[!-- Note Anchor 3 --][Footnote 3: See [Mahometans in India], page 151.]
On the whole, however, the wave of Mahometan conquest receded. In Spain the remnants of the Christian population, Visigoths, Romans, and still older peoples, pressed their way down from their old-time, secret mountain retreats and began driving the Saracens southward.[[4]] The decaying Roman Empire of the East still resisted the Mahometan attack; Constantinople remained a splendid city, type and picture of what the ancient world had been.
[!-- Note Anchor 4 --][Footnote 4: See [Decline of the Moorish Power in Spain], page 296.]
While the Saracens were thus laying waste the Frankish empire along its Mediterranean coasts, a more dangerous enemy was assailing it from the east. Toward the end of the ninth century the Magyars, an Asiatic, Turanian people, burst on Europe, as the Huns had done five centuries before. Indeed, the Christians called these later comers Huns also, and told of them the same extravagant tales of terror. The land which the Magyars settled was called Hungary. They dwell there and possess it even to this day, the only instance of a Turanian people having permanently established themselves in an Aryan continent and at the expense of Aryan neighbors.
From Hungary the Magyars soon advanced to the German border line, and made fierce plundering inroads upon the more civilized regions beyond. They came on horseback, so that the slower Teutons could never gather quickly enough to resist them. The marauding parties, as they learned the wealth and weakness of this new land, grew bigger, until at length they were armies, and defeated the German Franks in pitched battles, and spread desolation through all the country. They returned now every year. Their ravages extended even to the Rhine and to the ancient Gallic land beyond. The Frankish empire seemed doomed to reënact, in a smaller, far more savage way, the fate of Rome.
Yet more widespread in destruction, more important in result than the raids of either Saracens or Magyars, were those of the Scandinavians or Northmen. These, the latest, and perhaps therefore the finest, flower of the Teutonic stock, are closer to us and hence better known than the early Goths or Franks. Shut off in their cold northern peninsulas and islands, they had grown more slowly, it may be, than their southern brethren. Now they burst suddenly on the world with spectacular dramatic effect, wild, fierce, and splendid conquerors, as keen of intellect and quick of wit as they were strong of arm and daring of adventure.
We see them first as sea-robbers, pirates, venturing even in Charlemagne's time to plunder the German and French coasts. One tribe of them, the Danes, had already been harrying England and Ireland. Only Alfred,[[5]] by heroic exertions, saved a fragment of his kingdom from them. Later, under Canute,[[6]] they become its kings. The Northmen penetrate Russia and appear as rulers of the strange Slavic tribes there; they settle in Iceland, Greenland, and even distant and unknown America.[[7]]
[!-- Note Anchor 5 --][Footnote 5: See [Career of Alfred the Great].]
[!-- Note Anchor 6 --][Footnote 6: See [Canute Becomes King of England].]
[!-- Note Anchor 7 --][Footnote 7: [Leif Ericson Discovers America].]