CHAPTER XVI
THE SLAVS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Thus I have tried to give a picture in outline—a cinematograph, or moving picture—of the world after the break up of Charlemagne's Empire. We see the Turks pressing up against the Eastern Empire in Asia Minor, with the result that the Emperor appeals to the West, and that the first Crusade establishes, for nearly a hundred years, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. African Mahommedans have possession of the strip of North Africa running from Egypt—Egypt itself being held by the Turks—till they meet another Mahommedan African people which has possession of the southern part of Spain. That same power had the whole of the Spanish peninsula in its grip a little earlier, but its own divisions, of Arabs, Africans, and Syrians, made it weak, and it was broken as soon as it came against any organised force. Then in Italy we see that the Pope, aided by the Emperors and giving them the aid of the growing power of the Church in return, is on the whole establishing his temporal power in Rome more and more firmly. In the south of Italy and in Sicily the enterprising Normans drive out the Saracens and take possession. Northward, the great territory which, together with Italy, had been Charlemagne's, has been split into the two large divisions, the kingdoms of France and of Germany. But in these so-called kingdoms the king was at this time only a little more powerful than his lords, the barons and big landowners. The feudal system prevailed, and the king was constantly engaged with the hard task of keeping his feudal lords in order. It was disorder, rather than order, that was the rule all over the unhappy world. England fared a little better, thanks to the Channel which cut it off and made its conditions different from those of the Continent. But now it has been conquered by the Norman, and we have to see how that conquest had the result, for a very long while, of counteracting the effect of the Channel as a separating barrier. England was soon caught up into the continental turmoil.
We have to see how that came to pass. But there is still one side or corner of the picture which we have left rather blank, and we had best get that corner filled before we come to consider the part that England played in the continental trouble. It is that corner which is occupied by the large stretch of territory on the eastern fringe of Charlemagne's Empire, from the southern shores of the Baltic right down to Constantinople and the boundaries of the Eastern Empire.
You may have noticed that in the accounts of the Crusades—the first and the second, which are all that have come into our story as yet—I mentioned two names which had not appeared before, Hungary and the Wends. The first was the name of a country through which the Crusaders went to reach Constantinople; the second was the name of a heathen tribe against which certain of the knights who had been enrolled for the second Crusade obtained the sanction of the Pope to go, instead of against the Saracen.
These Wends were a tribe or branch of a race that appears to have increased in numbers very rapidly and, from a small territory to the north of the Carpathian mountains, to have spread over all that large tract just described from the Baltic to the neighbourhood of Constantinople. It was a race of people called Slavs, and even to-day it is thought to number more than any other of the races of man. It is not the first time that it has been mentioned in this greatest of all stories. We saw, in the first volume, that a large number of the serfs under the Roman Empire, especially in the East, were of this people. So large were their numbers that it is from their Latin name servus that we get our word "slave," which we use as a translation of servus. These Slavonic "serfs" were members of the Slav race who had been taken prisoners in battle.
Military knights
The Slavonic people from the East were constantly, as their numbers grew, and perhaps as they too were pressed by Huns and Mongolians from further East again, pressing in upon the Gothic, the Germanic tribes; and now it was against one of the Slav tribes, these Wends, that the knights of Northern Germany received leave to go on Crusade. They took to themselves the name of Knights of the Sword.