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William of Normandy, the conqueror, was also descended from English kings and was convinced that King Edward had promised him the succession. The disputed succession following the death of King Edward the Confessor, brought new invasions and new wars to England. Then two great battles fought in the fall of 1066, decided the country’s future. At Stamford Bridge, Harold, King of England, defeated his cousin and namesake Harold of Norway. His joy was short-lived; immediately after the battle, King Harold learnt that another cousin and claimant to the throne, William of Normandy, had crossed the Channel from France and had landed, only one hundred miles away. Overconfident after his recent victory, Harold rushed south with half his army, but was soundly defeated by William of Normandy at Hastings. Although undertaken with the blessings of the Pope, William’s invasion was in a sense, the last great Norse conquest and ironically, it brought England more closely into the orbit of continental Europe. The sheer white cliffs of the English coast, where William the Conqueror is thought to have landed with his army. At about nine o’clock on the morning of October 14, 1066, two armies of approximately equal size, faced each other across the valley between Telham Hill and a nameless rise, marked by the presence of a “hoary apple tree”, close to the modern town of Battle. William, Duke of Normandy, commanded a motley host of Norman retainers, Breton allies and Flemish mercenaries — the majority of them adventurers, whom he had persuaded to cross the Narrow Sea for loot and land. William of Normandy’s army has been estimated at somewhere between six and seven thousand men; it was probably nearer the lower figure. Perhaps 1,200 of these were mounted knights, who had brought their horses with them in the boats. …

Hugh Capet was coronated in 987 and with that, began the French dominance of Europe. During the eleventh century, a view of world history is dominated by the splendours of the Sung empire in China. Founded in the last decades of the previous century, it reached a peak during the eleventh century and that entitles it to be regarded as one of the most brilliant epochs, in the history of civilization. The European stage, is commanded by the prestige and apparent power of the German empire, founded by Otto I and ruled over by his descendants. Both the ambitions of the emperors and the ever-growing power of the great vassals contributed, with other causes, to a decline which even the reign of the great twelfth-century emperor Frederick Barbarossa, did not reverse. By 1200, power in Europe was slipping from the hands of the German emperors and was taken up by the central kingdom of France. The emergence of France as the dominant power in European affairs, during the high Middle Ages, was by no means a foregone conclusion. To observers of the coronation of Hugh Capet as king in 987, it must have seemed a very unlikely event. It is worth remembering how slow this rise was. Not for another two and a half centuries — centuries of constant struggle — was the French ascendancy to become obvious. King Philip I of France French Monarchy from Hugh Capet to Louis VI At the time of his coronation, Hugh Capet was perhaps the most important man in France. His family, founded over a century before by Robert the Strong, had already provided two kings during the troubled years of the later Carolingians. His lands, grouped around the important towns of Paris and Orléans, were strategically wellplaced; among his feudatories, were some …

Norsemen or Vikings – Danes, Norwegians and Swedes — were terrorizing the greater part of Europe, over a thousand years ago. Their earliest activities were chiefly limited to raiding and destroying; occupations for which their mastery of the sea admirably suited them. In time, they came to settle down — in the British Isles, in Iceland and in Greenland. It was this last, snow-covered and icebound land that was first colonized by Eric the Red — a man so named because of the colour of his hair, his fiery temper and murderous blood on his hands. Eric’s son Leif, introduced Christianity to Greenland and in a voyage even farther west, came upon a land, rich in grapes, that he named Vinland the Good. The Vikings did not stay long in Vinland and the colony in Greenland eventually expired. Five hundred years later, another voyager west, Christopher Columbus, rediscovered the “lost continent” and the world called it America. A gilt-bronze winged dragon, 11 inches long, frontal of a seventh-century viking shield; part of the treasure found in a viking royal ship, at Sutton Hoo, in East Anglia. To the eyes of a man born in Norway the, western coast of Greenland had perhaps a home-like look. In the year 982, Eric the Red and his small band of Vikings rowed up a fjord, to this day called Ericsfjord and found, hidden behind the barren cliffs, slopes and valleys, where the grass grew lush, in the long Arctic daylight. Eric was not actually the first Norseman to visit Greenland. Some eighty years before, an Icelander named Gunbjorn, had sailed along the glacial east coast of the island. Gunbjorn, however, judged the land to be uninhabitable. Eric was now testing this verdict and disproving it. He sailed farther west, than the boldest of …

The birth of Hungary The battle of the Lechfeld, which was so important to Western Europe, had an equally profound influence on events in Central and Eastern Europe. The almost total annihilation of their army compelled the Magyars to settle in their new home on the Hungarian plains and within sixty years they had embraced Christianity. Under King Stephen I (997-1038) , who was later canonized, they accepted Christianity from Rome, a process that had been began by Stephen’s father, Duke Geza. The new king accepted not only religion but also his royal title and crown from Pope Sylvester II. Although he had to face opposition from some of his pagan nobility, he was able to push through his religious programs and also to lay the basis of a royal administration closely modelled on that of the German empire. During the eleventh century the new kingdom, halted in its westward advance, also lost part of its territory in the southeast to the nomadic Patzinaks. This loss was balanced for a time by the Hungarian conquest, which gave the new state an important seacoast on the Adriatic. Thus in the early eleventh century, the main contours of medieval Europe had emerged and the political position of the German emperors seemed assured. Sung Dynasty, China The empire of Otto and his Saxon successors was roughly contemporary with a renewed period of grandeur and prosperity in the world’s largest empire, China. We have seen how in the late ninth century the glories of the Wang dynasty were subject to internal divisions and attacks over the frontiers by Asian barbarians. After the deposition of the last T’ang emperor in 907, there followed the fifty-year period generally known as the age of the Five Dynasties. The largest single territory was that in the north, which …

Lechfeld, the battleground outside Augsburg on St. Lawrence’s day, 10 August 955 A. D., was highly significant for the whole of Europe. On a battlefield littered with corpses and discarded weapons, the victorious Otto I, had his cheering troops proclaim him Emperor. Germany had been close to civil war and rebellious nobles had allied themselves with the barbarian Magyars, who were intent on destroying what passed for civilzation in tenth-century Germany. It was Otto’s achievement to unite the Germans against both the rebels and the invading Magyars. His new “Roman” Empire differed from the old in its strongly Christian character. Otto was the protector of the Church and constantly encouraged missionary work among the Slavs. His territorial ambitions also lay in the East, but in these he was largely frustrated. Nevertheless, Otto’s victory at the Lechfeld in 955, ensured that much of Central Europe would be safeguarded for Latin Christianity. Even the defeated Magyars who settled in Hungary, became under their great king St. Stephen, a Christian nation. The battle fought on the Lechfeld outside Augsburg on St. Lawrence’s day, August 10, A.D. 955, was highly significant for the whole of Europe. The victory of King Otto I, over the Magyars, was directly connected with the foundation of his empire and with the constitution of the German imperial Church as a leading political power — which was to survive till its destruction at Napoleon’s hands. The other consequences of Otto’s victory were the re-alignment of the eastern frontier of Bavaria with Austria; the foundation of the Hungarian kingdom with the coronation of Stephen as king; and the formation of Germany’s eastern policy for the next 1000 years. Part of the Chalice of St. Udalrich, Bishop of Augsburg, loyal priest and military leader under Otto I and hero of the battle …

Cluny, the Greatest Benedictine Abbey in Europe, was founded in 910. After the reign of the great Abd al-Rahman III, Islamic Spain was increasingly subject to internal division and the overthrow of the Cordovan Caliphate in 1013, allowed the Christians to capture the great city of Toledo. The Spanish Arabs now called on the newly converted and fanatical North African Berber tribes known as the Almoravides. By the beginning of the twelfth century, these allies, whose empire was based in Morocco, were in control of Islamic Spain. Within seventy years, they in their turn, fell to the still more puritanical sect of the Almohades. In 1195, the Almohades inflicted a crushing defeat on the armies of Alfonso VIII of Castile, but this was more than reversed by the great victory of the united kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Navarre and Aragon on the field of Las Novas de Tolosa in 1212. Islam Fails After that defeat, Islam never recovered its old power in Spain. Under the caliphate of Cordova, both the industry of the Moorish invaders, their religious toleration of the conquered Christians and the formerly persecuted Jews, contributed essentially to the great cultural flowering of the period. The Mozarabes, Christians who retained their faith on the payment of annual dues, were allowed their own places of worship. Throughout the Islamic period, save for a few years before its recapture, the city of Toledo kept itsncathedral, its archbishop and its liturgy. Despite the strict religious principles of the twelfth-century Moroccan rulers and the subsequent flight of numerous Mozerabes to the Chnistian kingdoms of the north, the cultural traditions of earlier ages was strong. It was the works of men like Avempace (d. 1138) who drew on the Aristotelian commentaries of the tenth-century Al Farabi of Damascus and above all, his great …

Caliph of Cordova’s library, raised Cordova to its great eminence. It was Europe’s most glittering capital: a place where Moslems, Christians and Jews lived, worked, studied and thought. Tenth-century Cordova was as preoccupied with philosophy, poetry and medicine, as Paris was to become in the eighteenth century. Spain’s intellectual ferment was a product of the recently established Islamic society, but it was also concerned with the old, with preserving the ancient learning of Greece and Rome. Toward the end of the century, the Caliph Al-Hakam II, gathered a library of four hundred thousand books and manuscripts, indisputably Europe’s finest collection of writings on history, science and literature. The library was largely destroyed by a fanatical successor and Cordova’s days of greatness drew to an end. The door in the western facade of the mosque of Cordova, showing the detailed decoration in tile and bas-relief, typical of the highpoint of artistic achievement under the Caliphate. Cordova, under its great caliphs of the tenth century, was the most splendid city of Western Europe. Ash-Shaquandi, the poet who sang the praises of his native al-Andalus (Andalusia) says that he rode for ten miles on end through its well-lit streets. A fine bridge spanned the river, which still bears its Moorish name of Guadalquivir and on either side stretched the quarters of the dominant Moslem population —Arabs and Berbers from Africa, as well as descendants of Spain’s indigenous inhabitants who had embraced Islam and communities of Jews, Christians (Mozarabes) and slaves from Eastern Europe. One traveller counted 300 public baths; another, 600 — a number perhaps not excessive for a population of over half a million, though it scandalized medieval Christians. Cordova’s other marvelous sights included innumerable workshops for the production of its famous leatherwork, carpets, ivory caskets and other handicrafts; more than four …

Baghdad founded and became the centre of Islamic learning and culture. England in the tenth century As a soldier, Alfred, rightly called the Great, saved his nation; as a legislator, he established the concept of a nationwide law for all the English; as a patron, he not only launched an educational revival, but himself translated Boethius’, On the Consolation of Philosophy and sponsored the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a major historical source for another two centuries. Although he had consolidated the existence of an English nation, Alfred had been able only to contain the threat of the Danes. Vast territories in the north and east of England remained independent of the kings of Wessex and their client-kingdom of English Mercia. Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, reigned conjointly with his sister Aethelflaed, the Lady of Mercia. At her death the kingdom was united. During this period, the English, basing their defense on the series of fortified towns begun by Alfred, made headway against the incursions of the Scandinavian kingdoms that surrounded them. Even in the midst of a struggle for survival, Alfred had planned for the future. His fortified boroughs provided not only military bases, but the foci of local administration and trade. Edward extended the military fortifications, but an aggressive counterattack against England’s enemies did not come until the reign of Athelstan (924-39). Islamic armies on the march, from a manuscript of the Baghdad School Brother-in-law of the Carolingian Charles the Simple of France, of Hugh Capet, the greatest man in the French kingdom and of the German Emperor Otto I, Athelstan mightily defended his position at home. He inflicted the crushing defeat of Brunanburh on the combined forces of the Scots, Irish, Norse and Welsh — a fight commemorated in one of the great epic poems of Old English. The glitter …

Alfred “The Great”, alone amongst the English kings, has been awarded this title. Earlier invaders of the British Isles had been assimilated, but the thin veneer of English civilzation in the Dark Ages could not withstand the impact of Danish attacks at the end of the eighth century. The fragmented English kingdoms could not seem to unite against this new terror. Then a saviour appeared — in the guise of the young prince of Wessex, Alfred. In the first few years after he came to the throne, Alfred fought many battles against the Danes — and lost most of them. Then the tide turned; in 886, Alfred took London. He had won a capital and he had also created a nation. More than just a soldier, Alfred was a scholar, determined to foster learning among his people. He translated classical works into the vernacular and issued a new legal code based on the Golden Rule. For this combination of talents, Alfred — alone among English kings — has been awarded the title “The Great.” The Alfred jewel made of rock crystal over cloisonńe enamel, set in gold, is inscribed with the words Alfred mec heht Gewyrcan (Alfred ordered me to be made). The base is in the shape of a boar’s head, with hollow snout. Found near Athelney, the supposed sight of Alfred’s fort, the jewel is commonly thought to have belonged to that king. When King Alfred of Wessex captured London in 886, he did more than strike a heavy blow at the Danish invaders. In effect, he became the first King of England and established a new idea of nationhood. His action gave heart to Englishmen all over the land, made them feel that the Danes after all could be defeated and kindled in them the sentiment of …

Charlemagne’s empire destroyed and dissolved in the ninth century, but the idea of “Europe” survived. By the late tenth century, the eastern and western parts of the Frankish kingdom had coalesced into the dim outlines of the future kingdoms of France and Germany. The Spanish March had disintegrated and been succeeded by the Basque kingdom of Navarre and the county of Barcelona. Italy, broken into a series of ineffectual kingdoms in the peninsula, owed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor (now the King of the east Franks) that was to become gradually less meaningful as the Middle Ages progressed. Louis the Pious, from a contemporary manuscript After his death in 814, Charlemagne was succeeded by his son Louis I, called the Pious, an amiable, but often too compassionate man. Unable to command his unruly subjects or control his quarrelsome family, Louis compounded the faults of his virtues by his indulgence toward his second wife, Judith of Bavaria and her son Charles. During his reign, Louis was constantly at war with his sons, who finally brought their conflicts to a conclusion with the Treaty of Verdun in 843, three years after Louis’ death. This treaty — one of the earliest records of the emerging vernacular languages, having both German and French texts — gave the imperial title and capital to the eldest son Lothair, who also received a huge tract of territory stretching from the Low Countries to the plains of central Italy. Louis, called the German, received the eastern lands; and the favourite, Charles the Bald, got the western lands, Verdun was the inevitable consequence of the Frankish practice of dividing a father’s possessions; but in the years that followed, the Carolingian house showed a lack of family loyalty and honest dealing that was remarkable even for the times. The …

Charlemagne crowned, at a solemn moment during the celebration of Mass in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day of the year 800. Pope Leo III stopped and turned toward the large man kneeling in front of the altar. Then, in a dramatic gesture that has been the topic of countless historical arguments since, Leo crowned Charles, King of the Franks, as the new Emperor of the Romans. The coronation apparently took even Charles by surprise; and it probably displeased him as well, since it seemed to imply that he received his power from the Pope. Indeed, this may have been Leo’s aim, for only a year before he had been driven out of the city by a rebellious population and he was now eager to reassert his authority. Whatever Leo’s motives, his action was of momentous significance, in creating a European Christian empire. In continuing the division between East-West and in sowing seeds of conflict between Church and State. The throne of Charlemagne in the minister at Aachen, seat of Carolingian pretension and a focal point of the cultural heritage of Western Europe. On Christmas Day in the year 800, Charlemagne heard Mass in St. Peter’s in Rome. As he knelt at prayer, Pope Leo III placed on his head a gold circlet in token of an imperial crown and the Romans proclaimed him Emperor: “To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor of the Romans, life and victory!” Charlemagne the Frank was a huge man, six feet and four inches tall, broadly built. He spoke quietly and was a cheerful, talkative man, who enjoyed the debating matches that were popular among the Germanic races. He drank sparsely but ate a great deal and detested wearing fine clothes made of silk. He favoured the shirt and …

Frankish hordes crush the Romans at Soissons and the disintegration of Europe begins. Japan during the Heian period For some three and a half centuries after the founding of Kyoto, Japan had an imperial court and administration devoted to a refined culture, that has shaped the character of the people down to this century. Power was in the hands of the Fujiwara family who intermarried with the imperial house and provided “regents” for a line of boy-emperors, most of whom abdicated voluntarily when they reached adulthood. The Emperor became an idealized figure, protected from the corrupting effects of actual political rule. The sensitive, stylish yet formal spirit of the Heian period under the Fujiwara, who enjoyed their greatest ascendancy from the mid-tenth to the mid-eleventh centuries, is fully embodied in the literary masterpiece Genji Monogatari written by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, in the early eleventh century. In sharp contrast to the delicate, almost effete life of the capital, was the life on the great semi-independent estates. The large landowners gradually acquired exemption from taxation; thus developed a feudal system with parallels to that in Europe. As the Fujiwara began to lose their grip on events, civil war broke out between rival factions of the family. In the twelfth century, they called two of the powerful military provincial families to their aid. Not surprisingly, when the smoke cleared after a long period of near anarchy, the Fujiwara found that they had been entirely supplanted by their military advisers. In 1166, the Taira family seized power and for the first time in three centuries, japan witnessed political executions; some twenty years later, the Taira were overthrown by the great Minamoto Yoritomo and in 1185, Japan came under a government controlled by the military. The age of the tea ceremony was succeeded …

Japanese renaissance was not until 794 A.D., when the Japanese capital was transferred from Nara to Heian (modern Kyoto), that Japan started to develop a national culture of its own. Since the sixth century, Japan has been ruled by a hereditary imperial famiiy. At first, the Japanese court modelled itself on the Chinese, in its principles of politics, ethics and religion, in its writing system and in its entire culture. About the year 1000, the Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, a masterpiece of literary invention, that mirrored the life of the brilliant Heian court. In painting, architecture and the decorative arts as well, there were signs of a growing culture that was remarkably refined, advanced for its time and most important, essentially Japanese in character. Throughout Japanese history, legitimate authority has resided in the hereditary imperial family, which has been on the throne since the sixth century, but power lay in the possession of land. Despite seventh century measures designed to assert the imperial title to all land, powerful families amassed vast estates and in the course of time, won immunity from tax assessment. It is an ironical fact, that the power of the Fujiwara clan lay in precisely this kind of tax immunity, for eventually, it fatally weakened the imperial (and hence the clan’s) authority. Respecting the hereditary principle that was deep-rooted in all Japanese society, the Fujiwara never attempted to usurp the title of Emperor, but instead acted as regents. The Emperor gave legitimacy to their regime and was also the fount of honour, from which they could draw the titles and offices, to reward their family and supporters. Tamon Ten, one of the four guardian demi-gods from the Kaidan-in Temple; an eighth century statue in clay painted in brilliant colours …

T’ang Empire – first of the great Chinese dynasties – unifies the nation. The siege of Byzantium During the seventh and eighth centuries, while Europe was in the turmoil of the conflicting dynasties that had succeeded the first generations of barbarian invaders, events of immense importance were taking place on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Within a hundred years, the armies of Islam had taken the legendary city of Samarkand in the East, while in the West they touched for a moment the banks of the Loire. The successor of the Prophet Mohammed was not to sit on the throne of Constantine until another eight centuries had elapsed, but throughout the seventh and early eighth centuries, the threat to Byzantium was a serious one. By 717 A.D., the Arab armies were actually at the gates of the imperial capital. Twice the siege was withstood; twice the Byzantine fleet proved its superiority and the armies of the new faith were driven back. Coin of the iconoclast Byzantine Emperor Leo Although they escaped military conquest, the Byzantines did succumb to the influence of the religious philosophy of their enemies. Within ten years of the first siege of Constantinople, the Emperor Leo III, issued the first “iconoclastic” decrees against the worship of images. For close to a century, the Church in the East, prohibited images of the saints – the descendants of local deities that Christianity had displaced – and permitted only the barest decoration of its places of worship. The puritanic zeal of Islam infected its rival; and the Emperor Leo, determined to withstand the attack of the infidel, did not hesitate to emulate his virtues. For, like Christianity, the faith of Islam claimed universality; like Christianity, it was exclusive. Islamic beliefs Islam, however, differed from Christianity in two important respects. …

The flight to Medina, was made by the prophet Mohammed, when he fled from his native Mecca, in hopes of finding a more receptive audience for his message. This event of 622, the Hegira, marks the beginning of the new Moslem religion and the beginning of a dynamic new civilization in the Middle East. Mohammed himself, proved to be both an inspired religious leader and an astute politician, creating a theocracy and presiding over it, as Allah’s Messenger. He also was a military leader. Mecca was soon brought into the Moslem orbit and at Mohammed’s death in 632 the entire Arabian Peninsula was his, but it remained for his successors, the caliphs, to impose Islamic rule over much of Asia and Africa and to bring a frightening challenge to Christian Europe. The mosque in Cairo, the earliest surviving example of a place of Moslem worship. The Moslem era begins in 622 A.D. the date of the Hegira, Mohammed’s emigration from his home town of Mecca to the neighbouring city of Medina. In fixing the date for the initiation of the Moslem era, Caliph Omar, successor to Mohammed’s first Caliph, Abu Bakr, is said to have hesitated between choosing the Hegira, the date of Mohammed’s birth, or the date he first accepted the vocation of prophet. When Omar chose the first alternative, he no doubt had good practical reasons: the date of the Hegira was better fixed in men’s minds than the less spectacular moment when Mohammed was finally convinced of his divine mission. Yet the Caliph may also have been quite conscious of the fact that it was the Hegira, even more than the first appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mohammed, that marked the historical epoch of the rise of Islam. In Mecca, Mohammed — a tradesman and previously …

Justinian Corpus, the Juris Civilis, is the ancestor of all European legal systems. The sixth century – in the West, a period in which the seeds of a new type of monastic and Church-orinented culture and a fragmented political system were being planted. This century, was for the Eastern Roman Empire and its Persian rival, an age of great splendour. Despite the closing of Plato’s academy at Athens by Justinian in 529, the tradition of lay classical learning was never broken. Moreover, the Arab civilization emerging in Egypt, Syria and Persia continued and even developed that tradition. The case with which the Arabs overthrew Persia and conquered great tracts of territory from Rome, was largely the result of the fierce religous ardour of their new Moslem faith; but there were also weaknesses within these great empires. The Age of Justinian The Eastern Roman Empire was not unscathed by the turmoil of barbarian invasions, but whereas the Western Empire ceased to exist as a political entity, the East recovered. After a period during which the barbarians in the service of the imperial army had dictated events in Constantinople, there followed the reign of the Emperor Zeno. Although orthodox himself, he was willing to attempt a compromise with the powerful monophysite heresy, a heresy that denied the dual nature of Christ as man and God and claimed that he had only one nature — the divine. Zeno’s successor, Anastasius I, restored the failing finances of the Empire and laid the foundations of the greatness of the sixth century, but his monophysite tendencies were marked. His successor, the aging but well-entrenched chief of the imperial guard, Justin, permitted no half measures; his persecution of the monophysites was total; he launched the edict against pagans and heretics that so angered Theodoric, an Arian. If …

St. Benedict’s monks tried to poison him, on one occasion it is said – and they often disregarded his instructions, but monasticism in the West, was created by St. Benedict. Before he founded Monte Cassino in 520, there were numerous other groups of monks in Europe, all with their own monastic rules, but Benedict’s Rule for his followers was the first to achieve general acceptance. It provided an ideal for monasticism that was at once disciplined and possible to achieve and maintain. With its emphasis on the individual monastery, Benedict’s Rule was ideally suited to a world degenerating into chaos ; and indeed, it was largely in Benedictine monasteries that classical learning survived during the Dark Ages. Perhaps more than any other single force, the Rule of St. Benedict gave adolescent Europe a message of fairness and a tradition of Christian behaviour. Some eighty-five miles southeast of Rome, the traveller to Naples, sees on the rocks of a towering hill, a large fortress-like building, with the cupola of a church in its midst. It is the abbey of Monte Cassino, reduced to dust by the Allied Air Forces in 1944 and now rebuilt in facsimile, to replace what was destroyed. In the early sixth century this was a remote region traversed only by herdsmen who were still pagan and on the summit of the hill, was a ruined temple of Apollo, together with a still earlier ruin of a fortress. About the year 520 the abbot Benedict, some forty years old, arrived at Monte Cassino with a small group of monks. He was attracted to the place, perhaps by the solitude of the hill and by the building stone available from the ruins. St. Benedict was born into a family in the higher level of society, possibly Roman in origin, …

Old Europe crumbles as barbarian waves batter civilizations. Ironically, the victory on the Mauriac Plain sealed the fate both of victor and vanquished. After his death in 453, Attila’s empire broke up not only as a result of the feuds among his heirs, but also because of a successful rebellion among his German subjects. For the victorious Roman general, Actius, the outcome of the battle was still more directly catastrophic. He fell victim to a palace conspiracy of enemies who feared his immense prestige. The Emperor Valentinian III, is said to have boasted of the disposal of this powerful and popular rival to a favourite courtesan. Her laconic reply was: “‘You have cut off your right hand with your left.” With the sack of Rome in 455 by the armies of Gaiseric the Vandal, the weakness of the Western Empire was fully revealed. Thereafter, the influence of barbarians in the imperial court, which had been considerable, became supreme. From his victory over Vandal armies in 456 to his death in 472, the Suevian general Ricimer was arbiter of the fortunes of the West. Beyond the Alps, only the territories of Syagrius in northern France remained under Roman rule and these constituted, because of their isolation, a virtually independent kingdom, soon to be destroyed by Clovis. During the brief reign of Majorian (457 – 61), the best traditions of the Empire were revived by that competent and conscientious ruler, but his growing prestige was a threat to Ricimer, who had him deposed and murdered. For another fifteen years, the fiction of a Western Emperor was maintained, but in 476, the auspiciously named but pitiable figure of Romulus Augustulus was wiped out by the soldiers of Odoacer another successful German soldier, who like Ricimer, succeeded in wielding real power in the West. …

Attila, the “Scourge of God” was the legendary force that — curiously enough — helped to hold the tottering Roman Empire together for a few more years. Halfway through the fifth century, the Empire was defended by an array of feuding barbarian tribes enlisted as mercenaries. These tribes were united by a common fear of the Huns, who had left Central Asia to invade India, Persia, Central and Eastern Europe and were now threatening the West. Aetius, commander-in-chief of the Roman army, knew the Huns well and their leader, Attila, in particular — the Roman general had once been a hostage in the Huns’ camp. Aetius also knew that the real danger to the Empire came from within, from its disintegrating society. When Attila invaded Gaul, Aetius checked him at a battle fought southeast of Paris, but the Roman “victory” brought only a temporary halt to the inevitable fall of Rome. On the battlefield of the Campus Mauriacus — to the west of the old Gallo-Roman town of Troyes, some ninety miles southeast of Paris — two armies faced each other in the year 451. In retrospect, they might be seen as the forces of two contrasting worlds: Asia against Europe, the civilization of the plains against that of the towns, pagan barbarism against the Christian heritage of Greece and Rome, but this assessment would be superficial. Arrayed behind the Hun, Attila, was a horde of tribes more or less under his command: not only his own people but also Ruli, Heruli, Gepidae, Ostrogoths, Lombards and others. Opposed to him in defense of the Roman Empire was the last of the great Romans, the nobleman Aetius. Among his forces, there were hardly any Gallo-Romans, but a mixture of barbarian peoples whose loyalty was not to be relied on: Franks, Burgundians, …

The Visigoths, led by Gaiseric, settle in North Africa and challenge Rome. Ireland before St. Patrick According to the most ancient traditions of Ireland, her history had been linked to that of the Mediterranean world long before the coming of St. Patrick and the religion of Rome. Even after St. Patrick, the history of the country was to remain, the preserve of an oral tradition handed down by a class of minstrels or bards. In western Europe, these minstrels were the latest heirs of an heroic Iron Age society, of which the earliest example known to us was the Greece described by Homer. At the time of Patrick’s mission, Ireland was ruled by Celtic kings and her society was by then entirely Celtic. Yet the picturesque and misleadingly precise lays of the bards not only traced the descent of every one of these kings back to the most remote past (genealogies which, after the acceptance of Christianity, were to stretch back to Adam), but also told of four conquerors, who had preceded the Celts. Their origins and their destinies must necessarily be classed as obscure, but we are told that when the original settlers of the island were defeated by the seafaring Fomors, many of them fled to Greece. The next race of invaders, the Tuatha De Danann (in whose name there might be a fossilized form of “Danai” — one of the names by which the ancient Greeks were known), made use of magical powers to assist them in their conquest. However, these arcane skills were not proof against the Milesians — according to the legend the last conquerors of the island and also a Celtic people. Early Celtic head from England, dating from the time of the Roman occupation. The Milesians, whose name also has an attractively Mediterranean …

In the spring of 432, Laoghaire, ruler of a petty kingdom in northern Ireland, gathered his court near Tara to celebrate the annual rites of his pagan religion. The Christian missionary Patrick, appeared in the midst of the gathering, confounded the King’s magicians with a miracle of fire and — on Easter Sunday — converted Laoghaire. Patrick went on to strengthen the fledgling Christian Church in the Emerald Isle and to establish a religious tradition that was to endure for centuries. As Continental Europe slipped into the Dark Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was the monks of Ireland who kept alive the flame of faith and who as missionaries — brought that faith back to the lands where it had been lost. According to the annals of Ireland, St. Patrick arrived there in 432 and died three decades later, in 461. His mission to Ireland had been prompted by a series of dreams or visions, which strengthened an earlier resolve to dedicate himself to God’s service. His great work, the Confessio (written about 450), is his spiritual autobiography, his account of his dependence upon God for his ability to carry out this resolve. We gather from Patrick’s own words that the journey of 432 was made with a set purpose, the evangelization of Ireland. He recognized to the full, his natural disabilities, such as teaching and writing in a tongue not his own, but outweighing all these, was his unshakable belief that God had dedicated him to be a bishop to the Irish. An inscribed stone at County Kerry in Ireland, one of several examples of monuments of pagan Druidic ritual which have been adapted with Christian symbols by early Christian worshipers for their own use. When St. Patrick went to Ireland he knew very well, what …