Scandinavian countries have for a time, as we have seen, been of the greatest importance in our story, pouring forth swarms of Northmen to make settlement and conquest in all quarters of the known world, but it has not been as nations, but rather in companies of sea-going raiders, that they have so wrought. For the moment those nations are not in the forefront of the world story.
Neither have the German States formed themselves as yet into any formidable nation. The power, always rather vague and ill-defined, of the Emperor has much decreased, and Switzerland and other States have shaken themselves free of it.
The Turk is pressing Austria and Hungary very hard. He holds, for a time, large provinces which had been Austria's, and which will be hers again, and, besides, he has established himself in that territory which is now the Balkan States and Greece, and is in possession of all that he now has of Asia Minor, with Egypt and the northern African coast in addition.
Poland, though she too has felt the Turkish pressure, has become a strong kingdom, and Russia, from her capital of Moscow, is growing in power after combining with those Tartar tribes which at one time threatened to destroy her.
And in all the years of the story with which this volume deals, we see that there has been one force constantly working, through all the time and over all the scene except where the Moslem has prevailed—the force of the Church. It is a divided force, for Eastern Christendom looks to the Patriarch of the Greek Church as its head; but the more important and powerful West looks to the Pope at Rome.
The new dawn
We have brought the story through some of the darkest times that mankind has known. Art and culture have nearly been destroyed under the barbarian invasions and the years of fighting. Now the Renaissance, the new birth of learning and of art, is at hand. Already we have seen hints of it and hopes of it, like flowers coming out in early spring, only to be nipped by late frost. There was that wonderful music of the troubadours of the Langue d'oc in the thirteenth century, with the ruder and less accomplished art of the trouvères in Northern France, of the minnesingers in Germany, and of the English minstrels.
But it is in Italy only that we can say that the Renaissance has arrived—in that land where the great painters have been at work, where Dante has sung his divine comedy, where Petrarch has written his sonnets, and where the despots of the cities have employed artists and architects to adorn the little States over which they tyrannised. Moreover, through nearly all Europe, and even in the gloom of the Dark Ages itself, there has been the most wonderful building of churches and cathedrals, of abbeys and ecclesiastical edifices, here and there of kings' palaces and of buildings for public use. Our England, too, has had her poets, of whom the chief is Chaucer rhyming his "Canterbury Tales," his "Romaunt of the Rose," and other beautiful pieces.
