abundantly with the
indestructible imple-
ments he chipped out
for his uses.
Still more fascinat-
ingly enigmatical are the
remains of a creature
found at Piltdown in
Sussex in a deposit that
may indicate an age be-
tween a hundred and a
hundred and fifty thou-
sand years ago, though
some authorities would
put these particular re-
mains back in time to
before the Heidelberg
jJaw-bone. Here thereMonkeys, Apes and Sub-men 47
are the remains of a thick sub-human skull much larger than any
existing ape’s, and a chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may
not belong to it, and, in addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant
bone evidently carefully manufactured, through which a hole had
apparently been bored. ‘There is also the thigh-bone of a deer with
cuts upon it like a tally.
That is all.
What sort of beast was
this creature which sat and
bored holes in bones?
Scientific men have
named him Eoanthropus, a, :
the Dawn Man. He stands yy
apart from his kindred; a
very different being either
from the Heidelberg crea-
ture or from any living ape. i. eee g
No other vestige like him tn —y “TTHO
is known. But the gravels
and deposits of from one | .
hundred thousand years
i |
Nat. Hist. Mus.
THE PILTDOWN SKULL, AS RECONSTRU¢ TED FROM
ORIGINAL FRAGMENT
onward are _ increasingly
rich in implements of flint
and similar stone. And
these implements are no longer rude ~ Eoliths.”’
are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,
The archeologists
knives, darts,
throwing stones and hand axes.
We are drawing very near to man.
have to describe the strangest of all these precursors of humanity,
the Neanderthalers, the men who were almost, but not quite, true
men.
But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no
scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the Heidelberg
Man or Eoanthropus, to be direct ancestors of the men of to-day.
These are, at the closest, related forms.
In our next section we shallx
Tur NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN
BOUT fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the climax
of the Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on earth
so like a man that until a few years ago its remains were
considered to be altogether human. We have skulls and bones of
it and a great accumulation of the large implements it made and
used. It made fires. It sheltered in caves from the cold. It prob-
ably dressed skins roughly and wore them. It was right-handed as
men are.
Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true
men. They were of a different species of the same genus. They
had heavy protruding jaws and great brow ridges above the eyes
and very low foreheads. Their thumbs were not opposable to the
fingers as men’s are; their necks were so poised that they could not
turn back their heads and look up to the sky. They probably
slouched along, head down and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones
resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone and are markedly unlike human
jaw-bones. And there were great differences from the human pat-
tern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth were more complicated in
structure than ours, more complicated and not less so; they had not
the long fangs of our cheek teeth; and also these quasi-men had not
the marked canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human being. The
capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was bigger
behind and lower in front than the human brain. Their intellectual
faculties were differently arranged. They were not ancestral to
the human line. Mentally and physically they were upon a differ-
ent line from the human line.
Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found at
Neanderthal among other places, and from that place these strange
proto-men have been christened Neanderthal Men, or Neander-
48The Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man 49
thalers. ‘They must have endured in Europe for many hundreds or
even thousands of years.
At that time the climate and geography of our world was very
different from what they are at the present time. Europe for
example was covered with ice reaching as far south as the
and into Central Germany and Russia; there was no Channel sepa-
rating Britain from France; the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
Thames
re
; <2
Ont Ag we
ANERNBERIIE ES
enna eT Be
THE*NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT
were great valleys, with perhaps a chain of lakes in their deeper por-
tions, and a great inland sea spread from the present Black Sea across
South Russia and far into Central Asia. Spain and all of Europe
not actually under ice consisted of bleak uplands under a harder
climate than that of Labrador, and it was only when North Africa
was reached that one would have found a temperate climate.
Across the cold steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse arctic
vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth,
and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer, no doubt following
the vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn.A Short History of the World
YY; Possible Outline of
ty/A EUROPE ¢ Western AST Re
Yy, at the Maximum of the
Fourth Ice
Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered,
gathering such subsistence as he could from small game or fruits
and berries and roots. Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian, chew-
ing twigs and roots. His level elaborate teeth suggest a largely
vegetarian dietary. But we also find the long marrow bones of
great animals in his caves, cracked to extract the marrow. His
weapons could not have been of much avail in open conflict with
great beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked them with spears
at difficult river crossings and even constructed pitfalls for them.
Possibly he followed the herds and preyed upon any dead that were
killed in fights, and perhaps he played the part of jackal to the
sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in his day. Possibly in the
bitter hardships of the Glacial Ages this creature had taken to
attacking animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation.
We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like. He
may have been very hairy and very inhuman-looking indeed. It
is even doubtful if he went erect. He may have used his knuckles
as well as his feet to hold himself up. Probably he went aboutThe Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man sr
alone or in small family groups. It is inferred from the structure
of his jaw that he was incapable of speech as we understand it.
For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest
animals that the European area had ever seen; and then some
thirty or thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer
a race of kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking
and co-operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler’s
world from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their
caves and squatting places; they hunted the same food; they prob-
ably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off.
These newcomers from the south or the east — for at present we do
not know their region of origin — who at last drove the Neander-
thalers out of existence altogether, were beings of our own blood and
kin, the first True Men. Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks
and teeth were anatomically the same as our own. In a cave at
Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a number of skeletons have
been found, the earliest truly human remains that are so far known.
So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the
story of mankind begins.
The world was growing liker our own in those days though the
climate was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age were receding
in Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to
great herds of horses as grass increased upon the steppes, and the
tea
2.
Nat. Hist. Mus.
COMPARISON OF (1) MODERN SKULL AND (2) RHODESIAN SKULL52 A Short History of the World
mammoth became more and more rare in southern Europe and fi-
nally receded northward altogether.
We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in
the summer of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found to-
gether with pieces of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa,
which seems to be a relic of a third sort of man, intermediate in its
characteristics between the Neanderthaler and the human being.
The brain-case indicates a brain bigger in front and smaller behind
than the Neanderthaler’s, and the skull was poised erect upon the
backbone in a quite human way. The teeth also and the bones are
quite human. But the face must have been ape-like with enormous
brow ridges and a ridge along the middle of the skull. The creature
was indeed a true man, so to speak, with an ape-like, Neanderthaler
face. This Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer to real men than
the Neanderthal Man.
This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the
end may prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species which
lived on the earth in the vast interval of time between the begin-
nings of the Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir, and
perhaps their common exterminator, the True Man. The Rhode-
sian skull itself may not be very ancient. Up to the time of pub-
lishing this book there has been no exact determination of its prob-
able age. It may be that this sub-human creature survived in South
Africa until quite recent times.xl
Tue First True MEN
HE earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a
humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have
1 in western Europe and particularly in France
scratchings upon bone and rock,
in caves and upon rock
been foun
and Spain. Bones, weapons,
carved fragments of bone, and paintings
surfaces dating, it is supposed, from 30,000 years ago or more, have
been discovered in both these countries.
world in these first relics of our real human
Spain is at present the
richest country in the
ancestors.
Of course our present collections of the
beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future,
when there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination
of all possible sources and when other countries in the world, now
‘naccessible to archeologists, have been explored in some detail.
The greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed
yet by a trained observer interested in these matters and free to
explore, and we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that
the early true men were distinctively inhabitants of western Europe
or that they first appeared in that region.
In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there
may be richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than
anything that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa, and
I do not mention Ameri¢a because so far there have been no finds
at all of any of the higher;Prirhates, either of great apes, sub-men,
Neanderthalers nor early true men. This development of life seems
been an exclusively old world development, and it was only
at the end of the Old Stone Age that humé
1d connexion that is now c
se things are the merest
to have
apparently
made their way across the lat
Straits, into the American continent.
53
in beings first
ut by BehringA Short History of the World
| These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear
already to have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct
races. One of these races was of a very high type indeed; it was tall
and big brained. One of the women’s skulls found exceeds in ¢a-
pacity that of the average man of to-day. One of the men’s skele-
tons is over six feet in height. The physical type resembled that
of the North American Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in
~
aa
Ste . "
at ‘
i
bet
es
im,
ONE OF THE MARVELLOUS CAVE PAINTINGS OF ALTAMIRA, NORTH SPAIN 5
The Walls of the Caves are covered in these representations of Bulls, etc., painted in soft tones of red shaded to
black. They may be fifteen or twenty thousand years old
which the first skeletons were found these people have been called
Cro-Magnards. They were savages, but savages of a high order.
The second race, the race of the Grimaldi cave remains, was dis-
tinctly negroid in its characters. Its nearest livi ing affinities are
the Bushmen and Hottentots of Sauth. Africa. It is interesting to
find at the very outset of the knotyi A Ingm: an story, that mankind
was already racially divided into at least two main varieties: and
one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the former
race was probably brownish rather than black and that it came
from the East or North, and that the latter was bl: ackish rather than
brown and came from the equatorial south.+ e a ot “* ¢
Se Jet a ig ASR KF
ES
BONE CARVINGS OF THE PALAOLITHIC PERIOD
leer, (3) Dagger Handle
’ Heads
(1 and 2) Mammoth tusk carved to shape of Rein
|! J
representing Mammoth, and (4) Bone engraved with Horses56 A Short History of the World
And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago were so
human that they pierced shells to make necklaces, painted them-
selves, carved images of bone and stone, scratched figures on rocks
and bones, and painted rude but often very able sketches of beasts
and the like upon the smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock
surfaces. They made a great variety of implements, much smaller
in scale and finer than those of the Neanderthal men. We have
now in our museums great quantities of their implements, their
statuettes, their rock drawings and the like.
The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was the
wild horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They followed it
as it moved after pasture. And also they followed the bison. They
knew the mammoth, because they have left us strikingly effective
pictures of that creature. To judge by one rather ambiguous draw-
ing they trapped and killed it.
They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not
seem to have had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet learnt
to tame any animals. They had no dogs. There is one carving of
a horse’s head and one or two drawings that suggest a bridled
horse, with a twisted skin or tendon round it. But the little horses
of that age and region could not have carried a man, and if the
horse was domesticated it was used as a led horse. It is doubtful
and improbable that they had yet learnt the rather unnatural use
of animal’s milk as food.
They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they
may have had tents of skins, and though they made clay figures
they never rose to the making of pottery. Since they had no cook-
ing implements their cookery must have been rudimentary or non-
existent. They knew nothing of cultivation and nothing of any
sort of basket work or woven cloth. Except for their robes of skin
or fur they were naked painted savages.
These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe
for a hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly drifted and
changed before a change of climate. turope, century by century,
was growing milder and damper. Reindeer receded northward and
eastward, and bison and horse followed. The steppes gave way to
forests, and red deer took the place of horse and bison. There is aThe First True Men 57
change in the character of the implements with this change in their
application. River and lake fishing becomes of great importance
to men, and fine implements of bone increased. “The bone needles
of this age,” says de Mortillet, ““are much superior to those of later,
even historical times, down to the Renaissance. The Romans, for
example, never had needles comparable to those of this epoch.”
THE RUTOT BUST OF A CRO-MAGNON MAN
Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people
drifted into the south of Spain, and left very remarkable drawings
of themselves upon exposed rock faces there. These were the
Azilians (named from the Mas d’Azil cave). They had the bow;
they seem to have worn feather headdresses; they drew vividly;
but also they had reduced their drawings to a sort of symbolism —
a man for instance would be represented by a vertical dab with
two or three horizontal dabs—that suggest the dawn of the writ-
ing idea. Against hunting sketches there are often marks like
tallies. One drawing shows two men smoking out a bees’ nest.| THE HONEY GATHERER AMONG THE BEES
He is ona rope-ladder
FIGHT OF BOWMEN
Among the most recent discoveries of Palzolithic Art are these specimens found in 1920 in Spain.
They are probably ten or twelve thousand years oldThe First True Men | 59
These are the latest of the men that we call Paleolithic (Old
Stone Age) because they had only chipped implements. By ten or
twelve thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe,
men have learnt not only to chip but to polish and grind stone im-
plements, and they have begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age
(New Stone Age) was beginning.
It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still
survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race of
human beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual develop-
ment than any of these earliest races of mankind who have left
traces in Europe. These people had long ago been cut off by geo-
graphical changes from the rest of the species, and from stimulation
and improvement. They seem te have degenerated rather than
developed. They lived a base life subsisting upon shellfish and
small game. They had no habitations but only squatting places.
They were real men of our species, but they had neither the manual
dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true men.XT
PRIMITIVE THOUGHT
ND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation;
how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human
adventure? How did men think and what did they think
in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred cen-
turies ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days
long before the written record of any human impressions, and we
are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers
to these questions.
The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts
to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently
the science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which
the egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,
suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of
social life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light
upon the history of primitive society; and another fruitful source
of suggestion has been the study of the ideas and customs of such
contemporary savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of
mental fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying
irrational superstitions and prejudices that still survive among
modern civilized people. And finally we have in the increasingly
numerous pictures, statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we
draw near to our own time, clearer and clearer indications of what
man found interesting and worthy of record and representation.
Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks,
that is to say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up
images or images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in
accordance with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an un-
educated person does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a
comparatively late development in human experience; it has not
60Primitive Thought 61
played any great part in human life until within the last three
thousand years. And even to-day those who really control and
order their thoughts are but a small minority of mankind. Most
of the world still lives by imagination and passion.
Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of
the true human story, were small family groups. Just as the
flocks and herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which
remained together and multiplied, so probably did the earliest
tribes. But before this could happen a certain restraint upon the
primitive egotisms of the individual had to be established. The
fear of the father and respect for the mother had to be extended
into adult life, and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group
for the younger males as they grew up had to be mitigated. The
mother on the other hand was the natural adviser and protector of
the young. Human social life grew up out of the reaction between
the crude instinct of the young to go off and pair by themselves as
they grew up, on the one hand, and the dangers and disadvantages
of separation on the other. An anthropological writer of great
genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his Primal Law, has shown how much of
the customary law of savages, the Tabus, that are so remarkable a
fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a mental adjustment of
the needs of the primitive human animal to a developing social
life, and the later work of the psycho-analysts has done much to
confirm his interpretation of these possibilities.
Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect
and fear of the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primi-
tive savage to older protective women, exaggerated in dreams and
enriched by fanciful mental play, played a large part in the begin-
nings of primitive religion and in the conception of gods and god-
desses. Associated with this respect for powerful or helpful person-
alities was a dread and exaltation of such personages after their
deaths, due to their reappearance in dreams. It was easy to believe
they were not truly dead but only fantastically transferred to a
remoteness of greater power.
The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more
vivid and real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man
was always something of a child. He was nearer to the animalsij Be A Short History of the World
| also, and he could suppose them to have motives and reactions
HT like his own. He could imagine animal helpers, animal enemies,
animal gods. One needs to have been an imaginative child oneself
to realize again how important, significant, portentous or friendly,
strangely shaped rocks, lumps of wood, exceptional trees or the like
may have appeared to the men of the Old Stone Age, and how
dream and faney would create stories and legends about such
Brit. Mus.
RELICS OF THE STONE AGE
Chert implements from Somaliland. In general form they are similar to those found in
estern and Northern Europe
things that would become credible as they told them. Some of
these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again.
The women would tell them to the children and so establish a tra-
dition. ‘To this day most imaginative children invent long stories
in which some favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-
human being figures as the hero, and primitive man probably did
the same
For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were
with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero real.
probably quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed
from the Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The
Neanderthaler may have been a dumb animal. Of course the primi-Primitive Thought 63
tive human speech was probably a very scanty collection of names,
and may have been eked out with gestures and signs.
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of sci-
ence of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical
in his associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an
effect with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and
so,” he said, ‘“‘and so and so happens.” You give a child a poison-
ous berry and it dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and
you become strong. There we have two bits of cause and effect
association, one true one false. We call the system of cause and
effect in the mind of a savage, Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage
science. It differs from modern science in that it is totally unsys-
tematic and uncritical and so more frequently wrong.
In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in
Brit. Mus.
WIDESPREAD SIMILARITY OF MEN OF THE STONE AGE
On the left is a flint implement excavated in Gray’s Inn Lane. London; on the right one of similar
form chipped by primitive men of Somaliland64 A Short History of the World
many others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience;
but there was a large series of issues of very great importance to
primitive man, where he sought persistently for causes and found
explanations that were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so
obviously wrong as to be detected. It was a matter of great im-
portance to him that game should be abundant or fish plentiful
and easily caught, and no doubt he tried and believed in a thou-
sand charms, incantations and omens to determine these desirable
results. Another great concern of his was illness and death. Occa-
sionally infections crept through the land and men died of them.
Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were en-
feebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the
hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise.
Dreams and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for
help to that man or beast or thing. He had the child’s aptitude for
fear and panic.
Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds
sharing the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more force-
ful than the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to
prescribe, to command. This they declared unpropitious and that
imperative, this an omen of good and that an omen of evil. The
expert in Fetish, the Medicine Man, was the first priest. He ex-
horted, he interpreted dreams, he warned, he performed the com-
plicated hocus pocus that brought luck or averted calamity. Primi-
tive religion was not so much what we now call religion as practice
and observance, and the early priest dictated what was indeed an
arbitrary primitive practical science.XT
Tue BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION
E are still very ignorant about the beginnings of culti-
vation and settlement in the world although a vast
amount of research and speculation has been given to
these matters in the last fifty years. All that we can say with
any confidence at present is that somewhen about 15,000 and
12,000 s.c. while the Azilian people were in the south of Spain and
while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting northward
and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or Western Asia or in that
great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters
of the Mediterranean sea, there were people who, age by age, were
working out two vitally important things: they were beginning
cultivation and they were domesticating animals. They were also
beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements of their
hunter forebears, implements of polished stone. They had discov-
ered the possibility of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of
plant fibre, and they were beginning to make a rudely modelled
pottery.
They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the
Neolithic phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the Palzo-
lithic (Old Stone) phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi people,
the Azilians and their like.1 Slowly these Neolithic people spread
over the warmer parts of the world; and the arts they had mas-
tered, the plants and animals they had learnt to use, spread by
imitation and acquisition even more widely than they did. By
10,000 B.c., most of mankind was at the Neolithic level.
1The term Paleolithic we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and
even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age is called the ‘Older Palsolithic,”’
the age of true men using unpolished stones in the ‘Newer Paleolithic.”’
6566 A Short History of the World
Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of
harvest, threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously rea-
sonable steps to a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a
commonplace that the world is round. What else could you do?
people will ask. What else can it be? But to the primitive man
of twenty thousand years ago neither of the systems of action and
reasoning that seem so sure and manifest to us to-day were at all
obvious. He felt his way to effectual practice through a multitude
of trials and misconceptions, with fantastic and unnecessary elabo-
rations and false interpretations at every turn. Somewhere in the
Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild; and man may have learnt
to pound and then grind up its seeds for food long before he learnt
to sow. He reaped before he sowed.
And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world
wherever there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable the
vestiges of a strong primitive association of the idea of sowing with
the idea of a blood sacrifice, and primarily of the sacrifice of a
human being. The study of the original entanglement of these two
things is a profoundly attractive one to the curious mind; the in-
terested reader will find it very fully developed in that monumen-
tal work, Sir J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough. It was an entangle-
ment, we must remember, in the childish, dreaming, myth-making
primitive mind; no reasoned process will explain it. But in that
world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it would seem that whenever
seed time came round to the Neolithic peoples there was a human
sacrifice. And it was not the sacrifice of any mean or outcast per-
son; it was the sacrifice usually of a chosen youth or maiden, a
youth more often who was treated with profound deference and
even worship up to the moment of his immolation. He was a sort
of sacrificial god-king, and all the details of his killing had become
a ritual directed by the old, knowing men and sanctioned by the
accumulated usage of ages.
At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the sea-
sons, must have found great difficulty in determining when was
the propitious moment for the seed-time sacrifice and the sowing.
There is some reason for supposing that there was an arly stage in
human experience when men had no idea of a year. The firstee
Brit. Mus.
NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS
07Brit. Mus.
NEOLITHICISM OF
TO-DAY
Spearheads, exactly as n the
true Neolithic days, but made
recently by Australian Natives.
(1) Made from a_ telegraph
insulator;
(2) from a _ piece of broken
bottle glass.
A Short History of the World
chronology was in lunar months; it is sup-
posed that the years of the Biblical patriarchs
are really moons, and the Babylonian calendar
shows distinct traces of an attempt to reckon
seed time by taking thirteen lunar months to
see it round. This lunar influence upon the
calendar reaches down to our own days. If
usage did not dull our sense of its strangeness
we should think it a very remarkable thing
indeed that the Christian Church does not
commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrec-
tion of Christ on the proper anniversaries but
on dates that vary year by year with the
phases of the moon.
It may be doubted whether the first agri-
culturalists made any observation of the stars.
It is more likely that stars were first observed
by migratory herdsmen, who found them a
convenient mark of direction. But once their
use In determining seasons was realized, their
importance to agriculture became very great.
The seed-time sacrifice was linked up with the
southing or northing of some prominent star.
A myth and worship of that star was for
primitive man an almost inevitable conse-
quence.
It is easy to see how important the man
of knowledge and experience, the man who
knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars,
became in this early Neolithic world.
The fear of uncleanness and _ pollution,
and the methods of cleansing that were ad-
visable, constituted another source of power
for the knowledgeable men and women. For
there have always been witches as well as
wizards, and priestesses as well as priests.
The early priest was really not so much aThe Beginnings of Cultivation 69
religious man as a man of applied science. His science was gener-
ally empirical and often bad; he kept it secret from the generality
of men very jealously; but that does not alter the fact that his
primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a
practical use.
Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and fairly
well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic human com-
munities, with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses
and their cultivated fields and their development of villages and
little walled cities, were spreading. Age by age a drift and ex-
change of ideas went on between these communities. Eliot Smith
Brit. Mus.
SPECIMEN OF NEOLITHIC POTTERY
Dug up at Mortlake from the Thames Bed
and Rivers have used the term “‘Heliolithic culture” for the cul-
ture of these first agricultural peoples. ‘“Heliolithic’” (Sun and
Stone) is not perhaps the best possible word to use for this, but
until scientific men give us a better one we shall have to use it.
Originating somewhere in the Mediterranean and western Asiatic
area, it spread age by age eastward and from island to island across
the Pacific until it may even have reached America and mingled
with the more primitive ways of living of the Mongoloid immi-
grants coming down from the North.
Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went
they took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas
and practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that they call
for the explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids70 A Short History of the World
and great mounds, and set up great circles of big stones, perhaps
to facilitate the astronomical observation of the priests; they
made mummies of some or all of their dead; they tattooed and cir-
cumcized; they had the old custom, known as the couvade, of send-
ing the father to bed and rest when a child was born, and they had
as a luck symbol the well-known Swastika.
If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how
far these group practices have left their traces, we should make a
belt along the temperate and sub-tropical coasts of the world from
Stonehenge and Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru. But
Africa below the equator, north central Europe, and north Asia
would show none of these dottings; there lived races who were
developing along practically independent lines.ya AY
PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS
BOUT 10,000 s.c. the geography of the world was very simi-
lar in its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is
probable that by that time the great barrier across the
Straits of Gibraltar that had hitherto banked back the ocean waters
from the Mediterranean valley had been eaten through, and that
the Mediterranean was a sea following much the same coastlines as
it does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still far more extensive
than it is at present, and it may have been continuous with the
Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this
great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and deserts were
fertile and habitable. Generally it was a moister and more fertile
world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and lake
than it is now, and there may still have been a land connexion
between Asia and America at Behring Straits.
It would have been already possible at that time to have dis-
tinguished the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them
to-day. Across the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer
and better-wooded world, and along the coasts, stretched the brown-
ish peoples of the Heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the bulk of
the living inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers,
the Egyptians and of much of the population of South and Eastern
Asia. This great race had of course a number of varieties. The
Iberian or Mediterranean or “dark-white” race of the Atlantic
and Mediterranean coast, the ““Hamitic” peoples which include
the Berbers and Egyptians, the Dravidians, the darker people of
India, a multitude of East Indian people, many Polynesian races
and the Maoris are all divisions of various value of this great main
mass of humanity. Its western varieties are whiter than its eastern.
In the forests of central and northern Europe a more blonde variety
7172 A Short History of the World
of men with blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off
from the main mass of brownish people, a variety which many people
now speak of as the Nordic race. In the more open regions of north-
eastern Asia was another differentiation of this brownish humanity
in the direction of a type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones,
a yellowish skin, and very straight black hair, the Mongolian peo-
ples. In South Africa, Australia, in many tropical islands in the
south of Asia were remains of the early negroid peoples. The cen-
tral parts of Africa were already a region of racial intermixture.
Nearly all the coloured races of Africa to-day seem to be blends of
the brownish peoples of the north with a negroid substratum.
We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely
and that they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human
races do not branch out like trees with branches that never come
together again. It is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind,
this remingling of races at any opportunity. It will save us from
many cruel delusions and prejudices if we do so. People will use
such a word as race in the loosest manner, and base the most pre-
posterous generalizations upon it. They will speak of a “British”
Lapps Eaton
Scandinavians Amerindians
Mexicans
‘Teurtons > ae
pets aoe RniS
: erentahon
Irish ( ae Italians
els AR eo an Indi ee —
Welsh Iberian an Mediter/. ie Rian aoicuiese
“|e 25 BE aN cut
75h is Kyrocesians
: Maori of
CROMAGNARD Piper] [GRIMALDI types Bushmen Australoids N.
MALDI t
LATER PALZOLITHIC RACES
Neanderthal True!Mén Tasmanians
one ADi atic Sur rary
oS ranint mut
of ese ae Ideas of the
296 Piltdown RELATIONS HIP
Pera Man) Pithecanthropus of HUMAN RACES
EARLIER PALEOLTHIC "RACES sf Arboreal i
——— Apes (Tt must be borne un mind that
li.c.widd, oR fe) Ground Apes human races interbreed freely.)Primitive Neolithic Civilizations
Brit. Mus.
A MAYA STELE
Showing a worshipper and a Serpent God. Note the grotesque faces in the writing
race or of a ““European”’ race. But nearly all the European nations
are confused mixtures of brownish, dark-white, white and Mon-
golian elements.
It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that peoples
of the Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Appar-
ently they came by way of Behring Straits and spread southward.
They found caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great74 A Short History of the World
herds of bison in the south. When they reached South America
there were still living the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the
Megatherium, a monstrous clumsy sloth as high as an elephant.
They probably exterminated the latter beast, which was as helpless
as it was big.
The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above
a hunting nomadic Neolithic life. They never discovered the use of
iron, and their chief metal possessions were native gold and copper.
But in Mexico, Yucatan and Peru conditions existed favourable to
settled cultivation, and here about 1000 B.c. or so arose very inter-
esting civilizations of a parallel but different type from the old-world
civilization. Like the much earlier primitive civilizations of the old
world these communities displayed a great development of human
sacrifice about the processes of seed time and harvest; but while in
the old world, as we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately
mitigated, complicated and overlaid by others, in America they
developed and were elaborated to a very high degree of intensity.
These American civilized countries were essentially priest-ruled
countries; their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule of
law and omen.
These priests carried astronomical science to a high level of
accuracy. They knew their year better than the Babylonians of
whom we shall presently tell. In Yucatan they had a kind of
writing, the Maya writing, of the most curious and elaborate char-
acter. So far as we have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly
for keeping the exact and complicated calendars upon which the
priests expended their intelligence. The art of the Maya civiliza-
tion came to a climax about 700 or 800 a.p. The sculptured work
of these people amazes the modern observer by its great plastic
power and its frequent beauty, and perplexes him by a grotesqueness
and by a sort of insane conventionality and intricacy outside the
circle of his ideas. There is nothing quite like it in the old world.
The nearest approach, and that is a remote one, is found in archaic
Indian carvings. Everywhere there are woven feathers and s®r-
pents twine in and out. Many Maya inscriptions resemble a certain
sort of elaborate drawing made by lunatics in European asylums,
more than any other old-world work. It is as if the Maya mindPrimitive Neolithic Civilizations 75
/
had developed upon a different line from the old-world mind, had
a different twist to its ideas, was not, by old-world standard:, a
rational mind at all.
This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea
of a general mental aberration finds support in their extraordinary
obsession by the shedding of human blood. The Mexican civiliza-
tion in particular ran
blood; it offered thou-
sands of human victims
yearly. The cutting
open of living victims,
the tearing out of the
still beating heart, was
an act that dominated
the minds and lives of
these strange _priest-
hoods. The public
life, the national festiv-
ities all turned on this
fantastically horri-
ble act.
The ordinary exist-
ence of the common
people in these commu-
nities was very like the
ordinary existence of
any other barbaric peas-
antry. Their pottery,
weaving and dyeing
was very good. ‘The
Maya writing was not
only carven on stone
NEOLITHIC WARRIOR
Modelled from drawing by Prof. Rutot
but written and painted upon skins and the like. The European
and American museums contain many enigmatical Maya manu-
scripts of which at present little has been deciphered except the
dates. In Peru there were beginnings of a similar writing but
they were superseded by a method of keeping records by knotting76 A Short History of the World
/
cords. A similar method of mnemonics was in use 1n China thou-
sands of years ago.
In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.c., that is to say three
or four thousand years earlier, there were primitive civilizations
not unlike these American civilizations; civilizations based upon a
temple, having a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an in-
tensely astronomical priesthood. But in the old world the primi-
tive civilizations reacted upon one another and developed towards
the conditions of our own world. In America these primitive civili-
zations never progressed beyond this primitive stage. Each of
them was in a little world of its own. Mexico it seems knew little
or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans came to America. The
potato, which was the principal food stuff in Peru, was unknown
in Mexico.
Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their gods and
made their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of
decorative beauty. Men made love and tribes made war. Drought
and plenty, pestilence and health, followed one another. The
priests elaborated their calendar and their sacrificial ritual through
long centuries, but made little progress in other directions.XV
SumeriA, Earty Eaypt anp WRITING
HE old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new.
By 6000 or 7000 B.c. there were already quasi-civilized
communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in
various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time
north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia were all
more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of very early
communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however
and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irri-
gation, and evidences of a social organization rising above the level
of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and
Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was
in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first
cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the
great history of Egypt was beginning.
These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with
prominent noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been
deciphered, and their language is now known. They had discov-
ered the use of bronze and they built great tower-like temples of
sun-dried brick. The clay of this country is very fine; they used
it to write upon, and so it is that their inscriptions have been pre-
served to us. They had cattle, sheep, goats and asses, but no
horses. They fought on foot, in close formation, carrying spears
and shields of skin. Their clothing was of wool and they shaved
their heads.
Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been ar.
independent state with a god of its own and priests of its own.
But sometimes one city would establish an ascendancy over others
and exact tribute from their population. A very ancient inscrip-
7778 A Short History of the World
/
tion at Nippur records the “empire,” the first recorded empire, of
the Sumerian city of Erech. Its god and its priest-king claimed an
authority from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.
At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial
record. Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write.
The Azilian rock pictures to which we have already referred show
the beginning of the process. Many of them record hunts and ex-
peditions,
and in most
of these the
human fig-
ures are
p lain iy
drawn. But
in some the
pain ter
would not
bother with
head and
limbs; he
just indicat-
ed men by a
vertical and
one or two
transverse
strokes.
| .
4 .
BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 see. I Nae this to
Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the building ofatemple @ CONVeN-
to a Sun God
tional con-
densed picture writing was an easy transition. In Sumeria, where
the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of the charac-
ters soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood for,
but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the
papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated
remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria
made wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cunei-
form (= wedge-shaped).Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing 79
An important step towards writing was made when pictures
were used to indicate not the thing represented but some similar
thing. In the rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still
done to-day. We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child
is delighted to guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The
Sumerian language
was a languagemade
up of accumulated
syllables rather like
some contemporary
Amerindian lan-
guages, and it lent
itself very readily to
this syllabic method
of writing words ex-
pressing ideas that
could not be con-
veyed by pictures
directly. Egyptian
writing underwent
parallel develop-
ments. Later on,
when foreign peoples
with less distinctly
syllabled methods of
speech were to learn
anduse these picture
scripts they were to
make those further EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EG YPTIAN
modifications and DYNASTY
at Abydos in 1921 by the British School of Ar-
Recovered from the Tombs
simplifications that theology. They give evider
developed at last
into alphabetical writing.
world derived from a mixture
Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing).
to develop a conventionalized picture writing,
never got to the alphabetical stage.
ice of early form of block printing
All the true alphabets of the later
of the Sumerian cuneiform and the
Later in China there was
but in China it80 A Short History of the World
| The invention of writing was of very great importance in the
_ development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, com-
i mandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than the
old city states possible. It made a continuous historical conscious-
ness possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could
go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is
interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used.
s
Paks}
Pholo: 5. Boyer
THE SAKHARA PYRAMIDS
The Pyramid to right, the step Pyramid, is the oldest stone building in the world
A king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very
artistically carved, and would impress it on any clay document he
wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six
thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became
permanent. For the reader must remember that in the land of Meso-
potamia for countless years, letters, records and accounts were all
written on comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe
a great wealth of recovered knowledge.
Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity,. meteoric
iron were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.
Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have beenPhoto: D. McLeish
VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
Showing how these great monuments dominate the plain
8Ies
fh.
al
Photo: D. McLeish
THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR AT DENDEREH
2Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing 83
very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for the asses
and cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike the life in the
Maya cities of America three or four thousand years later. Most
of the people in peace time were busy with irrigation and cultivation
except on days of religious fest:vity. They had no money and no
need for it. They managed their small occasional trades by barter.
The princes and rulers who alone had more than a few possessions
used gold and silver bars and precious stones for any incidental act
of trade. The temple dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great
towering temple that went up to a roof from which the stars were
observed; in Egypt it was a massive building with only a ground
floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was the greatest, most splendid
of beings. In Egypt however there was one who was raised above
the priests; he was the living incarnation of the chief god of the land,
the Pharaoh, the god king.
There were few changes in the world in those days; men’s days
were sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into
the land and such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed
life according to immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed
time and marked the omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the
warnings of dreams. Men worked and loved and died, not un-
happily, forgetful of the savage past of their race and heedless of its
future. Sometimes the ruler was benign. Such was Pepi II, who
reigned in Egypt for ninety years. Sometimes he was ambitious
and took men’s sons to be soldiers and sent them against neighbour-
ing city states to war and plunder, or he made them toil to build
great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus,
who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at Gizeh. The
largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in itis
4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and
lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have
exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.XVI
PrimiItivE NomMapic PEOPLES
T was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were
settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in
the centuries between 6000 and 3000 B.c. Wherever there were
possibilities of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food supply
men were exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting
and wandering for the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris
a people called the Assyrians were founding cities; in the valleys of
Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and islands, there were
small communities growing up to civilization. Possibly parallel
developments of human life were already going on in favourable
regions of India and China. In many parts of Europe where there
were lakes well stocked with fish, little communities of men had long
settled in dwellings built on piles over the water, and were eking out
agriculture by fishing and hunting. But over much larger areas of
the old world no such settlement was possible. The land was too
harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or the seasons too uncertain
for mankind, with only the implements and science of that age to
take root.
For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations
men needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine.
Where these needs were not satisfied, man could live as a transient,
as a hunter following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal
grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the hunting to
the herding life may have been very gradual. " From following herds
of wild cattle or (in Asia) wild horses, men may have come to an idea
of property in them, have learnt to pen them into valleys, have
fought for them against wolves, wild dogs and other predatory
beasts.
84POTTERY AND IMPLEMENTS OF THE LAKE DWELLERS
Brit. Mus.
85A CONTEMPORARY LAKE VILLAGE
These Borneo dwellings are practically counterparts of the homes of European neolithic
communities 6000 B.c.
So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were grow-
ing up chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way of living, the
nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro from winter
pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The nomadic
peoples were on the whole hardier than the agriculturalists; they
were less prolific and numerous, they had no permanent temples
and no highly organized priesthood; they had less gear; but the
reader must not suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly
developed way of living on that account. In many ways this free
life was a fuller life than that of the tillers of the soil. The in-
dividual was more self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd. The leader
was more important; the medicine man perhaps less so.large
the
nomad took a wider view of
life. He the
confines of this settled land
Moving over
stretches of country
touched on
and that. He was used to
the sight of strange faces.
He had to scheme and treat
for pasture with competing
tribes. He knew
minerals than the folk upon
more of
the plough lands because he
went over mountain passes
and into rocky places. He
been a_ better
Possibly
may have
metallurgist.
bronze and much more prob-
smelting were
ably iron
nomadic discoveries. Some
of the earliest implements of
iron reduced from its ores
have been found in Central
Europe far away from the
early civilizations.
Primitive Nomadic Peoples
FLINT KNIVES OF 4500 B.C.
Excavated 1922 by the British Schoo! of Archeology in Egypt
from First Dynasty Tombs
On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their
pottery and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that as
the two sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic differentiated,
a certain amount of looting and trading should develop between the
two. In Sumeria particularly which had deserts and seasonal
“WAN & » ~~
Wu N ae | SPA. . Ft
NOMADS IN EGYPT
Egyptian wall painting in a
tomb near ancient Beni Hassan,
middle Egypt. It depicts the
arriva! of a tribe of Semitic
Nomads in Egypt about the
year 1895 B.c88 A Short History of the World
country on either hand it must have been usual to have the nomads
camping close to the cultivated fields, trading and stealing and per-
haps tinkering, as gipsies do to this day. (But hens they would not
steal, because the domestic fowl — an Indian jungle fowl originally —
was not domesticated by man until about 1000 B.c.) They would
bring precious stones and things of metal and leather. If they were
hunters they would bring skins. They would get in exchange
pottery and beads and glass, garments and suchlike manufactured
things.
Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and im-
perfectly settled people there were in those remote days of the first
civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of
Europe were the
blonde Nordic peo-
ples, hunters and
herdsmen, a lowly
race. ‘The primitive
civilizations saw
very little of this
race before 1500 B.c.
Away on thesteppes
of eastern Asia vari-
ous Mongolian
EGYPT PEASANTS GOING TO WORK tribes, the Hunnish
From an ancient and curiously painted model in the British Museum peoples, were do-
mesticating the
horse and developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal move-
ment between their summer and winter camping places. Possibly
the Nordic and Hunnish peoples were still separated from one
another by the swamps of Russia and the greater Caspian Sea of
that time. For very much of Russia there was swamp and lake.
In the deserts, which were growing more arid now, of Syria and
Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people, the Semitic tribes,
were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses from pasture to
pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain more negroid
people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the first nomads
to come into close contact with the early civilizations. 'They cameSTELE GLORIFYING KING NARAM SIN, OF AKKAD
This monarch, son of Sargon I, was a great architect as well as a famous conqueror.
Discovered in 1898 among the ruins of Susa, Persia
89go A Short History of the World
as traders and as raiders. Finally there arose leaders among them
with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors.
About 2750 B.c. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered
the whole Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the
Persian Gulf. to the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate bar-
barian and his people, the Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian writing
and adopted the Sumerian language as the speech of the officials
and the learned. The empire he founded decayed after two cen-
turies, and after one inundation of Elamites a fresh Semitic people,
the Amorites, by degrees established their rule over Sumeria. They
made their capital in what had hitherto been a small up-river town,
Babylon, and their empire is called the first Babylonian Empire.
It was consolidated by a great king called Hammurabi (circa
2100 B.c.) who made the earliest code of laws yet known to history.
The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion
than Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a
successful Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set
up, the Hyksos or “‘shepherd kings,’”’ which lasted for several cen-
turies. These Semitic conquerors never assimilated themselves
with the Egyptians; they were always regarded with hostility as
foreigners and barbarians; and they were at last expelled by a
popular uprising about 1600 B.c.
But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all, the two
races assimilated and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its
language and character.XVII
Ture First SEA-GOING PEOPLES
HE earliest boats and ships must have come into use some
twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago. Man was prob-
ably paddling about on the water with a log of wood or an
inflated skin to assist him, at latest in the beginnings of the Neolithic
period. A basketwork boat covered with skin and caulked was used
in Egypt and Sumeria from the beginnings of our knowledge. Such
boats are still used there. They are used to this day in Ireland and
Wales and in Alaska; sealskin boats still make the crossing of Behring
Straits. The hollow log followed as tools improved. The building
of boats and then ships came in a natural succession.
Perhaps the legend of Noah’s Ark preserves the memory of some
early exploit in shipbuilding, just as the story of the Flood, so widely
distributed among the peoples of the world, may be the tradition
of the flooding of the Mediterranean basin.
There were ships upon the Red Sea long before the pyramids
were built, and there were ships on the Mediterranean and Persian
Gulf by 7000 s.c. Mostly these were the ships of fishermen, but
some were already trading and pirate ships — for knowing what we
do of mankind we may guess pretty safely that the first sailors
plundered where they could and traded where they had to do so.
The seas on which these first ships adventured were inland seas
on which the wind blew fitfully and which were often at a dead calm
for days together, so that sailing did not develop beyond an accessory
use. It is only in the last four hundred years that the well-rigged,
ocean-going, sailing ship has developed. The ships of the ancient
world were essentially rowing ships which hugged the shore and went
into harbour at the first sign of rough weather. As ships grew into
big galleys they caused a demand for war captives as galley slaves.
We have already noted the appearance of the Semitic people as
wanderers and nomads in the region of Syria and Arabia, and how
they conquered Sumeria and set up first the Akkadian and then the
first Babylonian Empire. In the west these same Semitic peoples
QI92 A Short History of the World
were taking to the sea. They set up a string of harbour towns along
the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, of which Tyre and Sidon
were the chief; and by the time of Hammurabi in Babylon, they had
spread as traders, wanderers and colonizers over the whole Mediter-
ranean basin. These sea Semites were called the Phoenicians. They
settled largely in Spain, pushing back the old Iberian Basque popula-
tion and sending coasting expeditions through the straits of Gibraltar;
and they set up colonies upon the north coast of Africa. Of Carthage,
one of these Phoenician cities, we shall have much more to tell later.
But the Phcenicians were not the first people to have galleys in
the Mediterranean waters. There was already a series of towns and
cities among the islands and coasts of that sea belonging to a race or
races apparently connected by blood and language with the Basques
to the west and the Berbers and Egyptians to the south, the A¢gean
peoples. These peoples must not be confused with the Greeks, who
come much later into our, story; they were pre-Greek, but they had
cities in Greece and Asia Minor, Mycenez and Troy for example, and
they had a great and prosperous establishment at Cnossos in Crete.
It is only in the last half century that the industry of excavating
archeologists has brought the extent and civilization of the Augean
peoples to our knowledge. Cnossos has been most thoroughly
explored; it was happily not succeeded by any city big enough to
destroy its ruins, and so it is our chief source of information about
this once almost forgotten civilization.
The history of Cnossos goes back as far as the history of Egypt;
the two countries were trading actively across the sea by 4000 B.c.
By 2500 s.c., that is between the time of Sargon I and Hammurabi,
Cretan civilization was at its zenith.
Cnossos was not so much a town as a great palace for the Cretan
monarch and his people. It was not even fortified. It was only forti-
fied later as the Phoenicians grew strong, and as a new and more ter-
rible breed of pirates, the Greeks, came upon the sea from the north.
The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch was
called Pharaoh; and he kept his state in a palace fitted with running
water, with bathrooms and the like conveniences such as we know of
in no other ancient remains. There he held great festivals and
shows. There was bull-fighting, singularly like the bull-fighting thatThe First Sea-going Peoples 93
still survives in Spain; there was resemblance even in the costumes
of the bull-fighters; and there were gymnastic displays. The
Photo: Fred Botssonnas
THE TREASURE HOUSE AT MYCEN
women’s clothes were remarkably modern in spirit; they wore corsets
and flounced dresses. The pottery, the textile manufactures, the
sculpture, painting, jewellery, ivory, metal and inlay work of these94 A Short History of the World
Cretans was often astonishingly beautiful. And they had a system
of writing, but that still remains to be deciphered.
This happy and sunny and civilized life lasted for some score of
centuries. About 2000 s.c. Cnossos and Babylon abounded in
comfortable and cultivated people who probably led very pleasant
lives. They had shows and they had religious festivals, they had
domestic slaves to look after them and industrial slaves to make a
profit for them. Life must have seemed very secure in Cnossos for
such people, sunlit and girdled by the blue sea. Egypt of course
must have appeared rather a declining country in those days under
the rule of her half-barbaric shepherd kings, and if one took an in-
terest in politics one must have noticed how the Semitic people
seemed to be getting everywhere, ruling Egypt, ruling distant
Babylon, building Nineveh on the upper Tigris, sailing west to the
Pillars of Hercules (the straits of Gibraltar) and setting up their
colonies on those distant coasts.
There were some active and curious minds in Cnossos, because
later on the Greeks told legends of a certain skilful Cretan artificer,
Deedalus, who attempted to make some sort of flying machine,
perhaps a glider, which collapsed and fell into the sea.
It is interesting to note some of the differences as well as the
resemblances between the life of Cnossos and our own. ‘Toa Cretan
gentleman of 2500 B.c. iron was a rare metal which fell out of the sky
and was curious rather than useful —for as yet only meteoric iron
was known, iron had not been obtained from its ores. Compare
that with our modern state of affairs pervaded by iron everywhere.
The horse again would be a quite legendary creature to our Cretan,
a sort of super-ass which lived in the bleak northern lands far away
beyond the Black Sea. Civilization for him dwelt chiefly in Agean
Greece and Asia Minor, where Lydians and Carians and Trojans
lived a life and probably spoke languages like his own. - There were
Pheenicians and AXgeans settled in Spain and North Africa, but those
were very remote regions to his imagination. Italy was still a
desolate land covered with dense forests; the brown-skinned Etrus-
cans had not yet gone there from Asia Minor. And one day perhaps
this Cretan gentleman went down to the harbour and saw a captive
who attracted his attention because he was very fair-complexionedThe First Sea-going Peoples Qs
and had blue eyes. Perhaps our Cretan tried to talk to him and was
answered in an unintelligible gibberish. This creature came from
somewhere beyond the Black Sea and seemed to be an altogether
benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan tribesman, of a race
and culture of which we shall soon have much to tell, and the strange
gibberish he spoke was to differentiate some day into Sanskrit,
Ft i ;
“ye —
LY Sy la Ly Ye
ba
oF)
fi K Nine’ 2} ay 67 ¢ ‘ ys Ls
f * ay an So 4 Vy
EON ea, e E26 Ly ex G60)
rr X
> A
"&
ee is
-
lee showing the relation
of the MEDIAN and
Second BABY LONIAN
(Chaldxzan)EMPIRES
in the reign of
Nebuchadnezzar the Great [MounTaINS
Shaded vertical ly.)The Last Babylonian Empire
The Caspi ea
were ly less extensive ..
Samarkand
So, sul
OoDTA
The length of the at
road from Sardis*to
Susa , across Armenia,
would be over 1600
mules,
Sardanapalus, though an Assyrian, had been quite Babylon-ized.
He made a library, a library not of paper but of the clay tablets that
were used for writing in Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days.
His collection has been unearthed and is perhaps the most precious
store of historical material in the world. The last of the Chaldean
line of Babylonian monarchs, Nabonidus, had even keener literary
tastes. He patronized antiquarian researches, and when a date was
worked out by his investigators for the accession of Sargon I he com-
memorated the fact by inscriptions. But there were many signs
of disunion in his empire, and he sought to centralize it by bringing a
number of the various local gods to Babylon and setting up temples
to them there. This device was to be practised quite successfully by
the Romans in later times, but in Babylon it roused the jealousy of
the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the dominant god of the
Babylonians. They cast about for a possible alternative to Naboni-
dus and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler of the adjacent
Median Empire. Cyrus had already distingu’shed himself by
conquering Croesus, the rich king of Lydia in Eastern Asia Minor,ep titanate ee cee ee
112 A Short History of the World
He came up against Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls,
and the gates of the city were opened to him (538 B.c.). His soldiers
entered the city without fighting. The crown prince Belshazzar,
the son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the Bible relates, when a hand
appeared and wrote in letters of fire upon the wall these mystical
words: “‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” which was interpreted by
the prophet Daniel, whom he summoned to read the riddle, as “God
has numbered thy kingdom and fin-
ished it; thou art weighed in the bal-
ance and found wanting and thy
kingdom is given to the Medes and
Persians.’ Possibly the priests of Bel
Marduk knew something about that
writing on the wall. Belshazzar was
killed that night, says the Bible.
Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and
the occupation of the city was so
peaceful that the services of Bel Mar-
duk continued without intermission.
Thus it was the Babylonian and
Median empires were united. Cam-
byses, the son of Cyrus, subjugated
Egypt. Cambyses went mad and
was accidentally killed, and was pres-
ently succeeded by Darius the Mede,
Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, one of
the chief councillors of Cyrus.
Photo: Miss ¥. Biggs The Persian Empire of Darius I,
PERSIAN MONARCH
From the ruins of Persepolis
the first of the new Aryan empires in
the seat of the old civilizations, was
the greatest empire the world had hitherto seen. It included all
Asia Minor and Syria, all the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires,
Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media, Persia, and it
extended into India as far as the Indus. Such an empire was
possible because the horse and rider and the chariot and the made-
road had now been brought into the world. Hitherto the ass and
ox and the camel for desert use had afforded the swiftest method of" ; 8 ome - ne ates 40 nin +. ' : “ + *
i NEP tae 2 re WIRES Jet ere PRR pegs Rey IH ithe : sr :
= ean fo GS eee | | eer
ee ge EPS Ree mu
scp
os soit
cs 4% * oem
Photo: Major W. ¥. P. Rodd
THE RUINS OF PERSEPOLIS
The capital city of the Persian Empire; burnt by Alexander th Great
eee: Roto: | Majer Wise woes .
THE GREAT PORCH OF XERXES, AT PERSEPOLIS |
II3sal lian ti Ag ilar nha imran ep bh
114 A Short History of the World
transport. Great arterial roads were made by the Persian rulers
to hold their new empire, and post horses were always in waiting
for the imperial messenger or the traveller with an official permit.
Moreover the world was now beginning to use coined money, which
greatly facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of this
vast empire was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priest-
hood of Bel Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon
though still important was now a declining city, and the great cities
of the new empire were Persepolis and Susa and Ecbatana. The
capital was Susa. Nineveh was already abandoned and sinking
into ruins.xO
Ture Earty History OF THE JEWS
ND now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so
important in their own time as in their influence upon the
later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long
before 1000 B.c., and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem.
Their story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either
side of them, Egypt to the south and the changing empires of Syria,
Assyria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable
high road between these latter powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they pro-
duced a written literature, a world history, a collection of laws,
chronicles, psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political
utterances which became at last what Christians know as the Old
Testament, the Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history
in the fourth or fifth century B.c.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We
have already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian
Empire while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians
and Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was de-
feated and slain at Megiddo (608 B.c.). Judah became a tributary
to Egypt, and when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean
king in Babylon, rolled back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to
manage Judah by setting up puppet kings in Jerusalem. The
experiment failed, the people massacred his Babylonian officials,
and he then determined to break up this little state altogether,
which had long been playing off Egypt against the northern empire.
Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant of the people was
carried off captive to Babylon.
II5derailed diame plana
116 A Short History of the World
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.c.). He
then collected them together and sent them back to resettle their
country and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civi-
lized or united people. Probably only a very few of them could read
or write. In their own history one never hears of the early books of
the Bible being read; the first mention of a book is in the time of
Josiah. The Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated
them. They returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self-
conscious and political people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the
Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament
as we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had
many of the other books that have since been incorporated with the
Pentateuch into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms
and Proverbs for example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and
of the Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with
similar Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the com-
mon beliefs of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses
and of Samson have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with
the story of Abraham and onward begins something more special
to the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in
Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitig nomad. To the book of
Genesis the reader must go for the story of his wanderings and for the
stories of his sons and grandchildren and how they became captive
in the Land of Egypt. He travelled through Canaan, and the God
of Abraham, says the Bible story, promised this smiling land of pros-
perous cities to him and to his children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wander-
ing in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of
Abraham, grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of
Canaan from the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have
done this somewhen between 1600 B.c. and 1300 B.c.; there are no
igyptian records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help out the
story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering anymorethanthe
hilly back-
grounds of
the promised
land. The
coast wasnow
in the hands,
not of ‘the
Canaanites
but of new-
comers, those
Aigean peo-
ples, the Phi-
listines; and
their cities,
Gaza, Gath,
Ashdod, As-
calonandJop-
pa success-
fully with-
stood the
Hebrew _at-
tack. For
many genera-
tions the
children of
Abraham re-
mained anob-
scure people
of the hilly
back country
engaged in
The Early History of the Jews
117
| The LAND of the HEBREWS
[The dist ance from, yre to
err salem ts rougt uby 100
— about that of ae
to | Pistol Fron 5 Gabe Te » the
Red ¢ Sea is ab ane the same
distance as frorn Londor to
Newcastle .]
AshaZa
Oe Zl
Ash ikelort 7 'G at
i, N of
ri TLa TT
|p|
Hill country shad2d 111 | sil
|| }
||
a
site ||
Route from Phoenicia || Route
to the Red Sea, across to Babylon
Palestne...-— —— p= eee Damascus
O 50 100
l i
incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes
about them,
the Moabites, the Midianites
so forth.
The
reader will find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles
and disasters during this period.
disasters and failures frankly told.
For very largely it is a record of118 A Short History of the World
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there
was any rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders
of the people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.c. they chose
| themselves a king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul!’s leading
tik was no great improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he
A perished under the hail of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount
Gilboa, his armour went into the temple of the Philistine Venus, and
his body was nailed to the walls of Beth-shan.
His successor David was more successful and more politic. With
Fin David dawned
rare eee the only period
of prosperity the
Hebrew peoples
were) €Vern to
know. It was
based on a close
alliance with the
Phoenician city
of Tyre, whose
Kane Hiram
seems to have
been a man of
very great intel-
ligence and en-
terprise. He
wished to secure
a trade route to
the Red Sea
through the He-
brewhillcountry.
Normally Phee-
nician trade went
to the Red Sea
by Egypt, but
Kgypt was in a
state of profound
disorder at this
MOUND AT BABYLON
Beneath which are the remains of a great palace of NebuchadnezzarThe Early History of the Jews IIQ
time; there may have been other obstructions to Phoenician trade
along this line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest
relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon.
Under Hiram’s auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem
arose, and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red
Sea. A very considerable trade passed northward and southward
through Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and mag-
nificence unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was
even given a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the
climax of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a
little city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of
his death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty,
had taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendours. The ac-
count of Solomon’s magnificence given in the books of Kings and
Chronicles is questioned by many critics. They say that it was
added to and exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers.
But the Bible account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it
appears at the first reading. Solomon’s temple, if one works out the
measurements, would go inside a small suburban church, and his
fourteen hundred chariots cease to impress us when we learn from an
Assyrian monument that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of
two thousand to the Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest
from the Bible narrative that Solomon spent himself in display and
overtaxed and overworked his people. At his death the northern
part of his kingdom broke off from Jerusalem and became the
independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem remained the capital
city of Judah.
The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram
died, and the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt
grew strong again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings
of Judah becomes a history of two little states ground between, first,
Syria, then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the
south. Itisa tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed
disaster. It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In
721 z.c. the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the
Assyrians and its people utterly lost to history. Judah strugglederr
ged as hea)
t No Br a sym =
. Fr. yuck A : Ie
SPN Te
ey
cee: ; Aa
Photo: Underwood & Underwood
THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON
The bulls are in richly coloured enamel on baked brick
I20The Early History of the Jews 121
on until in 604 B.c., as we have told, it shared the fate of Israel.
There may be details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew
history from the days of the Judges onward, but on the whole it is
evidently a true story which squares with all that has been learnt
in the excavation of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past
century.
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history to-
gether and evolved their tradition. The people who came back to
Jerusalem at the command of Cyrus were a very different people in
spirit and knowledge from those who had gone into captivity. They
had learnt civilization. Inthe development of their peculiar charac-
ter a very great part was played by certain men, a new sort of men,
the Prophets, to whom we must now direct our attention. These
Prophets mark the appearance of new and remarkable forces in the
steady development of human society.XXII
PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA
HE fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series
of disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In
the seventh century B.c. it would have seemed as though
the whole civilized world was to be dominated by Semitic rulers.
They ruled the great Assyrian empire and they had conquered Egypt;
Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all Semitic, speaking languages that
were mutually intelligible. The trade of the world was in Semitic
hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities of the Phoenician coast,
had thrown out colonies that grew at last to even greater proportion
in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded before 800 B.c., had
risen to a population of more than a million. It was for a time the
greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain and out into the
Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have already
noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build ships on the
Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the
time of the Pharaoh Necho, a Phoenician expedition sailed completely
round Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only
the Greeks were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of
the one they had destroyed, and the Medes were becoming “for-
midable,” as an Assyrian inscription calls them, in central Asia.
In 800 B.c. no one could have prophesied that before the third cen-
tury B.c. every trace of Semitic dominion would be wiped out by
Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that everywhere the Semitic peoples
would be subjects or tributaries or scattered altogether. Every-
where except in the northern deserts of Arabia, where the Bedouin
adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life, the ancient way of life
of the Semites before Sargon I and his Akkadians went down to
conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were never conquered
by Aryan masters.
122Priests and Prophets in Judea 123
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun
in these five eventful centuries one people only held together and
clung to its ancient traditions and that was this little people, the
Jews, who were sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus
the Persian. And they were able to do this, because they had got
together this literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It is not
so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the
Jews. Running through this Bible were certain ideas, different
from the ideas of the people about them, very stimulating and sus-
taining ideas, to which they were destined to cling through five and
twenty centuries of hardship, adventure and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was in-
visible and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with
hands, a Lord of Righteousness throughout the earth. All other
peoples had national gods embodied in images that lived in temples.
If the image was smashed and the temple razed, presently that god
died out. But this was a new idea, this God of the Jews, in the
heavens, high above priests and sacrifices. And this God of Abra-
ham, the Jews believed, had chosen them to be his peculiar people,
to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of Righteousness in
the World. They were a people exalted by their sense of a common
destiny. This belief saturated them all when they returned to
Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation
many Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many
Phoenicians, speaking practically the same language and having
endless customs, habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be
attracted by this inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellow-
ship and its promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and
the Spanish Pheenician cities, the Phoenicians suddenly vanish from
history; and as suddenly we find, not simply in Jerusalem but in
Spain, Africa, Egypt, Arabia, the East, wherever the Phoenicians
had set their feet, communities of Jews. And they were all held
together by the Bible and by the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem
was from the first only their nominal capital; their real city was this
book of books. This is a new sort of thing in history. It is some-
thing of which the seeds were sown long before, when the Sumerians124 A Short History of the World
and Egyptians began to turn their hieroglyphics into writing. The
Jews were a new thing, a people without a king and presently with-
out a temple (for as we shall tell Jerusalem itself was broken up
in 70 a.p.), held together and consolidated out of heterogeneous
elements by nothing but the power of the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor
foreseen nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new
kind of community but a new kind of man comes into history with
the development of the Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews
looked like becoming a little people just like any other little people
of that time clustering around court and temple, ruled by the wis-
dom of the priest and led by the ambition of the king. But already,
the reader may learn from the Bible, this new sort of man of which
we speak, the Prophet, was in evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance
of these Prophets increases.
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse
origins. The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the
Prophet Amos wore the goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had
this in common, that they gave allegiance to no one but to the God
of Righteousness and that they spoke directly to the people. They
os
ai
z
Ady
THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II
his obelisk (in the British Museum) of the King of Assyria mentions, in cuneiform, “Jehu the son of
mri Panel showing Jewish captives bringing tributePriests and Prophets in Judea 125
ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK
Captive Princes making obeisance to Shalmaneser II
‘ame without licence or consecration. ‘“‘Now the word of the Lord
came unto me;” that was the formula. They were intensely
political. They exhorted the people against Egypt, “that broken
reed,” or against Assyria or Babylon; they denounced the indolence
of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of the King. Some of them
turned their attention to what we should now call “social reform.”
The rich were “grinding the faces of the poor,” the luxurious were
consuming the children’s bread; wealthy people made friends with
and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and this was
hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly
punish this land.
These fulminations were written down and preserved and
studied. They went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they
went they spread a new religious spirit. They carried the common
man past priest and temple, past court and king and brought him
face to face with the Rule of Righteousness. That is their supreme
importance in the history of mankind. In the great utterances of
Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid anticipation
and foreshadows the whole earth united and at peace under one God.
Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent
reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much
prejudice, and much that will remind him of the propaganda pam-126 A Short History of the World
phlets of the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of
the period round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the
appearance of a new power in the world, the power of individual
moral appeal, of an appeal to the free conscience of mankind against
the fetish sacrifices and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled
and harnessed our race.OX
Tur GREEKS
OW while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about
960 B.c.) the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were
suffering destruction and deportation, and while the Jewish
people were developing their tradition in captivity in Babylon, an-
other great power over the human mind, the Greek tradition, was
also arising. While the Hebrew prophets were working out a new
sense of direct moral responsibility between the people and an eter-
nal and universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers were train-
ing the human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual
adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan-
speaking stem. They had come down among the Aigean cities and
islands some centuries before 1000 B.c. They were probably already
in southward movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his
first elephants beyond the conquered Euphrates. For in those days
there were elephants in Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but
there are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories
of Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill of the Cre-
tan artificers.
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters
whose performances were an important social link, and these handed
down from the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics,
the Iliad, telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and
sacked the town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the Odyssey, being a long
adventure story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus, from
Troy to his own island. These epics were written down somewhen
in the eighth or seventh century B.c., when the Greeks had acquired
the use of an alphabet from their more civilized neighbours, but they
127Photo: Sebah & ¥onillier
STATUE OF MELEAGER
Note the progress in plastic power from the earlier wooden statue on leftThe Greeks 129
are supposed to have been in existence very much earlier. Formerly
they were ascribed to a particular blind bard, Homer, who was sup-
posed to have sat down and composed them as Milton composed
Paradise Lost. Whether there really was such a poet, whether he
composed or only wrote down and polished these epics and so forth,
is a favourite quarrelling ground for the erudite. We need not con-
cern ourselves with such bickerings here. The thing that matters
from our point of view is that the Greeks were in possession of their
epics in the eighth century B.c., and that they were a common
possession and a link between their various tribes, giving them a
sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians. They were a
eroup of kindred peoples linked by the spoken and afterwards by the
written word, and sharing common ideals of courage and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron,
without writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to have
lived at first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs
outside the ruins of the AXgean cities they had destroyed. Then
they began to wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from
the people they had conquered. It has been said that the cities of
the primitive civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal
god, and that the wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the
wall preceded the temple. They began to trade and send out colo-
nies. By the seventh century B.c. a new series of cities had grown
up in the valleys and islands of Greece, forgetful of the AXgean cities
and civilization that had preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth,
Thebes, Samos, Miletus among the chief. There were already
Greek settlements along the coast of the Black Sea and in Italy and
Sicily. The heel and toe of Italy was called Magna Grecia. Mar-
seilles was a Greek town established on the site of an earlier Phoeni-
cian colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief
Euphrates or Nile tend
means of transport some great river like the
The cities of Egypt
to become united under some common rule.
and the cities of Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system
of government. But the Greek peoples were cut up among islands
and mountain valleys; both Greece and Magna Grecia are very
mountainous; and the tendency was all the other way. When the130 A Short History of the World
Greeks come into history they are divided up into a number of little
states which showed no signs of coalescence. They are different
even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens of this or that Greek
tribe, Ionic, Aolian or Doric; some have a mingled population of
Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek ‘‘Mediterranean”’ folk;
some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over an
enslaved conquered population like the ‘“‘Helots”’ in Sparta. In
some the old leaderly Aryan families have become a close aristocracy ;
Photo: Fred Botssonnas
RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
in some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens; in some there
are elected or even hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states
divided and various, kept them small. The largest states were
smaller than many English counties, and it is doubtful if the popula-
tion of any of their cities ever exceeded a third of a million. Few
came up even to 50,000. There were unions of interest and sym-
pathy but no coalescences. Cities made leagues and alliances asThe Greeks
trade increased, and small cities put themselves under the protection
of great ones. Yet all Greece was held together in a certain com-
munity of feeling by two things, by the epics and by the custom of
taking part every fourth year in the athletic contests at Olympia.
This did not prevent wars and feuds, but it mitigated something of
the savagery of war between them, and a truce protected all travel-
lers to and from the games. As time went on the sentiment of a
common heritage grew and the number of states participating in the
Olympic games increased until at last not only Greeks but com-
petitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and Macedonia
to the north were admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of
their civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries B.c.
Their social life differed in many interesting points from the social
life of the A2gean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid
temples but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was
in the cities of the older world, the repository of all knowledge, the
storehouse of ideas. They had leaders and noble families, but no
quasi-divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organize -d court.
Rather their organization was aristocratic, with leading families
which kept each other in order. Even their so-called * democracies ”’
were aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs and came
to the assembly in a democracy, but everybody was not a citizen.
The Greek democracies were not like our modern “‘democracies”
in which everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had
a few hundred or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands
of slaves, freedmen and so forth, with no share in public affairs.
Generally in Greece affairs were in the hands of a ee of sub-
stantial men. Their kings and their tyrants alike were Just men sel
in front of other men or usurping a leadership; they were not quasi-
divine overmen like Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of Mesopo-
tamia. Both thought and government therefore had ¢ . freedom
under Greek conditions such as they had known in none of the older
civilizations. "The Greeks had brought down into cities the indi-
vidualism, the personal initiative of the wandering life of the north-
ern parklands. They were the first republicans of importance in
history.132 A Short History of the World
. And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric
M warfare a new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life.
th We find men who are not priests seeking and recording knowledge
a, and enquiring into the mysteries of life and being, in a way that has
Hi hitherto been the sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptu-
Photo: Alinart
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PASSTUM, SICILY
ous amusement of kings. We find already in the sixth century B.c.
— perhaps while Isaiah was still prophesying in Babylon — such men
Bie as Thales and Anaximander of Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus,
elk who were what we should now call independent gentlemen, giving
their minds to shrewd questionings of the world in which we live,
asking what its real nature was, whence it came and what its destiny
might be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive answers. Of
these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we shall
have more to say a little later in this history. These Greek enquirersThe Greeks
who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.c. are the first
philosophers, the first ““wisdom-lovers,”’ in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth
century B.c. was in the history of humanity. For not only were
these Greek philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about
this universe and man’s place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish
prophecy to its sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama
Buddha was then teaching in India and Confucius and Lao T’se in
China. From Athens to the Pacific the human mind was astir.XOV
Ture WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS
HILE the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and
Asia Minor were embarking upon free intellectual
enquiry and while in Babylon and Jerusalem the last of
the Hebrew prophets were creating a free conscience for mankind,
two adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and the Persians, were in
possession of the civilization of the ancient world and were making a
great empire, the Persian empire, which was far larger in extent than
any empire the world had seen hitherto. Under Cyrus, Babylon and
the rich and ancient civilization of Lydia had been added to the
Persian rule; the Phoenician cities of the Levant and all the Greek
cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had sub-
jected Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian rulers
(521 B.c.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world.
His couriers rode with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the Indus
and from Upper Egypt to Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the
Spanish Phoenician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace;
but they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any
serious trouble were the old parent hordes of Nordic people in South
Russia and Central Asia, the Seythians, who raided the northern
and north-eastern borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a
population of Persians. ‘The Persians were only the small conquer-
ing minority of this enormous realm. ‘The rest of the population
was what it had been before the Persians came from time imme-
morial, only that Persian was the administrative language. Trade
and finance were still largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were
the great Mediterranean ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the
seas. But many of these Semitic merchants and business people as
134The Wars of the Greeks and Persians
Brit. Mus
FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY
Showing Greek merchant vessels with sails and oars
they went from place to place already found a sympathetic and con-
venient common history in the Hebrew tradition and the Hebrew
scriptures. A new element which was increasing rapidly in this
empire was the Greek element. The Greeks were becoming serious
rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their detached and vigorous
intelligence made them useful and unprejudiced officials.
It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe.
He wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Seythian
horsemen. He crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched
through Bulgaria to the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats
and pushed far northward. His army suffered terribly. It was
largely an infantry force and the mounted Scythians rode all round
it, cut off its supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never came to
a pitched battle. Darius was forced into an inglorious retreat.
He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and
Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrect ons of
the Greek cities in Asia followed this failure, and the Kuropean
Greeks were drawn into the contest. Darius resolved upon the sub-
jugation of the Greeks in Europe. With the Phoenician fleet at his
disposal he was able to subdue one island after another, and finally
in 490 B.c. he made his main attack upon Athens. A considerable
Armada sailed from the ports of Asia Minor and the eastern Mediter-
ranean, and the expedition landed its troops at Marathon to the
north of Athens. There they were met and s gnally defeated by the
Athenians.hele Ladi Dh a Taide aia eee eee
: 136 A Short History of the World
An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest
| rival of Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to
Sparta, sending a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans
not to let Greeks become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the
prototype of all “Marathon” runners) did over a hundred miles
of broken country in less than two days. The Spartans responded
| promptly and generously; but when, in three days, the Spartan
force reached Athens, there was nothing for it to do but to view the
battlefield and the bodies of the defeated Persian soldiers. The
Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So ended the first Persian
attack on Greece.
The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after
the news of his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years
his son and successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks.
For a time terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was
certainly the greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the world.
It was a huge assembly of discordant elements. It crossed the
Dardanelles, 480 B.c., by a bridge of boats; and along the coast
as it advanced moved an equally miscellaneous fleet carrying sup-
plies. At the narrow pass of Thermopyle a small force of 1400
men under the Spartan Leonidas resisted this multitude, and after
a fight of unsurpassed heroism was completely destroyed. Every
man was killed. But the losses they inflicted upon the Persians
were enormous, and the army of Xerxes pushed on to Thebes and
a Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered and made terms.
A The Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.
Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came
victory against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet,
though not a third the size of the Persian, assailed it in the bay of
Salamis and destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense
army cut off from supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated
to Asia with one half of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at
Platea (479 B.c.) what time the remnants of the Persian fleet were
hunted down by the Greeks and destroyed at Mycale in Asia Minor.
The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in
Asia became free. All this is told in great detail and with much
picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the History ofPat
we
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es
Syne
ok , ns td]
nthe SG os
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Photo: Fred Botssonnas
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON) AT CAPE SUNIUM
Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.c. in the Ionian city
of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon and Egypt
in his search for exact particulars. From Mycale onward Persia
sank into a confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered
in 465 B.c. and rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke up the
brief order of that mighty realm. The history of Herodotus lays
stress on the weakness of Persia. ‘This history is indeed what we
should now eall propaganda — propaganda for Greece to unite and
conquer Persia. Herodotus makes one character, Aristagoras, go
to the Spartans with a map of the known world and say to them:
“These Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You on the other hand
have now attained the utmost skill in war. . . . No other nations
in the world have what they possess: gold, silver, bronze, embroi-
dered garments, beasts and slaves. All this you might have for your-
selves, if you so desired.”XXV
Tue SPLENDOUR OF GREECE
HE century and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was
one of very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True
that Greece was torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy
between Athens, Sparta and other states (the Peloponnesian War 431
to 404 B.c.) and that in 338 B.c. the Macedonians became virtually
masters of Greece; nevertheless during this period the thought and
the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels that
made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of history.
The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For
over thirty years (466 to 428 B.c.) Athens was dominated by a man
of great vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to
rebuild the city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced
it. The beautiful ruins that still glorify Athens to-day are chiefly
the remains of this great effort. And he did not simply rebuild a
material Athens. He rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered
about him not only architects and sculptors but poets, dramatists,
philosophers and teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to recite his
history (438 B.c.). Anaxagoras came with the beginnings of a
scientific description of the sun and stars. A®schylus, Sophocles
and Euripides one after the other carried the Greek drama to its
highest levels of beauty and nobility.
The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived
on after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece
was now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and wasteful
struggle for “‘ascendancy”’ was beginning. Indeed the darkling of
the political horizon seems for a time to have quickened rather than
discouraged men’s minds.
Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of
Greek institutions had given great importance to skill in discussion.
13040 A Short History of the World
Decision rested neither with king nor with priest but in the assem-
blies of the people or of leading men. Eloquence and able argument
became very desirable accomplishments therefore, and a class of
teachers arose, the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men
‘in these arts. But one cannot reason without matter, and knowl-
edge followed in the wake of speech. The activities and rivalries
of these Sophists led very naturally to an acute examination of style,
of methods of
thought and of
the validity of
ar omen tise
When Pericles
died a_ certain
Socrates was
becoming prom-
inent as an able
and destructive
eritic of bad
argument —and
much of the
teaching of the
Sophists was
Photo: Fred Boissonnas
PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS
A specimen of Grecian sculpture in its finest expression. Compare the advance
of art with that seen in the animals shown on p. 105 A group of bril-
hant young men
gathered about Socrates. In the end Socrates was executed for
disturbing people’s minds (399 B.c.), he was condemned after the
dignified fashion of the Athens of those days to drink in his own
house and among his own friends a poisonous draught made from
hemlock, but the disturbance of people’s minds went on in spite of
his condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.
Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.c.) who
presently began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy.
His teaching fell into two main divisions, an examination of the
foundations and methods of human thinking and an examination of
political institutions. He was the first man to write a Utopia, that
is to say the plan of a community different from and better than any
bad argument.mn
be ATI I yeony
one ail ‘
Photo: Fred Botssonnas
THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS
The marvellous group of Temples and monuments built under the inspiration of Pericles
Photo: Fred Botssonnas
THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE
A wonderfully preserved specimen showing the vast auditorium
I4I142 A Short History of the World
existing community. This shows an altogether unprecedented
boldness in the human mind which had hitherto accepted social
traditions and usages with scarcely a question. Plato said plainly
to mankind: ‘Most of the social and political ills from which you
suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to
change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you
choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your
own power.” That is a high adventurous teaching that has still to
soak in to the common intell'gence of our race. One of his earliest
works was the Republic, a dream of a communist aristocracy; his last
unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of regulation for another
such Utopian state.
The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of govern-
ment was carried on after Plato’s death by Aristotle, who had been
his pupil and who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from
the city of Stagira in Macedonia, and his father was court physician
to the Macedonian king. For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alex-
THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM Pee
The ancient sanctuary on the Acropolis at AtbensPhoto: Alinart
ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON
143144 A Short History of the World
ander, the king’s son, who was destined to achieve very great things
of which we shall soon be telling. Aristotle’s work upon methods of
thinking carried the science of Logic to a level at which it remained
for fifteen hundred years or more, until the medizeval schoolmen took
up the ancient questions again. He made no Utopias. Before man
could really control his destiny as Plato taught, Aristotle perceived
that he needed far more knowledge and far more accurate knowledge
than he possessed. And so Aristotle began that systematic collec-
tion of knowledge which nowadays we call Science. He sent out
explorers to collect facts. He was the father of natural history.
He was the founder of political science. His students at the Lyceum
examined and compared the constitutions of 158 different states.
Here in the fourth century B.c. we find men who are practically
‘modern thinkers.” The child-like, dream-like methods of primi-
tive thought had given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon
the problems of life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and
imagery of the gods and god monsters, and all the taboos and awes
and restraints that have hitherto encumbered thinking are here
completely set aside. Free, exact and systematic thinking has
begun. The fresh and unencumbered mind of these newcomers out
of the northern forests has thrust itself into the mysteries of the
temple and let the daylight in.
‘XOX VE
Tue EMPIRE oF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ROM 431 to 404 B.c. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece.
Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred country of
Macedonia was rising slowly to power and civilization. The
Macedonians spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several
occasions Macedonian competitors had taken part in the Olympic
games. In 359 B.c. a man of very great abilities and ambition
became king of this litt e country — Philip. Philip had previously
been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek education
and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus — which had
also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates— of a possible
conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to
remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-
chariot had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-
fighting infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a
cloud of skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip
made his infantry fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian
phalanx, and he trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or
companions, to fight in formation and so invented cavalry. The
master move in most of his battles and in the battles of his son
Alexander was a cavalry charge. The phalanx held the enemy
infantry in front while the cavalry swept away the enemy horse on
his wings and poured in on the flank and rear of his infantry. Chari-
ots were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thes-
saly to Greece; and the battle of Cheronia (338 B.c.), fought against
Athens and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream
of Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states
appointed Philip captain-general of the Grzco-Macedonian con-
145£46 A Short History of the World
federacy against Persia, and in 336 B.c. his advanced guard crossed
into Asia upon this long premeditated adventure. But he never
followed it. He was assassinated; it is believed at the instigation
of his queen Olympias, Alexander’s mother. She was jealous
because Philip had mar-
ried a second wife.
But Philip had taken
unusual pains with his
son’s education. He
had not only secured
Aristotle, the greatest
philosopher in the
world, as this boy’s
tutor, but he had shared
his ideas with him and
thrust military experi-
ence upon him. At
Cheronia Alexander,
who was then only
eighteen years old, had
been in command of the
cavalry. And so it was
possible for this young
man, who was still only
twenty years old at the
time of his accession, to
take up his father’s task
a i ae ac eg a at once and to proceed
BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT successfully with the
(As in the British Museum) °
Persian adventure.
In 334 B.c. — for two years were needed to establish and confirm
his position in Macedonia and Greece
he crossed into Asia, de-
feated a not very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the
Granicus and captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept
along the sea-coast. It was necessary for him to reduce and garrison
all the coast towns as he advanced because the Persians had control
of the fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of the sea,The Empire of Alexander the Great 147
Had he left a hostile port in his rear the Persians might have landed
forces to raid his communications and cut him off. At Issus
(333 B.c.) he met and smashed a vast conglomerate host under )
Darius III. Like the host of Xerxes that had crossed the Darda-
nelles a century and a half before, it was an incoherent accumula-
tion of contingents and it was encumbered with a multitude of court
officials, the harem of Darius and many camp followers. Sidon
surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted obstinately. Finally
that great city was stormed and plundered and destroyed. Gaza
ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS
From the Pompeian Mosaic
Alexander charges in on the left, Darius is in the chariot to the right
also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 B.c. the conqueror
entered Egypt and took over its rule from the
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,
accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the |
trade of the Phoenician cities was diverted. The Phoenicians of the |
western Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history — and as
immediately the Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading
cities created by Alexander appear.
In 331 B.c. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as |
Thothmes and Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he “ad
marched by way of Tyre. At Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, j
Oo
Persians.ee ek leer tdci
A Short History of the World
which was al-
ready a forgot-
ten city, he met
Dariws ard
fought the deci-
sive battle of
the war: he
Persian chariot
charge failed, a
Macedonian
cavalry charge
broke up the
great composite
host and_ the
phalanx com-
pleted the vic-
tory;. Dariurs
led the retreat.
He made no
further attempt
to resist the in-
vader but fled
aN , northward into
THE APOLLO BELVEDERE veg = the country, soi
(In the Vatican Museum) the Medes.
Alexander
marched on to Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then
to Susa and Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt
down the palace of Darius, the king of kings.
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central
Asia, going to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he
turned northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at
dawn dying in his chariot, having been murdered by his own people.
He was still living when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexan-
der came up to find him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea,
he went up into the mountains of western Turkestan, he came down
by Herat (which he founded) and Cabul and the Khyber Pass intoThe Empire of Alexander the Great 140
India. He fought a great battle on the Indus with an Indian king,
Porus, and here the Macedonian troops met elephants for the first
time and defeated them. Finally he built himself ships, sailed down
to the mouth of the Indus, and marched back by the coast of Be-
luchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.c. after an absence of six
years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize this vast
empire he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects. He
assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this roused
the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble
with them. He arranged a number of marriages between these
Macedonian officers and Persian and Babylonian women: the
“Marriage of the East and West.” He never lived to effect the
consolidation he had planned. A fever seized him after a drinking
bout in Babylon and he died in 323 B.c.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his gen-
erals, Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the
Indus to Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus
secured Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable,
passing under the control of a succession of local adventurers. Bar-
barian raids began from the north and grew in scope and intensity.
Until at last, as we shall tell, a new power, the power of the Roman
republic, came out of the west to subjugate one fragment after an-
other and weld them together into a new and more enduring empire.XXOVit
i Tue MuseuM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA
EFORE the time of Alexander Greeks had already been
Hi spreading as merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers,
over most of the Persian dominions. In the dynastic dis-
putes that followed the death of Xerxes, a band of ten thousand
Greek mercenaries played a part under the leadership of Xenophon.
Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon is described in his
Retreat of the Ten Thousand, one of the first war stories that was ever
written by a general in command. But the conquests of Alexander
and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate generals,
greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the
Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of
this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia
and in north-west India. Their influence upon the development of
Indian art was profound.
For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of
art and culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 a.p., that is to
| say for nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the intellec-
a tual activity of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean
| to Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander had founded.
Here the Macedonian general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a
court that spoke Greek. He had become an intimate of Alexander
before he became king, and he was deeply saturated with the ideas
of Aristotle. He set himself, with great energy and capacity, to
organize knowledge and investigation. He also wrote a history of
Alexander’s campaigns which, unhappily, is lost to the world.
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance
the enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make
a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in
Alexandria which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum
150The Museum and Library at Alexandria 151
of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific work done
at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who
measured the size of the earth and came within fifty miles of its true
diameter, Apollonius who wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus who
made the first star map and catalogue, and Hero who devised the
first steam engine are among the greater stars of an extraordinary
constellation of scientific pioneers. Archimedes came from Syra-
cuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent correspondent of
the Museum. Herophilus was one of the greatest of Greek anato-
mists, and is said to have practised vivisection.
For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptol-
emy II there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alex-
andria as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century
ap. But it did not continue. There may have been several causes
of this decline. Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffty
suggested, was the fact that the Museum was a ~ royal” college and
all its professors and fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh.
This was all very well when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and
friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on
they became Egyptianized, they fell under the sway of Egyptian
priests and Egyptian religious developments, they ceased to follow
the work that was done, and their control stifled the spirit of en-
quiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its
first century of activity.
Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize
the finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclo-
peedic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was
not simply a storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling
organization. A great army of copyists was set to work perpetually
multiplying copies of books.
Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual
process in which we live to-day; here we have the systematic gath-
ering and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Mu-
seum and Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of
mankind. It is the true beginning of Modern History.
Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on
under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that152 A Short History of the World
separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader
and the artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in
abundance in those days, but they were not in mental contact with
the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most beautifully
coloured beads and phials and so forth, but he never made a Flor-
entine flask or a lens.
Clear glass does not
seem to have inter-
ested him. The
metal worker made
weapons and jewel-
lery but he never
made a chemical bal-
ance. The philoso-
pher speculated loft-
ily about atoms and
the nature of things,
but he had no prac-
tical experience of
enamels and pig-
ments and _ philters
and so forth. He
was not interested
in substances. So
Alexandria in its
brief day of oppor-
tunity produced no
microscopes and no
ARISTOTLE chemistry. And
From Herculaneum, probably Fourth Century B.c. though Hero in-
vented a steam en-
gine it was never set either to pump or drive a boat or do any use-
ful thing. There were few practical applications of science except
in the realm of medicine, and the progress of science was not
stimulated and sustained by the interest and excitement of prac-
tical applications. There was nothing to keep the work going
therefore when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I and Ptol-The Museum and Library at Alexandria
emy ITI was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum went on rec-
ord in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of scientific
curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of mankind.
Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making.
That ancient world had no paper made in
definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper was a
Chinese invention and it did not reach
the western world until the ninth century
A.D. The only book materials were parch-
ment and strips of the papyrus reed joined
edge to edge. These strips were kept on
rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to
and fro and read, and very inconvenient
for reference. It was these things that pre-
vented the development of paged and printed
books. Print’ng itself was known in the
world it would seem as early as the Old
Stone Age; there were seals in ancient
Sumeria; but without abundant paper there
was little advantage in printing books, an
improvement that may further have been
resisted by trades unionism on the part of
the copyists employed. Alexandria produced
abundant books but not cheap books, and it
never spread knowledge into the population
of the ancient world below the level of a
wealthy and influential class.
So it was that this blaze of intellectual
enterprise never reached beyond a small
circle of people in touch with the group of
philosophers collected by the first two
Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark
TE
STATUETTE OF MAITREYA:
THE BUDDHA TO COME
A Greco-Buddhist sculpture of
the Third Century A.D.
(From Malakand, N. W. Province,
now in the ndia Museum)
lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the
blaze may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it 1s unseen.
The rest of the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of
scientific knowledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether
had been sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even uponi 154 A Short History of the World
Alexandria. Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed
| that Aristotle had sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to
germinate. In a few centuries it had become that widespread
srowth of knowledge and clear ideas that is now changing the whole
of human life.
Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity
in the third century B.c. There were many other cities that dis-
played a brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating frag-
ments of the brief empire of Alexander. ‘There was, for example,
€ _~
jpn
7
India Mus.
THE DEATH OF BUDDHA
am Greco-Buddhist carving from Sivat Valley, N. W. Province, probably a.p. 350
the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science
flourished for two centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor,
which also had a great library. But this brilliant Hellenic world
was now stricken by invasion from the north. New Nordic bar-
barians, the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks that had
once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians
and Macedonians. ‘They raided, shattered and destroyed. And
in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out of Italy,
the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half of the
vast realm of Darius and Alexander. ‘They were an able but un-
imaginative people, preferring law and profit to either science or art.The Museum and Library at Alexandria
T55
New invaders were also coming down out of central Asia to shatter
and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the western world
again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of mounted
bowmen, who treated the Greeco-Persian empire of Persepolis and
Susa in the third century B.c. in much the same fashion that the
Medes and Persians had treated it in the seventh and sixth. And
there were now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the north-
‘ast, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and Aryan-speaking
but yellow-skinned and black-haired and with a Mongolian speech.
But of these latter people we shall tell more in a subsequent chapter.DOXCVIT
Tur Lire or GAUTAMA BUDDHA
UT now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of
a great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the re-
igious thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama
Buddha, who taught his disciples at Benares in India about the
same time that Isaiah was prophesying among the Jews in Babylon
and Heraclitus was carrying on his speculative enquiries into the
nature of things at Ephesus. All these men were in the world at
the same time, in the sixth century B.c. — unaware of one another.
This sixth century B.c. was indeed one of the most remarkable
in all history. Everywhere — for as we shall tel! it was also the case
in China — men’s minds were displaying a new boldness. Every-
where they were waking up out of the traditions of kingships and
priests and blood sacrifices and asking the most penetrating ques-
tions. It is as if the race had reached a stage of adolescence — after
a childhood of twenty thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen
perhaps about 2000 B.c., an Aryan-speaking people came down
from the north-west into India either in one invasion or in a series
of invasions; and was able to spread its language and traditions
over most of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was
the Sanskrit. They found a brunette people with a more elaborate
civilization and less vigour of will, in possession of the country of
the Indus and Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with
their predecessors as freely as did the Greeks and Persians. They
remained aloof. When the past of India becomes dimly visible to
the historian, Indian society is already stratified into’ several layers,
with a variable number of sub-divisions, which do not eat together
nor intermarry nor associate freely. And throughout history this
150stratification
The Life of Gautama Buddha 157
into castes continues. This makes the Indian popula-
tion something different from the simple, freely inter-breeding
European or
communities.
Siddhatth
ruled a small
at nineteen tc
Mongolian communities. It is really a community of
a Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which
district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married
» a beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went
about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and irrigated rice-
fields. And it was amidst this life that a great discontent fell upon
him. It was
the unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment.
He felt that the existence he was leading was not the reality of life,
but a holiday
a holiday that had gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the un-
satisfactorine
ss of all happiness, descended upon the mind of Gau-
tama. While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering
ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men
lived under s
evere rules, spending much time in meditation and in
religious discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some deeper
reality in life, and a passionate desire to do likewise took possession
of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when
the news was brought to him that his wife had been delivered
of his first-born son. ‘‘This is another tie to break,” said Gau-
tama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to cele-
brate the birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in
a great agony of spirit, “like a man who is told that his house is on
fire.’ He resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith. He
went softly t
the light of a
o the threshold of his wife’s chamber, and saw her by
little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers,
with his infant son in her arms. He felt a great craving to take up
the child in one first and last embrace before he departed, but the
fear of waking his wife prevented him, and at last he turned away
and went ou
t into the bright Indian moonshine and mounted his
horse and rode off into the world.
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped out-Indta Mus,
TIBETAN BUDDHA
Gilt Brass Casting in India Museum, showing Gautama Buddha in the “‘earth
S ° > ; ©
witness’ attitude
Y
IseThe Life of Gautama Buddha 150
side the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river.
There he cut off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his
ornaments and sent them and his horse and sword back to his house.
Going on he presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with
him, and so having divested himself of all worldly entanglements he
was free to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way south-
ward to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur of the Vind-
hya Mountains. There lived a number of wise men in a warren of
caves, going into the town for their simple supplies and imparting
their knowledge by word of mouth to such as cared to come to them.
Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his age. But
his acute intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
The Indian
mind has always
been disposed to
believe that
power and know-
ledge may be
obtained by ex-
treme asceti-
cism, by fasting,
sleeplessness,
and self-tor-
ment, and these
ideas Gautama
now put to the
test. He betook
himself with five
disciple com-
panions to the
jungle and there
he gave himself
up to fasting and
terrible pen-
ances. His fame
. +f ce 7 » » s ore 25 ag
spread, “‘like the A BURMESE BUDDHA
sound of a great Marble Figure from Mandalay, eighteenth century work, now in the India MuseumA Short History of the World
| | bell hung in the canopy of
| ae. the skies.””’ But it brought
| | 7 him no sense of truth
achieved. One day he was
walking up and down, try-
ing to think in spite of his
enfeebled state. Suddenly
he fell unconscious. When
he recovered, the prepos-
terousness of these semi-
magical ways to wisdom
was plain to him.
He horrified his com-
mano panions by demanding or-
ERE
dinary food and refusing to
continue his mortifications.
He had realized that what-
ever truth a man may reach
is reached best by a nour-
THE DHAMEKH TOWER
inte oe en ished brain in a_ healthy
eee IPR chs the Tad Musson body. Such a conception
was absolutely foreign to
the ideas of the land and age. His disciples deserted him, and went
off in a melancholy state to Benares. Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it
makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the
gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumina-
tion, it realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama. He had
seated himself under a great tree by the side of a river to eat, when
this sense of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw
life plam. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound
thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back
his lost disciples to his new teaching. In the King’s Deer Park at
Benares they built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to
which came many who were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a for-The Life of Gautama Buddha 161
tunate young man, ““Why am I not completely happy?” It was
an introspective question. It was a question very different in
quality from the frank and self-forgetful externalized curiosity with
which Thales and Heraclitus were attacking the problems of the
universe, or the equally self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation
that the culminating prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew
mind. The Indian teacher did not forget self, he concentrated upon
self and sought to destroy it. All suffering, he taught, was due to
the greedy desires of the individual. Until man has conquered his
personal cravings his life is trouble and his end sorrow. There were
three principal forms that the craving for life took and they were all
evil. The first was the desire of the appetites, greed and all forms of
sensuousness, the second was the desire for a personal and egotistic
immortality, the third was the craving for personal success, worldli-
ness, avarice and the like. All these forms of desire had to be over-
come to escape from the distresses and chagrins of life. When they
were overcome, when self had vanished altogether, then serenity of
soul, Nirvana, the highest good was attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek in-
junction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew
command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a
teaching much beyond the understanding of even Gautama’s im-
mediate disciples, and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal
influence was withdrawn it became corrupted and coarsened. ‘There
was a widespread belief in India at that time that at long intervals
Wisdom came to earth and was incarnate in some chosen person who
was known as the Buddha. Gautama’s disciples declared that he
was a Buddha, the latest of the Buddhas, though there is no evidence
that he himself ever accepted the title. Before he was well dead,
a cycle of fantastic legends began to be woven about him. The
human heart has always preferred a wonder story to a moral effort,
and Gautama Buddha became very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana
was too high and subtle for most men’s imaginations, if the myth-
making impulse in the race was too strong for the simple facts of
Gautama’s life, they could at least grasp something of the intention162 A Short History of the World
of what Gautama called the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Nobk
Path in life. In this there was an insistence upon mental upright
ness, upon right aims and speech, right conduct and honest liveli-
hood. There was a quickening of the conscience and an app sal to
generous and self-forgetful ends.POX
Kine ASOKA
OR some generations after the death of Gautama, these high
and noble Buddhist teachings, this first plain teaching that
the highest good for man is the subjugation of self, made
comparatively little headway in the world. Then they conquered
the imagination of one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever
seen.
We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great came
down into India and fought with Porus upon the Indus. It is
related by the Greek historians that a certain Chandragupta Maurya
came into Alexander’s camp and tried to persuade him to go on to
the Ganges and conquer all India. Alexander could not do this
because of the refusal of his Macedonians to go further into what was
for them an unknown world, and later on (321 B.c.) Chandragupta
was able to secure the help of various hill tribes and realize his dream
without Greek help. He built up an empire in North India and was
presently (303 B.c.) able to attack Seleucus I in the Punjab and
drive the last vestige of Greek power out of India. His son extended
this new empire. His grandson, Asoka, the monarch of whom we now
have to tell, found himself in 264 b.c. ruling from Afghanistan to
Madras.
Asoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his father
and grandfather and complete the conquest of the Indian peninsula.
He invaded Kalinga (255 8B.c.),a country on the east coast of Madras,
he was successful in his military operations and — alone among con-
querors — he was so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of war that
he renounced it. He would have no more of it. He adopted the
peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that henceforth his
conquests should be the conquests of religion.
His reign for eight-and-twenty years was one of the brightest
interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He organized a
103164 A Short History of the World
great digging of wells in India and the planting of trees for shade.
He founded hospitals and public gardens and gardens for the growing
of medicinal herbs. He created a ministry for the care of the
A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)
(From the statue in the British Museum)
aborigines and subject races of India. He made provision for the
education of women. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist
teaching orders, and tried to stimulate them to a better and more
energetic criticism of their own accumulated literature. For
corruptions and superstitious accretions had accumulated veryKing Asoka
TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA
speedily upon the pure and simple teaching of the great Indian
master. Missionaries went from Asoka to Kashmir, to Persia, to
Ceylon and Alexandria.
Such was Asoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance of his
age. He left no prince and no organization of men to carry on his
work, and within a century of his death the great days of his reign
had become a glorious memory in a shattered and decaying India.
The priestly caste of the Brahmins, the highest and most privileged
caste in the Indian social body, has always been opposed to the frank
and open teaching of Buddha. Gradually they undermined the
Buddhist influence in the land. The old monstrous gods, the
innumerable cults of Hinduism, resumed their sway. Caste became
india Mus.
ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUTTHE PILLAR OF LIONS
Capital of the Pillar (column lying on side) erected in Deer Park in the time
of Asoka, where Buddha preached his first sermon
(From a print in the India Museum)
more rigorous and complicated. For long centuries Buddhism and
Brahminism flourished side by side, and then slowly Buddhism
decayed and Brahminism in a multitude of forms replaced it. But
beyond the confines of India and the realms of caste Buddhism
spread — until it had won China and Siam and Burma and Japan,
countries in which it is predominant to this day.OK
ConFrucius AND Lao TSE
E have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and
Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which
began the adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.c,
In this history thus far we have told very little of the early story
of China. At present that early history is still very obscure, and
we look to Chinese explorers and archeologists in the new China
that is now arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the Euro-
pean past has been worked out during the last century. Very long
ago the first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the great river
valleys out of the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like
Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and
they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings offered
the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities must have been
very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six or seven thousand
years ago and very like the Maya life of Central America a thousand
years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal
sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture writing
was growing up long before a thousand years B.c.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western
Asia were in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of
the north, so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud
of nomadic peoples on their northern borders. There was a number
of tribes akin in language and ways of living, who are spoken of in
history in succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and
Tartars. They changed and divided and combined and re-combined,
just as the Nordic peoples in north Europe and central Asia changed
and varied in name rather than in nature. These Mongolian
nomads had horses earlier than the Nordic peoples, and it may
107168 A Short History of the World
be that in the region of the Altai Mountains they made an
independent discovery of iron somewhen after 1000 B.c. And
just as in the western case so ever and again these eastern nomads
would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the con-
querors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and
civilized region.
[t is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not
Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of Europe
and western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that
the earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization and of a
piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civiliza-
tiors, and that when the first recorded history of China began there
had already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we find
that by 1750 B.c. China was already a vast system of little kingdoms
and city states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying
more or less regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great
priest emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” The “Shang” dynasty
came to an end in 1125 B.c. A “Chow” dynasty succeeded “Shang,”
and maintained China in a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka
in India and of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Gradually China went to
pieces during that long “Chow” period. Hunnish peoples came
down and set up principalities; local rulers discontinued their tribute
and became independent. There was in the sixth century B.c.,
says one Chinese authority, five or six thousand practically inde-
pendent states in China. It was what the Chinese call in their
records an ““Age of Confusion.”
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intel-
lectual activity and with the existence of many local centres of art
and civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we
shall find that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Per-
gamum and her Macedonia. At present we must be vague and
brief about this period of Chinese division simply because our
knowledge is not sufficient for us to frame a coherent and con-
secutive story.
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in
shattered and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there
were philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these casesCONFUCIUS
Copy of stone carving in the Temple of Confucius at K’iu Fu
(From the records of the Archeological Mission to North China (Chavannes)170 A Short History of the World
insecurity and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the better sort
of mind. Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin and some official
importance in a small state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood
to the Greek impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering
and teaching Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China
distressed him profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better
government and a better life, and travelled from state to state seek-
ing a prince who would carry out his legislative and educational
ideas. He never found his prince; he found a prince, but court
intrigues undermined the influence of the teacher and finally defeated
his reforming proposals. It is interesting to note that a century
and a half later the Greek philosopher Plato also sought a prince,
and was for a time adviser to the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syra-
cuse In Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. “No intelligent ruler
arises to take me as his master,”’ he said, ““and my time has come to
die.’ But his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his
declining and hopeless years, and it became a great formative in-
fluence with the Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese
call the Three Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and
of Lao Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble
or aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as
much as Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness
and the Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteous-
ness. He was the most public-minded of all great teachers. He
was supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world,
and he wanted to make men noble in order to bring about a noble
world. He sought’to regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent;
to provide sound rules for every occasion in life. A polite, public-
spirited gentleman, rather sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he
found already developing in the northern Chinese world and one to
which he gave a permanent form.
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of
the imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical
and vague and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have
preached a stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of theSake
~~ series ae
ee a ay
i ee
be pall GTS odes 5
pe: 2 Sami '
, ae Age hh
Inderwood
Photo: Underwood & L
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
As it crosses the mountains in Manchuria
171a
EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL
Inscribed in archaic characters: “made for use by the elder of Hing village
(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)
172 A Short History of the World
world and a return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left
| writings very contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in
_ riddles. After his death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama
| Buddha, were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the
most complex and
extraordinary _ob-
servances and super-
stitious ideas grafted
upon them. In
China just as in
India primordial
ideas of magic and
monstrous legends
out of the childish
past of our race
struggled against
the new thinking in
the world and _ suc-
ceeded in plastering
it over with gro-
tesque, irrational
and antiquated ob-
servances. Both
Buddhism and Tao-
ism (which ascribes
itself largely to Lao
Tse) as one finds
them in China now,
arereligions of monk,
temple, priest and
offering of a type as
ancient in form, if
not in thought, as
the _ sacrificial __re-
ligions of ancient
Sumeria and Egypt.
But the teachingConfucius and Lao Tse 173
of Confucius was not so overlaid because it was limited and plain
and straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confu-
cian in thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China,
became Taoist. Since those days a conflict has always been tracea-
ble in Chinese affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north
and the spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and
Nankin, between the official-minded, upright and conservative
north, and the sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their
worst stage in the sixth century B.c. The Chow dynasty was so
enfeebled and so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court
and retired into private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in
those days, Ts’i and Ts’in, both northern powers, and Ch’u, which
was an aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last
Ts’i and Ts’in formed an alliance, subdued Ch’u and imposed a gen-
eral treaty of disarmament and peace in China. The power of
Ts’in became predominant. Finally about the time of Asoka in
India the Ts’in monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels of the
Chow emperor and took over his sacrificial duties. His son, Shi-
Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.c., emperor in 220 B.c.), is called in the
Chinese Chronicles ‘‘the First Universal Emperor.”
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-
six years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the
beginning of a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese
people. He fought vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from
the northern deserts, and he began that immense work, the Great
Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions.OO
Rome Comes into History
HE reader will note a general similarity in the history of all
these civilizations in spite of the effectual separation caused
by the great barriers of the Indian north-west frontier and
of the mountain masses of Central Asia and further India. First for
thousands of years the heliolithic culture spread over all the warm
and fertile river valleys of the old world and developed a temple
system and priest rulers about its sacrificial traditions. Apparently
its first makers were always those brunette peoples we have spoken
of as the central race of mankind. Then the nomads came in from
the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations and superposed
their own characteristics and often their own language on the primi-
tive civilization. They subjugated and stimulated it, and were
stimulated to fresh developments and made it here one thing and
here another. In Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and then the
Semite, and at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the Greeks
who supplied the ferment; over the region of the Aigean peoples it
was the Greeks; in India it was the Aryan-speakers; in Egypt there
was a thinner infusion of conquerors into a more intensely saturated
priestly civilization; in China, the Hun conquered and was absorbed
and was followed by fresh Huns. China was Mongolized just as
Greece and North India were Aryanized and Mesopotamia Semitized
and Aryanized. Everywhere the nomads destroyed much, but
everywhere they brought in a new spirit of free enquiry and moral
innovation. ‘They questioned the beliefs of immemorial ages.
They let daylight into the temples. They set up kings who were
neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among their -aptains and
companions.
In the centuries following the sixth century B.c. we find every-
where a great breaking down of ancient traditions and a new spirit
174Gi ,
Photo: Anderaoe
THE DYING GAUL
ig a Gaul stabbing himself, after
YY e ~- e . °
‘ihe statue in the National Museum, Rome, depict
f his enemies
killing his wife, in the presence 0
175176 A Short History of the World
of moral and intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit never more to be
altogether stilled in the great progressive movement of mankind.
We find reading and writing becoming common and accessible
accomplishments among the ruling and prosperous minority; they
were no longer the jealously guarded secret of the priests. Travel
is increasing and transport growing easier by reason of horses and
roads. A new and easy device to facilitate trade has been found in
coined money.
Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the ex-
treme east of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean.
Here we have to note the appearance of a city which was destined to
play at last a very great part indeed in human affairs, Rome.
Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It
was before 1000 B.c. a land of mountain and forest and thinly popu-
lated. Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula and
formed little towns and cities, and the southern extremity was
studded with Greek settlements. The noble ruins of Pzstum pre-
serve for us to this day something of the dignity and splendour of
these early Greek establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably
akin to the A‘gean peoples, the Etruscans, had established them-
selves in the central part of the peninsula. They had reversed the
usual process by subjugating various Aryan tribes. Rome, when it
comes into the light of history, is a little trading city at a ford on the
Tiber, with a Latin-speaking population ruled over by Etruscan
kings. The old chronologies gave 753 B.c. as the date of the found-
ing of Rome, half a century later than the founding of the great
Phoenician city of Carthage and twenty-three years after the first
Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier date than 753 B.c.
have, however, been excavated in the Roman Forum.
In that red-letter century, the sixth century B.c., the Etruscan
kings were expelled (510 B.c.) and Rome became an aristocratic
republic with a lordly class of “‘patrician”’ families dominating a
commonalty of “plebeians.” Except that it spoke Latin it was not
unlike many aristocratic Greek republics.
For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the story of
a long and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the govern-
ment on the part of the plebeians. It would not be difficult to findRome Comes into History 17
“I
Greek parallels to this conflict, which the Greeks would have called
a conflict of aristocracy with democracy. In the end the plebeians
broke down most of the exclusive barriers of the old families and
established a working equality with them. They destroyed the old
exclusiveness, and made it possible and acceptable for Rome to
extend her citizenship by the inclusion of more and more “out-
A tens
Photo: Underwood & Underwood
REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE
siders.” For while she still struggled at home, she was extending
her power abroad.
The extension of Roman power began in the fifth century B.c.
Until that time they had waged war, and generally unsuccessful
war, with the Etruscans. There was an Etruscan fort, Veii, only <
few miles from Rome which the Romans had never been able to cap-
ture. In 474 B.c., however, a great misfortune came to the Etrus-
cans. Their fleet was destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily.178 A Short History of the World
At the same time a wave of Nordic invaders came down upon them
from the north, the Gauls. Caught between Roman and Gaul, the
‘truscans fell— and disappear from history. Veii was captured by
the Romans. The Gauls came through to Rome and sacked the
city (390 B.c.) but could not capture the Capitol. An attempted
night surprise was betrayed by the cackling of some geese, and fi-
nally the invaders were bought off and retired to the north of Italy
again.
The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than weakened
Rome. The Romans conquered and assimilated the Etruscans,
and extended their power over all central Italy from the Arno to
Naples. To this they had reached within a few years of 300 B.c.
Their conquests in Italy were going on simultaneously with the
growth of Philip’s power in Macedonia and Greece, and the tre-
mendous raid of Alexander to Egypt and the Indus. The Romans
had become notable people in the civilized world to the east of them
by the break-up of Alexander’s empire.
To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls; to the south
of them were the Greek settlements of Magna Grecia, that is to say
of Sicily and of the toe and heel of Italy. The Gauls were a hardy,
warlike people and the Romans held that boundary by a line of
forts and fortified settlements. The Greek cities in the south headed
by Tarentum (now Taranto) and by Syracuse in Sicily, did not so
much threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about for some
help against these new conquerors.
We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to pieces
and was divided among his generals and companions. Among these
adventurers was a kinsman of Alexander’s named Pyrrhus, who
estabiished himself in Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea over
against the heel of Italy. It was his ambition to play the part of
Philip of Macedonia to Magna Grecia, and to become protector
and master-general of Tarentum, Syracuse and the rest of that part
of the world. He had what was then a very efficient modern army;
he had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from Thessaly — which was now
quite as good as the original Macedonian cavalry — and twenty fight-
ing elephants; he invaded Italy and routed the Romans in two con-
siderable battles, Heraclea (280 B.c.) and Ausculum (279 B.c.), andRome Comes into History 179
having driven them north, he turned his attention to the subjuga-
tion of Sicily.
But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than
were the Romans at that time, the Phoenician trading city of Car-
thage, which was probably then the greatest city in the world. Sicily
was too near Carthage for a new Alexander to be welcome there,
and Carthage was mindful of the fate that had befallen her mother
city Tyre half a century before. So she sent a fleet to encourage or
compel Rome to continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas
communications of Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus found himself freshly as-
sailed by the Romans, and suffered a disastrous repulse in an attack
he had made upon their camp at Beneventum between Naples and
Rome.
And suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The
Gauls were raiding south. But this time they were not raiding down
into Italy; the Roman frontier, fortified and guarded, had become
too formidable for them. They were raiding down through Illyria
(which is now Serbia and Albania) to Macedonia and Epirus. Re-
pulsed by the Romans, endangered at sea by the Carthaginians, and
threatened at home by the Gauls, Pyrrhus abandoned his dream of
conquest and went home (275 B.c.), and the power of Rome was
extended to the Straits of Messina.
On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of Messina,
and this presently fell into the hands of a gang of pirates. The
Carthaginians, who were already practically overlords of Sicily and
allies of Syracuse, suppressed these pirates (270 B.c.) and put in a
Carthaginian garrison there. The pirates appealed to Rome and
Rome listened to their complaint. And so across the Straits of Mes-
sina the great trading power of Carthage and this new conquering
people, the Romans, found themselves in antagonism, face to face.KOON T
RomME AND CARTHAGE
T was in 264 B.c. that the great struggle between Rome and Car-
thage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was begin-
ning his reign in Behar and Shi-Hwang-ti was a little child, the
Museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the
barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from
Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated
by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind
heard only vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went
on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the
western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic
power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world.
Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and
Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and
Jew. Our history now is coming to events whose consequences and
distorted traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality
in, and exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the
conflicts and controversies of to-day.
The First Punic War began in 264 B.c. about the pirates of Mes-
sina. It developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily
except the dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advan-
tage of the sea was at first with the Carthaginians. They had great
fighting ships of what was hitherto an unheard-of size, quinqueremes,
galleys with five banks of oars and a huge ram. At the battle of
Salamis, two centuries before, the leading battleships had only been
triremes with three banks. But the Romans, with extraordinary
energy and in spite of the fact that they had little naval experience,
set themselves to outbuild the Carthaginians. They manned the
new havy they created chiefly with Greek seamen, and they invented
180Rome and Carthage 181
grappling and boarding to make up for the superior seamanship of
the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to ram or shear the
oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him and the Roman
soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Myle (260 B.c.) and at Ecnomus
7 ms. Paolo cancel
HANNIBAL
Bust in the National Museum at Naples
(256 B.c.) the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They re-
pulsed a Roman landing near Carthage but were badly beaten at
Palermo, losing one hundred and four elephants there—to grace
such a triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had never
seen before. But after that came two Roman defeats and then a
Roman recovery. The last naval forces of Carthage were defeated182 A Short History of the World
by a last Roman effort at the battle of the Aigatian Isles (241 B.C.)
and Carthage sued for peace. All Sicily except the dominions of
Hiero, king of Syracuse, was ceded to the Romans.
For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both
had trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again,
threatened Rome — which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices
to the Gods! — and were routed at Telamon. Rome pushed forward
to the Alps, and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic
coast to Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and
from revolts in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less recu-
perative power. Finally, an act of intolerable aggression, Rome
seized and annexed the two revolting islands.
Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river
Ebro. To that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any cross-
ing of the Ebro by the Carthaginians was to be considered an act
of war against the Romans. At last in 218 B.c. the Carthaginians,
provoked by new Roman aggressions, did cross this river under a
young general named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant com-
manders in the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain
over the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls against the Romans, and
carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for fifteen years. He
inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at Lake Trasimere
and at Cann, and throughout all his Italian campaigns no Roman
army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army
had landed at Marseilles and cut his communications with Spa‘n;
he had no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally
the Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at
home, were forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa,
a Roman army crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experienced his
first defeat under its walls at the battle of Zama (202 B.c.) at the
hands of Scipio Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended
this Second Punic War. Carthage capitulated; she surrendered
Spain and her war fleet; she paid an enormous indemnity and
agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the Romans. But
Hannibal escaped ‘and fled to Asia where later, being in danger of
falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he took poison and
died.Rome and Carthage 183
For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at
peace. And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused
and divided Greece, invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus
III, the Seleucid monarch, at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt,
still under the Ptolemies, and Pergamum and most of the small
states of Asia Minor into “Allies,” or, as we should call them now,
‘“protected states.”
Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly
regaining something of her former prosperity. Her recovery revived
the hate and suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the
most shallow and artificial of quarrels (149 B.c.), she made an
obstinate and bitter resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed
(146 B.c.). The street fighting, or massacre, lasted six days; it
was extraordinarily bloody, and when the citadel capitulated only
about fifty thousand of the Carthaginian population remained alive
out of a quarter of a million. They were sold into slavery, and the
city was burnt and elaborately destroyed. The blackened ruins
were ploughed and sown as a sort of ceremonial effacement.
So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and
cities that had flourished in the world five centuries before only one
little country remained free under native rulers. This was Judea,
which had liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under the rule
The EXTENT of the ROMAN POWER & its BLLIANE ES ‘about 150 B.C
[ie., on the eve of the
Re | Thaxtl Punic War. J
ee 6
Ss AL ie
Sram 2 nk
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AS IT APPEARS TO-DAY
200Man’s Life under Early Roman Empire 207
tives were not so abundant for one thing, and slaves were dearer.
And slave-owners began to realize that the profit and comfort they
got from their slaves increased with the self-respect of these unfor-
tunates. But also the moral tone of the community was rising, and
a sense of justice was becoming effective. The higher mentality of
Greece was qualifying the old Roman harshness. Restrictions upon
cruelty were made, a master might no longer sell his slave to fight
beasts, a slave was given property rights in what was called his
peculium, slaves were paid wages as an encouragement and stimulus,
a form of slave marriage was recognized. Very many forms of agri-
culture do not lend themselves to gang working, or require gang
workers only at certain seasons. In regions where such conditions
prevailed the slave presently became a serf, paying his owner part
of his produce or working for him at certain seasons.
When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin and
Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two centuries A.D. was a
slave state and how small was the minority who had any pride or
freedom in their lives, we lay our hands on the clues to its decay and
collapse. There was little of what we should call family life, few
homes of temperate living and active thought and study; schools
and colleges were few and far between. The free will and the free
mind were nowhere to be found. The great roads, the ruins of
splendid buildings, the tradition of law and power it left for the as-
tonishment of succeeding generations must not conceal from us that
all its outer splendour was built upon thwarted wills, stifled intelli-
gence, and crippled and perverted desires. And even the minority
who lorded it over that wide realm of subjugation and of restraint
and forced labour were uneasy and unhappy in their souls; art and
literature, science and philosophy, which are the fruits of free and
happy minds, waned in that atmosphere. There was much copy-
ing and imitation, an abundance of artistic artificers, much slavish
pedantry among the servile men of learning, but the whole Roman
empire in four centuries produced nothing to set beside the bold
and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of
Athens during its one century of greatness. Athens decayed under
the Roman sceptre. The science of Alexandria decayed. The spirit
of man, it seemed, was decaying in those days.ROO
Reticious DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE
HE soul of man under that Latin and Greek empire of the
first two centuries of the Christian era was a worried and
frustrated soul. Compulsion and cruelty reigned; there
were pride and display but little honour; little serenity or steadfast
happiness. The unfortunate were despised and wretched; the
fortunate were insecure and feverishly eager for gratifications. In
a great number of cities life centred on the red excitement of the
arena, where men and beasts fought and were tormented and slain.
Amphitheatres are the most characteristic of Roman ruins. Life
went on in that key. The uneasiness of men’s hearts manifested it-
self in profound religious unrest.
From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon the
ancient civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods of the tem-
ples and priesthoods should suffer great adaptations or disappear.
In the course of hundreds of generations the agricultural peoples of
the brunette civilizations had shaped their lives and thoughts to the
temple-centred life. Observances and the fear of disturbed routines,
sacrifices and mysteries, dominated their minds. Their gods seem
monstrous and illogical to our modern minds because we belong to
an Aryanized world, but to these older peoples these deities had the
immediate conviction and vividness of things seen in an intense
dream. The conquest of one city state by another in Sumeria or
early Egypt meant a change or a renaming of gods or goddesses,
but left the shape and spirit of the worship intact. There was no
change in its general character. The figures in the dream changed,
but the dream went on and it was the same sort of dream. And the
early Semitic conquerors were sufficiently akin in spirit to the Sume-
rians to take over the religion of the Mesopotamian civilization they
subjugated without any profound alteration. Egypt was never
208Religious Developments 200
indeed subjugated to the extent of a religious revolution. Under
the Ptolemies and under the Cesars, her temples and altars and
priesthoods remained essentially Egyptian.
So long as conquests went on between people of similar social
and religious habits it was possible to get over the clash between the
god of this temple and region and the god of that by a process of
grouping or assimilation. If the two gods were alike in character
they were identified. It was really the same god under another
name, said the priests and the people. This fusion of gods is called
theocrasia; and the age of the great conquests of the thousand
years B.C. was an age of theocrasia. Over wide areas the local gods
were displaced by, or rather they were swallowed up in, a general
god. So that when at last Hebrew prophets in Babylon proclaimed
one God of Righteousness in all the earth men’s minds were fully
prepared for that idea.
But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an assimilation,
and then they were grouped together in some plausible relationship.
A female god — and the Hgean world before the coming of the Greek
was much addicted to Mother Gods— would be married to a male
god, and an animal god or a star god would be humanized and the
animal or astronomical aspect, the serpent or the sun or the star,
made into an ornament orasymbol. Or the god of a defeated people
would become a malignant antagonist to the brighter gods. The
history of theology is full of such adaptations, compromises and
rationalizations of once local gods.
As Egypt developed from city states into one united kingdom
there was much of this theocrasia. The chief god so to speak was
Osiris, a sacrificial harvest god of whom Pharaoh was supposed to
be the earthly incarnation. Osiris was represented as repeatedly
dying and rising again; he was not only the seed and the harvest
but also by a natural extension of thought the means of human
immortality. Among his symbols was the wide-winged scarabeus
beetle which buries its eggs to rise again, and also the effulgent sun
which sets to rise. Later on he was to be identified with Apis, the
sacred bull. Associated with him was the goddess Isis. Isis was
also Hathor, a cow-goddess, and the crescent moon and the Star
of the sea. Osiris dies and she bears a child, Horus, who is also a210 A Short History of the World
hawk-god and the dawn, and who grows to become Osiris again.
The effigies of Isis represent her as bearing the infant Horus in her
arms and standing on the crescent moon. These are not logical
relationships, but they were devised by the human mind before the
development of hard and systematic thinking and they have a
dream-like coherence. Beneath this triple group there are other
and darker Egyptian gods, bad gods, the dog-headed Anubis, black
night and the like, devourers, tempters, enemies of god and man.
Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to the
shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt that out of these
illogical and even uncouth symbols, Egyptian people were able to
fashion for themselves ways of genuine devotion and consolation.
The desire for immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind,
and the religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyp-
MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN
(In tne British Museum)Religious Developments 211
tian religion Was an see > immortality religion
as no other religion prs had ever been. As
Egypt went down under foreign con-
querors and_ the Egyptian gods
ceased to have any satisfactory political
craving for a life of
after, intensified.
significance, this
compensations here-
After the Greek
city of Alexandria
conquest, the new
‘ became the centre
gious life, and indeed
of the whole Hel-
great temple, the
up by Ptolemy I at
of Egyptian reli-
of the religious life
lenic world. A
Serapeum, was set |
which a sort of ISIS AND HORUS trinity of gods was
° ry ‘ .
worshipped. These were Serapis (who
was Osiris-Apis rechristened), Isis and Horus. These were not
regarded as separate gods but as three aspects of one god, and
Serapis was identified with the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter
and the Persian sun-god. This worship spread wherever the
Hellenic influence extended, even into North India and Western
China. The idea of immortality, an immortality of compensa-
tions and consolation, was eagerly received by a world in which
the common life was hopelessly wretched. Serapis was called
‘the saviour of souls.” ‘“‘After death,” said the hymns of that time,
“*we are still in the care of his providence.” Isis attracted many
devotees. Her images stood in her temples, as Queen of Heaven,
bearing the infant Horus in her arms. Candles were burnt before
her, votive offerings were made to her, shaven priests consecrated
to celibacy waited on her altar.
The rise of the Roman empire opened the western European
world to this growing cult. The temples of Serapis-Isis, the chant-
ing of the priests and the hope of immortal life, followed the Roman
standards to Scotland and Holland. But there were many rivals to
the Serapis-Isis religion. Prominent among these was Mithraism.
This was a religion of Persian origin, and it centred upon some now
forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacrificing a sacred and benevo-
lent bull. Here we seem to have something more primordial than212 A Short History of the World
the complicated and sophisticated Serapis-Isis beliefs. We are car-
ried back directly to the blood sacrifices of the heliolithic stage in
human culture. The bull upon the Mithraic monuments always
bleeds copiously from a wound in its side, and from this blood springs
new life. The votary to Mithraism actually bathed in the blood of
the sacrificial bull. At his initiation he went beneath a scaffolding
upon which a bull was killed so that the blood could actually run
down on him.
Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of the
numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the slaves and
citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are personal religions.
They aim at personal salvation and personal immortality. The
older religions were not personal like that; they were social. The
older fashion of divinity was god or goddess of the city first or of the
state, and only secondarily of the individual. ‘The sacrifices were a
public and not a private function. They concerned collective prac-
tical needs in this world in which we live. But the Greeks first and
now the Romans had pushed religion out of politics. Guided by
the Egyptian tradition religion had retreated to the other world.
These new private immortality religions took all the heart and
emotion out of the ae old state religions,
but they did not | | | actually replace
them.
—— PP REAE AGN
offering and burn a waa Gn pinch of incense to
show one’s loyalty. COMMODUS, a.v. 180-192 But it would be to
‘ a Represented as the God Mithras,
the temple of Isis, “®Roman, Cirea 4.0. 190 the dear Queen of
Heaven, one would (In the British Museum) go with the burthenReligious Developments
of one’s private troubles for advice and relief. There might be
local and eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long affected the
worship of the old Carthaginian Venus. In a cave or an under-
ground temple there would certainly be an altar to Mithras,
attended by legionaries and slaves. And probably also there
would be a synagogue where the Jews gathered to read their Bible
and uphold their faith in the unseen God of all the Earth.
Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the po-
litical side of the state religion. They held that their God was a
jealous God intolerant of idolatry, and they would refuse to take
part in the public sacrifices to Caesar. They would not even salute
the Roman standards for fear of idolatry.
In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been
ascetics, men and women who gave up most of the delights of life,
who repudiated marriage and property and sought spiritual powers
and an escape from the stresses and mortifications of the world in
abstinence, pain and solitude. Buddha himself set his face against
ascetic extravagances, but many of his disciples followed a monkish
life of great severity. Obscure Greek cults practised similar dis-
ciplines even to the extent of self-mutilation. Asceticism appeared
in the Jewish communities of Judea and Alexandria also in the first
century B.c. Communities of men abandoned the world and gave
themselves to austerities and mystical contemplation. Such was
the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first and second centuries
A.p. there was an almost world-wide resort to such repudiations of
life, a universal search for “‘salvation”’ from the distresses of the
time. The old sense of an established order, the old confidence in
priest and temple and law and custom, had gone. Amidst the pre-
vailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and hectic self-
indulgence, went this epidemic of self-disgust and mental insecurity,
this agonized search for peace even at the price of renunciation and
voluntary suffering. This it was that filled the Serapeum with weep-
ing penitents and brought the converts into the gloom and gore of
the Mithraic cave.DOO TL
TuE TEACHING OF JESUS
T was while Augustus Czesar, the first of the Emperors, was
reigning in Rome that Jesus who is the Christ of Christianity
was born in Judea. In his name a religion was to arise which
was destined to become the official religion of the entire Roman
Empire.
Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and
theology apart. A large proportion of the Christian world believes
that Jesus was an incarnation of that God of all the Earth whom the
Jews first recognized. The historian, if he is to remain historian,
can neither accept nor deny that interpretation. Materially Jesus
appeared in the likeness of a man, and it is as a man that the his-
torian must deal with him.
He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cesar. He was a
prophet. He preached after the fashion of the preceding Jewish
prophets. He was a man of about thirty, and we are in the pro-
foundest ignorance of his manner of life before his preaching began.
Our only direct sources of information about the life and teaching
of Jesus are the four Gospels. All four agree in giving us a picture
of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say, “Here was
aman. This could not have been invented.”
But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been dis-
torted and obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of
later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality
of Jesus is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that
a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Chris-
tian art. Jesus was a penniless teacher, who wandered about the
dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon castal gifts of food;
yet he is always represented clean, combed and sleek, in spotless
raiment, erect and with something motionless about him as though
214The Teaching of Jesus
he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal
and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of
the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unin-
telligently devout.
We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories.
with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate,
capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound
doctrine — namely, the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the
coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person — to
use a common phrase— of intense personal magnetism. He at-
tracted followers and filled them with love and courage. Weak and
ailing people were heartened and healed by his presence. Yet he
was probably of a delicate physique, because of the swiftness with
which he died under the pains of crucifixion. There is a tradition
that he fainted when, according to the custom, he was made to bear
his cross to the place of execution. He went about the country for
three years spreading his doctrine and then he came to Jerusalem
and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in Judea;
he was tried upon this charge, and crucified together with two
thieves. Long before these two were dead his sufferings were
over.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main
teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doc-
trines that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small
wonder if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance,
and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its tremen-
dous challenges to the established habits and institutions of man-
kind. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus seems
to have preached it, was no less than a bold and uncompromising
demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of our
struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and within. To the
vospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous
teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon
established ideas.
The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole
world, was a righteous god, but they also thought of him as a
trading god who had made a bargain with their Father Abrahami
oe
EARLY IDEAL PORTRAIT, IN GILDED GLASS, OF JESUS CHRIST IN WHICH
THE TRADITIONAL BEARD IS NOT SHOWN
about them, a very good bargain indeed for them, to bring them
at last to predominance in the earth. With dismay and anger they
heard Jesus sweeping away their dear securities. God, he taught,
was no bargainer; there were no chosen people and no favourites
in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving father of all life,
as incapable of showing favour as the universal sun. And all men
were brothers — sinners alike and beloved sons alike — of this divine
father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus cast scorn
upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people
and to minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races.
In the parable of the labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim
of the Jews to have a special claim upon God. All whom God
takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike; there is no dis-
tinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty.
From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses,
and as the incident of the widow’s mite enforces, he demands the
utmost. There are no privileges, no rebates and no excuses in the
Kingdom of Heaven.The Teaching of Jesus 217
But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that
Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and
he would have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family
affections in the great flood of the love of God. The whole kingdom
of Heaven was to be the family of his followers. We are told that,
“While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his
brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then one said
unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without,
desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him
that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And
he stretched forth his hands towards his disciples, and said, Behold
my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of
my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister,
and mother.” !
And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of
family loyalty in the name of God’s universal fatherhood and broth-
erhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned
all the gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and
1 Matt, xii, 46-50.
ee
: ¥annaway218 A Short History of the World
personal advantages. All men belonged to the kingdom; all their
possessions belonged to the kingdom; the righteous life for all men,
the only righteous life, was the service of God’s will with all that we
had, with all that we were. Again and again he denounced private
riches and the reservation of any private life.
‘And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one run-
ning, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I
do that I may inherit eter-
nal life? And Jesus said to
him, Why callest thou me
good? there is none good
es but one, that is God. Thou
SP 4 = knowest the command-
; = ments, Do not commit
adultery, Do not kill, Do
not steal, Do not bear false
witness, Defraud not,
Honour thy father and
mother. And he answered
and said unto him, Master,
all these things have I ob-
served from my _ youth.
Then Jesus beholding him
loved him, and said unto
him, One thing thou lack-
est; go thy way, sell what-
sia soever thou hast, and give
on to the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven:
and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was
sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great
"Photo:
DAVID’S TOWER AND WALL OF JERUSALEM
possessions.
““And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples,
How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of
God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus
answered again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for
them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God! It is~
WO Le ND IDS OS
“RR eet *
Photo: Yannaway
A STREET IN JERUSALEM
Along such a thoroughfare Christ carried his cross to the place of execution
oe
219220 A Short History of the World
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich
man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”’!
Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom which
was to make all men one together in God, Jesus had small patience
for the bargaining righteousness of formal religion. Another large
part of his recorded utterances is aimed against the meticulous
observance of the rules of the pious career. ‘Then the Pharisees
and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the
tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands? He
answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of you
hypocrites, as it is written,
“This people honoureth me with their lips,
“But their heart is far from me.
“Howbeit in vain do they worship me,
“Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
“For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradi-
tion of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such
things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the com-
mandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.”’?
It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus
proclaimed; it is clear from a score of indications that his teaching
had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his
kingdom was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and
not upon a throne; but it is equally clear that wherever and in what
measure his kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer
world would be in that measure revolutionized and made new.
Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have
missed in his utterances, it is plain they did not miss his resolve to
revolutionize the world. The whole tenor of the opposition to him
and the circumstances of his trial and execution show clearly that
to his contemporaries he seemed to propose plainly, and did propose
plainly, to change and fuse and enlarge all human life.
In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who
were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming
of their world at his teaching? He was dragging out all the little
private reservations they had made from social service into the light
1 Mark x. 17-25. 2 Mark vii. 1-9.The Teaching of Jesus 221
of a universal religious life. He was like some terrible moral hunts-
man digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had
lived hitherto. In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was
to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive
indeed and no reward but love. Is it any wonder that men were
dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even his dis-
ciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it any
wonder that the priests realized that between this man and them-
selves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish?
Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed
by something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all
their disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter, and crown him
with thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Ceesar of him?
For to take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming
life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay
an incredible happiness. .. .OD, OVA HEE
Ture DEVELOPMENT OF DocTRINAL CHRISTIANITY
N the four gospels we find the personality and teachings of
Jesus but very little of the dogmas of the Christian church. It
is in the epistles, a series of writings by the immediate followers
of Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief are laid down.
Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was St. Paul.
He had never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul’s name was
originally Saul, and he was conspicuous at first as an active perse-
cutor of the little band of disciples after the crucifixion. Then he
was suddenly converted to Christianity, and he changed his name
to Paul. He was a man of great intellectual vigour and deeply and
passionately interested in the religious movements of the time. He
was well versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism and Alexandrian
religion of the day. He carried over many of their ideas and terms
of expression into Christianity. He did very little to enlarge or
develop the original teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the Kingdom
of Heaven. But he taught that Jesus was not only the promised
Christ, the promised leader of the Jews, but also that his death was
a sacrifice, like the deaths of the ancient sacrificial victims of the
primordial civilizations, for the redemption of mankind.
When religions flourish side by side they tend to pick up each
other’s ceremonial and other outward peculiarities. Buddhism,
for example, in China has now almost the same sort of temples and
priests and uses as ‘Taoism, which follows in the teachings of Lao
Tse. Yet the original teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were
almost flatly opposed. And it reflects no doubt or discredit upon
the essentials of Christian teaching that it took over not merely
such formal things as the shaven priest, the votive offering, the
altars, candles, chanting and images of the Alexandrian and Mithraie
faiths, but adopted even their devotional phrases and their theo-
222Development of Doctrinal Christianity 22
MOSAIC OF SS. PETER AND PAUL POINTING TO A THRONE, ON GOLD
BACKGROUND
From the Ninth Century original, in the Church of Sta. Prassede, Rome
(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)
logical ideas. All these religions were flourishing side by side with
many less prominent cults. Each was seeking adherents, and
there must have been a constant going and coming of converts
between them. Sometimes one or other would be in favour with
the government. But Christianity was regarded with more suspicion
than its rivals because, like the Jews, its adherents would not perform
acts of worship to the God Cesar. This made it a seditious religion,
quite apart from the revolutionary spirit of the teachings of Jesus
himself.
St. Paul familiarized his disciples with the idea that Jesus, like224 A Short History of the World
Osiris, was a god who died to rise again and give men immortality.
And presently the spreading Christian community was greatly torn
by complicated theological disputes about the relationship of this
God Jesus to God the Father of Mankind. The Arians taught that
Jesus was divine, but distant from and inferior to the Father. The
Sabellians taught that Jesus was merely an aspect of the Father,
and that God was Jesus and Father at the same time just as a man
may be a father and an artificer at the same time; and the Trini-
tarians taught a more subtle doctrine that God was both one and
three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For a time it seemed that
Arianism would prevail over its rivals, and then after disputes,
violence and wars, the Trinitarian formula became the accepted
formula of all Christendom. It may be found in its completest
expression in the Athanasian Creed.
We offer no comment on these controversies here. ‘They do not
sway history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways history. The
personal teaching of Jesus does seem to mark a new phase in the
moral and spiritual life of our race. Its insistence upon the uni-
versal Fatherhood of God and the implicit brotherhood of all men,
its insistence upon the sacredness of every human personality as a
living temple of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon all the
subsequent social and political life of mankind. With Christianity,
with the spreading teachings of Jesus, a new respect appears in the
world for man as man. It may be true, as hostile critics of Chris-
tianity have urged, that St. Paul preached obedience to slaves, but
it is equally true that the whole spirit of the teachings of Jesus pre-
served in the gospels was against the subjugation of man by man.
And still more distinctly was Christianity opposed to such outrages
upon human dignity as the gladiatorial combats in the arena.
Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian
religion spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving together
an ever-growing multitude of converts into a new community of
ideas and will. The attitude of the emperors varied between hos-
tility and toleration. There were attempts to suppress this new
faith in both the second and third centuries; and finally in 303 and
the following years a great persecution under the Emperor Diocle-
tian. The considerable accumulations of Church property wereDevelopment of Doctrinal Christianity 22.
Me name mmm i na ~
>.
THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST
(Sixth Century Ivory Panel in the British Museum)
seized, all bibles and religious writings were confiscated and de-
stroyed, Christians were put out of the protection of the law and
many executed. ‘The destruction of the books is particularly nota- |
ble. It shows how the power of the written word in holding to- af226 A Short History of the World
gether the new faith was appreciated by the authorities. These
“book religions,” Christianity and Judaism, were religions that
educated. Their continued existence depended very largely on
people being able to read and understand their doctrinal ideas.
The older religions had made no such appeal to the personal intelli-
gence. In the ages of barbaric confusion that were now at hand in
western Europe it was the Christian church that was mainly instru-
mental in preserving the tradition of learning.
The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress the
growing Christian community. In many provinces it was ineffec-
tive because the bulk of the population and many of the officials were
Christian. In 317 an edict of toleration was issued by the associated
2mperor Galerius, and in 324 Constantine the Great, a friend and
on his deathbed a baptized convert to Christianity, became sole
ruler of the Roman world. He abandoned all divine pretensions and
put Christian symbols on the shields and banners of his troops.
In a few years Christianity was securely established as the official
religion of the empire. The competing religions disappeared or were
absorbed with extraordinary celerity, and in 390 Theodosius the
Great caused the great statue of Jupiter Serapis at Alexandria to be
destroyed. From the outset of the fifth century onward the only
priests or temples in the Roman Empire were Christian priests and
temples.OXON IOX
Tue BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO East AND West
HROUGHOUT the third century the Roman Empire, decay-
ing socially and disintegr: ating morally, faced the barbarians.
The emperors of this period were fighting milit: ary autocrats,
and the capital of the empire shifted with the necessities of their
military policy. Now the imperial headquarters would be at Milan
in north Italy, now in what is now Serbia at Sirmium or Nish. now
in Nicomedia in Asia Minor.. Rome halfway down Italy was too far
from the centre of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was
a declining city. Over most of the empire peace still prevailed and
men went about without arms. The armies continued to be the sole
repositories of power; the emperors, dependent on their legions,
became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire and
their state more and more like that of the Persian and other oriental
monarchs. Diocletian assumed a royal diadem and oriental robes.
All along the imperial frontier, which ran roughly along the
Rhine and Danube, enemies were now pressing. The Franks and
other German tribes had come up to the Rhine. In north Hungary
were the Vandals; in what was once Dacia and is now Roumania,
the Visigoths or West Goths. Behind these in south Russia were
the East Goths or Ostrogoths, and beyond these again in the V olga
region the Alans. But now Mongolian peoples were forcing their
way towards Europe. The Huns were already exacting tribute from
the Alans and Ostrogoths and pushing them to the west.
In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the push
of a renascent Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassenid
kings, was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of
the Roman Empire in Asia for the next three centuries.
A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the peculiar
weakness of the empire. The river Danube comes down to witbin
227228 A Short History of the World
a couple of hundred miles of the Adriatic Sea in the region of what is
now Bosnia and Serbia. It makes a square re-entrant angle there.
The Romans never kept their sea communications in good order,
and this two hundred mile strip of land was their line of communica-
tion between the western Latin-speaking part of the empire and the
eastern Greek-speaking portion. Against this square angle of the
Danube the barbarian pressure was greatest. When they broke
through there it was inevitable that the empire should fall into two
parts.
The EMPIRE and the _ BARBARIANS
9
11} Pill |
| 1137 saw i} ] i .
Mutt tt| Hy ®
4) |
f sUUU
oO
Mo UU LOU HH
A more vigorous empire might have thrust forward and recon-
quered Dacia, but the Roman Empire lacked any such vigour. Con-
stantine the Great was certainly a monarch of great devotion and
intelligence. He beat back a raid of the Goths from just these vital
Balkan regions, but he had no force to carry the frontier across the
Danube. He was too pre-occupied with the internal weaknesses of
the empire. He brought the solidarity and moral force of Chris-
tianity to revive the spirit of the declining empire, and he decided
to create a new permanent capital at Byzantium upon the Helles-
pont. This new-made Byzantium, which was re-christened Con-
stantinople in his honour, was still building when he died. ‘Towards
the end of his reign occurred a remarkable transaction. TheThe Barbarians Break the Empire 229
Vandals, being pressed by the Goths, asked to be received into the
: r e . . . .
Roman Empire. They were assigned lands in Pannonia, which is
now that part of Hungary
west of the Danube, and
their fighting men became
nominally legionaries. But
these new legionaries re-
mained under their own
chiefs. Rome failed to di-
gest them.
Constantine died work-
ing to reorganize his great
realm, and soon the fron-
tiers were ruptured again
and the Visigoths came al-
most to Constantinople.
They defeated the Emperor
Valens at Adrianople and
made a settlement in what
is now Bulgaria, similar to
the settlement of the Van-
dals in Pannonia. Nomi-
nally they were subjects of
the emperor, practically
they were conquerors.
From 379 to 395 A.D.
reigned the Emperor Theo-
dosius the Great, and while
he reigned the empire was
still formally intact. Over
the armies of Italy and Pan-
nonia presided Stilicho, a
Vandal, over the armies in
the Balkan peninsula,
Alaric, a Goth. When Theo-
dosius died at the close of
the fourth eentury he left
—_—
Eee
Photo: Sebah & Foatllter
CONSTANTINE’S PILLAR, CONSTANTINOPLE230 A Short History of the World
two sons. Alaric supported one of these, Arcadius, in Constantino-
ple, and Stilicho the other, Honorius, in Italy. In other words Alaric
and Stilicho fought for the empire with the princes as puppets. In
the course of their struggle Alaric marched into Italy and after a
short siege took Rome (410 a.p.).
The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman
Empire in Europe the prey of robber armies of barbarians. It is
difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the world at that time.
Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula, the great cities
that had flourished under the early empire still stood, impoverished,
partly depopulated and falling into decay. Life in them must have
been shallow, mean and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted
their authority and went on with their work with such conscience
as they had, no doubt in the name of a now remote and inaccessible
emperor. The churches went on, but usually with illiterate priests.
There was little reading and much superstition and fear. But
everywhere except where looters had destroyed them, books and
pictures and statuary and such-like works of art were still to be
found.
The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere
this Roman world was much more weedy and untidy than it had
been. In some regions war and pestilence had brought the land
down to the level of a waste. Roads and forests were infested with
robbers. Into such regions the barbarians marched, with little or no
opposition, and set up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman
official titles. If they were half civilized barbarians they would give
the conquered districts tolerable terms, they would take possession
of the towns, associate and intermarry, and acquire (with an accent)
the Latin speech; but the Jutes, the Angles and Saxons who sub-
merged the Roman province of Britain were agriculturalists and had
no use for towns, they seem to have swept south Britain clear of the
Romanized population and they replaced the language by their own
Teutonic dialects, which became at last English.
It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the move-
ments of all the various German and Slavonic tribes as they went to
and fro in the disorganized empire in search of plunder and a pleasant
home. But let the Vandals serve as an example. They came iatoi ses i.
ix F i ‘ nis x yet te ee re
: - s % +
’
ee th.
:
~*~.
ie
ats,
53? Cra ’ <3 paged : t ¢ : : } ae *
ay Be ey 2 is
i ag S04 tt a be aS eA 7 <2 bs ey J
; ; ee j --
; ;
+2. rede ee LR ast oR
J 4 ores | aay ug ~* = te: iy , bb poets ’
344, Frew OS eeeti ats ieee
“@ - : s ~ : 7 \
— : ,
in. \ { ‘ > tee , 8
or Py Se La re pee
a ws i ati — adhe aa A 3
Photo: Sebah & ¥oatliter
BASE OF THE “OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS,” CONSTANTINOPLE
The obelisk of Thothmes, taken from Egypt to Constantinople by Theodosius and placed
upon the pedestal here shown: an interesting example of early Byzantine art.
The complete obelisk is seen on page 239.
231232 A Short History of the World
history ineast Germany. ‘They settled as we have told in Pannonia.
Thence they moved somewhen about 425 a.p. through the interven-
ing provinces to Spain. There they found Visigoths from South
Russia and other German tribes setting up dukes and kings. From
Spain the Vandals under Genseric sailed for North Africa (429),
captured Carthage (439), and built a fleet. They secured the
mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged Rome (455), which had
recovered very imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric
half a century earlier. ‘Then the Vandals made themselves masters
of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other islands of the
western Mediterranean. They made, in fact, a sea empire very
similar in its extent to the sea empire of Carthage seven hundred odd
years before. They were at the climax of their power about 477.
They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country.
In the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered
for the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of energy
under Justinian I.
The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar
adventures. But now there was coming into the European world
the least ‘kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators,
the Mongolian Huns or Tartars, a yellow people active and able,
such as the western world had never before encountered.xs
Tue Huns AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE
HIS appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in Europe
may be taken to mark a new stage in human history. Until
the last century or so before the Christian era, the Mongol
and the Nordic peoples had not been in close touch. Far away in
the frozen lands beyond the northern forests the Lapps, a Mongolian
people, had drifted westward as far as Lapland, but they played
no part in the main current of history. For thousands of years the
western world carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan,
Semitic and fundamental brunette peoples with very little inter-
ference (except for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or so) either
from the black peoples to the south or from the Mongolian world in
the far East.
It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new west-
ward drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the consolidation
of the great empire of China, its extension northward and the in-
crease of its population during the prosperous period of the Han
dynasty. The other was some process of climatic change; a lesser
rainfall that abolished swamps and forests perhaps, or a greater rain-
fall that extended grazing over desert steppes, or even perhaps both
these processes going on in different regions but which anyhow
facilitated a westward migration. A third contributary cause was
the economic wretchedness, internal decay and falling population
of the Roman Empire. The rich men of the later Roman Republic,
and then the tax-gatherers of the military emperors had utterly
consumed its vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means and
opportunity. There was pressure from the east, rot in the west and
an open road.
The Hun had reached the eastern boundaries of European
Russia by the first century A.D., but it was not until the fourth and
233234 A Short History of the World
fifth centuries A.D. that these horsemen rose to predominance upon
the steppes. The fifth century was the Hun’s century. The first
Huns to come into Italy were mercenary bands in the pay of Stilicho
the Vandal, the master of Honorius. Presently they were in posses-
sion of Pannonia, the empty nest of the Vandals.
By the second quarter of the fifth century a great war chief had
arisen among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing
glimpses of his power. He ruled not only over the Huns but over a
conglomerate of tributary Germanic tribes; his empire extended
from the Rhine cross the plains into Central Asia. He exchanged
ambassadors with China. His head camp was in the plain of Hun-
gary east of the Danube. There he was visited by an envoy from
Constantinople, Priscus, who has left us an account of his state.
The way of living of these Mongols was very like the way of living of
the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The common folk were in
huts and ‘tents; the chiefs lived in great stockaded timber halls.
There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards. The
Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian companions of Alexander
would probably have felt more at home in the camp-capital of
Attila than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent
court of Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning
in Constantinople.
For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership
of the Huns and Attila would play the same part towards the Greco-
Roman civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the barbaric
Greeks had played long ago to the Agean civilization. It looked like
history repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the Huns were
much more wedded to the nomadic life than the early Greeks, who
were rather migratory cattle farmers than true nomads. The Huns
raided and plundered but did not settle.
For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His
armies devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constanti-
nople, Gibbon says that he totally destroyed no less than seventy
cities in the Balkan peninsula, and Theodosius bought him off by
payments of tribute and tried to get rid of him for good by sending
secret agents to assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention
to the remains of the Latin-speaking half of the empire and invadedHuns and the End of the Western Empire 235
Gaul. Nearly every town in northern Gaul was sacked. Franks,
Visigoths and the imperial forces united against him and he was
defeated at Troyes in a vast dispersed battle in which a multitude
of men, variously estimated as between 150,000 and 300,000, were
killed. This
checked him in
Gaul, but it did
not exhaust his
Ee eT
enormous mili-
tary resources.
Next year he
came into Italy
by way of Ve-
netia, burnt
Aquileia and
Padua and
looted Milan.
Numbers of
fugitives from
these north
Italian towns
and particular-
ly from Padua
fled to islands
in the lagoons
at the head of
the Adriatic
and laid there
the foundations ; 5 ne ee
of the city state HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF
(In the British Museum)
of Venice,
which was to become one of the greatest of the trading centres
in the middle ages.
In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate his
marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder confedera-
tion of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear from history,
mixed into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking popula-A Short History of the World
tions. But these great Hun raids practically consummated the end
of the Latin Roman Empire. After his death ten different emperors
ruled in Rome in twenty years, set up by Vandal and other merce-
nary troops. The Vandals from Carthage took and sacked Rome
in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the chief of the barbarian troops,
suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring as emperor under the
impressive name of Romulus Augustulus, and informed the Court of
Constantinople that there was no longer an emperor in the west.
So ingloriously the Latin Roman Empire came to an end. In 493
Theodoric the Goth became King of Rome.
All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs were
reigning as kings, dukes and the like, practically independent but
for the most part professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to the
emperor. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such
practically independent brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain and Italy
and in Dacia the Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted
forms, but in Britain and east of the Rhine languages of the German
group (or in Bohemia a Slavonic language, Czech) were the common
speech. The superior clergy and a small remnant of other educated
men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere life was insecure and prop-
erty was held by the strong arm. Castles multiplied and roads
fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century was an age of division
and of intellectual darkness throughout the western world. Had it
not been for the monks and Christian missionaries Latin learning
might have perished altogether.
Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely
decayed? It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it
together. Throughout the days of the expanding republic, and even
into the days of the early empire there remained a great number of
men conscious of Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an
obligation to be a Roman citizen, confident of their rights under the
Roman law and willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome.
The prestige of Rome as of something just and great and law-up-
holding spread far beyond the Roman boundaries. But even as
early as the Punic wars the sense of citizenship was being under-
mined by the growth of wealth and slavery. Citizenship spread
indeed but not the idea of citizenship.Huns and the End of the Western Empire 237
The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive organization:
it did not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes
of citizens, did not invite their co-operation in its decisions. ‘There
was no network of schools to ensure a common understanding, no
distribution of news to sustain collective activity. The adventurers
who struggled for power from the days of Marius and Sulla onward
had no idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the im-
perial affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation and no one
observed it die. All empires, all states, all organizations of human
society are, in the ultimate, things of understanding and will. There
remained no will for the Roman Empire in the World and so it came
to an end.
But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the fifth
century, something else had been born within it that was to avail
itself enormously of its prestige and tradition, and that was the
Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the
empire died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men,
because it had books and a great system of teachers and mission-
aries to hold it together, things stronger than any law or Iegions.
Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries A.p. while the empire was
decaying, Christianity was spreading to a universal dominion in
Europe. It conquered its conquerors, the barbarians. When
Attila seemed disposed to march on Rome, the patriarch of Rome
intercepted him and did what no armies could do, turning him back
by sheer moral force.
The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the
entire Christian church. Now that there were no more emperors,
he began to annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of
pontifer maximus, head sacrificial priest of the Roman dominion,
the most ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed.XLI
Tur BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES
HE Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire showed
much more political tenacity than the western half. It
weathered the disasters of the fifth century a.p., which saw
a complete and final breaking up of the original Latin Roman power.
Attila bullied the Emperor Theodosius II and sacked and raided
almost to the walls of Constantinople, but that city remained intact.
The Nubians came down the Nile and looted Upper Egypt, but
Lower Egypt and Alexandria were left still fairly prosperous. Most
of Asia Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians.
The sixth century, which was an age of complete darkness for
the West, saw indeed a considerable revival of the Greek power.
Justinian I (527-565) was a ruler of very great ambition and energy,
and he was married to the Empress Theodora, a woman of quite
equal capacity who had begun life as an actress. Justinian recon-
quered North Africa from the Vandals and most of Italy from the
Goths. He even regained the south of Spain. He did not limit his
energies to naval and military enterprises. He founded a university,
built the great church of Sta. Sophia in Constantinople and codified
the Roman law. But in order to destroy a rival to his university
foundation he closed the schools of philosophy in Athens, which
had been going on in unbroken continuity from the days of Plato,
that is to say for nearly a thousand years.
From the third century onwards the Persian Empire had been
the steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires kept Asia
Minor, Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual unrest and waste.
In the first century a.p., these lands were still at a high level of
civilization, wealthy and with an abundant population, but the con-
tinual coming and going of armies, massacres, looting and war taxa-
tion wore them down steadily until only shattered and ruinous
238The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires — 239
cities remained upon a countryside of scattered peasants. In this
melancholy process of impoverishment and disorder lower Egypt
fared perhaps less badly than the rest of the world. Alexandria,
like Constantinople, continued a dwindling trade between the east
and the west.
Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both these
warring and decaying empires. The last philosophers of Athens,
until their suppression, preserved the texts of the great literature of
the past with an infinite reverence and want of understanding.
But there remained no class of men in the world, no free gentlemen
with bold and independent habits of thought, to carry on the tradi-
tion of frank statement and enquiry embodied in these writings.
The social and political chaos accounts largely for the disappearance
of this class, but there was also another reason why the human in-
telligence was sterile and feverish during this age. In both Persia
and Byzantium it was an age of intolerance. Both empires were
religious empires in a new way, in a way that greatly hampered the
free activities of the human mind.
Pie
(ers ata
peestie < a b eG Phra m
Photo: Sebah & Yoatllter
THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE
The obelisk of Theodosius is in the foregroundShort History of the World
Of course
the oldest
empires in
the world
were _ relig-
ious empires,
centring
upon the
worship of a
god or of a
god-king.
Alexander
was treated
as a divinity
and —t use
Ceesars were
gods in so
much as they
A ee had altars
Bese) 67) 2 RE et and temples
, or >. devoted to
them and the
offering of
incense was
made a test
of loyalty to
the Roman
state. But these older religions were essentially religions of act and
fact. They did not invade the mind. If a man offered his sacrifice
and bowed to the god, he was left not only to think but to say prac-
tically whatever he liked about the affair. But the new sort of
religions that had come into the world, and particularly Christianity,
turned inward. These new faiths demanded not simply conformity
but understanding belief. Naturally fierce controversy ensued upon
the exact meaning of the things believed. These new religions
were creed religions. ‘The world was confronted with a new word,
Orthodoxy, and with a stern resolve to keep not only acts but speech
Photo: Sehah & Foatliter
THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIAThe Byzantine and Sassanid Empires 241
and private thought within the limits of a set teaching. For to hold
a wrong opinion, much more to convey it to other people, was no
longer regarded as an intellectual defect but a moral fault that
- might condemn a soul to everlasting destruction.
Both Ardashir I who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the third
century A.D., and Constantine the Great who reconstructed the
Roman Empire in the fourth, turned to religious organizations. for
help, because in these organizations they saw a new means of using
and controlling the wills of men. And already before the end of
the fourth century both empires were persecuting free talk and re-
ligious innovation. In Persia Ardashir found the ancient Persian
religion of Zoroaster (or Zarathushtra) with its priests and temples
and a sacred fire that burnt upon its altars, ready for his purpose as
a state religion. Before the end of the third century Zoroastrianism
OW
was persecuting Christianity, and in 277 a.p. Mani, the founder of
3 err
Photo: Alinart
THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS COURTPhoto: Callersood & aorta
THE ROCK-HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA
242The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires = 243
a new faith, the Manicheans, was crucified and his body flayed.
Constantinople, on its side, was busy hunting out Christian heresies.
Manicheean ideas infected Christianity and had to be fought with
the fiercest methods; in return ideas from Christianity affected the
purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine. All ideas became suspect.
Science, which demands before all things the free action of an un-
troubled mind, suffered a complete eclipse throughout this phase of
intolerance.
War, the bitterest theology, and the usual vices of mankind
constituted Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque, it
was romantic; it had little sweetness or light. When Byzantium
and Persia were not fighting the barbarians from the north, they
wasted Asia Minor and Syria in dreary and destructive hostilities.
Even in close alliance these two empires would have found it a hard
task to turn back the barbarians and recover their prosperity. ‘The
Turks or Tartars first come into history as the allies first of one power
and then of another. In the sixth century the two chief antagonists
were Justinian and Chosroes I; in the opening of the seventh the
Emperor Heraclius was pitted against Chosroes IT (580).
At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor (610)
Chosroes II carried all before him. He took Antioch, Damascus
and Jerusalem and his armies reached Chalcedon, which is in Asia
Minor over against Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt.
Then Heraclius pressed a counter attack home and routed a Persian
army at Nineveh (627), although at that time there were still Persian
troops at Chalcedon. In 628 Chosroes II was deposed and murdered
by his son, Kavadh, and an inconclusive peace was made between
the two exhausted empires.
Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war. But few
people as yet dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the
deserts to put an end for ever to this aimless, chronic struggle.
While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria a message reached
him. It had been brought in to the imperial outpost at Bostra
south of Damascus; it was in Arabic, an obscure Semitic desert
language, and it was read to the Emperor, if it reached him at all,
by an interpreter. It was from someone who called himself “ Mu-
hammad the Prophet of God.” It called upon the Emperor tonn ee
244 A Short History of the World
acknowledge the One True God and to serve him. What the Em-
peror said is not recorded.
A similar message came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon. He was an-
noyed, tore up the letter, and bade the messenger begone.
This Muhammad, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader whose head-
quarters were in the mean little desert town of Medina. He was
preaching a new religion of faith in the One True God.
“Even so, O Lord!” he said; “rend thou his Kingdom from
Kavadh.”’
a
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1
Saheeaen Ninna!
—————————ec
Tue Dynasties oF Suy AND TANG IN CHINA
HROUGHOUT the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries,
there was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward.
The Huns of Attila were merely precursors of this advance,
which led at last to the establishment of Mongolian peoples in Fin-
land, Esthonia, Hungary and Bulgaria, where their descendants,
speaking languages akin to Turkish, survive to this day. The Mon-
golian nomads were, in fact, playing a roéle towards the Aryanized
civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that the Aryans had
played to the Agean and Semitic civilizations ten or fifteen centuries
before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is
now Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turk-
ish officials and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out
of history, absorbed into the general population of Persia. There
were no more Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia; Mon-
golian people had replaced them. The Turks became masters of
Asia from China to the Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D.
that had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han
dynasty in China. Then came a period of division and of Hunnish
conquests from which China arose refreshed, more rapidly and more
completely than Europe was destined to do. Before the end of the
sixth century China was reunited under the Suy dynasty, and this
by the time of Heraclius gave place to the Tang dynasty, whose
reign marks another great period of prosperity for China.
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was
the most secure and civilized country in the world. The Han
dynasty had extended her boundaries in the north; the Suy and
Tang dynasties now spread her civilization to the south, and China
245See ee
Sees Le wae
|
|
:
Bt
7
CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TA
G DYNASTY, 618-906
Specimens in glazed earthenw
are, in brown, green and buff, discovered in tombs in China
(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)
246The Dynasties of Suy and Tang in China 247
began to assume the proportions she has to-day. In Central Asia
indeed she reached much further, extending at last, through tribu-
tary Turkish tribes, to Persia and the Caspian Sea.
The new China that had arisen was a very different land from
the old China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary
school appeared, there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had
revolutionized philosophical and religious thought. There were
great advances in artistic work, in technical skill and in all the ameni-
ties of life. Tea was first used, paper manufactured and wood-block
printing began. Millions of people indeed were leading orderly,
graceful and kindly lives in China during these centuries when the
attenuated populations of Europe and Western Asia were living
either in hovels, small walled cities or grim robber fortresses. While
the mind of the west was black with theological obsessions, the mind
of China was open and tolerant and enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai-tsung,
who began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at
Nineveh. He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was prob-
ably seeking an ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a
party of Christian missionaries (635). They were allowed to ex-
plain their creed to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation
of their Scriptures. He pronounced this strange religion acceptable,
and gave permission for the foundation of a church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad.
They came to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole
way from Arabia along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and
Kavadh, Tai-tsung gave these envoys a courteous hearing. He ex-
pressed his interest in their theological ideas and assisted them to
build a mosque in Canton, a mosque which survives, it is said, to
this day, the oldest mosque in the world.KT
MuHAMMAD AND ISLAM
PROPHETIC amateur of history surveying the world in
the opening of the seventh century might have concluded
very reasonably that it was only a question of a few centuries
before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domina-
tion. There were no signs of order or union in Western Europe,
and the Byzantine and Persian Empires were manifestly bent upon
a mutual destruction. India also was divided and wasted. On
the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which proba-
bly at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish
people who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed to
work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have
been an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the thirteenth
century when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danub>
to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over
the entire Byzantine and Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of
India.
Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred
would have been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the
Latin end of Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian
desert. Arabia would have seemed what it had been for times
immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. No
Semitic people had founded an empire now for more than a thousand
years.
Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of
splendour. They spread their rule and language from Spain to
the boundaries of China. They gave the world a new culture.
They created a religion that is still to this day one of the most
vital forces in the world.
248Muhammad and Islam 2409
The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as
the young husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of
Mecca, named Muhammad. Until he was forty he did very little
to distinguish himself in the world. He seems to have taken con-
siderable interest in religious discussion. Mecca was a pagan city
at that time worshipping in particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of
great repute throughout all Arabia and a centre of pilgrimages;
but there were great numbers of Jews in the country — indeed all
the southern portion of Arabia professed the Jewish faith— and
there were Christian churches in Syria.
About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic character-
istics like those of the Hebrew prophets twelve hundred years before
him. He talked first to his wife of the One True God, and of the
rewards and punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can
be no doubt that his thoughts were very strongly influenced by
Jewish and Christian ideas. He gathered about him a small circle
of believers and presently began to preach in the town against
the prevalent idolatry. This made him extremely unpopular with
his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to the Kaaba were the
chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed. He became
bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself to be the
last chosen prophet of God entrusted with a mission to perfect
religion. Abraham, he declared, and Jesus Christ were his fore-
runners. He had been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation
of God’s will.
He produced verses which he said had been communicated to
him by an angel, and he had a strange vision in which he was taken
up through the Heavens to God and instructed in his mission.
As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow towns-
men increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him; but he
escaped with his faithful friend and disciple, Abu Bekr, to the
friendly town of Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities
followed between Mecca and Medina which ended at last in a treaty.
Mecca was to adopt the worship of the One True God and accept
Muhummad as his prophet, but the adherents of the new farth were
still to make the pilgrimage to Mecca just as they had done when they
were pagans. So Muhammad established the One True God ins
CPR 5 ay |
SGI Bi: Pi, “a Bs
Photo: Lehnert & Landrock
AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT
+
250
vvMuhammad and Islam 251
Mecca without injuring its pilgrim traffic. In 629 Muhammad
returned to Mecca as its master, a year after he had sent out these
envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung, Kavadh and all the rulers of
the earth.
Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad
spread his power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of
wives in his declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern
standards unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded
of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite
~ at
Ge.
on ee
ay ES Ci
ses
Photo: Lehnert & Landrock
LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND
sincere religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and
expositions, the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him
from God. Regarded as literature or philosophy the Koran is cer-
tainly unworthy of its alleged Divine authorship.
Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writings
have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed
upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration. One is its uncom-
promising monotheism; its simple enthusiastic faith in the rule and
fatherhood of God and its freedom from theological complications.
Another is its complete detachment from the sacrificial priest and the
temple. It is an entirely prophetic religion, proof against any possi-
bility of relapse towards blood sacrifices. In the Koran the limited252 A Short History of the World
and ceremonial nature of the pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond
the possibility of dispute, and every precaution was taken by Mu-
hammad to prevent the deification of himself after his death. And
a third element of strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the
perfect brotherhood and equality before God of all believers, what-
ever their colour, origin or status.
These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs.
It has been said that the true founder of the Empire of Islam was
not so much Muhammad as his friend and helper, Abu Bekr. If
Muhammad, with his shifty character, was the mind and imagina-
tion of primitive Islam, Abu Bekr was its conscience and its will.
Whenever Muhammad wavered Abu Bekr sustained him. And
when Muhammad died, Abu Bekr became Caliph (= successor),
and with that faith that moves mountains, he set himself simply and
sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to Allah —
with little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs — according to those letters
the prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs of
the world.XLIV
Tue GREAT Days or THE ARABS
HERE follows the most amazing story of conquest in the
whole history of our race. The Byzantine army was
smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the
Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his energy sapped by
dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war, saw his new
conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the
rest fall almost without resistance to the Moslim. Large elements
in the population went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned
sast. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a
great host with a force of elephants; and for three days they fought
the Arabs at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire
pushed far into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the
Chinese. Egypt fell almost without resistance to the new con-
querors, who full of a fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran,
wiped out the vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexan-
dria Library. The tide of conquest poured along the north coast of
Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in
710 and the Pyrenees Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the
Arab advance had reached the centre of France, but here it was
stopped for good at the battle of Poitiers and thrust back as far as
the Pyrenees again. ‘The conquest of Egypt had given the Moslim
a fleet, and for a time it looked as though they would take Con-
stantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between 672 and 718
but the great city held out against them.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experi-
ence, and this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which
stretched from Spain to China, was destined to break up very
speedily. From the very beginning doctrinal differences under-
252254 A Short History of the World
GROWTH of the MOSLEM POWER in 2
Moslem & Smpwe at the death of
Muhammad , 632
at the death of
Othman ,656....
mined its unity. But our interest here lies not with the story of its
political disintegration but with its effect upon the human mind and
upon the general destinies of our race. The Arab intelligence had
been flung across the world even more swiftly and dramatically than
had the Greek a thousand years before. The intellectual stimula-
tion of the whole world west of China, the break-up of old ideas and
development of new ones, was enormous.The Great Days of the Arabs 255
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not
only with Manichean, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with
the scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but in
Syrian translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also. Every-
where, and particularly in Spain, it discovered an active Jewish
tradition of speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met
Buddhism and the material achievements of Chinese civilization.
It learnt the manufacture of paper—which made printed books
possible — from the Chinese. And finally it came into touch with
Indian mathematics and philosophy.
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of
faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was
dropped. Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the
Arab conquerors. By the eighth century there was an educational
Photo: Lehnert & Landrock
JERUSALEM. SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR
ee256 A Short History of the World
eeemteons mee Se ee era
organization throughout the whole “‘Arabized”’ world. In the ninth
learned men in the schools of Cordoba in Spain were corresponding
with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad, Bokhara and Samarkand. The
Jewish mind assimilated very readily with the Arab, and for a time
the two Semitic races worked together through the medium of
Arabic. Long after the political break-up and enfeeblement of the
Arabs, this intellectual community of the Arab-speaking world
endured. It was still producing very considerable results in the
thirteenth century.
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts
which was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this astonish-
ing renascence of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the
museum of Alexandria that had lain so long inactive and neglected
now germinated and began to grow towards fruition. Very great
advances were made in mathematical, medical and physical science.The Great Days of the Arabs 257
The clumsy Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we
use to this day and the zero sign was first employed. The very name
algebra is Arabic. So is the word chemistry. The names of such
stars as Algol, Aldebaran and Bodétes preserve the traces of Arab
conquests in the sky. ‘Their philosophy was destined to reanimate
the medieval philosophy of France and Italy and the whole Christian
world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they
were still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and
results secret as far as possible. They realized from the very begin-
ning what enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give
them, and what far-reaching consequences they might have on
human life. They came upon many metallurgical and technical
devices of the utmost value, alloys and dyes, distilling, tinctures and
essences, optical glass; but the two chief ends they sought, they
sought in vain. One was “the philosopher’s stone’’— a means of
changing the metallic elements one into another and so getting a
control of artificial gold, and the other was the elzxir vite, a stimulant
that would revivify age and prolong life indefinitely. The crabbed
patient experimenting of these Arab alchemists spread into the
Christian world. The fascination of their enquiries spread. Very
gradually the activities of these alchemists became more social and
co-operative. They found it profitable to exchange and compare
ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the alchemists became
the first of the experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone which was to
transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they
found the methods of modern experimental science which promise in
the end to give man illimitable power over the world and over his
own destiny.DGIEV.
Toe DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM
T is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the
share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the seventh
and eighth centuries. A thousand years before, the Aryan-
speaking races were triumphant over all the civilized world west of
China. Now the Mongol had thrust as far as Hungary, nothing of
Asia remained under Aryan rule except the Byzantine dominions in
Asia Minor, and all Africa was lost and nearly all Spain. The great
Hellenic world had shrunken to a few possessions round the nucleus
of the trading city of Constantinople, and the memory of the Roman
world was kept alive by the Latin of the western Christian priests.
In vivid contrast to this tale of retrogression, the Semitic tradition
had risen again from subjugation and obscurity after a thousand
years of darkness.
Yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted. Con-
fined now to Central and North-Western Europe and _ terribly
muddled in their social and political ideas, they were nevertheless
building up gradually and steadily a new social order and preparing
unconsciously for the recovery of a power even more extensive than
that they had previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth century there
remained no central government in Western Europe at all. That
world was divided up among numbers of local rulers holding their
own as they could. ‘This was too insecure a state of affairs to last;
a system of co-operation and association grew up in this disorder,
the feudal system, which has left its traces upon European life up
to the present time. This feudal system was a sort of crystalliza-
tion of society about power. Everywhere the lone man felt insecure
and was prepared to barter a certain amount of his liberty for help
and protection. He sought a stronger man as his lord and protector;
Y
258The Development of Latin Christendom 2 en
264 A Short History of the World
Roman Empire were the Saracens. They had made themselves
largely masters of the sea; their only formidable adversaries upon
the water were the Northmen, the Russian Northmen out of the
Black Sea and the Northmen of the west.
Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive peoples,
amidst forces they did not understand and dangers they could not
EUROPE = the death of CHARLEMAGNE — 81
Finnish Tribes
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estimate, Charlemagne and after him a series of other ambitious
spirits took up the futile drama of restoring the Western Empire
under the name of the Holy Roman Empire. From the time of
Charlemagne onward this idea obsessed the political life of Western
Europe, while in the East the Greek half of the Roman power de-
cayed and dwindled until at last nothing remained of it at all but the
corrupt trading city of Constantinople and a few miles of territory
about it. Politically the continent of Europe remained traditional
and uncreative from the time of Charlemagne onward for a thousand
years.The Development of Latin Christendom 26;
The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history but
his personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read nor write,
but he had a considerable respect for learning; he liked to be read
aloud to at meals and he had a weakness for theological discussion.
At his winter quarters at Aix-la-Chapelle or Mayence he gathered
about him a number of learned men and picked up much from their
conversation. In the summer he made war, against the Spanish
Saracens, against the Slavs and Magyars, against the Saxons, and
other still heathen German tribes. It is doubtful whether the idea
of becoming Ceesar in succession to Romulus Augustulus occurred to
him before his acquisition of North Italy, or whether it was suggested
to him by Pope Leo III, who was anxious to make the Latin Church
independent of Constantinople.
There were the most extraordinary manceuvres at Rome between
the Pope and the prospective emperor in order to make it appear
or not appear as if the Pope gave him the imperial crown. The
Pope succeeded in crowning his visitor and conqueror by surprise
in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day 800°4.p. He produced a crown, put
it on the head of Charlemagne and hailed him Cesar and Augustus.
There was great applause among the people. Charlemagne was by
no means pleased at the way in which the thing was done, it rankled
in his mind as a defeat; and he left the most careful instructions to
his son that he was not to let the Pope crown him emperor; he was
to seize the crown into his own hands and put it on his own head
himself. So at the very outset of this imperial revival we see be-
ginning the age-long dispute of Pope and Emperor for priority. But
Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, disregarded his father’s
instructions and was entirely submissive to the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis the
Pious and the split between the French-speaking Franks and the
German-speaking Franks widened. The next emperor to arise was
Otto, the son of a certain Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been
elected King of Germany by an assembly of German princes and
prelates in 919. Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned
emperor there in 962. This Saxon line came to an end early in the
eleventh century and gave place to other German rulers. The
feudal princes and nobles to the west who spoke various French dia-266 A Short History of the World
lects did not fall under the sway of these German emperors after the
Carlovingian line, the line that is descended from Charlemagne, had
come to an end, and no part of Britain ever came into the Holy
Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France
and a number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside.
In 987 the Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of
the Carlovingian line into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descen-
dants were still reigning in the eighteenth century. At the time of
Hugh Capet the King of France ruled only a comparatively small
territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an in-
vasion of the Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada
and by the Latinized Northmen under the Duke of Normandy.
Harold King of England defeated the former at the battle of Stam-
ford Bridge, and was defeated by the latter at Hastings. England
was conquered by the Normans, and so cut off from Scandinavian,
Teutonic and Russian affairs, and brought into the most intimate
relations and conflicts with the French. For the next four centuries
the English were entangled in the conflicts of the French feudal
princes and wasted upon the fields of France.MEVT
THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION
T is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the
Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the
Arabian Nights. It is recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid sent
ambassadors from Bagdad — which had now replaced Damascus
as the Moslem capital — with a splendid tent, a water clock, an ele-
phant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was
admirably calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy
Roman Empire by the ears as to which was the proper protector of
the Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth century
was still a weltering disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a
great Arab Empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized
than anything Europe could show. Here literature and science
still lived; the arts flourished, and the mind of man could move
without fear or superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa
where the Saracenic dominions were falling into political confusion
there was a vigorous intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed
by these Jews and Arabs during these centuries of European dark-
ness. They guarded the neglected seeds of science and philosophy.
North-east of the Caliph’s dominions was a number of Turkish
tribes. They had been converted to Islam, and they held the faith
much more simply and fiercely than the actively intellectual Arabs
and Persians to the south. In the tenth century the Turks were
growing strong and vigorous while the Arab power was divided and
decaying. The relations of the Turks to the Empire of the Caliphate
became very similar to the relations of the Medes to the last Baby-
lonian Empire fourteen centuries before. In the eleventh century
a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks, came down into Meso-
potamia and made the Caliph their nominal ruler but really their
267268 A Short History of the World
captive and tool. They conquered Armenia. Then they struck at
the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia Minor. In 1071 the
Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the battle of Melasgird, and
the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule remained
in Asia. They took the fortress of Niczea over against Constanti-
nople, and prepared to attempt that city.
The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror.
He was already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman
adventurers who had seized Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish
people, the Petschenegs, who were raiding over the Danube.
In his extremity he sought help where he could, and it is notable that
he did not appeal to the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as
the head of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII,
and his successor Alexius Comnenus wrote still more urgently to
Urban II.
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the
Latin and Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive
‘n men’s minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented
itself to the Pope as a supreme opportunity for reasserting the
supremacy of the Latin Church over the dissentient Greeks. More-
over this occasion gave the Pope a chance to deal with two other
matters that troubled western Christendom very greatly. One was
the custom of “private war” which disordered social life, and the
other was the superabundant fighting energy of the Low Germans
and Christianized Northmen and particularly of the Franks and
Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of the Cross, was
CRUSADER TOMBS IN EXETER CATHEDRALpreached
against the
Turkish eap-
tors of Jeru-
salem, and
a truce to
all warfare
amongst
Christians
(1095). The
declared ob-
ject of this
war was the
recovery of
the Holy
Sepulchre
from the un-
believers. A
man called
Peter the
Hermit car-
ried ona pop-
ular prop-
af an da
throughout
France and
Crusades
and Age of Papal Dominion 26,
ud
rer
SS. x e j
AOS
Photo: Lehnert & Landrock
-
c
VIEW OF CAIRO
Germany on broadly democratic lines. He went clad in a coarse
garment, barefooted on an ass, he carried a huge cross and
harangued the crowd in street or market-place or church. He
denounced the cruelties practised upon the Christian pilgrims by
the Turks, and the shame of the Holy Sepulchre being in any but
Christian hands.
The fruits of centuries of Christian teaching be-
"ame apparent in the response. A great wave of enthusiasm swept
the western world, and popular Christendom discovered itself.
Such a widespread uprising of the common people in relation to
a single idea as now occurred was a new thing in the history of our
race. ‘There is nothing to parallel it in the previous history of the270 A Short History of the World
Roman Empire or of India or China. On a smaller scale, however,
there had been similar movements among the Jewish people after
their liberation from the Babylonian captivity, and later on Islam
was to display a parallel susceptibility to collective feeling. Such
movements were certainly connected with the new spirit that had
come into life with the development of the missionary-teaching
religions. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and his disciples, Mani,
Muhammad, were all exhorters of men’s individual souls. They
brought the personal conscience face to face with God. Before
that time religion had been much more a business of fetish, of pseudo-
science, than of conscience. The old kind of religion turned upon
temple, initiated priest and mystical sacrifice, and ruled the common
man like a slave by fear. The new kind of religion made a man of
him.
The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of the
common people in European history. It may be too much to call
it the birth of modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern
democracy stirred. Before very long we shall find it stirring again,
and raising the most disturbing social and religious questions.
Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully
and lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds
rather than armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland
and Central Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equip-
ment to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. This was the “‘people’s cru-
sade.” Two great mobs blundered into Hungary, mistook the
recently converted Magyars for pagans, committed atrocities and
were massacred. A third multitude with a similarly confused mind,
after a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland, marched east-
ward, and was also destroyed in Hungary. ‘Two other huge crowds,
under the leadership of Peter the Hermit himself, reached Con-
stantinople, crossed the Bosphorus, and were massacred rather than
defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this first move-
ment of the European people, as people.
Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus.
Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They
stormed Nicsea, marched by much the same route as Alexander had
followed fourteen centuries before, to Antioch. The siege of An-Crusades and Age of Papal Dominion 271
tioch kept them a year, and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem.
It was stormed after a month’s siege. The slaughter was terrible.
Men riding on horseback were splashed by the blood in the streets.
At nightfall on July 15th the Crusaders had fought their way
into the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre
and overcome all
opposition there:
blood-stained,
weary and “sob-
bing from excess of
joy they knelt
down in prayer.
Immediately the
hostility of Latin
and Greek broke
out again. The
Crusaders were the
servants of the
Latin Church, and
the Greek patriarch
of Jerusalem found
himself in a far
worse case under
the triumphant Lat-
ins than under the
Turks. The Crusa-
ders discovered
themselves between
Byzantine and Turk
and fighting both.
EE Se Bf
Photo: D. McLeish
THE HORSES OF S MARK, VENICE
Originally on the arch of Trajan at Constantinople, the Doge Dandalo V
took them after the Fourth Crusade, to Venice, whence Napoleon I removed
them to Paris, but in 1815 they were returned to Venice. During the Great
War of 1914-18 they were hidden away for fear of air raids.
Much of Asia Minor was recovered by the
Byzantine Empire, and the Latin princes were left, a buffer between
Turk and Greek, with Jerusalem and a few small principalities, of
which Edessa was one of the chief, in Syria. Their grip even on
these possessions was precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell to the
Moslim, leading to an ineffective Second Crusade, which failed to
recover Edessa but saved Antioch from a similar fate.272 A Short History of the World
In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish adven-
turer named Saladin who had made himself master of Egypt. He
preached a Holy War against the Christians, recaptured Jerusalem
in 1187, and so provoked the Third Crusade. This failed to recover
Jerusalem. In the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) the Latin Church
turned frankly upon the Greek Empire, and there was not even a
pretence of fighting the Turks. It started from Venice and in 1204
it stormed Constantinople. The great rising trading city of Venice
was the leader in this adventure, and most of the coasts and islands
of the Byzantine Empire were annexed by the Venetians. A
“Latin” emperor (Baldwin of Flanders) was set up in Constanti-
nople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be reunited.
The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261 when
the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman predominance.
The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was
the age of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the
ascendancy of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the North-
men. A united Christendom under the rule of the Pope came
nearer to being a working reality than it ever was before or after
that time.
In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and wide-
spread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through
some dark and discreditable phases; few writers can be found to
excuse the lives of Popes John XI and John XII in the tenth century;
they were abominable creatures; but the heart and body of Latin
Christendom had remained earnest and simple; the generality of the
common priests and monks and nuns had lived exemplary and
faithful lives. Upon the wealth of confidence such lives created
rested the power of the church. Among the great Popes of the past
had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I (590-604) and Leo II
(795-816) who invited Charlemagne to be Cesar and crowned him
in spite of himself. ‘Towards the close of the eleventh century there
arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended his life as
Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). Next but one after him came
Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. These two
were the founders of this period of papal greatness during which the
Popes lorded it over the Emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland andniet
Abe
7
.
Photo: Lehnert & Landrock
A COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRAsteel mntlhett:oTo
274 A Short History of the World
from Norway to Sicily and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Greg-
ory VII obliged the Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him
at Canossa and to await forgiveness for three days and nights in the
courtyard of the castle, clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the
snow. In 1176 at Venice the Emperor Frederick (Frederick Bar-
barossa), knelt to Pope Alexander III and swore fealty to him.
The great power of the church in the beginning of the eleventh
century lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to retain
the moral prestige on which its power was based. In the opening
decades of the fourteenth century it was discovered that the power of
the Pope had evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naive
confidence of the common people of Christendom in the church
so that they would no longer rally to its appeal and serve its
purposes?
The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by
the church. The church never died, and there was a frequent dis-
position on the part of dying childless people to leave lands to the
church. Penitent sinners were exhorted to do so. Accordingly in
many European countries as much as a fourth of the land became
church property. The appetite for property grows with what it
feeds upon. Already in the thirteenth century it was being said
everywhere that the priests were not good men, that they were
always hunting for money and legacies.
The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property very
greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military support,
they found their land supporting abbeys and monks and nuns. And
these lands were really under foreign dominion. Even before the
time of Pope Gregory VII there had been a struggle between the
princes and the papacy over the question of “‘investitures,”’ the
question that is of who should appoint the bishops. If that power
rested with the Pope and not the King, then the latter lost control
not only of the consciences of his subjects but of a considerable
part of his dominions. For also the clergy claimed exemption from
taxation. They paid their taxes to Rome. And not only that,
but the church also claimed the right to levy a tax of one-tenth upon
the property of the layman in addition to the taxes he paid his
prince.Crusades and Age of Papal Dominion 27;
The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom tells
of the same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of struggle between
monarch and Pope on the issue of investitures and generally it tells
of a victory for the Pope. He claimed to be able to excommunicate
the prince, to absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him, to
recognize a successor. He claimed to be able to put a nation under
an interdict, and then nearly all priestly functions ceased except the
sacraments of baptism, confirmation and penance; the priests could
neither hold the ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead.
With these two weapons it was possible for the twelfth century Popes
to curb the most recalcitrant princes and overawe the most restive
peoples. These were enormous powers, and enormous powers are
only to be used on extraordinary occasions. The Popes used them
at last with a frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty years
at the end of the twelfth century we find Scotland, France and
England in turn under an interdict. And also the Popes could not
resist the temptation to preach crusades against offending princes —
until the crusading spirit was extinct.
It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply
against the princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the
general mind, it might have achieved a permanent dominion over all
Christendom. But the high claims of the Pope were reflected as
arrogance in the conduct of the clergy. Before the eleventh century
the Roman priests could marry; they had close ties with the people
among whom they lived; they were indeed a part of the people.
Gregory VII made them celibates; he cut the priests off from too
ereat an intimacy with the laymen in order to bind them more
closely to Rome, but indeed he opened a fissure between the church
and the commonalty. The church had its own law courts. Cases
involving not merely priests but monks, students, crusaders, widows,
orphans and the helpless were reserved for the clerical courts, and so
were all matters relating to wills, marriages and oaths and all cases
of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the layman found
himself in conflict with the priest he had to go to a clerical court.
The obligations of peace and war fell upon his shoulders alone and
left the priest free. It is no great wonder that jealousy and hatred
of the priests grew up in the Christian world.
= a
Nt a A Bis Ra ils
ae
reine le276 A Short History of the World
Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the con-
sciences of common men. It fought against religious enthusiasm,
which should have been its ally, and it forced doctrinal orthodoxy
upon honest doubt and aberrant opinion. When the church inter-
fered in matters of morality it had the common man with it, but not
when it interfered in matters of doctrine. When in the south of
France Waldo taught a return to the simplicity of Jesus in faith and
life, Innocent III preached a crusade against the Waldenses, Waldo’s
followers, and permitted them to be suppressed with fire, sword, rape
and the most abominable cruelties. When again St. Francis of
Assisi (1181-1226) taught the imitation of Christ and a life of
poverty and service, his followers, the Franciscans, were persecuted,
scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In 1318 four of them were
burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand the fiercely orthodox
order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic (1170-1221) was
strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its assistance set up
an organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of heresy and the
affliction of free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous
privileges, and by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free faith
of the common man which was the final source of all its power.
The story of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from without
but continually of decay from within.XLVII
RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM
NE very great weakness of the Roman Church in its strug-
gle to secure the headship of all Christendom was the
manner in which the Pope was chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and
establish one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it
was vitally necessary that it should have a strong, steady and con-
tinuous direction. In those great days of its opportunity it needed
before all things that the Popes when they took office should be able
men in the prime of life, that each should have his successor-desig-
nate with whom he could discuss the policy of the church, and that
the forms and processes of election should be clear, definite, unalter-
able and unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained.
It was not even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor
whether the Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the
matter. That very great papal statesman Hildebrand (Pope
Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much to regularize the election. He
confined the votes to the Roman cardinals and he reduced the
Emperor’s share to a formula of assent conceded to him by the
church, but he made no provision for a successor-designate and he
left it possible for the disputes of the cardinals to keep the See
vacant, as in some cases it was kept vacant, for a year or more.
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in
the whole history of the papacy up to the sixteenth century. From
quite early times onward there were disputed elections and two or
more men each claiming to be Pope. The church would then be
subjected to the indignity of going to the Emperor or some other
outside arbiter to settle the dispute. And the career of every one
of the great Popes ended in a note of interrogation. At his death
the church might be left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated
277MILAN CATHEDRAL
View showing the exquisite carvings characteristic of the 98 spires of the edifice
2
78
nt
i
|
i;Recalcitrant Princes and Great Schism 279
body. Or he might be replaced by some old rival eager only to dis-
credit and undo his work. Or some enfeebled old man tottering on
the brink of the grave might succeed him. :
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organiza-
tion should attract the interference of the various German princes,
the French King, and the Norman and French Kings who ruled in
England; that they should all try to influence the elections, and have
a Pope in their own interest established in the Lateran Palace at
Rome. And the more powerful and important the Pope became in
European affairs, the more urgent did these interventions become.
Under the circumstances it is no great wonder that many of the
Popes were weak and futile. The astonishing thing is that many of
them were able and courageous men.
One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of this
ereat period was Innocent III (1198-1216) who was so fortunate as
to become Pope before he was thirty-eight. He and his successors
were pitted against an even more interesting personality, the
Emperor Frederick II; Stupor mundi he was called, the Wonder of
the world. The struggle of this monarch against Rome is a turning
place in history. In the end Rome defeated him and destroyed his
dynasty, but he left the prestige of the church and Pope so badly
wounded that its wounds festered and led to its decay.
Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his mother
was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of Sicily. He in-
herited this kingdom in 1198 when he was a child of four years.
Innocent III had been made his guardian. Sicily in those days had
been but recently conquered by the Normans; the Court was half
oriental and full of highly educated Arabs; and some of these were
associated in the education of the young king. No doubt they were
at some pains to make their point of view clear to him. He got a
Moslem view of Christianity as well as a Christian view of Islam, and
the unhappy result of this double system of instruction was a view,
exceptional in that age of faith, that all religions were impostures.
He talked freely on the subject; his heresies and blasphemies are
on record.
As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with his
guardian. Innocent III wanted altogether too much from his ward.a
y
eee 38 nh ell
}
@
y as
AS j |
i
A TYPICAL CRUSADER: DON RODRIGO DE
CARDENAS
From the Church of S. Pedro at Ocana, Spain
(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)
A Short History of the World
When the opportunity came for
Frederick to succeed as Emperor,
the Pope intervened with condi-
tions. Frederick must promise
to put down heresy in Germany
with a strong hand. Moreover
he must relinquish his crown in
Sicily and South Italy, because
otherwise he would be too strong
for the Pope. And the German
clergy were to be freed from all
taxation. Frederick agreed —
but with no intention of keeping
his word. The Pope had already
induced the French King to make
war upon his own subjects in
France, the cruel and_ bloody
crusade against the Waldenses;
he wanted Frederick to do the
same thing in Germany. But
Frederick being far more of a
heretic than any of the simple
pietists who had incurred the
Pope’s animosity, lacked the
crusading impulse. And when
Innocent urged him to crusade
against the Moslim and recover
Jerusalem he was equally ready
to promise and equally slack in
his performance.
Having secured the imperial
crown Frederick II stayed in
Sicily, which he greatly preferred
to Germany as a residence, and
did nothing to redeem any of
his promises to Innocent III,
who died baffled in 1216.Recalcitrant Princes and Great Schism 238;
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better with
Frederick, and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal throne evidently
resolved to settle accounts with this young man at any cost. He
excommunicated him. Frederick II was denied all the comforts
of religion. In the half-Arab Court of Sicily this produced singu-
larly little discomfort. And also the Pope addressed a public letter
to the Emperor reciting his vices (which were indisputable), his
heresies, and his general misconduct. To this Frederick replied in a
document of diabolical ability. It was addressed to all the princes
of Europe, and it made the first clear statement of the issue between
the Pope and the princes. He made a shattering attack upon the
manifest ambition of the Pope to become the absolute ruler of all
Europe. He suggested a union of princes against this usurpation.
He directed the attention of the princes specifically to the wealth
of the church.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform
his twelve-year-old promise and go upon a crusade. ‘This was the
Sixth Crusade (1228). It was, as a crusade, farcical. Frederick II
went to Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the Sultan. These
two gentlemen, both of sceptical opinions, exchanged congenial
views, made a commercial convention to their mutual advantage,
and agreed to transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed was a
new sort of crusade, a crusade by private treaty. Here was no
blood splashing the conqueror, no “weeping with excess of joy.”
As this astonishing crusader was an excommunicated man, he had
to be content with a purely secular coronation as King of Jerusalem,
taking the crown from the altar with his own hand — for all the
clergy were bound to shun him. He then returned to Italy, chased
the papal armies which had invaded his dominions back to their
own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant him absolution from
his excommunication. So a prince might treat the Pope in the
thirteenth century, and there was now no storm of popular indig-
nation to avenge him. ‘Those days were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX resumed his struggle with Frederick, excom-
municated him for a second time, and renewed that warfare of public
abuse in which the papacy had already suffered severely. ‘The con-
troversy was revived after Gregory [IX was dead, when Innocent IV282 A Short History of the World
was Pope; and again a devastating letter, which men were bound
to remember, was written by Frederick against the church. He
denounced the pride and irreligion of the clergy, and ascribed all the
corruptions of the time to their pride and wealth. He proposed to
his fellow princes a general confiscation of church property — for the
good of the church. It was a suggestion that never afterwards leit
the imagination of the European princes.
We will not go on to tell of his last years. The particular events
of his life are far less significant than its general atmosphere. It is
possible to piece together something of his court life in Sicily. He
was luxurious in his way of living, and fond of beautiful things. He
is described as licentious. But it is clear that he was a man of very
effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem
as well as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to
irrigate the Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him
the Arabic numerals and algebra were introduced to Christian
students, and among other philosophers at his court was Michael
Seott, who translated portions of Aristotle and the commentaries
thereon of the great Arab philosopher Averroes (of Cordoba). In
1224 Frederick founded the University of Naples, and he enlarged
and enriched the great medical school at Salerno University. He
also founded a zoological garden. He left a book on hawking, which
shows him to have been an acute observer of the habits of birds,
and he was one of the first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian
poetry was indeed born at his court. He has been called by an able
writer, ‘‘the first of the moderns,’’ and the phrase expresses aptly
the unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual side.
A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and sus-
taining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes
came into conflict with the growing power of the French King.
During the lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into
disunion, and the French King began to play the role of guard, sup-
porter and rival to the Pope that had hitherto fallen to the Hohen-
staufen Emperors. A series of Popes pursued the policy of support-
ing the French monarchs. French princes were established in the
kinedom of Sicily and Naples, with the support and approval of
Rome, and the French Kings saw before them the possibility ofRecalcitrant Princes and Great Schism 28,
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE
FIFTEENTH CENTURY
restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne. When, however,
the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II, the last of
the Hohenstaufens, came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was
elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of Rome began to
fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with the
sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261 the Greeks
recaptured Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder
of the new Greek dynasty, Michael Palzeologus, Michael VIII,
after some unreal tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke
away from the Roman communion altogether, and with that, and
the fall of the Latin kingdoms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of
the Popes came to an end
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile
to the French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission
of Rome. For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300
he held a jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in
Rome. ‘So great was the influx of money into the papal treasury,
that two assistants were kept busy with the rakes collecting the284 A Short History of the World
offerings that were deposited at the tomb of St. Peter.”! But this
festival was a delusive triumph. Boniface came into conflict with
the French King in 1302, and in 1303, as he was about to pronounce
sentence of excommunication against that monarch, he was sur-
prised and arrested in his own ancestral palace at Anagni, by Guil-
laume de Nogaret. This agent from the French King forced an
entrance into the palace, made his way into the bedroom of the
frightened Pope — he was lying in bed with a cross in his hands — and
heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope was liberated a
day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to Rome; but there
he was seized upon and again made prisoner by the Orsini family,
and in a few weeks’ time the shocked and disillusioned old man died
a prisoner in their hands.
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose
against Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the Pope’s
native town. ‘The impertant point to note is that the French King
1 J. lal Robinson.
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE
FIFTEENTH CENTURY
This series is from casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum of the original brass statuettes
in the Rijks Museum, AmsterdamRecalcitrant Princes and Great Schism 28;
in this rough treatment of the head of Christendom was acting
with the full approval of his people; he had summoned a council of
the Three Estates of France (lords, church and commons) and gained
their consent before proceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy,
Germany nor England was there the slightest general manifestation
of disapproval at this free handling of the sovereign pontiff. The
idea of Christendom had decayed until its power over the minds of
men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to
recover its moral sway. ‘The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a
Frenchman, the choice of King Philip of France. He never came
to Rome. He set up his court in the town of Avignon, which then
belonged not to France but to the papal See, though embedded in
French territory, and there his successors remained until 1377, when
Pope Gregory XI returned to the Vatican palace in Rome. But
Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of the whole church with
him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin and their habits
and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in 1378
Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these dis-
sentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected another
Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. ‘This split is called the Great
Schism. The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French
powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary, Poland and
the North of Europe were loyal to them. ‘The anti-Popes, on the
other hand, continued in Avignon, and were supported by the King
of France, his ally the King of Scotland, Spain, Portugal and various
German princes. Each Pope excommunicated and cursed the
adherents of his rival (1378-1417).
Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people began to
think for themselves in matters of religion?
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, which
we have noted in the preceding chapters, were but two among
manv of the new forces that were arising in Christendom, either
to hold or shatter the church as its own wisdom might decide.
Those two orders the church did assimilate and use, though with
a little violence in the case of the former. But other forces were
more frankly disobedient and critical. A century and a half later286 A Short History of the World
came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a learned Doctor at Oxford.
Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken criticisms of the
corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom of the church. He
organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites, to spread his
ideas throughout England; and in order that people should judge
between the church and himself, he translated the Bible into Eng-
lish. He was a more learned and far abler man than either St.
Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and
a great following among the people; and though Rome raged against
him, and ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man. But the
black and ancient spirit that was leading the Catholic Church to its
destruction would not let his bones rest in the grave. By a decree
of the Council of Constance in 1415, his remains were ordered to be
dug up and burnt, an order which was carried out at the command
of Pope Martin V by Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration
was not the act of some isolated fanatic; it was the official act of the
church.XV
THrt Moncout CoNnQuEsts
UT in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally in-
effectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the
Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous events
were afoot upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from
the country to the north of China rose suddenly to prominence in the
world’s affairs, and achieved such a series of conquests as has no
parallel in history. These were the Mongols. At the opening of
the thirteenth century they were a horde of nomadic horsemen,
living very much as their predecessors, the Huns, had done, sub-
sisting chiefly upon meat and mare’s milk and living in tents of skin.
They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion, and
brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military confederacy.
Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty
of Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century, and after a
phase of division into warring states, three main empires, that of
Kin in the north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the
south with a capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain.
In 1214 Jengis Khan, the leader of the Mongol confederates, made
war on the Kin Empire and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned
westward and conquered Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia,
India down to Lahore, and South Russia as far as Kieff. He died
master of a vast empire that reached from the Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing career of
conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of effi-
ciency; and they had with them a new Chinese invention, gun-
powder, which they used in small field guns. He completed the
conquest of the Kin Empire and then swept his hosts right across
Asia to Russia (1235), an altogether amazing march. Kieff was
237A Short History of the World
a aE lis dete?
TU
mY
a EMPIRE ~
tse ae
| destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to the
| Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles and
| Germans was annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia
in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made
any great efforts to stay the advancing tide.
“It is only recently,” says Bury in his notes to Gibbon’s Decline
i and Fall of the Roman Empire, “that European history has begun to
| understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran
Poland and occupied Hungary in the spring of a.p. 1241 were won by
consummate strategy and were not due to a mere ov erwhelming
superiority of numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter
of common knowledge; the vulgar opinion which represents the
Tartars as a wild horde carrying all before them solely by their mul-
titude, and galloping through Eastern Europe without a strategic
plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight,
still prevails.
“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrange-
ments were carried out in operations extending from the Lower
Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond theThe Mongol Conquests 280
power of any European army of the time, and it was beyond the
vision of any European commander. There was no general in Eu-
rope, from Frederick IT downward, who was not a tyro in strategy
compared to Subutai. It should also be noticed that the Mongols
embarked upon the enterprise with full knowledge of the political
situation of Hungary and the condition of Poland — they had taken
care to inform themselves by a well-organized system of spies;
on the other hand, the Hungarians and the Christian powers, like
childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies.”
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not
continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands
and hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they
turned southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or
assimilating the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously
massacred and assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns
before them. From the Hungarian plain they would probably have
made raids west and south as the Hungarians had done in the ninth
century. the Avars in the seventh and eighth and the Huns in the
fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there was trouble
The ot TOMAN EMPIRE betove LEDS.
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J.FIH. —_— >290 A Short History of the World
about the succession, and recalled by this, the undefeated hosts of
Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Roumania towards
the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their
Asiatic conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they
had conquered the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai
Khan as Great Khan in 1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan
governor of China. In 1280 Kublai Khan had been formally recog-
nized Emperor of China, and so founded the Yuan dynasty which
lasted until 1368. While the last ruins of the Sung rule were going
down in China, another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was conquering
Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to
Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population of Bagdad
when they captured that city, but set to work to destroy the imme-
morial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly
prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From
that time until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins,
sustaining only a scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never
ypt completely defeated an army of
x
Co
4s,
penetrated; the Sultan of |
Hulagu’s in Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The
dominions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states.
The eastern Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese; the
western became Moslim. The Chinese threw off the rule of the
Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up the native Ming dynasty which
flourished from 1368 to 1644. The Russians remained tributary
to the Tartar hordes upon the south-east steppes until 1480, when
the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the
foundation of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol
vigour under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He estab-
lished himself in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand
Khan in 1369, and conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the
most savage and destructive of all the Mongol conquerors. He
established an empire of desolation that did not survive his death.
In 1505, however, a descendant of this Timur, an adventurer named
Baber, got together an army with guns and swept down upon theTARTAR HORSEMEN
(From a Chir eSt Print in the British Muse um)
291292 A Short History of the World
plains of India. His grandson Akbar (1556-1605) completed his
conquests, and this Mongol (or “Mogul” as the Arabs called it)
dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until the
eighteenth century.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol con-
quest in the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks,
the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They
extended and consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the
GERMANS pp 2 ae
Venn, ‘ LE The
EMPIRE;?» “A OTTOMAN &EMPIRG
Ww, at the death of”
Suleiman the Magnificent’
ARMENI NIB 2g
Dardanelles and conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until
at last Constantinople remained like an island amongst the Ottoman
dominions. In 1453 the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, took
Constantinople, attacking it from the European side with a great
number of guns. This event caused intense excitement in Europe
and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of the crusades was past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans
conquered Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and
their fleet made them masters of the Mediterranean. They very
nearly took Vienna, and they exacted a tribute from the Emperor.
There were but two items to offset the general ebb of ChristianThe Mongol Conquests 20
FS
dominion in the fifteenth century. One was the restoration of the
independence of Moscow (1480); the other was the gradual recon-
quest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492, Granada, the last
Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand of Aragon
and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of
Lepanto broke the pride of the Ottomans, and restored the Mediter-
ranean waters to Christian ascendancy.LE
hoe ata ae —— +
XX
Tue INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
HROUGHOUT the twelfth century there were many signs
that the European intelligence was recovering courage and
leisure, and preparing to take up again the intellectual enter-
prises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as
those of the Italian Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many
and complex. ‘The suppression of private war, the higher standards
of comfort and security that followed the crusades, and the stimu-
lation of men’s minds by the experiences of these expeditions were
no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was reviving;
cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of education was
arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing, independent or
quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris,
Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod, Wisby
and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many
travellers, and where men trade and travel they talk and think.
The polemics of the Popes and princes, the conspicuous savagery and
wickedness of the persecution of heretics, were exciting men to
doubt the authority of the church and question and discuss funda-
mental things.
We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle
to Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a channel
through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the
renascent European mind. Still more influential in the stirring up
of men’s ideas were the Jews. Their very existence was a note of
interrogation to the claims of the church. And finally the secret,
fascinating enquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide
and setting men to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful resumption of
experimental science.
204The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans 29;
And the stir in men’s minds was by no means confined now to the
independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was
awake in the world as it had never been before in all the experience of
mankind. In spite of priest and persecution, Christianity does seem
to have carried a mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It
established a direct relation between the conscience of the indi-
vidual man and the God of Righteousness, so that now if need arose
he had the courage to form his own judgment upon prince or prelate
or creed.
As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion had
begun again in Europe, and there were great and growing univer-
sities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There medieval
‘““schoolmen” took up again and thrashed out a series of questions
upon the value and meaning of words that were a necessary pre-
liminary to clear thinking in the scientific age that was to follow.
And standing by himself because of his distinctive genius was Roger
Bacon (circa 1210 to cirea 1293), a Franciscan of Oxford, the father
of modern experimental science. His name deserves a prominence
in our history second only to that of Aristotle.
His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his
age it was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a
man may tell the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all its methods
are still infantile and clumsy and its dogmas childish assumptions,
without much physical danger; but these peoples of the middle ages
when they were not actually being massacred or starving or dying
of pestilence, were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the com-
pleteness and finality of their beliefs, and disposed to resent any re-
flections upon them very bitterly. Roger Bacon’s writings were
like a flash of light in a profound darkness. He combined his attack
upon the ignorance of his times with a wealth of suggestion for the
increase of knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of
experiment and of collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives
again in him. “Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of
Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of
him because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and
pored over the bad Latin translations which were then all that was296 A Short History of the World
_ available of the master. “If I had my way,’ he wrote, in his in-
a || temperate fashion, “I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the
hs study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and
increase ignorance,’ a sentiment that Aristotle would probably have
echoed could he have returned to a world in which his works were
not so much read as worshipped — and that, as Roger Bacon showed,
i f in these most abominable translations.
aS
“—,
=
ieee
—~
=
=
>
B
AN EARLY PRINTING PRESS
(From an old print)The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans 207
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of
seeming to square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and
worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by
dogmas and authorities; look at the world!’’ Four chief sources
of ignorance he denounced; respect for authority, custom, the sense
of the ignorant crowd, and the vain, proud unteachableness of our
dispositions. Overcome but these, and a world of power would
open to men: —
“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that
great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be
borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise
cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be
moved cum impetu inestimable, as we deem the scythed chariots to
have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are
possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by
which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying
bird.”
So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse
before men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden
stores of power and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the
dull surface of human affairs.
But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus
of its philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it paper. It is
scarcely too much to say that paper made the intellectual revival
of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its use prob-
ably goes back to the second century B.c. In 751 the Chinese made
an attack upon the Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were re-
pulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them were some skilled
papermakers, from whom the art was learnt. Arabic paper manu-
scripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The manu-
facture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the
capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of
Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated
sadly. Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the
end of the thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the
world. Only by the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach
Germany, and not until the end of that century was it abundant and2098 A Short History of the World
cheap enough for the printing of books to be a practicable business
proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and neces-
sarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions, and the in-
tellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far more vigorous
phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from mind to mind; it became
a broad flood, in which thousands and presently scores and hundreds
of thousands of minds participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the
appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a
cheapening of school-books. The knowledge of reading spread
swiftly. There was not only a great increase of books in the world,
but the books that were now made were plainer to read and so easier
to understand. Instead of toiling at a crabbed text and then think-
ing over its significance, readers now could think unimpeded as they
read. With this increase in the facility of reading, the reading public
grew. ‘The book ceased to be a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s
mystery. People began to write books to be read as well as looked at
by ordinary people. They wrote in the ordinary language and not
in Latin. With the fourteenth century the real history of the
European literature begins.
So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic share in the
European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mon-
gol conquests. ‘They stimulated the geographical imagination of
Europe enormously. For atime under the Great Khan, all Asia and
Western Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were
temporarily open, and representatives of every nation appeared at
the court of Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia
set up by the religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered.
Great hopes were entertained by the papacy for the conversion of
the Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion so far had been
Shumanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist
priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers,
Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab officials and
Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol
court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres
of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity and desire for
learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as transmittersThe Intellectual Revival of the Europeans 299
of knowledge and method their influence upon the world’s history
has been very great. And everything one can learn of the vague and
romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai
tends to confirm the
impression that these men were at least as understanding and crea-
tive monarchs as either that flamboyant
Alexander the Great or that raiser of po-
litical ghosts, that energetic but illiterate
theologian Charlemagne.
One of the most interesting of these
visitors to the Mongol Court was a certain
Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards set
down his story in a book. He went to
China about 1272 with his father and uncle,
who had already once made the journey.
The Great Khan had been deeply impressed
by the elder Polos; they were the first men
of the “Latin” peoples he had seen; and he
sent them back with enquiries for teachers
and learned men who could explain Christi-
anity to him, and for various other Euro-
pean things that had aroused his curiosity.
Their visit with Marco was their second
visit.
The three Polos started by way of
Palestine and not by the Crimea, as in their
previous expedition. They had with them
a gold tablet and other indications from the
Great Khan that must have greatly facili-
but egotistical figure
ANCIENT BRONZE FIGURE
FROM BENIN, W. AFRICA
Note evidence in attire of knowl-
edge of early European explorers
(In the British Museum)
tated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil
from the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem;
and so thither they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into
Armenia. They went thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt
was raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Thence they came
by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they
contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from
«
India. For some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned
northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over| on A Short History of the World
3
. the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor into
f te ; - . . =
_ the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great
_ Khan, and they were hospitably entertained.
: Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and
1 it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly.
He was given an official position and sent on several missions, chiefly
in south-west China. The tale he had to
tell of vast stretches of smiling and pros-
perous country, “all the way excellent hos-
telries for travellers,’’ and “fine vineyards,
fields and gardens,” of ““many abbeys” of
Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “‘cloth
of silk and gold and many fine taffetas,”’ a
“constant succession of cities and boroughs,”
and so on, first roused the incredulity and
then fired the imagination of all Europe.
He told of Burmah, and of its great armies
with hundreds of elephants, and how these
animals were defeated by the Mongol bow-
men, and also of the Mongol conquest of
Pegu. Hetold of Japan, and greatly exag-
gerated the amount of gold in that country.
For three years Marco ruled the city of
. Yang-chow as governor, and he probably
| at Senay ANGIEND NEGHO impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being
2 ae ns a very little more of a foreigner than any
Tartar would have been. He may also
have been sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a
certain Polo attached to the imperial council in 1277, a very
valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story.
| The publication of Marco Polo’s travels produced a profound
effect upon the European imagination. ‘The European literature,
and especially the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes
with the names in Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China)
and Cambulae (Pekin) and the like.
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco
Polo was a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who
p
iA
H
i
H
;The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans
the
idea of
conceived
brilliant
sailing westward
round the world
HonCinw aa. - bn
Seville there is a
copy of the Trav-
els with marginal
notes by Colum-
bus. There were
many reasons why
the thought of a
Genoese should
be turned in this
Until
its capture by the
Turks in 1453
Constantinople
had been an im-
partial trading
mart between the
Western world
direction.
and the East, and
the Genoese had
traded there
But the
“Latin” Vene-
the bitter
rivals of the Gen-
freely.
tians,
oese, had been the
allies and helpers
of the Lurks
against the
Greeks, and with
the coming of the
Turks Constanti-
nople turned an
301
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goliatial: 1g
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Bier tcabte a Set Be Sadi sacs
EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVING OF A SAILING SHIP
(In the British Museum)302 A Short History of the World
uniriendly face upon Genoese trade. The long forgotten dis-
covery that the world was round had gradually resumed its sway
over men’s minds. The idea of going westward to China was there-
fore a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The
mariner’s compass had now been invented and men were no longer
left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars to determine the direc-
tion in which they were sailing, and the Normans, Catalonians and
Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the Atlantic
as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores.
Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships
to put his idea to the test. He went from one European Court to
another. Finally at Granada, just won from the Moors, he secured
the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was able to set out
across the unknown ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of
two months and nine days he came to a land which he believed to be
India, but which was really a new continent, whose distinct existence
the old world had never hitherto suspected. He returned to Spain
with gold, cotton, strange beasts and birds, and two wild-eyed
painted Indians to be baptized. They were called Indians be ause,
to the end of his days, he believed that this land he had found was
India. Only in the course of several years did men begin to realize
that the whole new continent of America was added to the world’s
resources.
The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enor-
mously. In 1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India. and in
1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519 Magellan, a
Portuguese sailor in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville west-
ward with five ships, of which one, the Vittoria, came back up the
river to Seville in 1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated
the world. Thirty-one men were aboard her, survivors of two-
hundred-and-eighty who had started. Magellan himself had been
killed in the Philippine Isles.
Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a
thing altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands, strange
animals and plants, strange manners and customs, discoveries over-
seas and in the skies and in the ways and materials of life burst upon
the European mind. The Greek classics, buried and for gotten for soThe Intellectual Revival of the Europeans 303
long, were speedily being printed and studied, and were colouring
men’s thoughts with the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an
age of republican freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had
first brought law and order to Western Europe, and the Latin Church
had restored it: but under both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity
and innovation were subordinate to and restrained by organization.
The reign of the Latin mind was now drawing to an end. Between
the thirteenth and the sixteenth century the European Aryans,
thanks to the stimulating influence of Semite and Mongol and the
rediscovery of the Greek classics, broke away from the Latin tradi-
tion and rose again to the intellectual and material leadership of
mankind.IF
Tue REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH
HE Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this
mental rebirth. It was dismembered; and even the portion
that survived was extensively renewed.
We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic
leadership of all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
and how in the fourteenth and fifteenth its power over men’s minds
and affairs declined. We have described how popular religious
enthusiasm which had in earlier ages been its support and power was
turned against it by its pride, persecutions and centralization, and
how the insidious scepticism of Frederick IT bore fruit in a growing
insubordination of the princes. The Great Schism had reduced its
religious and political prestige to negligible proportions. The forces
of insurrection struck it now from both sides.
The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely through-
out Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series
of lectures upon Wycliffe’s teachings in the university of Prague.
This teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused
great popular enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole
church was held at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was
invited to this Council under promise of a safe conduct from the
emperor, seized, put on trial for heresy and burnt alive (1415). So
far from tranquillizing the Bohemian people, this led to an insurrec-
tion of the Hussites in that country, the first 0. a series of religious
wars that inaugurated the break-up of Latin Christendom. Against
this insurrection Pope Martin V, the Pope specially elected at
Constance as the head of a reunited Christendom, preached a
Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people
and all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe was
304The Reformation of the Latin Church
395
turned upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in the thir-
teenth it had been turned upon the Waldenses.
Czechs, unlike the Waldenses, believed in armed resistance.
But the Bohemian
The
Bohemian Crusade dissolved and streamed away from the battle-
field at the sound
of the Hussites’
the
distant chanting of
waggons and
their troops; it did
even wait to
(battle of
1431).
agree-
not
fight
Domazlice,
In 1436 an
ment was patched
up with the Hussites
by a new Council of
the church at Basle
in which many of
the special objec-
tions to Latin prac-
tice were conceded.
In the fifteenth
century a_ great
pestilence had pro-
duced much social
disorganization
throughout Europe.
There had been ex-
treme misery and
discontent among
the common people,
and peasant risings
against the
landlords and the wealthy in
os. = ——
|
|
|.
.
|AETHERNA IPSE SVAE\MENTIS SIMVLACHRA LVTHERVS
|, ExPRIMIT:AT WILTVS CERA LVCAE OCCIDVOS
}
;
| “M:DXXX:
| iin
PORTRAIT OF LUTHER
(From an early German engraving in the British Museum)
England and France.
After the Hussite Wars these peasant insurrections increased in
gravity in Germany and took on a religious character.
came in as an influence upon this development.
Printing
By the middle of
the fifteenth century there were printers at work with movable type306 A Short History of the World
in Holland and the Rhineland. The art spread to Italy and England,
where Caxton was printing in Westminster in 1477. The immediate
consequence was a great increase and distribution of Bibles, and
greatly increased facilities for widespread popular controversies.
The European world became a world of readers, to an extent that
had never happened to any community in the past. And this
sudden irrigation of the general mind with clearer ideas and more
accessible information occurred just at a time when the church was
confused and divided and not ina position to defend itself effectively,
and when many princes were looking for means to weaken its hold
upon the vast wealth it claimed in their dominions.
In Germany the attack upon the church gathered round the
personality of an ex-monk, Martin Luther | 1483-1546), who appeared
in Wittenberg in 1517 offering disputations against various orthodox
doctrines and practices. At first he disputed in Latin in the fashion
of the Schoolmen. Then he took up the new weapon of the printed
word and scattered his views far and wide in German addressed to
the ordinary people. An attempt was made to suppress him as
Huss had been suppressed, but the printing press had changed
conditions and he had too many open and secret friends among the
German princes for this fate to overtake him.
For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith there
were many rulers who saw their advantage in breaking the religious
ties between their people and Rome. They sought to make them-
selves in person the heads of a more nationalized religion. England,
Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany and Bohe-
mia, one after another, separated themselves from the Roman Com-
munion. They have remained separated ever since.
The various princes concerned cared very little for the moral and
intellectual freedom of their subjects.
They used the religious
doubts and insurgence of their people
s to strengthen them against
Rome, but they tried to keep a grip upon the popular movement as
soon as that rupture was achieved and a national church set up
under the control of the crown. But there has always been
curious vitality in the teaching of Jesus, a direct
a
appeal to righteous-
ness and a man’s self-respect over every loyalty and every subor-
dination, lay or ecclesiastical. None of these princely churches brokeThe Reformation of the Latin Church 30
W
I
A MAJOLICA DISH PAINTED IN COLOURS
An allegory of the Church triumphant over heretics and infidels. Italian (Urbino), dated 1543
(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)
off without also breaking off a number of fragmentary sects that
would admit the intervention of neither prince nor Pope between a
man and his God. In England and Scotland, for example, there was
a number of sects who now held firmly to the Bible as their one guide
‘n life and belief. ‘They refused the disciplines of a state church.
In England these dissentients were the Non-conformists, who played
a very large part in the politics of that country in the seventeenth308 A Short History of the World
and eighteenth centuries. In England they carried their objection
to a princely head to the church so far as to decapitate King
Charles I (1649), and for eleven prosperous years England was a
republic under Non-conformist rule.
The breaking away of this large section of Northern Europe from
Latin Christendom is what is generally spoken of as the Reforma-
tion. But the shock and stress of these losses produced changes
perhaps as profound in the Roman Church itself. The church was
reorganized and a new spirit came into its life. One of the dominant
figures in this revival was a young Spanish soldier, Inigo Lopez de
Recalde, better known to the world as St. Ignatius of Loyola. After
some romantic beginnings he became a priest (1538) and was per-
mitted to found the Society of Jesus, a direct attempt to bring the
generous and chivalrous traditions of military discipline into the
service of religion. This Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, became one
of the greatest teaching and missionary societies the world has ever
seen. It carried Christianity to India, China and America. It
arrested the rapid disintegration of the Roman Church. It raised
the standard of education throughout the whole Catholic world: it
raised the level of Catholic intelligence and quickened the Catholic
conscience everywhere; it stimulated Protestant Europe to competi-
tive educational efforts. The vigorous and aggressive Roman
Catholic Church we know to-day is largely the product of this Jesuit
revival.el
THe Emprror CHarutes V
HE Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign
of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most ex-
traordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen. For a
time he had the air of being the greatest monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the
creation of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519).
Some families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world
power; the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his
career with Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the
original Habsburg patrimony; he married — the lady’s name scarcely
matters to us — the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy
slipped from him after his first wife’s death, but the Netherlands
he held. Then he tried unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He
became Emperor in succession to his father, Frederick III, in 1493,
and married the duchy of Milan. Finally he married his son to the
weak-minded daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and
Isabella of Columbus, who not only reigned over a freshly united
Spain and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the two Sicilies, but
over all America west of Brazil. So it was that this Charles V, his
grandson, inherited most of the American continent and between
a third and a half of what the Turks had left of Europe. He suc-
ceeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his grandfather Ferdinand
died in 1516, he became practically king of the Spanish dominions,
his mother being imbecile; and his grandfather Maximilian dying
in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively
tender age of twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick
upper lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of
young and vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young
309
ee
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310 A Short History of the World
monarchs. Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515
at the age of twenty-one, Henry VIII had become King of England
in 1509 at eighteen. It was the age of Baber in India (1526-1530)
and Suleiman the Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally
capable monarchs, and the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very dis-
tinguished Pope. The Pope and Francis I attempted to prevent the
election of Charles as Emperor because they dreaded the concentra-
tion of so much power in the hands of one man. Both Francis I and
Henry VIII offered themselves to the imperial electors. But there
was now a long established tradition of Habsburg Emperors (since
1273), and some energetic bribery secured the election for Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in
the hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself
and take control. He began to realize something of the threatening
complexities of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound
as it was splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation
created by Luther’s agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one
reason for siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to
his election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most
Catholic of countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came
into conflict with the Protestant princes and particularly the Elector
of Saxony. He found himself in the presence of an opening rift
that was to split the outworn fabric of Christendom into two con-
tending camps. His attempts to close that rift were strenuous and
honest and ineffective. There was an extensive peasant revolt in
Germany which interwove with the general political and religious
disturbance. And these internal troubles were complicated by
attacks upon the Empire from east and west alike. On the west
of Charles was his spirited rival, Francis I; to the east was the
ever advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in alliance with
Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute from the
Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain at
his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective sup-
port in money from Germany. His social and political troubles
were complicated by financial distresses. He was forced to ruinous
borrowing.Photo: Anderson
THE CHARLES V PORTRAIT BY TITIAN
(In the Gallery del Prado, Madrid)312 A Short History of the World
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was success-
ful against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was
North Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances
and retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The
German army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back
into Italy, lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a
long and unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German
forces, defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the
Pope and Henry VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining
excessive power, turned against Charles. The German troops in
Milan, under the Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather
than followed their commander into a raid upon Rome. They
stormed the city and pillaged it (1527). The Pope took refuge in
the Castle of St. Angelo while the looting and slaughter went
on. He bought off the German troops at last by the payment
of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such confused
fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found
himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the
Pope—he was the last German Emperor to be so crowned —at
Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary.
They had defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held
Buda-Pesth, and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took
Vienna. The Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances,
and did his utmost to drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest
difficulty in getting the German princes to unite even with this
formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained im-
placable for a time, and there was a new French war: but in 1538
Charies won his rival over to a more friendly attitude after ravaging
the south of France. Francis and Charles then formed an alliance
against the Turk. But the Protestant princes, the German princes
who were resolved to break away from Rome, had formed a league,
the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and in the place of a
great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom Charles had to
turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in Germany. Of
that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a struggle, a
sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy, nowThe Emperor Charles V 313
flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues
and diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that
was to go on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century
and to waste and desolate Central Europe again and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work
in these gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an ex-
ceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious
dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring fragments as
genuine theological differences. He gathered diets and councils in
futile attempts at reconciliation. Formule and confessions were
tried over. The student of German history must struggle with the
details of the Religious Peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at the
Diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of Augsburg, and the like. Here
we do but mention them as details in the worried life of this culminat-
ing Emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly one of the multifarious
princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been acting in good
faith.. The widespread religious trouble of the world, the desire of
the common people for truth and social righteousness, the spreading
knowledge of the time, all those things were merely counters in the
imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who
had begun his career with a book against heresy, and who had been
rewarded by the Pope with the title of “Defender of the Faith,”
being anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of a young lady
named Anne Boleyn, and wishing also to loot the vast wealth of the
church in England, joined the company of Protestant princes in
1530. Sweden, Denmark and Norway had already gone over to the
Protestant side.
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the
death of Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of
the campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at
Lochau. By something very like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse,
the Emperor’s chief remaining antagonist, was caught and im-
prisoned, and the Turks were bought off by the promise of an
annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the Emperor, Fran-
cis died. So by 1547 Charles got to a kind of settlement, and made
his last efforts to effect peace where there was no peace. In 1552 all
Germany was at war again, only a precipitate flight from Innsbruck314 A Short History of the World
saved Charles from capture, and in 1552, with the treaty of Passau,
came another unstable equilibrium.
Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for thirty-
two years. It is interesting to note how entirely the European mind
was concentrated upon the struggle for European ascendancy.
Neither Turks, French, English nor Germans had yet discovered any
political interest in the great continent of America, nor any signifi-
cance in the new sea routes to Asia. Great things were happening in
America; Cortez with a mere handful of men had conquered the
great Neolithic empire of Mexico for Spain, Pizarro had crossed the
Isthmus of Panama (1530) and subjugated another wonder-land,
Peru. But as yet these events meant no more to Europe than a
useful and stimulating influx of silver to the Spanish treasury.
It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to display
his distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored and
disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the intolerable
futility of these European rivalries came upon him. He had. never
been of a very sound constitution, he was natually indolent and he
was suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all
his sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain
and the Netherlands he resigned to his son Philip. Then in a sort of
magnificent dudgeon he retired to a monastery at Yuste, among the
oak and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the Tagus valley.
There he died in 1558.
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement,
this renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-
weary, seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his
retreat was neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a
hundred and fifty attendants; his establishment had all the splendour
and indulgences without the fatigues of a court, and Philip IT was a
dutiful son to whom his father’s advice was a command.
And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration of
European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate sort
to stir him. Says Prescott: “In the almost daily correspondence
between Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valla-
dolid, there is scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the
Emperor’s eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow,The Emperor Charles V
alte,
ae
1 RRO bs ba
Photo: ‘Altnart
INTERIOR OF ST. PETER’S, ROME, SHOWING THE HIGH ALTAR
like a running commentary, on the other. It is rare that such topics
have formed the burden of communications with the department
of state. It must have been no easy matter for the secretary to pre-
serve his gravity in the perusal of despatches in which politics and
gastronomy were so strangely mixed together. The courier from
Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a detour, so as to take
Jarandilla in his route, and bring supplies to the royal table. On316 A Short History of the World
Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve for the jour maigre that was
to follow. The trout in the neighbourhood Charles thought too
small, so others of a larger size were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish
of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was anything that in its
nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels, frogs, oysters,
occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare. Potted fish,
especially anchovies, found great favour with him; and he regretted
that he had not brought a better supply of these from the Low
Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.” . . .1
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III grant-
ing him a dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his
fast early in the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.
Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things. He
had never acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read aloud
to at meals after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what
one narrator describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He
also amused himself with mechanical toys, by listening to music or
sermons, and by attending to the imperial business that still came
drifting in to him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was
greatly attached, had turned his mind towards religion, which in his
case took a punctilious and ceremonial form; every Friday in Lent
he scourged himself with the rest of the monks with such good will
as to draw blood. These exercises and the gout released a bigotry in
Charles that had hitherto been restrained by considerations of
policy. The appearance of Protestant teaching close at hand in
Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the grand inquisitor and his
council from me to be at their posts, and to lay the axe at the root
of the evil before it spreads further.” . . . He expressed a doubt
whether it would not be well, in so black an affair, to dispense with
the ordinary course of justice, and to show no merey; “lest the
criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his
crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode of pro-
ceeding in the Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in
their errors were burned alive, and those who were admitted to
penitence were beheaded.”
And almost symbolical of his place and réle in history was his
+ Prescott’s Appendix to Robertson’s History of Charles V.The Emperor Charles V 317
preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an intuition
that something great was dead in Europe and sorely needed burial,
that there was a need to write Finis, overdue. He not only attended
every actual funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had sery-
ices conducted for the absent dead, he held a funeral service in
memory of his wife on the anniversary of her death, and finally he
celebrated his own obsequles.
“The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of
wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The
brethren in their conventual dress, and ail the Emperor’s house-
hold clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque,
shrouded also in black, which had been raised in the centre of the
chapel. The service for the burial of the dead was then performed;
and, amidst the dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for
the departed spirit, that it might be received into the mansions of the
blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted to tears, as the
image of their master’s death was presented to their minds — or they
were touched, it may be, with compassion by this pitiable display
of weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a
lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the spectator
of his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony was concluded by his
placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in sign of his surrender-
ing up his soul to the Almighty.”
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the
brief greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His
realm was already divided between his brother and his son. The
Holy Roman Empire struggled on indeed to the days of Napoleon I
but as an invalid and dying thing. ‘To this day its unburied tradi-
tion still poisons the political air.LII
THe Acer or PouiticaL ExprRIMENTS: OF GRAND MoNARCHY
AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE
HI Latin Church was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in
extreme decay; the history of Europe from the opening of
the sixteenth century onward is a story of peoples feeling
their way darkly to some new method of government, better adapted
to the new conditions that were arising. In the Ancient World, over
long periods of time, there had been changes of dynasty and even
changes of ruling race and language, but the form of government
through monarch and temple remained fairly stable, and still more
stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern Europe since
the sixteenth century the dynastic changes are unimportant, and the
interest of history lies in the wide and increasing variety of experi-
ments in political and social organization.
The political history of the world from the sixteenth century
onward was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort, of
mankind to adapt its political and social methods to certain new
conditions that had now arisen. The effort to adapt was compli-
cated by the fact that the conditions themselves were changing with
a steadily increasing rapidity. The adaptation, mainly unconscious
and almost always unwilling (for man in general hates voluntary
change), has lagged more and more behind the alterations in condi-
tions. From the sixteenth century onward the history of mankind
is a story of political and social institutions becoming more and more
plainly misfits, less comfortable and more vexatious, and of the slow
reluctant realization of the need for a conscious and deliberate
reconstruction of the whole scheme of human societies in the face
of needs and possibilities new to all the former experiences of life.
What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have
disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader, with
318The Age of Political Experiments 319
periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest, that has held human
affairs in the Old World in a sort of working rhythm for more than a
hundred centuries?
They are manifold and various, for human affairs are multi-
tudinously complex; but the main changes seem all to turn upon one
cause, namely the growth and extension of a knowledge of the nature
of things, beginning first of all in small groups of intelligent people and
spreading at first slowly, and in the last five hundred years very
rapidly, to larger and larger proportions of the general population.
But there has also been a great change in human conditions due
to a change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on
side by side with the increase and extension of knowledge, and is
subtly connected with it. There has been an increasing disposition
to treat a life based on the common and more elementary desires
and gratifications as unsatisfactory, and to seek relationship with
and service and participation in a larger life. This is the common
characteristic of all the great religions that have spread throughout
the world in the last twenty odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity
and Islam alike. They have had to do with the spirit of man in a
way that the older religions did not have to do. They are forces quite
different in their nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-
sacrifice religions of priest and temple that they have in part modified
and in part replaced. They have gradually evolved a self-respect
in the individual and a sense of participation and responsibility
in the common concerns of mankind that did not exist among the
populations of the earlier civilizations.
The first considerable change in the conditions of political and
social life was the simplification and extended use of writing in the
ancient civilizations which made larger empires and wider political
understandings practicable and inevitable. The next movement
forward came with the introduction of the horse, and later on of
the camel as a means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the
extension of roads and the increased military efficiency due to the
discovery of terrestrial iron. Then followed the profound economic
disturbances due to the device of coined money and the change in
the nature of debt, proprietorship and trade due to this convenient
but dangerous convention. The empires grew im size and range, and320 A Short History of the World
men’s ideas grew likewise to correspond with these things. Came
the disappearance of local gods, the age of theocrasia, and the teach-
ing of the great world religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned
and recorded history and geography, the first realization by man of
his profound ignorance, and the first systematic search for knowledge.
For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in
Greece and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Teutonic
barbarians, the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples, con-
vulsive religious reconstruction and great pestilences put enormous
strains upon political and social order. When civilization emerged
again from this phase of conflict and confusion, slavery was no
longer the basis of economic life; and the first paper-mills were pre-
paring a new medium for collective information and co-operation in
printed matter. Gradually at this point and that, the search for
knowledge, the systematic scientific process, was resumed
And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an inevitable
by-product of systematic thought, appeared a steadily increasing
series of inventions and devices affecting the intereommunication
and interaction of men with one another. They all tended towards
wider range of action, greater mutual benefits or injuries, and in-
creased co-operation, and they came faster and faster. Men’s
minds had not been prepared for anything of the sort, and until the
great catastrophes at the beginning of the twentieth century quick-
ened men’s minds, the historian has very little to tell of any intelli-
gently planned attempts to.meet the new conditions this increasing
flow of inventions was creating. The history of mankind for the
last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper,
stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and
shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling
and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than
like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity.
Since history is the story not of individual lives but of communi-
ties, 1t is inevitable that the inventions that figure most in the
historical record are inventions affecting communications. In the
sixteenth century the chief new things that we have to note are the
appearance of printed paper and the sea-worthy, ocean-going sailing
ship using the new device of the mariner’s compass. The formerThe Age of Political Experiments 321
cheapened, spread, and revolutionized teaching, public information
and discussion, and the fundamental operations of political activity.
The latter made the round world one. But almost equally important
was the ixcreased utilization and improvement of guns and gun-
powder which the Mongols had first brought westward in the thir-
ee
CROMWELL DISSOLVES THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND SO BECOMES AUTOCRAT
OF THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC
(From a contemporary satirical print in the British Museum)
teenth century. This destroyed the practical immunity of barons
‘n their castles and of walled cities. Guns swept away feudalism.
Constantinople fell to guns. Mexico and Peru fell before the terror
of the Spanish guns.
The seventeenth century saw the development of systematic
scientific publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more
pregnant innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great
forward step was Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) afterwards LordA Short History of the World
Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and
perhaps the mouthpiece of another Englishman, Dr. Gilbert, the
experimental philosopher of Colchester (1540-1603). This sec-
ond Bacon, like the first, preached observation and experiment,
and he used the inspiring and fruitful form of a Utopian story, The
New Atlantis, to express his dream of a great service of scientific
research.
Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine
Society, and later other national bodies for the encouragement of
research and the publication and exchange of knowledge. These
European scientific societies became fountains not only of countless
inventions but also of a destructive criticism of the grotesque theo-
logical history of the world that had dominated and crippled human
thought for many centuries.
Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century witnessed
any Innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions
as printed paper and the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady
accumulation of knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear its
full fruits in the nineteenth century. The exploration and mapping
of the world went on. Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand appeared
on the map. In Great Britain in the eighteenth century coal coke
began to be used for metallurgical purposes, leading to a considerable
cheapening of iron and to the possibility of casting and using it in
larger pieces than had been possible before, when it had been smelted
with wood charcoal. Modern machinery dawned.
Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower
and fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of the
nineteenth century the real fruition of science — which indeed hence-
forth may never cease— began. First came steam and steel, the
railway, the great liner, vast bridges and buildings, machinery of
almost limitless power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of
every material human need, and then, still more wonderful, the
hidden treasures of electrical science were opened to men.
We have compared the political and social life of man from the
sixteenth century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies and
dreams while his prison burns about him. Yn the sixteenth century
the European mind was still going on with its Latin Imperial dream,The Age of Political Experiments 323
its dream of a Holy Roman Empire, united under a Catholic Church.
But just as some uncontrollable element in our composition will
insist at times upon introducing into our dreams the most absurd
and destructive comments, so thrust into this dream we find the
sleeping face and craving stomach of the Emperor Charles V, while
Gc
Oo ae Be Bae Senne
THE COURT AT VERSAILLES
(From the print after Watteau in the British Museum)
Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the unity of Catholicism
to shreds.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to
personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this
period tells with variations the story of an attempt to consolidate
a monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its power over weaker
adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance, first of the land-
owners and then with the increase of foreign trade and home indus-
try, of the growing trading and moneyed class, to the exaction and
interference of the crown. ‘There is no universal victory of either
side: here it is the King who gets the upper hand while there it is the324 A Short History of the World
man of private property who beats the King. In one case we find a
King becoming the sun and centre of his national world, while just
over his borders a sturdy mercantile class maintains a republic. So
wide a range of variation shows how entirely experimental, what
local accidents, were all the various governments of this period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the King’s
minister, often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who stands
behind the King, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable
services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these various
national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went
Protestant and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip IT of Spain,
the son of the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his
minister Wolsey, Queen Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, pre-
pared the foundations of an absolutism that was wrecked by the
folly of James I and CharlesI. Charles I was beheaded for treason
to his people (1649), a new turn in the political thought of Europe.
For a dozen years (until 1660) Britain was a republic; and the
crown was an unstable power, much overshadowed by Parliament,
until George III (1760-1820) made a strenuous and partly suc-
cessful effort to restore its predominance. The King of France, on
the other hand, was the most successful of all the European Kings
in perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers, Richelieu (1585—
1642) and Mazarin (1602-1661), built up the power of the crown in
that country, and the process was aided by the long reign and very
considerable abilities of King Louis XIV, “the Grand Monarque”’
(1643-1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was,
within his limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition
was stronger than his baser passions, and he guided his country
towards bankruptcy through the complication of a spirited foreign
policy with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our admiration.
His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend France to the
Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands; his
remoter view saw the French Kings as the possible successors of
Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a
state method almost more important than warfare. Charles IT ofThe Age of Political Experiments 325
England was in his pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility,
presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of
the tax-paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his pre-
vailing occupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles
with its salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains
and parks and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the world.
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in
Europe was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means
as his subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere the nobility
rebuilt or extended their chateaux to the new pattern. A great
TTS SSS Se
THE SACK OF A VILLAGE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
From Callot’s ‘“‘ Miseres de la Guerre’
industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnishings devel-
oped. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere; sculpture in
alabaster, faience, gilt woodwork, metal work, stamped leather,
much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and bindings,
fine crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture
went a strange race of “gentlemen” in tall powdered wigs, silks and
laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes; and
still more wonderful “ladies,’’ under towers of powdered hair and
wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through
it all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the
meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower
darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate.
The German people remained politically divided throughout this
period of the monarchies and experimental governments, and a con-320 A Short History of the World
siderable number of ducal and princely courts aped the splendours of
Versailles on varying scales. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), a
devastating scramble among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians
for fluctuating political advantages, sapped the energies of Germany
for a century. A map must show the crazy patchwork in which this
struggle ended, a map of Europe according to the peace of West-
phalia (1648). One sees a tangle of principalities, dukedoms, free
states and the like, some partly in and partly out of the Empire.
Sweden’s arm, the reader will note, reached far into Germany; and
except for a few islands of territory within the imperial boundaries
France was still far from the Rhine. Amidst this patchwork the
Contral EUROPE after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648.]
AN & KG y\ 5 r Gc RAM :
\ ARK Rvp os yy a
: u SX ~ = a Te = ( UA
DE N{M
SSF
: sll
i
rl
ie
Sai
Cologne.
SL .
= ‘Sees
fp Swiss
Y REPUBLIC
Res
Boundary of the ae
Empire qsomests Colo, French ” Bex
Austrian Habsburgs. INNS
andenbur
(Pras)... L000The Age of Political Experiments 327
Kingdom of Prussia — it became a Kingdom in 1701 — rose steadily
to prominence and sustained a series of successful wars. Frederick
the Great of Prussia (1740-86) had his Versailles at Potsdam, where
his court spoke French, read French literature and rivalled the
culture of the French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England,
adding one more to the list of monarchies half in and half out
of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained
the title of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now
there was also an Emperor of the East again. After the fall of Con-
stantinople (1453), the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great
(1462-1505), claimed to be heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted
the Byzantine double-headed eagle upon his arms. His grandson,
Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), assumed the imperial title of
Cesar (Tsar). But only in the latter half of the seventeenth
century did Russia cease to seem remote and Asiatic to the European
mind. The Tsar Peter the Great (1682-1725) brought Russia into
the arena of Western affairs. He built a new capital for his empire,
Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the part of a window between
Russia and Europe, and he set up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen
miles away, employing a French architect who gave him a terrace,
fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park and all the recognized
appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia as in Prussia French
became the language of the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the
Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too
jealous of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a
nominal kingship to the monarch they elected. Her fate was divi-
sion among these three neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France
to retain her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a
group of republican cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy like so
much of Germany was divided among minor dukes and princes.
The Pope ruled like a prince in the papal states, too fearful now of
losing the allegiance of the remaining Catholic princes to interfere
between them and their subjects or to remind the world of the com-
monweal of Christendom. There remained indeed no common328 A Short History of the World
political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over altogether to
division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of
aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a
“foreign policy” of aggression against its neighbours and of aggres-
sive alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of
this age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from
the hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered. The history of
this time becomes more and more manifestly “‘gossip,’’ more and
more unmeaning and wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are
told of how this war was caused by this King’s mistress, and how the
jealousy of one minister for another caused that. A tittle-tattle of
bribes and rivalries disgusts the intelligent student. The more
permanently significant fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a
score of frontiers, reading and thought still spread and increased
and inventions multiplied. The eighteenth century saw the appear-
ance of a literature profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts
and policies of the time. In such a book as Voltaire’s Candide we
have the expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confu-
sion of the Kuropean world.LIII
Tar New Empires of THE Evroprans in AsiA AND OVERSEAS
HILE Central Europe thus remained divided and con-
fused, the Western Europeans and particularly the
Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish, the Portu-
guese, the French and the British were extending the area of their
struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing press had
dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a vast and at first inde-
terminate fermentation, but that other great innovation, the ocean-
going sailing ship, was inexorably extending the range of European
experience to the furthermost limits of salt water.
The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlan-
tic Europeans were not for colonization but for trade and mining.
The Spaniards were first in the field; they claimed dominion over
the whole of this new world of America. Very soon however the
Portuguese asked for a share. The Pope — it was one of the last
acts of Rome as mistress of the world — divided the new continent
between these two first-comers, giving Portugal Brazil and every-
thing else east of a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.
and all the rest to Spain (1494). The Portuguese at this time were
also pushing overseas enterprise southward and eastward. In 1497
Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the Cape to Zanzibar
and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese
ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were setting
up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts of the
Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller possessions in
India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portu-
guese possessions.
The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement
paid little heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The English,
the Danes and Swedes, and presently the Dutch, were soon staking
329330 A Short History of the World
out claims in North America and the West Indies, and his Most
Catholic Majesty of France heeded the papal settlement as little
as any Protestant. The wars of Europe extended themselves to
these claims and possessions.
In the long run the English were the most successful in this
scramble for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too
Britain, France 6'& S Spain 1 in America, 1750.
N.B.- Shading does not indicate
S S areas actually settled (of later
maps) but general extent
territories claimed.
/ (/
FLORIDA
Ol PY BAHAMAS
; a (British)
Gulf of Mexico eS "8. 0
GLEZ “ <4
Voy P*
A gee
Lc JAMAICA
f/ Lay (British)
LN See
i, Tite /
eon Y fy
French m
Sparish V///) 7)
ly
J.FLH, xThe New Empires of the Europeans
EUROPEANS 11GER HUNTING IN INDIA
(From the engraving of the picture by Zoffany in the British Museum)
deeply entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to sustain
effective expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the German
battlefields by a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protes-
tant ‘Lion of the North.’ The Dutch were the heirs of such small
settlements as Sweden made in America, and the Dutch were too
near French aggressions to hold their own against the British. In
the far East the chief rivals for empire were the British, Dutch and
French, and in America the British, French and Spanish. The
British had the supreme advantage of a water frontier, the “silver
streak”? of the English Channel, against Europe. ‘The tradition
of the Latin Empire entangled them least.
France has always thought too much in terms of Europe.
Throughout the eighteenth century she was wasting her oppor-
tunities of expansion in West and East alike in order to dominate
Spain, Italy and the German confusion. The religious and political
dissensions of Britain in the seventeenth century had driven many332 A Short History of the World
of the English to seek a permanent home in America. They struck
root and increased and multiplied, giving the British a great ad-
vantage in the American struggle. In 1756 and 1760 the French
lost Canada to the British and their American colonists, and a few
years later the British trading company found itself completely
dominant over French, Dutch and Portuguese in the peninsula
of India. The great Mongol Empire of Baber, Akbar and their
successors had now far gone in decay, and the story of its practical
-apture by a London trading company, the British East India
Company, is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole
history of conquest.
This East India Company had been originally at the time of
its incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a company
of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been forced to raise
troops and arm their ships. And now this trading company, with
its tradition of gain, found itself dealing not merely in spices and
dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and territories of princes
(From the engraving of the picture by Singleton in the British Museum)The New Empires of the Europeans B32
and the destinies of India. It had come to buy and sell, and it
found itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There was no one to
challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that its captains and
commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks and common soldiers,
came back to England loaded with spoils?
Men under such circumstances, with a great and wealthy land
at their mercy, could not determine what they might or might
not do. It was a strange land to them, with a strange sunlight;
its brown people seemed a different race, outside their range of
sympathy; its mysterious temples sustained fantastic standards
of behaviour. Englishmen at home were perplexed when presently
these generals and officials came back to make dark accusations
against each other of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parlia-
ment passed a vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774.
In 1788 Warren Hastings, a second great Indian administrator,
was impeached and acquitted (1792). It was a strange and un-
precedented situation in the world’s history. The English Par-
liament found itself ruling over a London trading company, which
in its turn was dominating an empire far greater and more populous
than all the domains of the British crown. To the bulk of the
English people India was a remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible
land, to which adventurous poor young men went out, to return
after many years very rich and very choleric old gentlemen. It
was difficult for the English to conceive what the life of these count-
less brown millions in the eastern sunshine could be. Their imagi-
nations declined the task. India remained romantically unreal.
It was impossible for the English, therefore, to exert any effective
supervision and control over the company’s proceedings.
And while the Western European powers were thus fighting
for these fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in the world,
two great land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had
thrown off the Mongol yoke in 1360, and flourished under the great
native dynasty of the Mings until 1644. Then the Manchus, an-
other Mongol people, reeonquered China and remained masters of
China until 1912. Meanwhile Russia was pushing East and growing
to greatness in the world’s affairs. The rise of this great central
power of the old world, which is neither altogether of the East nor334 A Short History of the World
altogether of the West, is one of the utmost importance to our
human destiny. Its expansion is very largely due to the appear-
ance of a Christian steppe people, the Cossacks, who formed a
barrier between the feudal agriculture of Poland and Hungary
to the west and the Tartar to the east. The Cossacks were the
wild east of Europe, and in many ways not unlike the wild west
of the United States in the middle nineteenth century. All who
had made Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well as the
persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, religious secretaries, thieves,
vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes
and there made a fresh start and fought for life and freedom against
Pole, Russian and Tartar alike. Doubtless fugitives from the
Tartars to the east also contributed to the Cossack mixture. Slowly
these border folk were incorporated in the Russian imperial service,
much as the highland clans of Scotland were converted into regiments
by the British government. New lands were offered them in Asia.
They became a weapon against the dwindling power of the Mongolian
nomads, first in Turkestan and then across Siberia as far as the Amur.
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries
from the days of Jengis and Timurlane Central Asia had relapsed
from a period of world ascendancy to extreme political impotence.
Changes of climate, unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial
type, may have played their part in this recession — which may be
only a temporary recession measured by the scale of universal
history — of the Central Asian peoples. Some authorities think
that the spread of Buddhist teaching from China also had a pacifying
influence upon them. At any rate, by the sixteenth century the
Mongol, Tartar and Turkish peoples were no longer pressing out-
ward, but were being invaded, subjugated and pushed back both by
Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east.
All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spread-
ing eastward from European Russia, and settling wherever they
found agricultural conditions. Cordons of forts and stations formed
a moving frontier to these settlements to the south, where the
Turkomans were still strong and active; to the north-east, however,
Russia had no frontier until she reached right to the Pacific. . .eV;
Tuer AMERICAN War or INDEPENDENCE
HE third quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the
remarkable and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided
against itself, and no longer with any unifying political or
religious idea, yet through the immense stimulation of men’s imagi-
nations by the printed book, the printed map, and the opportunity
of the new ocean-going shipping, able in a disorganized and con-
tentious manner to dominate all the coasts of the world. It was
a planless, incoherent ebullition of enterprise due to temporary and
almost accidental adyantages over the rest of mankind. By virtue
of these advantages this new and still largely empty continent of
America was peopled mainly from Western European sources, and
South Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as
prospective homes for a European population.
The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco
da Gama to India was the perennial first motive of all sailors since
the beginning of things—trade. But while in the already populous
and productive East the trade motive remained dominant, and
the European settlements remained trading settlements from which
the European inhabitants hoped to return home to spend their
money, the Europeans in America, dealing with communities at
a very much lower level of productive activity, found a new in-
ducement for persistence in the search for gold and silver. Par-
ticularly did the mines of Spanish America yield silver. The
Europeans had to go to America not simply as armed merchants
but as prospectors, miners, searchers after natural products, and
presently as planters. In the north they sought furs. Mines
and plantations necessitated settlements. They obliged people
to set up permanent overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as
when the English Puritans went to New England in the early seven-
335336 A Short History of the World
teenth century to escape religious persecution, when in the eigh-
teenth Oglethorpe sent people from the English debtors’ prisons
to Georgia, and when in the end of the eighteenth the Dutch sent
orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the Europeans frankly crossed
the seas to find new homes for good. In the nineteenth century,
and especially after the coming of the steamship, the stream of
European emigration to the new empty lands of America and
Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration.
So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans,
and the European culture was transplanted to much larger areas
than those in which it had been developed. These new communities
bringing a ready-made civilization with them to these new lands
grew up, as it were, unplanned and unperceived; the statecraft of
Europe did not foresee them, and was unprepared with any ideas
about their treatment. The politicians and ministers of Europe
continued to regard them as essentially expeditionary establish-
ments, sources of revenue, “possessions” and “dependencies,” long
after their peoples had developed a keen sense of their separate
social life. And also they continued to treat them as helplessly
subject to the mother country long after the population had spread
inland out of reach of any effectual punitive operations from the sea.
Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be
remembered, the link of all these overseas empires was the ocean-
going sailing ship. On land the swiftest thing was still the horse,
and the cohesion and unity of political systems on land was still
limited by the limitations of horse communications.
Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century
the northern two-thirds of North America was under the British
crown. France had abandoned America. Except for Brazil,
which was Portuguese, and one or two small islands and areas in
French, British, Danish and Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana,
California and all America to the south was Spanish. It was the
British colonies south of Maine and Lake Ontario that first demon-
strated the inadequacy of the sailing ship to hold overseas popula-
tions together in one political system.
These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin
and character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settle-The American War of Independence 337
ments as well as British; there were British Catholics in Maryland
and British ultra-Protestants in New England, and while the New
Englanders farmed their own land and denounced slavery, the
British in Virginia and the south were planters employing a swelling
multitude of imported negro slaves. There was no natural common
unity in such states. To get from one to the other might mean
a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than the transatlantic cross-
ing. But the union that diverse origin and natural conditions
denied the British Americans was forced upon them by the selfish-
ness and stupidity of the British government in London. They
were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes; their
trade was sacrificed to British interests; the highly profitable slave
trade was maintained by the British government in spite of the
opposition of the Virginians who—though quite willing to hold
and use slaves—feared to
be swamped by an ever-
growing barbaric black
population.
Britain at that time was
lapsing towards an intenser
form of monarchy, and the
obstinate personality of
George IIT (1760-1820) did
much to force on a struggle
between the home and the
colonial governments.
The conflict was precip-
itated by legislation which
favoured the London East
India Company at the ex-
pense of the American ship-
per. Three cargoes of tea
which were imported under
the new conditions were
thrown overboard in Boston
harbour by a band of men GEORGE WIGHIR CHES
disguised as Indians (1773). (Fram’alpatating'by | Gilbert setart)
Le,
*.
ceaTHE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, NEAR BOSTON
(From the engraving of the picture by John Trumbull in the British Museum)
Fighting only began in 1775 when the British government at-
tempted to arrest two of the American leaders at Lexington near
Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington by the British;
the first fighting occurred at Concord.
So the American War of Independence began, though for more
than a year the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling
to sever their links with the mother land. It was not until the
middle of 1776 that the Congress of the insurgent states issued
“The Declaration of Independence.” George Washington, who
like many of the leading colonists of the time had had a military
training in the wars against the French, was made commander-
in-chief. In 1777 a British general, General Burgoyne, in an
attempt to reach New York from Canada, was defeated at Free-
mans Farm and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the same
year the French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain,
greatly hampering her sea communications. A second British
army under General Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown pen-
insula in Virginia and obliged to capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peaceThe American War of Independence 33
was made in Paris, and the Thirteen Colonies from Maine to Georgia
became a union of independent sovereign States. So the United
States of America came into existence. Canada remained loval
to the British flag.
The UNITED STATES, showing extent of sctlle.
SS | ment i ut 1790. ye oe S
T,. SUPERIOR.
oh a "I |
BSG 0
PENNS YVAN ti} Ure
5 1] | II ft
LLIN?
SS HAH
=
Hi Iq a=
BS Cull Me i
bef core 1760
SSN Areas settled
S 1760-1790
: : + N.H.-NewHamepsHire
avarmaht == = C.=ConneEcTICUT
See ee ORE =ReoreIsuanp
- - — Ne New JERSEY
MARYLAND
D. DELAWARE
New Orlvans———— = — : = = ——]
For four years these States had only a very feeble central govern-
ment under certain Articles of Confederation, and they seemed des-
tined to break up into separate independent communities. Their
immediate separation was delayed by the hostility of the British and
a certain aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought340 A Short History of the World
home to them the immediate dangers of division. A Constitution
was drawn up and ratified in 1788 establishing a more efficient
Federal government with a President holding very considerable
powers, and the weak sense of national unity was invigorated by
a second war with Britain in 1812. Nevertheless the area covered
by the States was so wide and their interests so diverse at that
time, that — given only the means of communication then available
—a disintegration of the Union into separate states on the European
scale of size was merely a question of time. Attendance at Wash-
ington meant a long, tedious and insecure journey for the senators
and congressmen of the remoter districts, and the mechanical im-
pediments to the diffusion of a common education and a common
literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable. Forces
were at work in the world however that were to arrest the process
of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river steamboat
and then the railway and the telegraph to save the United States
from fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together again
into the first of great modern nations.
Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were
to follow the example of the Thirteen and break their connection
with Europe. But being more dispersed over the continent and
separated by great mountainous chains and deserts and forests
and by the Portuguese Empire of Brazil, they did not achieve a
union among themselves. They became a constellation of republi-
can states, very prone at first to wars among themselves and to
revolutions.
Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable
separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occu-
pied the mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled
to Brazil. From that time on until they separated, Portugal was
rather a dependency of Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822
Brazil declared itself a separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of
the Portuguese King. But the new world has never been very
favourable to monarchy. In 1889 the Emperor of Brazil was
shipped off quietly to Europe, and the United States of Brazil fell
into line with the rest of republican America.LV
Tue FreNcuH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY
IN FRANCE
RITAIN had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America
before a profound social and political convulsion at the very
heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more
vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrange-
ments of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most suc-
cessful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy
and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But
it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse.
It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and
substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were
protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the
whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The
peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were
dominated and humiliated by the nobility.
In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged
to call representatives of the different classes of the realm into
consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive
expenditure. In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles,
clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the
British Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not
assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been an abso-
lute monarchy. Now the people found a means of expressing their
long fermenting discontent. Disputes immediately broke out
between the three estates, due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the
Commons, to control the Assembly. The Commons got the better
of these disputes and the States General became a National As-
sembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British
341il 342 A Short History of the World
Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
destroyed, and the owners murdered or driven away.
i
:
\
| Parliament kept the British crown in order. The king (Louis XVI)
i prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the provinces.
struggle through to an effective modernized government.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The
grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of
Paris, and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In
| the east and north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the
i nobility were burnt by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully
In a month
it the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had col-
| lapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the queen’s
party fled abroad. A provisional city government was set up in
Paris and in most of the other large cities, and a new armed force,
il | the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly to
resist the forces of the crown, was brought into existence by these
i ba municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself called
i upon to create a new political and social system for a new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the
utmost. It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolut-
ist regime; it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles
and privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy
in Paris. The king abandoned Versailles and its splendours and
kept a diminished state in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might
Much
ie of its work was sound and still endures, if much was experimental
and had to be undone. Much was ineffective. There was a clear-
ing up of the penal code; torture, arbitrary imprisonment and
persecutions for heresy were abolished. The ancient provinces of
France, Normandy, Burgundy and the like gave place to eighty
departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army was
laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system
of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having
the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time.
This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges,
like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery.
And the whole vast property of the church was seized and ad-The French Revolution 343
ministered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in
education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of
the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a
bad thing for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously
underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addi-
tion the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which
struck at the very root idea of the Roman Church, which centred
everything upon the Pope, and in which all authority is from above
downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at one
blow to make the church in France Protestant, in organization if
not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts
between the state priests created by the National Assembly and the
recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France
was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen,
working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends
abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and
one night in June the king and queen and their children slipped
away from the Tuileries and fled to join the foreigners and the
aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought
back to Paris, and all France flamed up into a passion of patriotic
republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with Austria
and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed (January,
1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French
people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and
the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home
and abroad; at home royalists and every form of disloyalty were
to be stamped out; abroad France was to be the protector and
helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to
become Republican. The youth of France poured into the Re-
publican armies; a new and wonderful song spread through the
land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the Marseillaise.
Before that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and
their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies rolled back;
before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the
utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on344 A Short History of the World
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they
had raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland.
Then the French Government did an unwise thing. It had been
exasperated by the expulsion of its representative from England
upon the execution of Louis, and it declared war against England.
It was an unwise thing to do, because the revolution which had
given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery
THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI
(From a print in the British Museum)
released from its aristocratic officers and many cramping conditions
had destroyed the discipline of the navy, and the English were
supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united all England
against France, whereas there had been at first a very considerable
liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy with the revolution.
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against
a European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the
Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic.
The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful ofThe French Revolution 345
cavalry without firing its guns. For some time the French thrust
towards Ita'y was hung up, and it was only in 1796 that a new
general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and hungry republican
armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and Verona. Says
C. F. Atkinson,! “What astonished the Allies most of all was the
number and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised
armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable
for want of money, untransportable for want of the enormous
number of wagons that would have been required, and also un-
necessary, for the discomfort that woud have caused wholesale
desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men of
1793-94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be
carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar with
‘living on the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern
system of war — rapidity of movement, full development of national
strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious
manoeuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and
chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the
second the spirit of risking little to gain a little. =
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite
clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the
countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris
was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution
was now under the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This
man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally
timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for power,
faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he conceived it,
and he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he. So
that to keep in power was to save the Republic. The living spirit
of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung from a slaughter of royalists
and the execution of the king. There were insurrections; one
in the west, in the district of La Vendée, where the people rose
against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox
clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south,
where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon
1 In his article, ‘French Revolutionary Wars,” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.346 A Short History of the World
had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. ‘To which there
seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaugh-
tering began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to
this mood. The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s
antagonists were guillotined, atheists who argued that there was
no Supreme Being were guillotined; day by day, week by week,
VET R PUBL
fi. ate
TRANSAW
/
THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE, OCTOBER 16, 1793
(From a print in the British Museum)
this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and
more. ‘The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood; and
needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more
opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was over-
thrown and guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five
men which carried on the war of defence abroad and held France
together at home for five years. Their reign formed a curious
interlude in this history of violent changes. They took thingsThe French Revolution 347
as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution
carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland,
south Germany and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled
and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of
the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the
French Government. Their wars became less and less the holy
wars of freedom, and more and more like the aggressive wars of
the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand Monarchy that
France was disposed to discard was her tradition of foreign policy.
One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate as if there
had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied
in its intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave
that country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat.
This was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies
of the Directory to victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been schem-
ing and working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to
supreme power. He was a man of severely limited understanding
but of ruthless directness and great energy. He had begun life
as an extremist of the school of Robespierre; he owed his first promo-
tion to that side; but he had no real grasp of the new forces that
were working in Europe. His utmost political imagination carried
him to a belated and tawdry attempt to restore the Western Empire.
He tried to destroy the remains of the old Holy Roman Empire,
intending to replace it by a new one centring upon Paris. The
Kmperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor and
became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French
wife in order to marry an Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in
1799, and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct
imitation of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris,
taking the crown from the Pope and putting it upon his own head
himself as Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned King
of Rome.
For some years Napoleon’s reign was a career of victory. Heae
348 A Short History of the World
conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria,
and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the
command of the sea from the British and his fleets sustained a con-
clusive defeat inflicted by the British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar
(1805). Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British army under
Wellington thrust the French armies slowly northward out of the
peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with the Tsar
Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great conglom-
erate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and largely destroyed
by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose against
him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten
back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was
exiled to Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and
was defeated by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians at Water-
loo. - He died a British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and
finished. A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna
to restore as far as possible the state of affairs that the great storm
had rent to pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace
of exhausted effort, was maintained in Europe.LVI
THe Uneasy Peace in Evropg THar FOLLOWED THE FALL OF
NAPOLEON
WO main causes prevented that period from being a com-
plete social and international peace, and prepared the way
for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of
these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned, towards the
restoration of unfair privilege and interference with freedom of
thought and writing and teaching. The second was the impossible
system of boundaries drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards
past conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain.
Here even the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the
Spanish colonies had followed the example of the United States
and revolted against the European Great Power System, when
Napoleon set his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810.
The George Washington of South America was General Bolivar.
Spain was unable to suppress this revolt, it dragged on much as
the United States War of Independence had dragged on, and at
last the suggestion was made by Austria, in accordance with the
spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the European monarch should
assist Spain in this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe,
but it was the prompt action of President Monroe of the United
States in 1823 which conclusively warned off this projected monar-
chist restoration. He announced that the United States would
regard any extension of the European system in the Western Hemi-
sphere as a hostile act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, the
doctrine that there must be no extension of extra-American govern-
ment in America, which has kept the Great Power system out of
America for nearly a hundred years and permitted the new states of
Spanish America to work out their destinies along their own lines.
349350 A Short History of the World
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least,
under the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose
in Europe: A popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a
French army in 1823, with a mandate from a European congress,
and simultaneously Austria suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X.
Charles set himself to destroy the liberty of the press and univer-
sities, and to restore absolute government; the sum of a billion
francs was voted to compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings
and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodi-
ment of the ancient regime, and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the
son of that Philip, Duke of Orleans, who was executed during the
Terror. The other continental monarchies, in face of the open
approval of the revolution by Great Britain and a strong. liberal
ferment in Germany and Austria, did not interfere in this affair.
After all, France was still a monarchy. This man Louis Philippe
(1830-48) remained the constitutional King of France for eighteen
years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress
of Vienna, which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings
of the monarchists. The stresses that arose from the unscientific
boundaries planned by the diplomatists at Vienna gathered force
more deliberately, but they were even more dangerous to the peace
of mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer
together the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and
so reading different literatures and having different general ideas,
especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious disputes.
Only some strong mutual interest, such as the common defensive
needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close linking of
peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths; and even in Switzerland
there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in Macedonia,
populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and districts, the
-antonal system is imperatively needed. But if the reader will
look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew it, he
will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned the
maximum of local exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumpedThe Uneasy Peace in Europe 351
together the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics
of the old Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom
of the Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old republic of
Venice, but all of North Italy as far as Milan to the German-speak-
ing Austrians. French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces
of Italy to restore the kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and Hungary,
already a sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant nationalities,
Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians,
and now Italians, was made still more impossible by confirming
Austria’s Polish acquisitions of 1772 and 1795. The Catholic and
republican-spirited Polish people were chiefly given over to the less
civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important districts
went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his
acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The very dissimilar Nor-
wegian and Swedish peoples were bound together under one king.
Germany, the reader will see, was left in a particularly dangerous
state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were both partly in and
partly out of a German confederation, which included a multitude
of minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German
confederation by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in
Holstein. Luxembourg was included in the German confederation,
though its ruler was also King of the Netherlands, and though many
of its peoples talked French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who
talk German and base their ideas on German literature, the people
who talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the
people who talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature,
will all be far better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to
the rest of mankind if they conduct their own affairs in their own
idiom within the ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder
that one of the most popular songs in Germany during this period
declared that wherever the German tongue was spoken, there was
the German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current
revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association in the
kingdom of the Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the possi-
bilities of a republic or of annexation to France, hurried in to pacifyPORTRAIT OF NAPOLEON (CORONATION)
(From a printin the British Museum)
352The Uneasy Peace in Europe
EUROPE after the Congress of” ne
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this situation, and gave the Belgians a monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-
Coburg Gotha. There were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and
Germany in 1830, and a much more serious one jn Russian Poland.
A republican government held out in Warsaw for a year against
Nicholas I (who sueceeded Alexander in 1825 ), and was then stamped
out of existence with great violence and cruelty. The Polish lan-
guage was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church was substituted
for the Roman Catholic as the state religion.
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the
Turks. For six years they fought a desperate war, while the govern-
ments of Europe looked on. Liberal opinion protested against
this inactivity; volunteers from every European country joined
the insurgents, and at last Britain, France and Russia took joint
action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed by the French and English
at the battle of Navarino (1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey.
By the treaty of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared free, but354 A Short History of the World
she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican traditions.
A German king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto of Bavaria,
and Christian governors were set up in the Danubian provinces
(which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the Jugo-Slav
region). Much blood had still to run however before the Turk
was altogether expelled from these lands.LVII
Tue. DEVELOPMENT oF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
HROUGHOUT the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
the opening years of the nineteenth century, while these con-
flicts of the powers and princes were going on in Europe, and
the patchwork of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) was changing
kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of the treaty of Vienna (1815),
and while the sailing ship was spreading European influence through-
out the world, a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing
up of men’s ideas about the world in which they lived was in
progress in the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking
immediate results in political life. Nor was it affecting popular
thought very profoundly during this period. These reactions were
to come later, and only in their full force in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. It was a process that went on chiefly in a small
world of prosperous and independent-spirited people. Without
what the English call the
could not have begun in Greece, and could not have been renewed in
‘
‘private gentleman, ”’ the scientific process
Europe. The universities played a part but not a leading part in
the philosophical and scientific thought of this period. Endowed
learning is apt to be timid and conservative learning, lacking in
initiative and resistent to innovation, unless it has the spur of
contact with independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in
1662 and its work in realizing the dream of Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Throughout the eighteenth century there was much clearing up
of general ideas about matter and motion, much mathematical
advance, a systematic development of the use of optical glass in
microscope and telescope, a renewed energy in classificatory natural
a
III356 A Short History of the World
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406The British Empire in 1914 407
province, occupied and administered jointly by the British and by
the (British controlled) Egyptian Government;
Then a number of partially self-governing communities, some
British in origin and some not, with elected legislatures and an
appointed executive, such as Malta, Jamaica, the Bahamas and
Bermuda;
Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British Home
Government (through the Colonial Office) verged on autocracy, as in
Ceylon, Trinidad and Fiji (where there was an appointed council),
and Gibraltar and St. Helena (where there was a governor);
Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product areas,
with politically weak and under-civilized native communities which
a
ge
Photo: C. Stnclatr
GIBRALTAR
were nominally protectorates, and administered either by a High
Commissioner set over native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a
chartered company (as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign
Office, in some cases the Colonial Office, and in some eases the India
Office, has been concerned in acquiring the possessions that fell into
this last and least definite class of all, but for the most part the
Colonial Office was now responsible for them.
It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no single
brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a whole. It
was a mixture of growths and accumulations entirely different from
anything that has ever been called an empire before. It guaranteed
a wide peace and security; that is why it was endured and sustained
by many men of the “subject” races — in spite of official tyrannies
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STREET IN HONG KONG
>
and insufficiencies, and of much negligence on the part of the “home’
| public. Like the Athenian Empire, it was an overseas empire;
| its ways were sea ways, and its common link was the British Navy.
| AE Like all empires, its cohesion was dependent physically upon a
i method of communication; the development of seamanship, ship-
' building and steamships between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries had made it a possible and convenient Pax — the “Pax
Britannica,”’ and fresh developments of air or swift land transport
might at any time make it inconvenient.LXV
THe AGE oF ARMAMENT IN Europ, AND THE GREAT War oF
1914-18
HE progress in material science that created this vast steam-
boat-and-railway republic of America and spread _ this
precarious British steamship empire over the world, pro-
duced quite other effects upon the congested nations upon the
continent of Europe. They found themselves confined within
boundaries fixed during the horse-and-high-road period of human life,
and their expansion overseas had been very largely anticipated by
Great Britain. Only Russia had any freedom to expand eastward:
and she drove a great railway across Siberia until she entangled her-
self in a conflict with Japan, and pushed south-eastwardly towards
the borders of Persia and India to the annoyance of Britain. The
rest of the European Powers were in a state of intensifying conges-
tion. In order to realize the full possibilities of the new apparatus
of human life they had to rearrange their affairs upon a broader
basis, either by some sort of voluntary union or by a union imposed
upon them by some predominant power. The tendency of modern
thought was in the direction of the former alternative, but all the
force of political tradition drove Europe towards the latter.
The downfall of the ‘empire’? of Napoleon III, the establish-
ment of the new German Empire, pointed men’s hopes and fears
towards the idea of a Europe consolidated under German auspices.
For thirty-six years of uneasy peace the politics of Europe centred
upon that possibility. France, the steadfast rival of Germany
for European ascendancy since the division of the empire of Charle-
magne, sought to correct her own weakness by a close alliance with
Russia, and Germany linked herself closely with the Austrian
Empire (it had ceased to be the Holy Roman Empire in the days
of Napoleon I) and less successfully with the new kingdom of Italy.
409A Short History of the World
410
At first Great Britain stood as usual half in and half out of conti-
nental affairs. But she was gradually forced into a close association
with the Franco-Russian group by the aggressive development of a
r % . . ; > .
great German navy. The grandiose imagination of the Emperor
ee one , ~~ Photo: British Ofictal
BRITISH TANK IN THE BATTLE OF THE MENIN ROAD : i
The crew come out for a breath of fresh air during a lull
William IT (1888-1918) thrust Germany into premature overseas
enterprise that ultimately brought not only Great Britain but
Japan and the United States into the circle of her enemies.
All these nations armed. Year after year the proportion of
national production devoted to the making of guns, equipment,
battleships and the like. increased. Year after year the balanceThe Age of Armament in Europe 4II
Photo: : Toptcal
THE RUINS OF YPRES (ONCE A DELIGHTFUL OLD FLEMISH TOWN)
To show the complete destructiveness of modern war
of things seemed trembling towards war, and then war would be
averted. At last it came. Germany and Austria struck at France
and Russia and Serbia; the German armies marching through
Belgium, Britain immediately came into the war on the side of
Belgium, bringing in Japan as her ally, and very soon Turkey
followed on the German side. Italy entered the war against Austria
in 1915, and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the October
of that year. In 1916 Rumania, and in 1917 the United States
and China were forced into war against Germany. It is not within
the scope of this history to define the exact share of blame for this
ast catastrophe. The more interesting question is not why the
Great War was begun but why the Great War was not anticipated
and prevented. It is a far graver thing for mankind that scores
of millions of people were too “patriotic,” stupid, or apathetic to
prevent this disaster by a movement towards European unity upon
frank and generous lines, than that a small number of people may
have been active in bringing it about.
It is impossible within the space at our command here to trace
the intricate details of the war. Within a few months it became
apparent that the progress of modern technical science had changed412 A Short History of the World
the nature of warfare very profoundly. Physical science gives
power, power over steel, over distance, over disease; whether that
power is used well or ill depends upon the moral and political intelli-
gence of the world. The governments of Europe, inspired by
antiquated policies of hate and suspicion, found themselves with
unexampled powers both of destruction and resistance in their
hands. The war became a consuming fire round and about the
world, causing losses both to victors and vanquished out of all
proportion to the issues involved. The first phase of the war was a
tremendous rush of the Germans upon Paris and an invasion of
East Prussia by the Russians. Both attacks were held and turned.
Then the power of the defensive developed; there was a rapid
elaboration of trench warfare until for a time the opposing armies
lay entrenched in long lines right across Europe, unable to make
any advance without enormous losses. The armies were millions
strong, and behind them entire populations were organized for the
supply of food and munitions to the front. There was a cessation
of nearly every sort of productive activity except such as con-
tributed to military operations. All the able-bodied manhood of
Europe was drawn into the armies or navies or into the improvised
ET
—
a)
|
|
t
Photo: Phot
THE DEVASTATION OF MODERN WAR ee eae
“ay: .
Wire entanglements in the foregroundThe Age of Armament in Europe 413
factories that served them. There was an enormous replacement
of men by women in industry. Probably more than half the people
in the belligerent countries of Europe changed their employment
altogether during this stupendous struggle. They were socially
uprooted and transplanted. Education and normal scientific work
were restricted or diverted to immediate military ends, and the
distribution of news was crippled and corrupted by military control
and “propaganda”’ activities.
The phase of military deadlock passed slowly into one of aggres-
sion upon the combatant populations behind the fronts by the
destruction of food supplies and by attacks through the air. And
also there was a steady improvement in the size and range of the
guns employed and of such ingenious devices as poison-gas shells
and the small mobile forts known as tanks, to break down the
resistance of troops in the trenches. The air offensive was the
most revolutionary of all the new methods. It carried warfare
from two dimensions into three. Hitherto in the history of man-
kind war had gone on only where the armies marched and met.
Now it went on everywhere. First the Zeppelin and then the
bombing aeroplane carried war over and past the front to an ever-
increasing area of civilian activities beyond. The old distinction
maintained in civilized warfare between the civilian and combatant
population disappeared. Everyone who grew food, or who sewed
a garment, everyone who felled a tree or repaired a house, every
railway station and every warehouse was held to be fair game for
destruction. The air offensive increased in range and terror with
every month in the war. At last great areas of Europe were in a
state of siege and subject to nightly raids. Such exposed cities as
London and Paris passed sleepless night after sleepless night while
the bombs burst, the anti-aircraft guns maintained an intolerable
racket, and the fire engines and ambulances rattled headlong through
the darkened and deserted streets. The effects upon the minds and
health of old people and of young children were particularly dis-
tressing and destructive.
Pestilence, that old follower of warfare, did not arrive until
the very end of the fighting in 1918. For four years medical science
staved off any general epidemic; then came a great outbreak ofAIA A Short History of the World
influenza about the world which destroyed many millions of people.
Famine also was staved off for some time. By the beginning of
1918 however most of Europe was in a state of mitigated and regu-
lated famine. The production of food throughout the world had
fallen very greatly through the calling off of peasant mankind to
the fronts, and the distribution of such food as was produced was
impeded by the havoe wrought by the submarine, by the rupture
of customary routes through the closing of frontiers, and by the
disorganization of the transport system of the world. ‘The various
governments took possession of the dwindling food supplies, and,
with more or less success, rationed their populations. By the fourth
year the whole world was suffering from shortages of clothing and
housing and of most of the normal gear of life as well as of food.
Business and economic life were profoundly disorganized. Every-
one was worried, and most people were leading lives of unwonted
discomfort.
The actual warfare ceased in November, 1918. After a supreme
effort in the spring of 1918 that almost carried the Germans to Paris,
the Central Powers collapsed. They had come to an end of their
spirit and resources.LXGvr
Tort REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN Russia
UT a good year and more before the collapse of the Central
Powers the half oriental monarchy of Russia, which had
protessed to be the continuation of the Byzantine Empire,
had collapsed. The Tsardom had been showing signs of profound
rottenness for some years before the war; the court was under the
sway of a fantastic religious impostor, Rasputin, and the public
administration, civil and military, was in a state of extreme in-
efficiency and corruption. At the outset of the war there was a
great flare of patriotic enthusiasm in Russia. A vast conscript army
was called up, for which there was neither adequate military equip-
ment nor a proper supply of competent officers, and this great
host, ill supplied and badly handled, was hurled against the German
and Austrian frontiers.
There can be no doubt that the early appearance of Russian
armies in East Prussia in September, 1914, diverted the energies
and attention of the Germans from their first victorious drive upon
Paris. The sufferings and deaths of scores of thousands of ill-led
Russian peasants saved France from complete overthrow in that
momentous opening campaign, and made all western Europe the
debtors of that great and tragic people. But the strain of the war
upon this sprawling, ill-organized empire was too heavy for its
strength. The Russian common soldiers were sent into battle
without guns to support them, without even rifle ammunition;
they were wasted by their officers and generals in a delirium of
militarist enthusiasm. For a time they seemed to be suffering
mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a limit to the endurance
even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust for Tsardom was
creeping through these armies of betrayed and wasted men. From
the close of 1915 onward Russia was a source of deepening anxiety
to her Western Allies. Throughout 1916 she remained largely on
415416 A Short History of the World
the defensive, and there were rumours of a separate peace with
Germany.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered
at a dinner party in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made
to put the Tsardom in order. By March things were moving
rapidly; food riots in Petrograd developed into a revolutionary
insurrection; there was an attempted suppression of the Duma,
the representative body, there were attempted arrests of liberal
leaders, the formation of a provisional government under Prince
Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a time
it seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution might be
possible — perhaps under anew T'sar. Then it became evident that
the destruction of popular confidence in Russia had gone too far
for any such adjustments. ‘The Russian people were sick to death
of the old order of things in Europe, of Tsars and wars and of Great
Powers; it wanted relief, and that speedily, from unendurable
miseries. The Allies had no understanding of Russian realities;
their diplomatists were ignorant of Russian, genteel persons with
their attention directed to the Russian Court rather than to Russia,
they blundered steadily with the new situation. There was little
goodwill among these diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest
disposition to embarrass the new government as much as possible.
At the head of the Russian republican government was an eloquent
and picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed by
the forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the “social
revolution,’ at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied governments
abroad. His Allies would neither let him give the Russian peasants
the land for which they craved nor peace beyond their frontiers.
The French and the British press pestered their exhausted ally for a
fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans made a strong
attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty quailed
before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new Rus-
sian Republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their naval
predominance and the bitter protests of the great English admiral,
Lord Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted that the British and their
Allies, except for some submarine attacks, left the Germans the
complete mastery of the Baltic throughout the war.The Russian masses, however
The Revolution and Famine in Russia
407
» were resolute to end the war.
At any cost. There had come into existence in Petrograd a body
representing the workers and common soldie
rs, the Soviet, and this
body clamoured for an international conference
of socialists at
Stockholm. Food riots were occurring in Berlin at this time, war
weariness in Austria and Germany was profound, and there can be
little doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that such a conference
would have precipitated a reasonable peace on democratic lines
in 1917 and a German revolution.
Kerensky implored his Western
allies to allow this conference to take place, but, fearful of a world-
wide outbreak o
Party.
the unhappy
‘
“moderate’”’
{ socialism and republicanism, they refused, in spite
of the favourable response of a small majority of the British Labour
Without either moral or physical help from the Allies,
Russian Republic still fought on and
made a last desperate offensive effort in July. It failed after some
preliminary successes, and there came another great slaughtering
of Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached.
Mutinies broke
out in the Russian armies, and_ particularly upon the northern
front, and on November 7th, 1917, Kerensky’s government was
overthrown and power was seized by the Soviets, dominated by
the Bolshevik socialists under Lenin, and pledged to make peace
regardless of the
peace between Russia
It speedily b
men of a very different
Western powers.
On March 2nd, 1918, a separate
and Germany was signed at Brest-Litovsk.
ecame evident that these Bolshevik socialists were
and revolutionaries of the Kerensky phase.
Marxist communists.
quality from the rhetorical constitutionalists
They were fanatical
They believed that their accession to power
in Russia was only the opening of a world-wide social revolution,
and they set about changing the social and economic order with
the thoroughness of perfect faith and absolute inexperience. The
western European and the American governments were themselves
much too ill-informed and incapable to guide or help this extraor-
dinary experiment, and the press set itself to discredit and the
ruling classes to wreck these usurpers upon any terms and at any
cost to themselves or to Russia.
and disgusting inventions went on unchecked in the press of the
A propaganda of abominableBy courtesy 7 Me SSTS. Hodder & Sto ughton
A VIEW IN PETERSBURG UNDER BOLSHEVIK RULE
A wooden house has been demolished for firewoodThe Revolution and Famine in Russia 419
world; the Bolshevik leaders were repre
sented as incredible monsters
glutted with blood an
| plunder and living lives of sensuality before
which the realities of the Tsarist court during the R
asputin regime
paled to a white purity.
Expeditions were launched at the ex-
hausted country, insurgents and raiders were encouraged, armed
attack was too mean or too mon-
strous for the frightened enemies of the Bolshevik regime. In
1919, the Russian Bolsheviks. ruling a country already exhausted
and disorganized by five years of intensive warfare, were fighting
a British Expedition at Archangel, Japanese invaders in J
Siberia, Roumanians with French and Greek
and subsidized, and no method of
fasten
contingents in the
south, the Russian Admiral Koltchak in Siberia and General Deni-
ken, supported by the French fleet. in the Crimea. In July of that
year an Esthonian army, under Genera] Yudenitch, almost got to
Petersburg. In 1920 the Poles, incited by the French, made
new attack on Russia; and a new
Wrangel, took over the task of
a
reactionary raider, General
General Deniken in invading and
devastating his own country. In March, 1921, the sailors at Cron-
stadt revolted. The Russian Government under its president,
Lenin, survived all these various attacks. It showed an amazing
tenacity, and the common people of Russia sustained it unswerv-
ingly under conditions of extreme hardship. By the end of 1921
both Britain and Italy had made a sort of recognition of the com-
munist rule.
But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its struggle
against foreign intervention and internal revolt, it was far less
happy in its attempts to set up a new social order based upon com-
munist ideas in Russia. The Russian peasant is a small land-
hungry proprietor, as far from communism in his thoughts and
methods as a whale is from flying; the revolution gave him the
land of the great landowners but could not make him grow food
for anything but negotiable money, and the revolution, among other
things, had practically destroyed the value of money. Agricultural
production, already greatly disordered by the collapse of the rail-
ways through war-strain, shrank to a mere cultivation of food by
the peasants for their own consumption. The towns _ starved.
Hasty and ill-planned attempts to make over industrial production420 A Short History of the World
‘1 accordance with communist ideas were equally unsuccessful.
By 1920 Russia presented the unprecedented spectacle of a modern
civilization in complete collapse. Railways were rusting and pass-
ing out of use, towns were falling into ruin, everywhere there was an
‘mmense mortality. Yet the country still fought with its enemies
at its gates. In 1921 came a drought and a great famine among
the peasant cultivators in the war-devastated south-east provinces.
Millions of people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible recuperation
of Russia brings us too close to current controversies to be discussed
here.setters ern
LX VII
THe PourticAL AND SocrtaL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE Worup
HE scheme and scale upon which this History is planned do
not permit us to enter into the complicated and acrimonious
disputes that centre about the treaties, and particularly
of the treaty of Versailles, which concluded the Great War. We
are beginning to realize that that conflict, terrible and enormous as it
was, ended nothing, began nothing and settled nothing. It killed
millions of people; it wasted and impoverished the world. It
smashed Russia altogether. It was at best an acute and frightful
reminder that we were living foolishly and confusedly without much
plan or foresight in a dangerous and unsympathetic universe. The
crudely organized egotisms and passions of national and imperial
greed that carried mankind into that tragedy, emerged from it
sufficiently unimpaired to make some other similar disaster highly
probable so soon as the world has a little recovered from its war
exhaustion and fatigue. Wars and revolutions make nothing; their
utmost service to mankind is that, in a very rough and painful way,
they destroy superannuated and obstructive things. The great war
lifted the threat of German imperialism from Europe, and shattered
the imperialism of Russia. It cleared away a number of monarchies.
But a multitude of flags still waves in Europe, the frontiers still
exasperate, great armies accumulate fresh stores of equipment.
The Peace Conference at Versailles was a gathering very ill
adapted to do more than carry out the conflicts and defeats of the
war to their logical conclusions. The Germans, Austrians, Turks
and Bulgarians were permitted no share in its deliberations; they
were only to accept the decisions it dictated to them. - From the
point of view of human welfare the choice of the place of meeting
was particularly unfortunate. It was at Versailles in 1871 that,
with every circumstance of triumphant vulgarity, the new German
421422 A Short History of the World
{mpire had been proclaimed. The suggestion of a melodramatic
reversal of that scene, in the same Hall of Mirrors, was overpowering.
Whatever generosities had appeared in the opening phases of
the Great War had long been exhausted. The populations of the
victorious countries were acutely aware of their own losses and
sufferings, and entirely regardless of the fact that the defeated
had paid in the like manner. The war had arisen as a natural and
inevitable consequence of the competitive nationalisms of Europe
and the absence of any Federal adjustment of these competitive
forces; war is the necessary logical consummation of independent
sovereign nationalities living in too small an area with too powerful
an armament; and if the great war had not come in the form it
did it would have come in some similar form — just as it will cer-
tainly return upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty or thirty
years’ time if no political unification anticipates and prevents it.
States organized for war will make wars as surely as hens will lay
eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and war-worn countries dis-
regarded this fact, and the whole of the defeated peoples were
treated as morally and materially responsible for all the damage,
as they would no doubt have treated the victor peoples had the
issue of war been different. The French and English thought the
Germans were to blame, the Germans thought the Russians, French
and English were to blame, and only an intelligent minority thought
that there was anything to blame in the fragmentary political
constitution of Europe. The treaty of Versailles was intended to be
exemplary and vindictive; it provided tremendous penalties for the
vanquished; it sought to provide compensations for the wounded and
suffering victors by imposing enormous debts upon nations already
bankrupt, and its attempts to reconstitute international relations
by the establishment of a League of Nations against war were
manitestly insincere and inadequate.
So far as Europe was concerned it is doubtful if there would
have been any attempt whatever to organize international relations
for a permanent peace. The proposal of the League of Nations
was brought into practical polities by the President of the United
States of America, President Wilson. Its chief support was in
America. So far the United States, this new modern state, hadThe Political and Social Reconstruction 423
,7
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PASSENGER AEROPLANE FLYING OVER NORTHOLT
developed no distinctive ideas of international relationship beyond
the Monroe Doctrine, which protected the new world from European
interference. Now suddenly it was called upon for its mental con-
tribution to the vast problem of the time. It had none. The
natural disposition of the American people was towards a permanent
world peace. With this however was linked a strong traditional
distrust of old-world politics and a habit of isolation from old-world
entanglements. The Americans had hardly begun to think out an
American solution of world problems when the submarine cam-
paign of the Germans dragged them into the war on the side of
the anti-German allies. President Wilson’s scheme of a League of
Nations was an attempt at short notice to create a distinctively
American world project. It was a sketchy, inadequate and danger-
ous scheme. In Europe however it was taken as a matured Ameri-
can point of view. The generality of mankind in 1918-19 was
intensely weary of war and anxious at almost any sacrifice to erect424 A Short History of the World
barriers against its recurrence, but there was not a single govern-
ment in the old world willing to waive one iota of its sovereign
independence to attain any such end. The public utterances of
President Wilson leading up to the project of a World League of
Nations seemed for a time to appeal right over the heads of the
governments to the peoples of the world; they were taken as ex-
pressing the ripe intentions of America, and the response was
enormous. Unhappily President Wilson had to deal with govern-
ments and not with peoples; he was a man capable of tremendous
flashes of vision and yet when put to the test egotistical and limited,
and the great wave of enthusiasm he evoked passed and was wasted.
Says Dr. Dillon in his book, The Peace Conference: ‘Europe,
when the President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the
creative potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow
a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars
are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he
was Just that great leader. In France men bowed down before
him with awe and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that
they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades
would go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble
schemes. To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly
clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The
Germans regarded him and his doctrine as their sheet-anchor of
safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said: ‘If President Wilson
were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon
them, they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur
and set to work at once.’ In German-Austria his fame was that
of a saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to
the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the) afflicteds 4 a
Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson
raised. How completely he disappointed them and how weak and
futile was the League of Nations he made is too long
and too dis-
treesful a story to tell here.
He exaggerated in his person our
common human tragedy, he was so very great in his dreams and so
incapable in his performance. America dissented from the acts
of its President and would not join the League I
:
“urope accepted
from him. There was a slow realization on the p
art of the AmericanThe Political and Social] Reconstruction 42>
people that it had been rushed into something for which it was
totally unprepared. There was a corresponding realization on the
part of Europe that America had nothing ready to give to the old
world in its extremity. Born prematurely and crippled at its birth.
that League has become indeed, with its elaborate
and unpractical
constitution and its manifest limitations of power
, 2 serious obstacle
in the way of any effective reorganization of international relation-
ships. The problem would be a clearer one if the League did not
yet exist. Yet that world-wide blaze of enthusiasm that first
welcomed the project, that readiness of
men everywhere round
and about the earth, of men. that j
s, as distinguished from govern-
ments, for a world control of war, is a thing to be recorded with
emphasis in any history. Behind the short-sighted governments
that divide and mismanage human affairs. a real force for world
unity and world order exists and grows.
From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of conferences.
Of these the Conference at Washington called by President Harding
(1921) has been the most successful and suggestive. Notable, too,
is the Genoa Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and
Russian delegates at its deliberations. We will not discuss this
long procession of conferences and tentatives in any detail. It
becomes more and more clearly manifest that a huge work of re-
construction has to be done by mankind if a crescendo of such con-
vulsions and world massacres as that of the great war is to be
averted. No such hasty improvisation as the League of Nations,
no patched-up system of Conferences between this group of states
and that, which change nothing with an air of settling everything,
will meet the complex political needs of the new age that lies before
us. 529. Justinian
the schools at
had flourished
closed
Athens, which
Chronological Table
A.D.
543:
553.
610.
619.
629.
632.
634.
635.
637.
638.
642.
643.
655.
668.
431
nearly a thousand years. Bel-
isarilus (Justinian’s general)
took Naples.
Chosroes I began to reign.
Great plague in Constantinople.
Goths expelled from Italy by
Justinian.
Justinian died. The Lombards
conquered most of North Italy
(leaving Ravenna and Rome
Byzantine).
Muhammad born.
Chosroes I died.
(The Lombards dominant in
Italy.)
Plague raged in Rome. Chos-
roes IT began to reign.
Heraclius began to reign.
Chosroes II held Egypt, Jeru-
salem, Damascus, and _ had
armies on Hellespont. Tang
dynasty began in China.
The Hegira.
Great Persian defeat at Nineveh
by Heraclius. Tai-tsung be-
came Emperor of China.
Kavadh II murdered and _ suc-
ceeded his father, Chosroes IT.
Muhammad wrote letters to all
the rulers of the earth.
Muhammad returned to Mecca.
Muhammad died. Abu _ Bekr
Caliph.
Battle of the Yarmuk.
took Syria. Omar
Caliph.
Tai-tsung received Nestorian mis-
slonaries.
Battle of Kadessia.
Jerusalem surrendered
Caliph Omar.
Heraclius died.
Othman third Caliph.
Moslems
second
to the
Defeat of the Byzantine fleet
by the Moslems.
The Caliph Moawija attacked
Constantinople by sea.
Pepin of Hersthal, mayor of the
palace, reunited Austrasia and
Neustria.
Moslem army
from Africa.
invaded Spain432
A.D.
ti i (
810.
814.
. 828.
~843.
936.
Chronological Table
. "15. The domains of the Caliph Walid
I extended from the Pyrenees
to China.
"17-18. Suleiman, son and successor
of Walid, failed to take Con-
stantinople.
Charles Martel defeated the
Moslems near Poitiers.
Pepin crowned King of the
French.
Pepin died.
Charlemagne sole king.
Charlemagne conquered Lom-
bardy.
Haroun-al-Raschid Abbasid Ca-
liph in Bagdad (to 809).
Leo III became Pope (to 816).
Leo crowned Charlemagne Em-
peror of the West.
Egbert, formerly an English
refugee at the court of Charle-
magne, established himself as
King of Wessex.
Krum of Bulgaria defeated and
killed the Emperor Nicephorus.
Charlemagne died.
Egbert became first King of
England.
Louis the Pious died, and the
Carlovingian Empire went to
pieces. Until 962 there was
no regular succession of Holy
Roman Emperors, though the
title appeared intermittently.
About this time Rurik (a North-
man) became ruler of Novgo-
rod and Kieff.
Boris first Christian
Bulgaria (to 884).
The fleet of the Russians (North-
King of
men) threatened Constanti-
nople.
Russian (Northmen) fleet off
Constantinople.
Rolf the Ganger established him-
self in Normandy.
Henry the Fowler elected King~
of Germany.
Otto I became King of Germany
in succession to his father,
Henry the Fowler.
A.D.
941.
962.
987.
1016.
1043.
1066.
1071.
1073.
1084.
Russian fleet again threatened
Constantinople.
Otto I, King of Germany,
crowned Emperor (first Saxon
Emperor) by John XII.
Hugh Capet became King of
France. End of the Car-
lovingian line of French kings.
Canute became King of Eng-
land, Denmark and Norway.
Russian fleet threatened Con-
stantinople.
Conquest of England by William,
Duke of Normandy.
Revival of Islam under the Seljuk
Turks. Battle of Melasgird.
Hildebrand became Pope (Greg-
ory VII) to 1085.
Robert Guiscard, the Norman,
sacked Rome.
1087-99. Urban II Pope.
1095.
—1096.
1099.
“1147.
1169.
1176.
1187.
“1189.
1198.
“1202.
1204.
1214.
1226.
1227.
Aw Aw
1240.
~1228.
Urban II at Clermont
moned the First Crusade.
Massacre of the People’s Cru-
sade.
Godfrey of Bouillon captured
Jerusalem.
The Second Crusade.
Saladin Sultan of Egypt.
Frederick Barbarossa acknowl-
edged supremacy of the Pope
(Alexander IIT) at Venice.
Saladin captured Jerusalem.
The Third Crusade.
Innocent III Pope (to 1216).
Frederick II (aged four), King
of Sicily, became his ward.
The Fourth Crusade attacked
the Eastern Empire.
Capture of Constantinople by
the Latins.
Jengis Khan took Pekin.
St. Francis of Assisi died.
Franciscans.)
Jengis Khan died, Khan from
the Caspian to the Pacific, and
was succeeded by Ogdai Khan.
Frederick II embarked upon the
Sixth Crusade, and acquired
Jerusalem.
Mongols destroyed Kieff. Russia
tributary to the Mongols.
sum-
(TheA.D.
1241.
1250.
1251.
1258.
1260.
1261.
1273.
~ 1280.
1992.
1293.
1348.
~™~1360.
1398.
1414-18. The
1417.
1453.
1480.
1481.
~ 1486.
1492.
1493.
Mongol victory at Liegnitz in
Silesia.
Frederick II, the last Hohen-
staufen Emperor, died. Ger-
man interregnum until 1273.
Mangu Khan became Great
Khan. Kublai Khan governor
of China.
Hulagu Khan took and destroyed
Bagdad.
Kublai Khan became Great
Khan.
The Greeks recaptured Con-
stantinople from the Latins.
Rudolf of Habsburg elected Em-
peror. The Swiss formed their
Everlasting League.
Kublai Khan founded the Yuan
dynasty in China.
Death of Kublai Khan.
Roger Bacon, the prophet of
experimental science, died.
The Great Plague, the Black
Death.
In China the Mongol (Yuan)
dynasty fell, and was suc-
ceeded by the Ming dynasty
(to 1644).
Pope Gregory XI returned to
Rome.
The Great Schism. Urban VI
in Rome, Clement VII at
Avignon.
Huss preached Wycliffism at
Prague.
Council of Constance.
Huss burnt (1415).
The Great Schism ended.
Ottoman Turks under Muham-
mad II took Constantinople.
Ivan II, Grand Duke of Moscow,
threw off the Mongol alle-
glance.
Death of the Sultan Muham-
mad II while preparing for
the conquest of Italy.
Diaz rounded the Cape of Good
Hope.
Columbus crossed the Atlantic
to America.
Maximilian I became Emperor.
Chronological
A.D.
1498.
1499.
1500.
1509.
1513.
1515,
1520.
1558.
1566.
1603.
“1620.
1625.
1626.
1643.
1644.
1648.
Table
iS
Ww
I]
Vasco da Gama sailed round the
Cape to India.
Switzerland became
pendent republic.
Charles V born.
Henry VIII King of England.
Leo X Pope.
Francis I King of France.
Suleiman the Magnificent, Sul-
tan (to 1566), who ruled from
Bagdad to Hungary. Charles
V Emperor.
Baber won the battle of Panipat,
captured Delhi, and founded
the Mogul Empire.
The German troops in Italy,
under the Constable of Bour-
bon, took and pillaged Rome.
Suleiman besieged Vienna.
Charles V crowned by the Pope.
Henry VIII began his quarrel
with the Papacy.
The Society of Jesus founded.
Martin Luther died.
Ivan IV (the Terrible) took the
title of Tsar of Russia.
Charles V abdicated. Akbar,
Great Mogul (to 1605). Ipg-
natius of Loyola died.
Death of Charles V.
Suleiman the Magnificent died.
James I King of England and
Scotland.
Mayflower expedition
New Plymouth.
slaves landed
(Va.).
Charles I of England.
Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Veru-
lam) died.
Louis XIV began his reign of
seventy-two years.
The Manchus ended the Ming
dynasty.
Treaty of Westphalia. There-
by Holland and Switzerland
were recognized as free re-
publics and Prussia became
important. The treaty geve
a complete victory neither to
the Imperial Crown nor to the
Princes.
an inde-
founded
First negro
at Jamestown434
A.D.
1648.
1649.
1658.
1660.
~ 1674.
1683.
1689.
1701.
1707.
1713.
1715.
Chronological Table
War of the Fronde; it ended in
the complete victory of the
French crown.
Execution of Charles I of Eng-
land.
Aurungzeb Great Mogul. Crom-
well died.
Charles II of England.
Nieuw Amsterdam finally be-
came British by treaty and
was renamed New York.
The last Turkish attack on
Vienna defeated by John III
of Poland.
Peter the Great of Russia. (To
1725.)
Frederick I first King of Prussia.
Death of Aurungzeb. The em-
pire of the Great Mogul dis-
integrated.
Frederick the Great of Prussia
born.
Louis XV of France.
~1755-63. Britain and France struggled
1788.
41789.
for America and India. France
in alliance with Austria and
Russia against Prussia and
Britain (1756-63); the Seven
Years’ War.
The British general, Wolfe, took
Quebec.
George III of Britain.
Peace of Paris: Canada ceded to
Britain. British dominant in
India.
Napoleon Bonaparte born.
Louis XVI began his reign.
Declaration of Independence by
the United States of America.
Treaty of Peace between Britain
and the new United States of
America.
. The Constitutional Convention
of Philadelphia set up the
Federal Government of the
United States. France dis-
covered to be bankrupt.
First Federal Congress of the
United States at New York.
The French States-General as-
sembled. Storming of the
Bastille.
A.D.
1791.
1792.
1793.
1794.
1799.
1804.
1806.
1808.
1810,
1812,
1814.
1824.
1825.
1827.
1829.
1830.
Flight to Varennes.
France declared war on Austria:
Prussia declared war _ on
France. Battle of Valmy.
~France became a republic.
Louis XVI beheaded.
Execution of Robespierre and
end of the Jacobin republic.
The Directory. Bonaparte sup-
pressed a revolt and went to
Italy as commander-in-chief.
Bonaparte went to Egypt. Battle
of the Nile.
Bonaparte returned to France.
He became First Consul with
enormous powers.
Bonaparte became Emperor.
Francis II took the title of
Emperor of Austria in 1805, and
in 1806 he dropped the title of
Holy Roman Emperor. So
the ‘‘Holy Roman Empire”
came to an end.
Prussia overthrown at Jena.
Napoleon made _ his _ brother
Joseph King of Spain.
Spanish America became re-
publican.
Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
Abdication of Napoleon. Louis
XVIII.
Charles X of France.
Nicholas I of Russia. First
railway, Stockton to Dar-
lington.
Battle of Navarino.
Greece independent.
A year of disturbance. Louis
Philippe ousted Charles X.
Belgium broke away from
Holland. Leopold of Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha became king of
this new country, Belgium,
Russian Poland revolted in-
effectually.
. The word “‘socialism”’ first used.
-. Queen Victoria.
. Queen Victoria married Prince
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
. Napoleon III Emperor of the
French.
1854-56. Crimean War.A.D.
1856.
1861.
1865.
1870.
1871.
1878.
1888.
Alexander II of Russia.
Victor Emmanuel First King
of Italy. (Abraham Lincoln
became President, U. S. A.
The American Civil War began.
Surrender of Appomattox Court
House. Japan opened to the
world.
Napoleon III declared war
against Prussia.
Paris surrendered (January).
The King of Prussia became
““German Emperor.” The
Peace of Frankfort.
The Treaty of Berlin. The
Armed Peace of forty-six year:
began in western Europe.
Frederick II (March), William
If (June), German Emperors.
Chronological
2
Table 4
A.D.
1912. China became a republic.
1914. The Great War in Europe be-
gan.
The two Russian revolutions.
Establishment of the Bolshevik
regime in Russia.
The Armistice.
First meeting of the League of
Nations, from which Germany,
Austria, Russia and Turkey
were excluded and at which the
United States was not repre-
sented.
The Greeks, incomplete disregard
of the League of Nations, make
war upon the Turks.
Great defeat of the Greeks in
Asia Minor by the Turks.
L917.
1918.
1920.
1921.
1922.INDEXA
ABOLITIONIST movement, 384
Abraham the Patriarch, 116
Abu Bekr, 249, 252, 431
Abyssinia, 398
Actium, battle of, 195
Adam and Eve, 116
Adams, William, 400
Aden, 405
Adowa, battle of, 398
Adrianople, 229
Adrianople, Treaty of, 353
Adriatic Sea, 178, 228
gatian Isles, 182
gean peoples, 92,
Kolic Greeks, 108,
Aeroplanes, 4, 363
Eschylus, 139
Afghanistan, 163
Africa, 72, 92, 122,
Africa, Central, 397
Africa, North, 65, 94, 180, 192, 232,
397, 431
Africa, South, 72, 335, 398, 405
Africa, West, 393
**Age of Confusion,”’ the, 168, 173
Agriculturalists, primitive, 66, 68
Agriculture, 203; slaves in, 203
Ahab, 119
Air-breathing vertebrata, 23, 24
Air-raids, 413
Aix-la-Chapelle, 265
Akbar, 29%, 332, 433
Akkadian and Akkadians, 90, 122, 429
Alabama, 385
Alabama, the, 388
Alani, 227, 430
Alaric, 230, 232, 431
Albania, 179
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Prince Con-
sort), 434
Alchemists, 257, 294
Aldebaran, 257
Alemanni, 200, 431
Alexander I, Tsar, 348
Alexander II of Russia, 435
Alexander III, Pope, 274, 432
Alexander the Great, 142, 146 et seq., 163,
186, 240, 299, 430
94, 100, 108, 117, 174
130
, 413
123, 182, 253, 258, 302
292, 394,
INDEX
Alexandretta, 147
Alexandria, 147, 151, 209, 222, 239
Alexandria, library at, 151
Alexandria, museum of, 150, 180
Alexius Comnenus, 268
Alfred the Great, 263
Alge, 13
Algebra, 257
Algiers, 185
Algol, 257
Allah, 252
Alligators, 28
Alphabets, 79, 127
Alps, the, 37, 197
Alsace, 200, 309, 391
Aluminium, 360
Amenophis III, 96, 429
Amenophis IV, 96
America, 263, 302, 309, 314, 324, 335, 336,
4.22-+23, 434
America, North, 12, 330, 336, 382
American Civil War, 386, 435
American civilizations, primitive, 73 et seq.
American warships in Japanese waters, 402
Ammonites, 30, 36
Amorites, 90
Amos, the prophet, 124
Amphibia, 24
Amphitheatres, 208
Amur, 334
Anagni, 284
Anatomy, 24, 355
Anaxagoras, 138
Anaximander of Miletus, 132
Andes, 37
Angles, 230
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 405
Animals. (See Mammalia)
Annam, 402
Anti-aircraft guns, 413
Antigonus, 149
Antioch, 243, 271, 43
Antiochus III, 183
Anti-Slavery Society, 384
Antoninus Pius, 195, 430
Antony, Mark, 194
Antwerp, 294
Anubis, 210
Apes, 43, 44; anthropoid, 45
439
, 282440 Index
Apis, 209, 211
Apollonius, 151
Appian Way, 191
Appomattox Court House, 388, 435
Aquileia, 235
Arabia, 77, 88, 91, 122, 123, 248
Arabic figures, 257
Arabic language, 243
Arabs, 253 et seq., 294; culture of, 267
Arbela, battle of, 147, 431
Arcadius, 230, 431
Archangel, 419
Archimedes, 151
Ardashir I, 241, 430
Argentine Republic, 396
Arians, 224
Aristocracy, 130
Aristotle, 142, 144, 146, 256, 282, 294, 295,
356, 370
Armadillo, 74
Armenia, 192, 268, 287, 299
Armenians, 100, 108
Armistice, the, 435
Arno, the, 178
Arsacid dynasty, 199, 431
Artizans, 152
Aryan language, 95, 100, 106
Aryans, 95, 104 ef seq., 122, 128, 151, 174,
176, 185, 197, 198, 233, 303, 429
Ascalon, 117
Asceticism, 158-60, 213
Ashdod, 117
Asia, 72, 197, 227, 287, 298, 329 ef seq., 338,
399 et seq., 403 et seq., 430
Asia, Central, 108, 122, 134, 148, 185, 245-
247, 255, 334.
Asia Minor, 92, 94, 108, 127, 134, 148, 180,
192-93, 238, 243, 258, 271, 292, 429,
430, 431
Asia, Western, 65
Asoka, King, 163 et seq., 180, 430
Assam, 394
Asses, 77, 83, 102, 112
Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus), 97, 98, 109,
110
Assyria, 109, 115, 119, 121, 122, 429
Assyrians, 84, 96, 97, 98, 108, 429
Astronomy, early, 70, 74
Athanasian Creed, 224
Athenians, 135
Athens, 129, 135-36, 139, 150, 185, 204,
431
Athens, schools of philosophy in, 238
Atkinson, C. F., 345
Atkinson, J. J., 61, 373
Atlantic, 122, 302
Attalus, 430
Attila, 234, 235, 238, 431
Augsburg, Interim of, 313
Augustus Cesar, Roman Emperor, 195, 214
Aurelian, Emperor, 200
| Aurochs, 197
| Aurungzeb, 434
| Ausculum, battle of, 178, 430
Australia, 72, 322, 336, 395, 405
Austrasia, 431
| Austria, 309, 327, 347-48, 349-52, 390, 411,
434
| Austrian Empire, 409
| Austrians, 344, 35
| Automobiles, 362
Avars, 289
| Avebury, 106
Averroes, 282
Avignon, 285, 433
Axis of earth, 1, 2
Azilian age, 57, 65
Azilian rock pictures, 57, 78
Azoic rocks, 11
Azores, 302
B
BasEr, 290, 310, 332, 433
Baboons, 43
Babylon, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 111, 112;
114, 115-16, 119, 121, 122, 134, 147,
148, 373, 429
Babylonian calendar, 68
Babylonian Empire, 90, 91, 109, 110
Babylonians, 108
Bacon, Roger, 295-97, 43:
Bacon, Sir Francis, 321, 355. 433
Bagdad, 256, 267, 290, 292, 432, 433
Bahamas, 407
Baldwin of Flanders, 272
| Balkan peninsula, 108, 200, 230, 392, 429
Balkh, 299
| Balloons, altitude attained by, 4
Baltic, 415
Baltic Fleet, Russian, 404
Baluchistan, 405
Barbarians, 227 et seq., 230, 320
Barbarossa, Frederick. (See Frederick I)
Bards, 106, 234
Barrows, 104
Barter, 83, 102
Basketwork, 65
Basle, Council of, 305
Basque race, 92, 107
Bastille, 342, 434
Basutoland, 407
Beaconsfield, Lord, 394
Bedouins, 122, 248
Beetles, 26
Behar, 180, 430
Behring Straits, 52, 71, 73
Bel Marduk, 109, 111, 112, 114
Belgium, 185, 344, 347, 352, 411, 434
Belisarius, 43
Belshazzar, 112Beluchistan, 149
Benares, 156, 160
Beneventum, 179
Berbers, 71, 92
Bergen, 294
Berlin, Treaty of, 435
Bermuda, 407
Bessemer process, 359
Beth-shan, 118
Bible, 1, 68, 100, 112, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122,
184, 286, 298, 306-07. (Cf. Hebrew
Bible)
Birds, flight of, 4; the earliest, 31; develop
ment of, 32
Bison, 56
Black Death, the, 433
Black Sea, 71, 94-95, 108, 129, 200
Blood sacrifice, 167, 186, 212.
Sacrifice)
Boats, 91, 136
Boer republic, 187
Boers, 398
Bohemia, 236, 306
Bohemians, 304-05, 326
Bokhara, 256
Boleyn, Anne, 313
Bolivar, General, 349
Bologna, 295, 312
Bolsheviks (and Bolshevism), 417-19, 435
Bone carvings, 53
Bone implements, 45, 46
Boniface VIII, Pope, 283-84
“Book religions,” 226
Books, 153, 298, 302
Boétes, 257
Boris, King of Bulgaria, 432
Bosnia, 228
Bosphorus, 135
Boston, 337-38
Bostra, 243
Botany Bay, 393
Bourbon, Constable of, 312, 433
Bowmen, 145, 155, 300
Brahmins and Brahminism, 165, 166
Brain, 42
Brazil, 329, 336, 340
Breathing, 24
Brest-Litovsk, 417
Britain, 106, 122, 174, 185, 203, 236, 349,
353, 402, 431, 434. (See also England,
Great Britain)
British, 329, 331
British Civil Air Transport Commission, 363
British East Indian Company. (See East
India Company)
British Empire, 407;
1914) 405
British Guiana, 393
British Navy, 408
‘British schools,” the, 369
(See also
(in 1815) 393; (in
Index
Brittany, 309
Broken Hill, South Africa, 52
Bronze, 80, 87, 102, 104
Bruges, 294
Brussels, 344
Brythonic Celts, 107
Buda-Pesth, 312
Buddha, 133, 156, 172, 213, 429:
158; his teaching, 161-62
Buddhism (and Buddhists), 166, 172, 22¢
2504 200) o19s Sony BO! é
Buddha)
Bulgaria, 135, 229, 245, 292, 411, 432
Bull fights, Cretan, 93
Burgoyne, General, 338
Burgundy, 309, 342
Burial, early, 102, 104
Burleigh, Lord, 324
Burma, 166, 300, 405
Burning the dead, 104
Bury, J. B., 288
Bushmen, 54
Byzantine Army, 253
Byzantine Empire, 238, 271-72
Byzantine fleet, 431
Byzantium, 228, 243, 267, 268.
Constantinople)
life of,
(See also
C
CaBuL, 148
Cesar, Augustus, 430
Cesar, Julius, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 430
Cesar, title, etc., 212, 223, 240, 327
Cainozoic period, 37 et seq.
Cairo, 256
Calendar, 68
Calicut, 329
California, 336, 383
Caligula, 195, 430
Caliphs, 252
““Cambulac,”’ 300
Cambyses, 112, 134
Camels, 42, 102, 112, 196, 319
Campanella, 371
Canaan, 116
Canada, 332, 396, 405, 434
Canary Islands, 302
Cannze, 182
Canossa, 274
Canton, 247
Canute, 263, 432
Cape Colony, 398
Cape of Good Hope, 336, 393, 433
Capet, Hugh, 266, 432
Carboniferous age. (See Coal swamps)
Cardinals, 277 et seq.
Caria, 98
Carians, 94
Caribou, 73
Carlovingian Empire, 432442 Index
Carnac, 106
Carolinas, 388
Carrhe, 194
Chronicles, book of, 116, 119
| Chronology, primitive, 68
Ch’u, 173
Carthage, 92, 122, 123, 134, 176, 179, 182, | Church, the, 68
183, 185, 232, 429-30, 431
Carthaginians, 179, 182
| Cicero, 193
Cilicia, 299
Caspian Sea, 71, 88, 108, 148, 193, 197, 430 | Cimmerians, 100
Caste, 157, 165
Catalonians, 302
“‘Cathay,”’ 300
Catholicism, 237, 337, 351. (See also Papacy,
Roman Catholic)
Cato, 187
Cattle, 77, 83
Caudine Forks, 430
Cavalry, 145, 148, 178
Cave drawings, 53, 56
Caxton, William, 306
Celibacy, 275
Celts, 106, 107, 193
Centipedes, 23
Ceylon, 165, 407
Cheeronia, battle of, 145, 146, 430
Chalcedon, 243
Chaldean Empire, 109
Chaldeans, 109, 110-11, 115, 429
Chandragupta, 163, 430
Chariots, 96, 100, 101-02, 112, 119, 145, 148
Charlemagne, 259, 261, 264-65, 272, 309, 432
Charles I, King of England, 308, 324, 433
Charles II, King of England, 324, 434
Charles V, Emperor, 309, 310, 314, 316, 433
Charles X, King of France, 350, 434
Charles the Great. (See Charlemagne)
Charlotte Dundas, steamboat, 357
Chelonia, 27
Chemists, Arab, 257. (Cf. Alchemists)
Cheops, 83
Chephren, 83 |
China, 76, 84, 103, 166, 167 et seq., 1738, 174, |
233, 245 et seg., 248, 287, 290, 297, 333, |
399-400, 402-03, 411, 429-31, 432. 433,
435. (See also Chow, Han, Kin, Ming, |
Shang, Sung, Suy, Ts’in, and Yuan
dynasties)
China, culture and civilization in, 247
China, Empire of, 196 et seq.
China, Great Wall of, 173, 430
China, North, 173
Chinese picture writing, 79, 167
Chosroes I, 243, 431
Chosroes IT, 243, 431
Chow dynasty, 168, 173, 429
Christ. (See Jesus)
Christian conception of Jesus, 214
Christianity (and Christians), 224, 255, 272.
295, 319, 400, 431
Christianity, doctrinal, development of, 222
et seq.
Christianity, spirit of, 224
or
~“
> «
| Circumcision, 70
Circumnavigation, 302
Cities, Sumerian, 78
Citizenship, 187 et seq., 236, 237
City states, Greek, 129 et seq.; Chinese, 168
Civilization, 100
Civilization, Hellenic, 189, 150 et seq.
Civilization, Japanese, 400
‘ivilization, pre-historic, 71
‘ivilization, primitive, 76, 167
‘ivilization, Roman, 185
‘laudius, Emperor, 195, 430
Clay documents, 77, 80, 111
Clement V, Pope, 285
Clement VII, Pope, 285, 433
Cleopatra, 194
Clermont, 432
Clermont, steamboat, 358
Climate, changes of, 21, 37
Clive, 333
Clothing, 77
| Clothing of Cretan women, 93
Clouds, 8
Clovis, 259
| Clyde, Firth of, 357
Cnossos (Crete), 92, 94, 95, 101, 108, 1927,
429
Coal, 26
Coal swamps, the age of, 21 ef seq.
Coinage, 114, 176, 201, 319
Coke, 322
Collectivists, 375
Colonies, 394 et seq., 407
Columbus, Christopher, 300-01 et seq., 335,
433
Communism (and Communists), 374-75,
417
Comnenus, Alexius. (See Alexius)
Comparative anatomy, science of, 25. (Cf.
Anatomy)
Concord, Mass., 338
Confederated States of America. 385
Confucius, 133, 168 et seq., 173, 429
Congo, 397
Conifers, 26, 36
Constance, Council of, 286, 304, 433
Constantine the Great, 187, 226, 228, 229,
241, 429, 43]
Constantinople 229, 238, 239, 243, 253, 258,
263-64, 270 et seq., 272, 283, 292. 301,
321, 327, 431, 432, 433. (See also By-
zantium)
Consuls, Roman, 193
SNCopper, 74, 80, 102, 360, 395
Cordoba, 256
Corinth, 129
Cornwallis, General, 338
Corsets, 93
Corsica, 182, 185, 232
Cortez, 314
Cossacks, 334
Cotton fabrics, 102
Couvade, the, 70
Crabs, 23
Crassus, 192, 194, 199
Creation of the world, story of, 1, 116
Creed religions, 240
Cretan script, 94
Crete, 92, 108
Crimea, 419
Crimean War, 390, 434
Crocodiles, 28
Croesus, 111, 429
Cro-Magnon race, 51, 54, 65
Cromwell, Oliver, 434
Cronstadt, 419
Crucifixion, 204
Crusades, 267 et seg., 281, 304-05, 432
Crustacea, 13
Ctesiphon, 244
Cuba, 393
Cultivation, the beginnings of, 65 et seq.
Culture, Heliolithic, 69
Culture, Japanese, 402
Cuneiform, 78
Currents, 18
Cyaxares, 109-10, 429
'yeads, 26, 36
Cyrus the Persian, 111, 116, 121, 123, 134,
429
‘zech language, 236
‘zecho-Slovaks, 351
Czechs, 304
D
Dacta, 195, 200, 203, 227, 236
Deedalus, 94
Dalmatia, 431
Damascus, 243, 253, 431
Danes, 329, 330
Danube, 135, 200, 227, 430
Dardanelles, 136, 147, 292
Darius I, 112, 134, 135, 136, 429
Darius III, 147, 148, 430
Darlington, 356, 434
David, King, 118-19, 429
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 356
Davis, Jefferson, 385, 388
Dawn Man. (See Eoanthropus)
Dead, burning the, 104; burial of (see Burial)
Debtors’ prisons, 336
Deciduous trees, 36
Index
Decius, Emperor, 200, 432
Declaration of Independence, 334, 434
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gib-
bon’s), 288-89
Deer, 42, 56
Defender of the Faith, title of, 313
Defoe, Daniel, 365
Delhi, 292, 433
Democracy, 131, 132, 270
Deniken, General, 419
Denmark, 306, 313, 394, 432
Deshima, 401
Devonian system, 19
Diaz, 433
Dictator, Roman, 194
Dillon, Dr., 424
Dinosaurs, 28, 31, 36
Diocletian, Emperor, 224, 226, 227
Dionysius, 170
Diplodocus Carnegii, measurement of, 28
Diseases, infectious, 379
Ditchwater, animal and plant life in, 13
Dogs, 42
Domazlice, battle of, 305
Dominic, St., 276
Dominican Order, 276, 285, 400
Dorian Greeks, 108, 130
Douglas, Senator, 386
Dover, Straits of, 193
Dragon flies, 23
Drama, Greek, 139
Dravidian civilization, 108
Dravidians, 71
Duck-billed platypus, 34
Duma, the, 416
Durazzo, 268
Dutch, 329, 331, 332, 399
Dutch Guiana, 394
Dutch Republic, 350
Dyeing, 75
E
Eartn, the, shape of, 1; rotation of, 1; dis-
tance from sun, 2; age and origin of, 5;
surface of, 21
Earthquakes, 95
East India Company, 332, 337, 393, 394
East Indies, 394, 399
Ebro, 182
Ecbatana, 109, 114
Echidna, the, 34
Eclipses, 8
Ecnomus, battle of, 181, 430
Economists, French, 371
Edessa, 271
Education, 294, 361, 368, 369
Egbert, King of Wessex, 263, 432
Egg-laying mammals, 34
Eggs, 24, 26, 31, 102444 Index
Egypt (and Egyptians), 71, 78, 90, 91, 92,
96, 98, 100-101, 115, 119, 121, 122, 123,
124, 134, 138, 147, 174, 208, 209, 210,
238, 253, 267, 290, 292, 396, 398, 405,
429, 431, 434
Egyptian script, 78, 79
Elamites, 88, 90, 174
Elba, 348
Electric light, 360
Electric traction, 360
Electricity, 322, 358, 360
Elephants, 42, 127, 149, 178, 181, 253, 300
Elixir of life, 257
Elizabeth, Queen, 324, 332
Emigration, 336
Emperor, title of, 327
Employer and employed, 375
““Encyclopzdists,”’ the, 371
England (and English), 306, 390, 431
England, Norman Conquest of, 266
England, overseas possessions, 330
English Channel, 331
English language, 95
Entelodonts, 42
Eoanthropus, 47
Eoliths, 45
Ephesus, 149
Ephthalites, 199
Epics, 106, 127, 129, 131
Epirus, 131, 178, 179
Epistles, the, 222
Eratosthenes, 151
Erech, Sumerian city of, 78
Esarhaddon, 429
Essenes, 213
Esthonia, 245
Esthonians, 419
Ethiopian dynasty, 429
Ethiopians, 96, 233
Etruscans, 94, 100, 176, 430
Euclid, 151
{uphrates, 77, 110, 127, 129, 174, 196, 429,
430
{uripides, 139
Europe, 200
Europe, Central, 329
{urope, Concert of, 350
Europe, Western, 53, 298
{uropean overseas populations, 336
Europeans, intellectual revival of, 294 et seq.
Europeans, North Atlantic, 329
“uropeans, Western, 329
iverlasting League, 433
Evolution, 16, 42
{¢xcommunication, 275, 281, 285
Execution, Greek method of, 140
Ezekiel, 124
F
Factory system, 365
Family groups, 61
Famine, 420
Faraday, 358
Fashoda, 398
Fatherhood of God, the, 215, 224, 251
Fear, 61
Feathers, 32
Ferdinand of Aragon, King, 293, 302, 309
Ferns, 23, 26
Fertilizers, 363
Fetishism, 63, 64
Feudal system, 258, 400, 401, 402
Fielding, Henry, 365
Fiji, 407
Finance, 134
Finland, 245
Finns, 351
Fish, the age of, 16 et seq.; the first known
vertebrata, 19; evolution of, 30
Fisher, Lord, 416
Fishing, 57
Fleming, Bishop, 286
Flint implements, 44, 47
Flood, story of the, 91, 116
Florence, 294
Florentine Society, 322
Florida, 336, 385
Flying machines, 94, 363
Fontainebleau, 348
Food, rationing of, 414
Food riots, 417
Forests, 56, 197
Fossils, 13, 43. (Cf. Rocks)
Fowl, the domestic, 88, 102
France, 106, 185, 230, 259, 263, 312, 336.
342, 353, 390, 391, 394, 396, 402, 409,
411, 434
Francis I, King of France, 310, 312, 313,
433
Francis II, Emperor of Austria, 434
Francis of Assisi, St., 276, 432
Franciscan Order, 276, 285, 432
Frankfort, Peace of, 391, 435
Franks, 200, 227, 235, 259, 265, 431
Frazer, Sir J. G., 66
Frederick I (Barbarossa), 274, 432
Frederick I, King of Prussia, 434
Frederick IT, German Emperor, 279, 280 et
seq., 288, 289, 294, 304, 435
Frederick II, King of Sicily, 432
Frederick the Great of Prussia, 327, 434
Freeman’s Farm, 338
French, 329, 331, 332, 419
French Guiana, 394
French language, 203, 327, 328, 419
French Revolution, 342 et seq., 374
Frogs, 24
Fronde, war of the, 434
Fulton, Robert, 358
Furnace, blast, 359; electric, 359
Furs, 335GaALatTtA, 430
Galatians, 193
Galba, 430
Galerius, Emperor, 226, 431
Galleys, 91, 92, 181, 263
Galvani, 358
Gama, Vasco da, 329, 335, 433
Ganges, 156
Gath, 117
Gaul, 203, 235, 236, 357, 431
Gauls, 154, 178, 179, 180, 182, 193, 430
Gautama. (See Buddha)
Gaza, 117, 147
Gaztelu, 314
Genoa (and Genoese), 294, 300, 301, 302
Genoa Conference, 425
Genseric, 232
Geology, 11 et seq., 356
George III, King of England, 324, 337, 434
Georgia, 336, 339, 385, 387
German Empire, 409
German language, 95, 236, 260
Germans, 268, 288, 310, 351, 360-61, 362
Germany, 197, 326, 347, 348, 362, 390, 396,
402, 409, 410, 411
Germany, North, 306
Gibbon, E., 234, 288
Gibraltar, 71, 92, 94, 253, 393, 407
Gigantosaurus, measurement of, 28
Gilbert, Dr., 322
Gilboa, Mount, 118
Gills, 24
Giraffes, 42
Gizeh, pyramids at, 83
Glacial Ages, 22, 37, 44
Gladiators, 205
Glass, 102
Glyptodon, 74
Goa, 329
Goats, 77
God, idea of one true, 249
God of Judaism, 123, 209, 213, 214, 215
Godfrey of Bouillon, 432
Gods, 111, 123, 129, 165, 184, 186, 201 ef
seq., 208 et seq., 240
Goidelic Celts, 106
Gold, 74, 80, 83, 102, 300, 395
Golden Bough, Frazer's, 66
Good Hope, Cape of. (See Cape)
Gospels, the, 214 et seq., 222
Gothic kingdom, 259
Gothland, 197, 200
Goths, 181, 200, 227, 228, 430, 431
Granada, 293, 301
Granicus, battle of the, 146, 430
Grant, General, 387, 388
Graphite, 15
Grass, 37, 51
Great Britain, 396, 410
Index
Great Mogul, Empire of, 394, 434
Great Powers, 399 et seq.
Great Schism. (See Papal schism)
Great War, the, 411 et seq., 421, 435
Greece, 92, 94, 108, 127, 139 et seq., 145 et
seq., 434
Greece, war with Persia, 134 et seq.
Greek language, 95, 202, 203
Greeks, 92, 100, 101, 108, 122 ef seq., 135,
150; 174, 186; 271, 272, SOL. 353: 419
429, 430, 433
Greenland, 263
Gregory I, Pope, 272
Gregory VII, Pope (Hildebrand), 268, 272,
Q74, 275, 278, 432
Gregory IX, Pope, 281
Gregory XI, Pope, 285, 433
Gregory the Great, 272
Grimaldi race, 51, 54, 65
Guillotine, the, 346
Guiscard, Robert, 432
Gunpowder, 287, 321
Guns, 321, 413
Gustavus Adolphus, 331
Gymnastic displays, Cretan, 93
H
Hasssures, 283, 309, 310
Hadrian, 174, 430
Halicarnassus, 138
Hamburg, 294
Hamitic people, 71
Hammurabi, 90, 92, 104, 429
Han dynasty, 196, 200, 245, 430
Hannibal, 182
Hanover, Elector of, 327
Harding, President, 425
Harold Hardrada, 266
Harold, King of England, 266
Haroun-al-Raschid, 267, 432
Hastings, battle of, 266
Hastings, Warren, 333
Hatasu, Queen of Egypt, 96
Hathor, 209
Heaven, Kingdom of, 216, 217
Hebrew Bible, 1, 115, 116. (Cf. Bible)
Hebrew literature, 100
Hebrews, 100, 115. (See also Jews)
Hegira, 431
Heidelberg man, 45
Heliolithie culture, 69, 71, 167, 174
Heliolithic peoples, 107
Hellenic tribes, 100. (See also Greeks)
Hellespont, 430, 431
Helots, 130, 203
Hen. (See Fowl)
Henry IV, King, 274
Henry VI, Emperor, 279
Henry VIII, King of England, 310, 312,
313, 324, 433446 Index
Henry the Fowler, 265, 432
Heraclea, battle of, 178, 430
Heraclitus of Ephesus, 132, 156, 161
Heraclius, Emperor, 243, 247, 253, 431
Herat, 148
Herbivorous reptiles, 28
Hercules, Pillars of. (See Gibraltar)
Hero, 151, 152
Herodotus, 138, 139
Herophilus, 151
Hiero, 182
Hieroglyphics, 79, 124
Hildebrand. (See Gregory VII )
Himalayas, the, 37
Hipparchus, 151
Hippopotamus, 43
Hiram, King of Sidon, 118, 119, 122
History of Charles V, 316
Hittites, 96, 97, 98, 108
Hohenstaufens, 283
Holland, 306, 344, 347, 394, 396, 402, 433,
134
Holstein, 351
Holy Alliance, 349
Holy Roman Empire, 264,
347, 377, 409, 432, 434
Homer, 129
Honorius, 230, 43
Honorius III, Pope, 281
Horse, 51, 56, 94, 96, 97, 112, 167, 319, 336;
evolution of the, 42
Horsetails, 23
Horus, 209, 210, 211
Hottentots, 54
Hsia, 287
Hudson Bay Company, 393
Hudson River, 358
Hulagu Khan, 290, 433
Human sacrifice, 182, 186. (Cf. Blood Sac-
rifice, Sacrifice)
Hungarians, 263, 289,
Hungary, 185, 203, 2
290, 292, 310, 31
Hungary, plain of, 234
Huns, 88, 167, 168, 174, 197, 198, 227, 232,
233, 245, 203, 289, 431
Hunting, 56
Huss, John, 304, 433
Hussites, 305
Hwang-ho river, 173
Hwang-ho valley, 300
Hyksos, 90, 96
Hyracodons, 42
Hystaspes, 430
309% Sie 323:
a7 "245, 258, 263, 289,
2, 351
IBERIANS, 71, 92
Ice age, 43. (Cf. Glacial ages)
Iceland, 263
Ichthyosaurs, 29, 36
Ignatius of Le yyola, St., 308, 434
Iliad, 127
Illinois, 386
Illyria, 179, 182
Immolation of human beings, 102
Immortality, idea of, 210, 211, 224
Imperialism, 399
Implements, 46, 48, 56, 57, 65, 87
Implements, use of, by animals, 44, 45
India, 71, 84, 104, 108, 122, 149. 156, 163,
164, 196, 199, 287, 302, 335, 394-95,
399, 409, 433, 434
Indian Empire, 405
Indian Ocean, 329
Indiana, 383, 386
Individualists, 375 ef seq.
Individuality in reproduction, 16 et seq.
Indo-Scythians, 199, 430
Indus, 149, 429
Industrial revolution, 365 ef se q.
Infantry, 178
Influenza, 414
Innocent III, Pope, 276, 279, 280, 432
Innocent IV, Pope, 281
Innsbruck, 313
Inquisition, the, 276, 349
Insects, 26, 31
Interdicts, papal, Q75
Interglacial period, 44,
Internationalism, 380
Invertebrata, 13
Investitures, 275
Ionic Greeks, 108, 130
Iowa, 385
Ireland, 106, 405
Iron, 80, 87, 94, 9
358, 359
Irrigation, 290
Isabella of Castile, Queen, 293, 302, 309
Isaiah, 125, 133, 156
Isis, 209, 210, 21
Islam, 251, 252,
Islamism, 267, 319.
he amr: anism)
Isocr: at 145
Israel are es of, 118
Israeli kings of, 118, 119, 121
Issus, battle of, 147, 430
Italian language, 203
Italians, 107, 351
Italica, 202
Italy, 94, 108, 129, 134, 176, 180, 230, 236,
312, 327, 347, 390, 396, 409, 411, 429,
131, 43
Italy, C entr al, 429
Italy, North, 263, 312, 351, 390, 429, 431
Italy, South, 429
Ivan ILI (the Great)
Ivan LV (the Terrible),
7, 102, 104, 168, 319, 321,
(See also Moslem, Mu-
ry ©
eas A832
8
8|
JACOBIN republic, 434
Jamaica, 393, 407
James I, King of England and Scotland,
324, 433
Jamestown (Va.), 433
Japan, 166, 300, 399, 400-01 et seg., 409,
410, 435
Japanese, 419
Jarandilla, 315
Java, 302, 329
Jaw-bone, Heidelberg, 45-46; Piltdown, 46
Jehovah, 125
Jena, 434
Jengis Khan, 287, 298, 334, 432
Jerusalem, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 12 4, 184,
215, 243, 267, 271, 272, 299, 431, 432
Jerusalem, temple of, 119, 184
Jesuits, 308, 400, 433
Jesus, life and teaching of, 214 et seq., 294,
270, 306, 374, 430
Jews, 123, 124, 147, 184, 213, 21
270, 294
Jews, early history of, 115 et seq.
Jews, literature of, 115
Jewish religion and sacred books, 116
John III of Poland, 434
John le Pope, 2
John XII, Pope,
Joppa, 117
Joseph, King of Spain, 349, 434
Josiah, King of Judah, 110, 115, 116,
Judah, 115, 119
Judah, kings of, 119
Judea, 115, 183, 214
Judea, priests and prophets in, 122 et seq.
Judges, book of, 117
Judges of Israel, 118
Jugo-Slavia, 354
Jugo-Slavs, 351
Jugurtha, 192
Julian the Apostate, 431
Julius ILI, 316
Junks, Chinese, 400
5, 255, 256,
72
272, 432
,
Jupiter (god), 211, 212
Jupiter (planet), 2, 3
Jupiter Capitolinus, 184
Jupiter Serapis, 226
Justinian I, 232, 238, 243, 431
Jutes, 230
K
KaaBa, the, 249
Kadessia, battle of, 253, 431
Kalinga, 163
Kansas, 383
Karakorum, 287, 298
Karnak, 101
Kashgar, 300
Kashmir, Buddhists in, 165
Index
Kavadh, 243, 244, 431
Kentucky, 383, 386
Kerensky, 416, 417
Khans, 287 et seq.
Khyber Pass, 148, 199
Kiau Chau, 400
Kieff, 287, 432
Kin dynasty, 287
Kings, book of, 119
Kioto, 402
Ki-wi, the, 32
Koltchak, Admiral, 419
Koran, the, 251, 255
Korea, 400, 402
Kotan, 300
Krum of Bulgaria, 432
Kublai Khan, 290, 298, 300, 433
Kushan dynasty, 199
L
LABYRINTH, Cretan, 127
Lahore, 287
Lake Ontario, 336
Land scorpions, 23
Langley, Professor, 363
Languages of mankind, 94, 95, 100, 106,
107, 108, 134, 145, 156, 176, 201, 202,
203, 230, 236, 243, 245, 259, 325, 328
Lao Tse, 133, 170 et 8eq., 222, 429
Lapland, 233
Latin Emperor, 259
Latin language, 201, 202, 203, 236, 259. (Cf.
also Languages)
Latins, the, 271, 272, 432
Law, 238
Laws, Plato’s, 142
League of Nations, 422, 423, 424, 425, 435
Learning, 255
Lee, General, 387, 389
Legionaries, 229
Lemurs, 43
Lenin, 417, 419
Leo III, Pope, 265, 272, 432
Leo X, Pope, 310, 312, 433
Leonidas, 136
Leopold [S55
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 434
Lepanto, battle of, 293
Lepidus, 194
Lexington, 338
Liberia, 398
Libraries, 151, 154, 170
Liegnitz, battle of, 288, 289, 433
Life, beginnings of, the Record of the Rocks,
11 et seq.; progressive nature of, 16; of
what it consists, 16; theory of Natu‘a
Selection, 18; a teachable type: advent
of, 39
Lineoln, Abraham, 385, 386, <
assassination of, 389
333, 339, 435;448 Index
Linen, 102
Lions, 42, 127
Lisbon, 294, 315, 329
Literary criticism, evolution of, 205
Literature, European, 298
Literature, pre-historic, 115
Lizards, 27, 28
Llamas, 42
Lob Nor, 300
Lochau, battle of, 313
Locke, John, 371
Logic, science of, 144
Lombard kingdom, 259
Lombards, 431
Lombardy, 432
London, 294, 413
Lopez de Recalde, Inigo, 308. (See also
Ignatius of Loyola)
Lorraine, 391
Louis XIV, 324, 433
Louis XV, 434
Louis XVI, 342, 343, 434
Louis XVIII, 350, 434
Louis Philippe, 350, 434
Louis the Pious, 265, 432
Louisiana, 336, 385
Lu, state of, 170
Lucretius, 294
Lucullus, 192
Lunar month, 68
Lung, the, 24
Luther, Martin, 306, 310, 433
Luxembourg, 351
Luxor, 101
Lvoff, Prince, 416
Lyceum, Athens, 142, 44
Lydia, 98, 134
Lydians, 94
Lyons, 345
M
Macao, 329
Macaulay, Lord, 187
Maccabeans, 184
Macedonia and Macedonians, 131, 135, 139,
145, 179, 292, 350
Machinery, 322, 356
Madeira, 122, 302
Madras, 163
Magellan, Ferdinand, 302
Magic, 172
Magna Grecia, 129, 178
Magnesia, battle of, 183
Magyars, 263, 264, 270, 289
Mahaffy, Professor, 151
Maine, 336, 339
Majuba Hill, battle of, 398
Malta, 393, 407
Mammals, the earliest, 33; viviparous, 33;
egg-laying, 34; the Age of, 37 et seq.
Mammoth, 43, 49
Man, brotherhood of, 216, 224, 380
Man, 43; Heidelberg, 45; Eoanthropus, 47;
Neanderthal, 47, 48 et seqg.; earliest
known, 53 et seq.
Manchu, 333, 433
Manchuria, 197, 400, 402, 403, 404
Mangu Khan, 290, 433
Mani, 241, 270, 430, 431
Manichans, 243, 255
Mankind, racial divisions of, 54, 71
Mantua, 345
Maoris, 71
Marathon, 136
Marathon. battle of, 430
Marchand, Colonel, 398
Marcus, Aurelius, 174, 430
Marie Antoinette, 343, 346
Mariner’s compass, 302, 320
Marius, 191, 192, 237, 430
“Marriage of East and West,” 149
Mars (planet), 2, 3
Marseillaise, the, 343, 345
Marseilles, 129, 182, 312, 345
Martel, Charles, 259, 432
Martin V, Pope, 286, 304
Marx, 376
Maryland, 337
Mas d’Azil cave, 57
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 390, 391
Maximilian I, Emperor, 309, 433
Maya writing, 74, 75
Mayence, 265, 344
Mayflower expedition, 433
Mazarin, Cardinal, 324
Mecca, 248, 249, 251, 431
Mechanical revolution, 356 et seg., 366, 369
Medes, 100, 108, 109, 115, 122, 134, 155,
174, 429
Media, rebellion in, 136
Median Empire, 109, 110, 112
Medicine man, the, 64
Medina, 249
Mediterranean, 71, 91, 176, 292, 293; val-
ley, 71
““Mediterranean”’ people, pre-Greek, 130
Megatherium, 74
Megiddo, battle of, 110, 115, 429
Melasgird, battle of, 268, 432
Mentality, primitive, 60 et seq.
Mercury (planet), 2, 3
Mesopotamia, 77, 80, 96, 100, 109, 127, 174,
267, 290, 299
Mesozoic period, 27; land life of, 28: sea
life of, 30; scarcity of bird and mam-
mal life in, 32, 34; its difference from
Cainozoic period, 38
Messina, 179, 180
Messina, Straits of, 179
Metallurgy, 356, 359, 360Metals, transmutation of, 257
Meteoric iron, 80, 94
Metz, 391
Mexico, 74, 76, 314, 321, 384, 385, 389, 390
Michael VII, Emperor, 268
Michael VIII. (See Paleologus)
Microscope, 355
Midianites, 117
Milan, 227, 235, 309, 312, 351
Miletus, 129
Millipedes, 23
Milton, 129
Ming dynasty, 290, 333, 433
Mining, 335
Minnesota, 385
Minos, 92, 95, 127, 131
Missionaries, 236, 247, 380, 400, 431
Mississippi (state), 385
Mississippi River, 386
Missouri, 382
Mithraism, 211, 212, 213, 222, 431
Mithras, 211, 213
Mnemonics, Chinese and Peruvian method
of, 76
Moabites, 117
Moawija, Caliph, 431
Mogul dynasty, 292, 433
Moluccas, 329
Monarchy, 323, 341, 347
Monasticism, 213, 236
Money, 114, 176, 201, 319
Mongol conquests, influence of, 298
Mongol Court, the, 299
Mongol Empire, 332
Index
Mongolia, 197
Mongolian language, 108
Mongolian peoples, 72, 73, 88, 16
232, 233 et Seq., 945, 258, §
298. 320, 333, 334, 400, 433
Mongoloid tribes, 69
Monkeys, 43, 45
Monotheism, 251. (Sce also Muhammad)
Monroe doctrine, 349, 389, 396, 423
Monroe, President, 349
Montesquieu, 371
Montgomery, 385
Month, the lunar, 68
Moon, the, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 68
Moorish paper-mills, 297
More, Sir Thomas, 365, 371
Morelly, 371
Morocco, 185, 398
Mortillet, 57
Moscow, 293, 434
Moscow, Grand Duke of, 290
Moses, 116
Moslem Empire, 253
Moslems, 297, 431, 432
Moslim, the, 253, 259, 271, 290
Mososaurs, 29
Mosses, 23
Mounds, Neolithic, 70
Mountains, 197
Mozambique, 329
Muehlon, Herr, 424
Muhammad, prophet, 243, 247, 248 et seq.,
270, 431
Muhammad II, Sultan, 292, 433
Mules, 102
Mummies, 70
Munitions, 412
Musk ox, 43
Mycale, battle of, 136, 430
Mycene, 92, 108
Mycerinus, 83
Myle, battle of, 181, 430
N
Nasonipvs, 111, 112
Nankin, 173
Naples, 178, 350, 431
Napoleon Bonaparte, 345, 347, 348, 356, 434
Napoleon III, 390, 434, 435
Nasmyth, 359
Natal, 398
““National schools,’’ 369
Natural history, father of, 144
Natural Selection, theory of, 17
Nautilus, the pearly, 30
Navarino, battle of, 353, 434
Neanderthaler Man, 47, 48 et seq.
Nebraska, 383
Nebuchadnezzar II (the Great), 109, 110,
115, 429
Nebule, 4, 5
Necho II, 109, 110, 115, 122, 147, 429
Needles, bone, 57
Negroid tribes, 72, 88
Nelson, Horatio, 348
Neolithic age, 59, 65
Neolithic civilizations, primitive, 71 et seq.
Neptune (planet), 2, 3
Nero, 195, 430
Nestorian missionaries, 431.
aries)
Netherlands, 259, 309, 351
Neustria, 431
Neva, 327
New Assyrian Empire, 97
New Atlantis, The, 322, 355
New England, 335, 337
New Mexico, 386
New Plymouth, 433
Newts, 24
New York, 358, 434
New Zealand, 322, 396, 405
Newfoundland, 405
Nicea, 268, 270
Niczea, Council of, 431
Nicephorus, Emperor, 432
(Cf. Mission-on
450 Index
Nicholas I, Tsar, 351, 390,.434
Nicholas II, Tsar, 416
Nickel, 360
Nicomedia, 227
Nieuw Amsterdam. 434. (Cf. New York)
Nile, 83, 100, 129, 398; valley, 90, 429
Nile, battle of the, 43
Nineveh, 94, 97, 101, 109, 114, 243, 429, 431
Nippur, 78
Nirvana, 161
Nish, 227
Noah’s Ark, 91
Nogaret, Guillaume de, 284
Nomadic peoples, primitive, 84 et seq. (Cf.
Nomads)
Nomads, 122, 155, 167, 168, 174, 198-200,
233-34, 245, 287, 334
Nonconformity, 307, 308
Nordic race, 72, 88, 104, 108, 134, 154, 155,
174, 178, 185, 197, 200, 233, 258, 261
Normandy, 263, 342, 432
Normandy, Duke of, 266
Normans, 263, 266, 279, 302
Northmen, 263, 264, 266, 268, 432
Norway, 306, 313, 432
Norwegians, 351
Novgorod, 294, 432
Nubians, 238
Numerals, Arabic, 282
Numidia, 191
Numidians, 182
Nuremberg, 294
Nuremberg, Peace of, 313
O
OcrEAN dredgings, deepest, 4
Ocean liners, 322, 336
Octavian. (See Augustus)
Odenathus of Palmyra, 431
Odoacer, 236, 431
Odyssey, 127
Ogdai Khan, 287, 289, 432
Oglethorpe, 336
Okapi, 397
“Old Man,” 372, 373
Old Testament, 115, 116
Olympiad, first, 176, 429
Olympian games, 131
Olympias, Queen, 146
Omar, Caliph, 431
Open-hearth process, 359
Orange River, 398
*“Ordinance of secession,” 385
Oregon, 385
Organic Evolution, 16
Ormuz, 299
Orsini family, 284
Orthodoxy, 240
Osiris, 209, 210, 211
Ostrogoths, 227, 431
Othman, 432
Otho, 430
Otto I, King of Germany, 265, 43
Otto of Bavaria, Prince, 354
Ottoman Empire, 292. (See also Turkey,
Turks)
Oudh, 394
Ownership, 373, 374, 375
Oxen, 49, 104, 112
Oxford, 295
P
Papua, 235
Pestum, 176
Paleologus, Michael (Michael VIII), 283
Paleolithic age, 13, 59, 66 (note)
Palermo, 181
Palestine, 290, 299
Pamirs, 196, 300
Panama, 385
Panama, Isthmus of, 314
Pan Chau, 197, 430
Panipat, battle of, 433
Pannonia, 203, 229, 232, 234, 431
Papacy (including Popes), 237, 261, 265, 277
et seq., 329 et seq., 343
Papal schism (the Great Schism), 285, 304,
433
Paper, 153, 236, 255, 297, 320, 322
Papyrus, 78, 153
Parables, 216
Paradise Lost, 129
Parchment, 153
Paris, 294, 295, 3
413, 415, 435
Paris, Peace of, 338, 434
Parthian dynasty, 202
Parthians, 155, 192, 194, 198, 199, 245
Passau, Treaty of, 314
Patricians, Roman, 176, 188
Paul, St., 202, 223
Pavia, siege of, 312
Peace Conference, Dr. Dillon’s, 424
Peasant revolts, 305, 310
Peculium, 206
Pedro I, 340
Pegu, 300
Pekin, 173, 287, 300, 383, 400, 43
Peloponnesian War, 139, 145, 430
Pentateuch, the, 116
“People’s crusade,” the, 270, 432. (Cf.
Crusades)
Pepi II, 83
Pepin I, 259
Pepin of Hersthal, 431
Pergamum, 154, 180, 183, 430
Pericles, 139, 140
Perry, Commodore, 402
Persepolis, 114, 148, 155
42, 350, 356, 390, 391, 412,Persia, 77, 134 et seq., 165, 185, 192, 227, 243,
253, 255, 287, 399, 409, 430, 431
Persian Empire, 112, 134, 238, 429
Persian Gulf, 77, 78, 91, 299
Persian language, 95
Persians, 100, 108, 109, 115, 155, 174, 431
Peru, 74, 75, 314, 321
Pestilence, 305, 320, 334, 413, 430, 431, 433
ire ao 82, 134
270
Peter the (¢
Peter the He er 269,
Peterhof,
327
Pete rsburg, 327, 419. (See also Petrograd)
Petrograd, 416, 417. (See also Petersburg)
Petschenegs, 268
Phalanx, 145, 178
Pharaohs, the, 90, 96, 119, 131, 150, 180
Pharsalos, 430
Philadelphia, 358, 434
Philip, Duke of Orleans,
Philip, King of France,
Philip II, King of Spain,
Philip of Hesse, 313
Philip of Macedon, 145, 146, 430
Philippine Islands, 392, 393, 400
Philistines, 100, 117
Philosopher's stone, 257
850
285
314, 324
Philosophers and Philosophy, 133, 139, 152,
168, 239, 294, 295
Pheenicians. 92, 94, 107, 123,
Phenix, steamship, 358
Phrygians, 100, 108
Physiocrats, 371
Picture writing, 56, 57, 78,
Piedmont, 345
Pirates and Piracy, 92, 179,
Pithecanthropus erectus, 45
79, 167
180, 200, 263
Pizarro, 314
Plague. (See Pestilence)
Planetoids, 2
Planets, 2
Plant lice, 13
Plants, 22, 23, 36
Platea, battle of, 136, 430
Plato, 140, 142, 144, 170,
Platypus, duck-billed, 34
370-71
Plebeians, Roman, 176, 177, 187-88
Plesiosaurs, 29, 30, 36
Poison-gas, 413
Poitiers, 432
Poitiers, battle of, 253, 259
Poland, 288, 327, 353, 434
Poles, 288, 419
Political experiment, age of,
Political ideas, development of,
8318 et seq.
370 et seq.
Political science, founder of, 144
Political worship, 412
Polo, Marco, 299-300
Polynesian races, 71
Pompey the Great, 192, 193, 196, 198, 430
Pontifex maximus, 237, 261
Index
Popes. (See Papacy)
Population, 379, 383
Port Arthur, 400, 403
Portugal, 340, 394, 396, 431
Portuguese, 302, 329, 332, 400
Porus, King, 149
Potato, 76
Potsdam, 327
Pottery, 75, 87
Prague, 43:
Prescott, .
Priestcraft (including Priests), 64, 68, 69, 74,
75, 77, 83, 111, 114 et seq, 122, 131
132, 167, 174, eet
Primal Ta 61
Primates, 43.
A
—
=
=
1)
"298 SUSE
Printing, 80, ae : 305
306, 320, 322, 329
Priscus, 234
Property N D] 4, 37 ) rf 4, 375
Prophet, Muhammad as, 249
Pri pee Jewish, 118, 122 et seq.
Bros torship, 373
eB note Tee 316, 324, 327, 351, 400
Proverbs, book of, 116
Prussia, 327, 348, 351, 390, 391, 392, 434,
39
Prussia, East, 412, 415
Psalms, 116
Psammetichus I, 109, 429
Psycho-analysis, 60
Pterodactyls, 28, 29, 31, 36
Ptolemy E 149, 150, 151, 186, 911
Ptolemy II, 151, 186
Punic language, 203
Punic en 180 et sea 187, 188, 430
Punjab,
Pee!
Pygmies, 397
3, 199
dt
6:
QQ”
III
Py ramids, 69, 100
Pyrenees, 253, 4: 32
Pyrrhus, 178, 179, 450
QUEBEC, 434
Quinqueremes, 180
Quixada, 314
R
Races of mankind, 71 et seq.
Railways, 399 350, 356, 357, 382, 383, 384,
889, 395, 396, 409, 454
Rain, 9, 10
Rameses II, 96, 147, 429
Rasputin, 415, 416
Ratisbon, Diet of, 313
Ravenna, 431
Reading, 176
Rebus, 79
Red deer, 56452
Empire, 208 et seq.
Religious wars, 270, 304, 313. (Cf. Cru-
ens sades)
ia Reptiles, the age of, 26 et seq.; mental life
of, 38
Reproduction, 17 et seq.
Republic, Plato’s, 142
a; Republic, the Assimilative, 187
Republics, 187 et seq., 236, 308, 324, 328, 340,
343, 344, 416, 433, 434, 435
Republicans, the first, 131
Retreat of the Ten Thousand, 150
Revolution, 342 et seq., 349 et seq., 390, 404,
416, 435
Rhine, 200, 227
Rhine languages, 236
Rhineland, 270, 306
Rhinoceros, 43, 49
Rhodes, 108
Rhodesia, 407
Rhodesian man. 52
Richelieu, Cardinal, 324
Richmond, U.S.A., 386, 388, 389
Roads, 114, 187
Robertson, 316
Robespierre, 345, 346, 434
Robinson, J. H., 284
‘Rocket,’ Stephenson’s, 356
Rock pictures, 57, 78
Rocks as record of beginnings
seq.
of life, 11 et
S
SABELLIANS, 224
Sabre-toothed tiger, 43
Sacrifice, 102, 103, 167, 174, 182, 186, 211,
212. (Cf. also Blood sacrifice, Human
sacrifice)
Sagas, 106
Saghalien, 404
Sailing ships, 91, 336
St. Angelo, castle of, 312
St. Helena, 407
St. Sophia, church of, 238
Saladin, 272, 432
Salamis, battle of, 180, 430
Salamis, bay of, 136
Salerno, 282
Samarkand, 256, 297
Samnites, 430
Samos, 129
Index
Te Red Sea, 91, 118, 122, 196
i Reformation, the, 308
iti Reindeer, 43, 49, 51, 56, 73
ips Religion, and the creation of the world, 1;
i} and organic evolution, 16; primitive,
iy 61, 64
at | Religions, 172, 222 et seq., 240 et seq., 319.
(Cf. Buddhism, Christianity, etc.)
a Religious developments under the Roman
na}
Samson, 116
Samurai, 401
San Francisco, 383
Sandstones, 26
Sanskrit, 95, 107, 156
Sapor I, 430
Saracens, 264
Saratoga, 338
Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal), 98, 109, 111
Sardinia, 182, 185, 232, 309, 351, 390
Sardis, 98
Sargon I, 90, 92, 109, 122, 429
Sargon II, 97, 109, 429
Sarmatians, 100
Sassanid dynasty,
Saturn (planet), 2,
Saul, King of Israel, 118, 429
Saul of Tarsus. (See Paul, St.)
Savannah, steamship, 358
Savoy, 334, 351, 390
Saxons, 230, 265
Saxony, Elector of, 310
Scandinavians, 329
Scarabeus beetle, 209
Scheldt, 344
Schmalkaldic League, 312
Science, 144
Science and religion, 243
Science, exploitation of, 362
Science, physical, 412
Scientific societies, 322
Scipio Africanus, 182, 187
Scorpion, sea, 13, 18, 23
Scotland, 306, 307
Scott, Michael, 282
Scythia, 429
Scythians, 100, 108, 134, 135
Sea trade, 91
| Sea worms, 13
Seasons, the, 68
Seaweed, 13
Sedan, 391
Seed-bearing trees, 26
Seleucid dynasty, 183, 186, 196, 199
Seleucus I, 149, 163
Seljuks, 267, 268, 272, 43
Semites and Semitic peoples,
94° 1075, Libs, 192. 7
258
Semitic language, 202, 243
Sennacherib, 97
Serapeum, 211, 213
Serapis, 211, 212
Serbia, 179, 200, 22
Serfdom, 207
Seven Years’ War, 434
Severus, Septimius, 202
Seville, 202, 213, 302
Shang dynasty, 103, 168
Sheep, 77
265
227, 241, 430
3
9
88, 89, 91, 92,
, 174, 233, 256,
2
J
7, 228, 292, 354, 411Shell necklaces, 56
Shellfish, 13
Shells, as protection against drying, 18
Sherman, General, 387, 388
Shi-Hwang-ti, 173, 180, 430
Shimonoseki, Straits of, 402
Shipbuilding, 359, 360, 400
Ships, 91, 119, 122, 149, 180, 196, 320, 322,
336
Shishak, 119
Shrubs, 36
Shumanism, 298
Siam, 166
Siberia, 334
Siberia, Eastern, 419
Siberian railway, 403, 409
Sicilies, Two, 287
Sicily, 108, 122, 129, 134, 178, 179, 182, 185,
188, 232, 263, 279, 280
Sidon, 92, 122, 123, 134, 147
Silurian system, 19
Silver, 80, 102, 335
Sind, 394
Sirmium, 227
Skins, use of: for clothing, 56; for writing,
75; inflated, as boats, 91
Skull, Rhodesian, 52
Slavery (and slaves), 94, 102, 188, 191, 194,
203 et seq., 236, 320, 337, 373, 374, 384—
386, 388, 430, 433
Slavonic language, 236
Slavs, 263, 265
Smelting, 87, 104, 322
Smith, Adam, 377
Smith, Eliot, 69
Snakes, 27, 28
Social reform, 125
Socialism, 371, 416, 417, 434
Socialists, 375 et seq.
Socialists, primitive. ‘
Society, primitive, 60
Socrates, 140
Solomon, King, 119, 122, 127, 429
Solomon’s temple, 119
Sophists, 140
Sophocles, 139
South Carolina, 385
Soviets, 417
Space, the world in,
x74
1 et seq.
Spain, 93, 106, 122, 123, 180, 185, 230, 232,
256, 253, 255, 256, 258, 309, 348, 349,
350, 393, 429, 431; relics of first true
man in, 53
Spain, North, 431
Spanish, 329, 331
Spanish language, 203
Sparta, 129, 130, 136, 203
Spartacus, 191, 192, 203, 430
Spartans, 136
Species, generation of, 17; new, 36
Index
Speech, primitive human, 63
Spiders, 23
Spiral nebule, 5
Spores, 24
Stagira, 142
Stamford Bridge, battle of, 266
Stars, 68, 257
State, modern idea of a, 375
State ownership, 374
States General, the, 341, 434
Steamboat, 340, 357 et seq., 374, 382, 395
396
Steam engine, 151, 152, 359
Steam hammer, 359
Steam power, 322
Steel, 322, 359-60
Stephenson, George, 356
Stilicho, 230, 234, 431
Stockholm, 417
Stockton, 356, 434
Stone age, 53, 59
Stone implements, 45, 65
Stonehenge, 106, 429
Story-telling, primitive, 62
Styria, 309
Submarine campaign, 423
Subutai, 289
Sudan, the, 405
Suevi, 431
Suleiman the Magnificent, 310, 312, 432, 433
Sulla, 192, 237
Sumeria and Sumerians, 77,
88, 90, 91, 122
Sumerian Empire, 429
Sumerian language and writing, 77, 78, 79
Sun, the, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10
Sun worship, 211
Sung dynasty, 290
Susa, 114, 135, 148, 149, 155
Suy dynasty, 245
Swastika, 70
Sweden, 306,
,
78 et seq., 87,
$13, 348
Swedes, 326, 329, 330, 351
Swimming bladder, 24
Switzerland, 327, 347, 350, 43:
Syracuse, 151, 154, 170, 178
Syria, 88, 91, 115, 119, 122,
249, 290, 431
Syrians, 96, 98
138, 238, 243,
Tabus, the, 61
Tadpoles, 26
Tagus valley, 314
Tai-Tsung, 247, 431
Tang dynasty, 200, 245, 247, 287, 431
“Tanks,” 413
Taoism, 174, 222.
Taranto, 178
Tarentum, 178
(See also Lao Tse)454
Tarim valley, 430
Tartars, 167, 197, 232, 243, 288, 290, 334
Tasmania, 59, 322, 393
Tattooing, 70
Taxation, 274, 337
Tea, 247, 337
Teeth, 19, 20
Telamon, battle of, 182
Telegraph, electric, 340, 358, 382, 384, 396
Telescope, 355
Temples, 77, 83, 101, 129, 131, 167,
184, 186, 208, 211, 212, 213, 240
Tennessee, 386
Testament, Old, 115, 116
Teutons, 431
Texas, 384, 385
Texel, 344
Thales, 131, 161
Thebes, 101, 102, 129, 136
Theocrasia, 209
Theodora, Empress, 238
Theodoric the Goth, 236, 431
Theodosius II, 234, 238
Theodosius the Great, 226, 229, 431
Thermopyle, battle of, 136, 430
Thessaly, 145, 178
Thirty Years’ War, 326
Thothmes III, 96, 127, 147, 429
Thought and research, 140
Thought, primitive, 60 et seq
Thrace, 135
Three Estates, council of the, 285
Three Teachings, the, 170
Tiberius Cesar, 195, 214, 430
Tibet, 196, 400
Tides, 18
Tigers, 42, 43
Tiglath Pileser I, 97, 429
Tiglath Pileser III, 97, 108, 109, 429
Tigris, 77, 84
Time, 5, 6
Timor, 329
Timurlane, 290, 334
Tin, 360
Tiryns, 108
Titanotherium, the, 39, 42
Tonkin, 402
Tortoises, 27, 28
Toulon, 345
Trade, early, 83, 88
Trade, Grecian, 129
Trade routes, 119
Traders, 122, 335
Traders, sea, 92
Trafalgar, battle of, 348
Trajan, 195, 430
Transport, 319, 358, 382
Transvaal, 398
Transylvania, 195
Trasimere, Lake, 182
174,
Index
Trench warfare, 412
Trevithick, 356
Tribal life, 61
Trilobites, 13
Trinidad, 407
Trinil, Java, 45
Trinitarians, 224
Trinity, doctrine of the, 224, 261
Triremes, 180
Triumvirates, 194
Trojans, 94
Troy, 92, 127
Troyes, battle of, 235, 431
Tsar, title of, 327
Tshushima, Straits of, 404
Ts’i, 173
Ts in, 173, 43
Tuileries, 342, 343
Tunis, 185
Turkestan, 77, 108, 148, 196, 197, 198, 199,
945, 253, 287, 290, 292, 334
Turkey, 390, 411
Turkoman dynasty, 405
Turkomans, 334
Turks, 167, 197, 2
$10, 312, 334,
Turtles, 27, 28
Tushratta, king of Mitanni, 97
Twelve tribes, the, 116
Tyrannosaurus, 28
Tyre, 92, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 147
13, 4
<
‘
U
UINTATHERES, 42
Uncleanness, 68
United States, 357, 410, 411, 422, 434; Dec-
laration of Independence, 338; treaty
with Britain, 339; expansion of, 382 et
seq.
Universities, 295, 304, 355, 361
Uranus, 2, 3
Urban II, Pope, 268, 272, 432
Urban VI, Pope, 285, 43¢
Utopias, 140, 142, 144
V
VaLens, Emperor, 229
Valerian, 430
Valladolid, 314, 315, 316
Valmy, battle of, 434
Vandals, 227, 229, 230, 232, 431
Varennes, 343, 434
Vassalage, 259
Vatican, 265, 266, 272, 285
Vedas, 106
Vegetation of Mesozoic period, 28
Veui, 177, 178
Vendée, 345
or
Venetia, 235Venetians, 301
Venice, 235, 272, 274, 294, 327, 351, 432
Venus (goddess), 213
Venus (planet), 2, 3
Verona, 345
Versailles, 325, 327, 341, 342
Versailles, Peace Conference of, 421
Versailles, Treaty of, 421, 422
Vertebrata, 19; ancestors of, 20
Verulam, Lord. (See Bacon, Sir Francis)
Vespasian, 430
Vesuvius, 191
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 435
Victoria, Queen, 394, 434
Vienna, 292, 312, 433, 434
Vienna, Congress of, 348, 349, 350
Vienna, Treaty of, 355
Vilna, 356
Vindhya Mountains, 159
Virginia, 337, 383, 386
Visigoths, 227, 229, 232, 235, 259, 431. (Cf.
Goths)
Vitellus, 430
Vittoria, ship, 302
Viviparous mammals, 33
Vivisection, Hergphilus and, 151
Voleanoes, 37
Volga, 200, 227
Volta, 358
Voltaire, 328
Votes, 382
W
WALDENSES, 276, 280, 305
Waldo, 276
Walid I, 432
War and Warfare, 96, 344, 390, 422
War of American Independence, 338 et seq.
Warsaw, 353
Washington, 340, 357, 383, 386,
Washington, Conference of, 425
Washington, George, 338
Waterloo, battle of, 348
Watt engine, 356
Weapons, 100, 106
Weaving, 65, 75
Wei-hai-wei, 400
Wellington, Duke of, 348
West Indies, 330, 385, 393, 394
Western Empire, 431
Westminster, 306
389
Index
Westphalia, Peace of, 326, 355, 433
Wheat, 66, 104
White Huns. (See Ephthalites)
William Duke of Normandy (William I), 432
William II, German Emperor, 410, 435
Wilson, President, 422, 423, 424
Wings, birds’, 32
Wisby, 294
Wisconsin, 385
““Wisdom lovers,” the first, 183
Witchcraft, 68
Wittenberg, 306
Wolfe, General, 434
Wolsey, Cardinal, 324
Wood blocks for printing, 247
Wool, 102, 395
Workers’ Internationals, 377
World. The, creation of, 1; in time, 5 et seq.
Wrangel, General, 419
Writing, 74, 77, 78,
dawn of, 57
Wycliffe, John, and his followers, 286, 304,
433
79, 80, 94, 124, 176;
x
XAVIER, FrRANcIs, 400
Xenophon, 150
Xerxes, 136, 138, 147, 150
Y
Yanoc-cuow, 300
Yang-tse-Kiang, 173
Yangtse valley, 173
Yarmuk, battle of, the, 253, 431
Yedo Bay, 401
Yorktown, 338
Yuan dynasty, 290, 433
Yucatan, 74
Yudenitch, General, 419
Yuste, 314, 317
7
7aMA, battle of, 182, 43
Zanzibar, 329
Zarathushtra, 241
Zeppelins, 413
Zero sign, 257
Zeus, 211
Zimbabwe, 397
Zoophytes, fossilized, 13
Zoroaster (and Zoroastrianism), 241, 243, 255}
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