If the predictions of Mr. Stoddard’s book seem far-fetched, one has but to consider that four times since the fall of Rome Asia has conquered to the very confines of Nordic Europe. The Nordicized Alpines of eastern Europe and the Nordicized Mediterraneans of southern Europe have proved too feeble to hold back the Asiatic hordes, Mongol or Saracen. It was not until the realms of pure Nordics were reached that the invaders were turned back. This is shown by the fact that the Arabs had quickly mastered northern Africa and conquered Spain, where the Nordic Goths were too few in number to hold them back, while southern France, which was not then, and is not now, a Nordic land, had offered no serious resistance. It was not until the Arabs, in 732, at Tours, dashed themselves to pieces against the solid ranks of heavy-armed Nordics, that Islam receded.
The same fate had already been encountered by Attila and his Huns, who, after dominating Hungary and southern Germany and destroying the Burgundians on the Rhine, had pushed into northern France as far as Châlons. Here, in 376, he was beaten, not by the Romanized Gauls but by the Nordic Visigoths, whose king, Roderick, died on the field. These two victories, one against the Arab south and the other over the Mongoloid east, saved Nordic Europe, which was at that time shrunken to little more than a fringe on the seacoast.
How slender the thread and how easily snapped, had the event of either day turned out otherwise! Never again did Asia push so far west, but the danger was not finally removed until Charlemagne and his successors had organized the Western Empire.
Christendom, however, had sore trials ahead when the successors of Jenghiz Khan destroyed Moscovy and Poland and devastated eastern Europe. The victorious career of the Tatars was unchecked, from the Chinese Sea on the east to the Indian Ocean on the south, until in 1241, at Wahlstatt in Silesia, they encountered pure Nordic fighting men. Then the tide turned. Though outnumbering the Christians five to one and victorious in the battle itself, the Tatars were unable to push farther west and turned south into Hungary and other Alpine lands.
Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China, central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in Khorasan, the “Garden of Asia,” the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the consequence that progress was retarded for centuries.
Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics went down in rout.
On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east collapsed under the invasions.
Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the Nordics came to bay—the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe.
One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never before known even in the days of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire world under European domination.