Read Ebook: The World War and What was Behind It; Or The Story of the Map of Europe by B N Zet Louis Paul

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The city of Rome spread its rule over all of Italy, over all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and finally over all the countries of Europe south and west of the rivers Danube and Rhine. One of the emperors planted a colony north of the Danube near its mouth, and the descendants of these colonists are living in that same country today. They have not forgotten their origin, for they still call themselves Romans , and talk a language greatly resembling the Latin, which was the tongue spoken by the Romans of old. With the exception of this country, which is now Roumania, the part of Europe north and east of the Danube and Rhine was practically free from the Romans. In this territory, roving bands wandered around, driving their cattle with them and clearing the woods of game.

In some ways, the Romans were a highly civilized people. They had schools where their children were taught to read and write, to speak Greek, and to work problems in geometry. They had magnificent public buildings, fine temples and palaces. They built excellent paved roads all over the southern part of Europe, and had wonderful systems of aqueducts which supplied their cities with pure water from springs and lakes miles away. Their dress was made of fine cloth. They knew how to make paper, glass, and steel.

On the other hand, they were a cruel and bloodthirsty people. Their favorite amusement was to go to shows where gladiators fought, either with each other or with wild beasts. These gladiators were generally men from tribes which had fought against Rome. They had been captured and brought to that city, where they were trained to use certain weapons. Then on holidays, with all the people of Rome packed into big amphitheaters, these unfortunate captives were forced to fight with each other until one man of each pair was killed. It occasionally happened that one gladiator might be wounded, and lie helpless on the sand, The spectators would then shout to the victorious fighter to take his knife and finish what he had begun. In this way what would seem to us like cold-blooded murder was committed hundreds of times each year, while the fairest ladies and young girls of Rome sat and watched with eager interest. Thus, although the Romans had all the outward appearance of being civilized, they were savages at heart, and had no sympathy for any people who were not of their own race.

In the early days, the Romans prided themselves on their honor. They scorned a lie and looked down on anyone who would cheat or deceive. They lived hardy lives and would not allow themselves luxuries. They rather despised the Greeks, because the latter surrounded themselves with comforts in life. The early Romans were fighters by nature. They had a certain god named Janus and his temple was open only when they were engaged in war. It is a matter of history that during the twelve hundred years from the first building of Rome to the end of the Roman Empire, the temple of Janus was closed on but three occasions and then only for a short time.

About five or six hundred years after the founding of Rome came several disastrous wars which killed off a great majority of her sturdy fighters. Rome was the victor in all of these wars, but she won them at tremendous cost to herself. With the killing off of her best and bravest men, a great deal of the old time honesty was lost. Very soon, we begin to hear of Roman governors who, when put in charge of conquered states, used their offices only to plunder the helpless inhabitants and to return to Rome after their terms were finished, laden with ill-gotten gains. Roman morals, which formerly were very strict, began to grow more lax, and in general the Roman civilization showed signs of decay.

To the north and east of the Roman Empire dwelt a people who were to become the leaders of the new nations of Europe. These were the free German tribes, which occupied the part of Europe bounded, roughly, by the rivers Danube and Rhine, the Baltic Sea, and the Carpathian Mountains. In many ways they were much less civilized than the Romans. They were clad in skins and furs instead of cloth. They lived in rough huts and tents or in caves dug in the sides of a hill. They, too, like the Romans, held human life cheap, and bloodshed and murder were common among them. As a rule, the men scorned to work, leaving whatever labor there was, largely to the women, while they busied themselves in fighting and hunting, or, during their idle times, in gambling. Nevertheless, these people, about the time that the Roman honesty began to disappear, had virtues more like those of the early Romans. They were frank and honorable. The men were faithful husbands and kind fathers, and their family life was very happy. They were barbarous and rough, but those of them who were taken to Rome and learned the Roman civilization made finer, nobler men than Rome was producing about the time of which we speak.

To the east of these German tribes were the Slavs, a people no better civilized, but not so warlike in their nature. As the Germans, in later years, moved on to the west, the Slavs, in turn, moved westward and occupied much of the land which had been left vacant by the Germans.

The inhabitants of western Europe, that is, France, Spain, and the British Isles, were largely Celts. In fact, all Europe could be said to be divided up among four great peoples: There were the Latins in Italy, the Celts in western Europe, the Germans in central Europe, and the Slavs to the east. All of these four families were distantly related, as can be proved by the languages which they spoke. The Greeks, while not belonging to any one of the four, were also distant cousins of both Germans and Latins. Probably all five peoples are descended from one big family of tribes.

In addition to these, there were, from time to time invasions of Europe by other nations which did not have any connection by blood with Celts, Latins, Greeks, Germans, or Slavs. For instance, the ferocious Huns, a people of the yellow race, rushed into Europe about 400 A.D., but were beaten in a big battle by the Romans and Germans and finally went back to Asia. Three hundred years later, a great horde of Moors and Arabs from Africa crossed over into Europe by way of the Straits of Gibraltar, and at one time threatened to sweep before them all the Christian nations. For several hundred years after this, they held the southern part of Spain, but were finally driven out.

Let us now come back to the story of what happened in Europe after the Romans had conquered all the country south and west of the Danube and Rhine. The wild tribes of the Germans were restlessly roaming through the central part of Europe. They were not at peace with each other. In fact, constant war was going on. Julius Caesar, the great Roman general, who conquered what is now France and added it to the Roman world, tells us that one great tribe of Germans, the Suevi , made it their boast that they would let no other tribe live anywhere near them. About a hundred years B.C., two great German tribes. the Cimbri and the Teutones, broke across the Rhine and poured into the Roman lands in countless numbers. For seven years they roamed about until at last they were conquered in two bloody battles by a Roman general, who was Caesar's uncle by marriage. After this time, the Romans tried to conquer the country of the Germans and they might have been successful but for a young German chief named Arminius. He had lived in Rome as a young man and had learned the Romans' method of war; so when an army came against his tribe, he taught the Germans how to defend themselves. As a result, the Roman army was trapped in a big forest and slaughtered, almost to a man.

This defeat ended any thought that the Romans may have had of conquering all Germany. For the next one hundred and fifty years, Germans and Romans lived apart, each afraid of the other. Then came a time when the Germans again became the attacking party. Other fiercer and wilder peoples, like the Huns, were assailing them in the east and pushing them forward. They finally broke over the Rhine-Danube boundary and poured across the Roman Empire in wave after wave. Some of these tribes were the Vandals, Burgundians, Goths, Franks, and Lombards. The Roman Empire went to pieces under their savage attacks.

Questions for Review

Why is it that after nations become civilized, people need less land to live on?

Are barbarous tribes more likely to engage in war than civilized peoples?

Explain why clubs were the earliest weapons and why the more civilized tribes were better armed than the barbarians.

Can a people be said to be civilized when they enjoy bloodshed and are not moved by the sufferings of others?

What was it that lowered the morals of the Roman republic?

In what way were the Germans better men than the later Romans?

What was the religion of the Moors and the Arabs?

Why did the German tribes invade the Roman empire?

The early chief a fighter.--The club the sign of power.--Free men led by a chief of their own choosing.--The first slaves.--Barbarians conquer civilized nations.--A ruling class among conquered people.--All men no longer free and equal.--The value of arms and armor.--The robber chiefs.--How kings first came.--Treaties between tribes follow constant wars.--Tribes unite for protection against enemies.--A king is chosen for the time being.--Some kings refuse to resign their office when the danger is past.--New generations grow up which never knew a kingless state.--The word "king" becomes sacred.

The chiefs of the invading tribes knew no law except the rule of the sword. If they saw anything which they wanted, they took it. Rich cities were plundered at will. They did not admit any man's ownership of anything. In the old days when the tribes were roaming around, there was no private ownership of land. Everything belonged to the tribe in common. Each man had a vote in the council of the tribe.

Among these invaders, as with all barbarous tribes, there was no such thing as an absolute rule. A chief was obeyed because the greater part of his people considered him the best leader in war. Often, no doubt, when a chief had lost a battle and the majority of the tribe had lost confidence in him, he resigned and let them choose a new chief. In spite of the fact, then, that the chief was stronger than any other man in the tribe, if the majority of his warriors had combined against him to put another man in his place he could not have withstood them. Government, in its beginning, was based upon the consent of the governed. All men in the primitive tribe were equal in rank, except as one was a better fighter than another, and the chief held the leadership in war only because the members of his tribe allowed him to keep it.

It must be remembered that in these early days, the people had no fixed place of abode. Their only homes were rude huts which they could put up or tear down at very short notice; and so when they heard of more fertile lands or a warmer climate across the mountains to the south they used to pull up stakes and migrate in a body, never to return. It was always the more savage and uncivilized peoples who were most likely to migrate. The lands which they wished to seize they generally found already settled by other tribes, more civilized and hence more peaceful, occupied in trade and agriculture, having gradually turned to these pursuits from their former habits of hunting and fighting. Sometimes these more civilized and peace-loving people were able, by their better weapons and superior knowledge of the art of fortifying, to beat back the invasion of the immigrating barbarians. Oftener, though, the rougher, ruder tribes were the victors, and settled down among the people they had conquered, to rule them, doing no work themselves, but forcing the conquered ones to feed and clothe them.

History is full of instances of such conquests, and they were taking place, no doubt, ages before the times from which our earliest records date. The best examples, however, are to be found in the invasions of the Roman Empire by the Germanic tribes to which we have referred above. The country between the Rhine River and the Pyrenees Mountains, which had been called Gaul when the Gauls lived there, became France when the Franks conquered the Gauls and stayed to live among them. In like manner, two German tribes became the master races in Spain. The Burgundians came down from the shores of the Baltic Sea and gave their name to their new home in the fertile valley of the Sa?ne ; the Vandals came out of Germany to roam through Spain, finally founding a kingdom in Africa; while the Lombards crossed the Alps to become the masters of the Valley of the Po, whither the Gauls had gone before them, seven hundred years earlier.

The island now known as Great Britain, which was inhabited two thousand years ago by the Britons and Gaels, Celtic peoples, was overrun and conquered in part about 450 A.D. by the Saxons and Angles, Germanic tribes, after whom part of the island was called Angleland. Then came Danes, who partially conquered the Angles and Saxons, and after them, in 1066 A.D., the country was again conquered by the Normans, descendants of some Norsemen, who, one hundred and fifty years before, had come down from Norway and conquered a large territory in the northwestern part of France.

In some cases, the conquered tribes moved on to other lands, leaving their former homes to their conquerors. In this way the Britons and Gaels gave up the greater part of their land to the Angles and Saxons and withdrew to the hills and mountains of Wales, Cornwall, and northern Scotland. In other cases, the conquered people and their conquerors inhabited the same lands side by side, as the Normans settled down in England among the Anglo-Saxons.

In the early days of savagery, one tribe would frequently make a raid upon another neighboring tribe and bring home with it some captives who became slaves, working without pay for their conquerors and possessing no more rights than beasts of burden.

When these slaves were kept as the servants of their conquerors, their number was very small as compared with that of their masters. When, on the other hand, a tribe settled among a people whom they had conquered, they often found themselves fewer in numbers, and kept their leadership only by their greater strength and fighting ability.

Here there had arisen a new situation: all men were no longer equal, led by a chief of their own choosing, but instead, the greater part of them now had no voice in the government. They had become subjects, working to earn their own living and also, as has been said, to support in idleness their conquerors.

This ability of the few to rule the many and force them to support their masters was increased as certain peoples learned better than others how to make strong armor and effective weapons. Nearly five hundred years before the time of Christ, at the battle of Marathon , the Greeks discovered that one Greek, clad in metal armor and armed with a long spear, was worth ten Persians wearing leather and carrying a bow and arrows or a short sword. One hundred and sixty years later, a small army of well-equipped Macedonian Greeks, led by that wonderful general, Alexander the Great, defeated nearly forty times its number of Persians in a great battle in Asia and conquered a vast empire.

In later times, as better and better armor was made, the question of wealth entered in. The chief who had money enough to buy the best arms for his men could defeat his poorer neighbor and force him to pay money as to a ruler. Finally, in the so-called "Middle Ages," before the invention of gunpowder, one knight, armed from crown to sole in steel, was worth in battle as much as one hundred poorly-armed farmers or "peasants" as they are called in Europe.

In the "Dark Ages," after all these barbarians that we have named had swarmed over Europe, and before the governments of modern times were fully grown, there were hundreds of robber chiefs, who, scattered throughout a country, were in the habit of collecting tribute at the point of the sword from the peaceful peasants who lived near. This tribute they collected in some cases, regularly, a fixed amount each month or year, just as if they had a right to collect it, like a government tax collector. It might be money or food or fodder, or fuel. The robber chiefs were well armed themselves and were able to give good weapons and armor to their men, who lived either in the chief's castle or in small houses built very near it. They likewise plundered any travelers who came by, unless their numbers and weapons made them look too dangerous to be attacked. But the regular tribute forced from the peaceful farmers was the chief source of their income. The robber chief and his men lived a life of idleness when they were not out upon some raid for plunder, and the honest, industrious peasants worked hard enough to support both their own families and those of the robbers.

The "Dark Ages" came before the "Middle Ages." They were called "dark" because the barbarians had extinguished nearly all civilization and learning.

These robber chiefs had no right but might. They were outlaws, and lived either in a country which had no government and laws, or in one whose government was too weak to protect its people. They were no worse, however, than the so-called feudal barons who came after them, who oppressed the people even more, because they had on their side whatever law and government existed in those days.

Now let us stop to consider how first there came to be kings. In the early days of the human race and also in later days among barbarous peoples, the land was very sparsely settled. The reason lay in the chief occupations of the men. A small tribe might inhabit a great stretch of territory through which they wandered to keep within reach of plenty of game. As time went on, however, the population increased, and, as agriculture took the place of hunting, and homes became more lasting, tribes found themselves living in smaller and smaller tracts of land, and hence nearer to their neighbors. In some cases, constant fighting went on, just as Caesar tells us that two thousand years ago, the Swiss and the Germans fought almost daily battles back and forth across the Rhine. In other cases, the tribes found it better for all concerned to make treaties of peace with their neighbors, and if they did not exchange visits and mix on friendly terms, at least they did not attack each other.

Finally, one day there would come to several tribes which had treaties with each other a common danger, such as an invasion by some horde of another race or nation. Common interest would drive them together for mutual protection, and the chief of some one of them would be chosen to lead their joint army. In this way, we find the fifteen tribes of the Belgians uniting against the Roman army led by Julius Caesar, and electing as king over them the chief of one of the tribes "on account of his justice and wisdom." Five years later, in the year 52 B.C., we find practically all the inhabitants of what is now France united into a nation under the leadership of Vercingetorix in one last effort to free themselves from Rome. Five hundred years later, the Romans themselves were driven to join forces with two of the Germanic tribes to check the swift invasion of the terrible Huns.

In some cases, these alliances were only for a short time and the kingships were merely temporary. In other cases, the wars that drove the tribes to unite under one great chief or king lasted for years or even centuries, so that new generations grew up who had never lived under any other government than that of a king. Thus when the wars were ended, the tribes continued to be ruled by the one man, although the reason for the kingship had ceased to be. In the days of the Roman republic, from 500 to 100 B.C., when grave danger arose, the senate, or council of elders, appointed one man who was called the dictator, and this dictator ruled like an absolute monarch until the danger was past. Then, like the famous Cincinnatus, he gave up the position and retired to private life. The first lasting kingships, then, began, as it were, by the refusal of some dictator to resign when the need for his rule was ended.

As kingdoms grew larger, and more and more people came to be busied in agriculture, trade, and even, on a small scale, in manufacture, the warriors grew fewer in proportion, and people began to forget that the king was originally only a war leader, and that the office was created through military need. They came to regard the rule of the king as a matter of course and stopped thinking of themselves as having any right to say how they should be governed. Kings were quick to foster this feeling. For the purpose of making their own positions sure, they were in the habit of impressing it upon their people that the kingship was a divine institution. They proclaimed that the office of king was made by the gods, or in Christian nations, by God, and that it was the divine will that the people of the nations should be ruled by kings. The great Roman orator, Cicero , in a speech delivered in the year 66 B.C., referring to people who lived in kingdoms, says that the name of king "seems to them a great and sacred thing." This same feeling has lasted through all the ages down to the present time, and the majority of the people in European kingdoms, even among the educated classes, still look upon a king as a superior being, and are made happy and proud if they ever have a chance to do him a service of any sort.

Questions for Review

Why was it that in barbarian tribes there was no private ownership of land?

What is meant by saying that government was based upon the consent of the governed?

Was there anything besides love of plunder that induced the German tribes to move southward?

Explain the beginnings of slavery.

Explain the value of armor in early times.

What is meant by the "Dark Ages"?

What is meant by saying that the fighting men were parasites?

When the first kings were chosen was it intended that they should be rulers for life?

Is it easy for a man in power to retain this power?

Why is it that most Europeans bow low before a king?

The land is the king's.--He lends it to barons.--Barons lend it to knights and smaller barons.--Smaller barons collect rent for it from the peasants.--A father's lands are lent to his son.--Barons pay for the land by furnishing men for the king's wars.--No account is taken of the rights of the peasant.--The peasant, the only producer, is despised by the fighting men.--If a baron rebels, his men must rebel also.--Dukes against kings.--What killed the feudal system.--Feudal wrongs alive today.

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