In China authentic history begins with the Chow dynasty (1122-255 B. C.) when Confucius and Mincius flourished (600 B. C). In the next (Tsin) dynasty Shih Hwang Ti (221-209 B. C.) reduced the independent petty states, and built the Great Wall as a protection against the barbarous Hiong-non (Huns) or Tartars of the north. Shortly after the beginning of the Christian era the Chinese seem to have begun intercourse with the Parthians and to have known the Roman Empire as Ta-tsin; and about the time of Constantine’s establishment of his new capital the Chinese emperor’s court was fixed at Nanking, the southern capital.
The increase of geographical knowledge during the period in which Rome was spreading out its power in all directions could not fail to be very considerable. Already in the latter part of the first century B. C., a general survey of the Roman Empire had been begun by the collection and arrangement of the itineraries of the roads to places in the empire. One of these traces the main roads of all the region stretching from Britain to the mouth of the Ganges in India.
World About A. D. 500.—For more than two centuries prior to this [map], the whole of northern Europe, had begun to pour forth wave after wave of barbarian hordes, against the Roman Empire. By the invasions of the tribes of Goths, Franks, Vandals, etc., the western emperors lost their power outside of Italy, and the empire itself ceases to exist in 476, when it is nominally joined to the Eastern Empire. The Vandals had established their rule along north Africa; the Visigoths ruled in Spain; the Ostrogothic monarchy of Theodoric the Great extended over Italy, France, and all the countries round the Alps as far as the middle Danube; and the Franks, under Clovis, had possession of the whole of Gaul between the Loire and Somme.
Persia, still under the energetic Sassanian dynasty, not only maintained its integrity as an empire, but had begun to repel the Roman or Byzantine power in Asia, and had added part of Armenia. Westward, however, the arms of the Byzantine Empire were triumphant, the reign of the Emperor Justinian having been rendered famous by the expedition of his great general Belisarius to Africa, where, after a campaign of two years, he completely overthrew the Vandals and led their king captive to Constantinople. In a second war, Belisarius wrested all southern Italy from the Ostrogoths, pursuing them northward to Rome and Ravenna, and thus began the re-conquest of the peninsula, which was completed by his successor, the imperial general Narses, after which the Ostrogoths disappear as a distinct nation.
At this time, under Khosru, the greatest of the great monarchs of the Sassanian dynasty, the Persian Empire stretched from the Red Sea to the Indus, and from Arabia far into central Asia.
World About A. D. 800.—The end of this century finds three great empires in Europe and eastern Asia: the Mohammedan or Saracenic Empire, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, and the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne. The Mohammedan Empire had spread itself out to central Asia and to Spain, and had already passed the zenith of its greatness. The dynasty of the Ommiades of Damascus had given place to that of the Abassides in the east, though a branch from it had set up an independent Califate at Cordova, in Spain. The Abbaside Haroun-al-Rashid, whose praises are sung by eastern poets, had his capital at Bagdad, on the Tigris, a city which had been founded by his predecessor in 762.
Charlemagne had consolidated and extended the Frankish Empire, received the ambassadors sent from the court of Bagdad to salute him, and had been crowned by the Pope at Rome. Irene, the mother of the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VI., had conceived the bold plan of uniting the east and west of Europe in one great empire, by marrying the Frankish emperor, a scheme which was frustrated by her overthrow and her banishment to the Isle Lesbos in the Ægean Sea (802).
Britain, so far as occupied by the Angles and Saxons, was divided into seven (or eight) little kingdoms, known as the Saxon Heptarchy.
World About A. D. 1000.—Germany, or the Eastern Franks, becomes at this time the greatest power in Europe, uniting to itself Upper Italy and Lotharingia.
France, or the Western Franks, early in this century is invaded by the Norsemen or Normans,—bold seafaring adventurers from Denmark and other northern lands, from whom the name Normandy is derived. The kingdom of France, however, began in 987.