I. [Britain]
II. [The Camps of the Legions]
III. [The Barbarian at the Walls]
IV. [The Division of the Empire]
V. [The Barbarian breaking through]
VI. [How Britain became England]
VII. [The Passing of the Barbarian]
VIII. [The Pope]
IX. [How England became Christian]
X. [The Saracens]
XI. [The Franks and the Feudal System]
XII. [How the People Lived]
XIII. [How the People Lived—continued]
XIV. [The Settlements Of The Sea-Rovers]
XV. [The Crusades]
XVI. [The Slavs in Eastern Europe]
XVII. [Normans and Angevins]
XVIII. [The Strength and the Weakness of Rome]
XIX. [The Moslems in Spain]
XX. [The Plantagenets in France and England]
XXI. [England, France, and Burgundy]
XXII. [The Teuton and the Slav]
XXIII. [The Turks in Europe]
XXIV. [The New Dawn]
[Index]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Hadrian's Wall To-Day] .... Frontispiece
[Stonehenge]
[The Iron Crown of the Lombards]
[Rome and St. Peter's]
[Whitby Abbey]
[Charlemagne's Sword]
[Canterbury]
[An Anglo-Saxon Mansion]
[An Anglo-Saxon Dinner Party]
[A Viking Ship]
[Norman Gateway]
[A Crusader]
[A Knight Templar]
[A Norman Household]
[A Joust between Knights]
[Cœur-de-Lion's Prison]
[Knight in Chain Armour]
[The Giralda, Seville]
[Byzantine Architecture]
[Gothic Architecture]
[Constantinople]
[Genoa]
[Columbus]
[Ship of Columbus' Time]
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
BRITAIN
In the first volume of this Greatest Story in the World we saw how man lived upon the earth from the earliest times at which we know anything about him. We followed the story down to about the year A.D. 100 when the different threads of the story came together into one hand—the mighty hand of Rome and of the firmly established Roman Empire. The whole world, or what the people of that time regarded as the whole of the world that mattered, was controlled by the Roman hand. This second volume will be mainly the story of what happened when the grasp of that hand weakened, and allowed the threads to fall apart again.
Rome had driven its fine roads, which you may imagine going out, from the imperial city as their centre, like the spokes of a great wheel, to the farthest ends of the Empire. And you should notice a peculiarity about those spokes—those roads—that they always went straight. It did not matter how high a hill they came to, nor how deep a valley—unless the hill or the vale side were impossibly steep, the road never turned. It did not go round the hill: it went over the top of it and down the other side.