The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE EMPIRE ARE BROKEN. While temporary extensions of territory had at times been made beyond the Rhine and the Danube, these rivers had finally come to be the established boundaries of the Empire on the north, and behind these rivers the Teutonic barbarians, or Germani, as the Romans called them, had by force been kept. To do even this the Romans had been obliged to admit bands of Germans into the Empire, and had taken them into the Roman army as “allies,” making use of their great love for fighting to hold other German tribes in check. In 166 A.D. the plague, brought back by soldiers returning from the East, carried off approximately half the population of Italy. This same year the Marcomanni (see Figure 18), a former friendly tribe, invaded the Empire as far as the head of the Adriatic Sea, and it required thirteen years of warfare to put them back behind the Danube. Even this was accomplished only by the aid of friendly German tribes. From this time on the Empire was more or less on the defensive, with the barbarian tribes to the north casting increasingly longing eyes toward “a place in the sun” and the rich plunder that lay to the south, and frequently breaking over the boundaries. Rome, though, was still strong enough to put them back again.

In 275 A.D., after a five years’ struggle, the Eastern Emperor gave the province of Dacia, to the south of the Danube, to the Visigoths, in an effort to buy them off from further invasion and warfare. This eased the pressure for another century. In 378 A.D., now pressed on by the terrible Huns from behind, the Visigoths, as a body, invaded the Eastern Empire, and in the Battle of Adrianople, near Constantinople, defeated the Roman army, slew the Roman Emperor, definitely broke the boundaries of the Empire, and they and the Ostrogoths now moved southward and settled in Moesia and Thrace. The Germans at Adrianople learned that they could beat the Roman legions, and from this time on it was they, and not the Romans, who named the terms of ransom and the price of peace. A few years later, under Alaric, the Visigoths invaded Greece, then turned westward through Illyria to the valley of the Po, in northern Italy, which they reached in the year 400. In 410 the great calamity came when they captured and sacked Rome. The effect produced on the Roman world by the fall of the Eternal City, as the news of the almost incredible disaster penetrated to the remote provinces, was profound (R. 48). For eight hundred years Rome had not been touched by foreign hands, and now it had been captured and plundered by barbarian hordes. It seemed to many as though the end of the world were approaching. The Visigoths now turned west once more, carrying with them the beautiful sister of the Emperor as a captive bride of the chief, and finally settled in Spain and southern Gaul, which provinces were thenceforth lost to Rome. This was the first of the great permanent inroads into the Empire, and from now on Roman resistance seemed powerless to stop the flood.

[Illustration: FIG. 32. THE GERMAN MIGRATIONS

The barriers of the Empire along the Rhine and the Danube now are broken down. Take a pencil and trace the route followed by each of these peoples.]

A PERIOD OF TRIBAL MOVEMENTS. The Hunnish pressure also started the Vandals and Suevi, and within fifty years they had been able to move across Germany, France, and Spain, plundering the cities on their way.

Finally they crossed to the northern coast of Africa, where they became noted as the great sea pirates of the Mediterranean. In 455 they crossed back to Italy, and Rome was sacked for the second time by barbarian hordes. The Huns, under the leadership of Attila, the so-called “Scourge of God,” now moved in and ravaged Gaul (451) and northern Italy (452), and then, at the intercession of the Roman Pope Leo, were induced by a ransom price to return to the lower Danube, where they have since remained. In 476 the barbarian soldiers of the Empire, tired of camp life and demanding land on which they too might settle, rose in revolt, displaced the last of the Western Emperors, and elevated Odovacar, a tribesman from the north, as ruler in his stead. The Western Roman Empire was now at an end. In 493

Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, became king of Italy.

Between 443 and 485 the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes left their earlier homes in what is now Denmark and northwestern Germany, and overran eastern and southern Britain. In 486 the Franks, a great nation living along the lower Rhine, began to move, and within two generations had overrun almost all of Gaul. In 586 the Lombards invaded and settled the valleys of northern Italy, displacing the Ostrogoths there. Slavic tribes now moved into the Eastern Empire—Serbs and Bulgars—and settled in Moesia and Thrace.

Southeastern Europe thus became Slavic-Greek, as western Europe had become Teutonic-Latin. Figure 32 shows the results of these different migrations up to about 500 A.D.

EUROPE TO BE TEUTONIC-LATIN. In the seventh century another great wave of people, of a different racial stock and religion—Semitic and Mohammedan—

starting from Arabia and along the shores of the Red Sea, swept rapidly through Egypt and Africa and across into Spain and France. For a time it looked as though they might overrun all western Europe and bring the German tribes under subjection. Fortunately they were definitely stopped and decisively defeated by the Franks, in the great Battle of Tours, in 732. They also overran Syria and Persia, but were held in check in Asia Minor by the Eastern Empire, which did not completely succumb to barbarian inroads until Constantinople was taken by the Turks, in 1453.

The importance of the result, to the future of our western civilization, of this battle in the West can hardly be overestimated. The future of European government, law, education, and civilization was settled on that Saturday afternoon in October, on the battle plains of Tours. [5] It was a struggle for mastery and dominion between the Aryan and Semitic races, between the Christian and Mohammedan religions, between the forces representing order on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions.

[Illustration: FIG. 33. THE KNOWN WORLD IN 800

This map shows the great extent of the Mohammedan conquests. The part marked as “European Heathen” was added to Christianity within the next few centuries, and became a part of our Latin-Teutonic or western civilization.]

Driven back across the Pyrenees by the Franks, these people settled in Spain; later developed there, for a short period, a for-the-time remarkable civilization, but one that only slightly influenced the current of European development; and then disappeared as a force in our western development and progress. We shall meet them again a little later, but only for a little while, and then they concern our western development no more.

Our interest from now on lies with the Teutonic-Latin peoples of western Europe, for it is through them that our western civilization has been worked out and has come down to us.

WHO THESE INVADERS WERE. A long-continued series of tribal migrations, unsurpassed before in history, had brought a large number of new peoples within the boundaries of the old Empire. They finally came so fast that they could not have been assimilated even in the best days of Rome, and now the assimilative and digestive powers of Rome were gone. Tall, huge of limb, white-skinned, flaxen-haired, with fierce blue eyes, and clad in skins and rude cloths, they seemed like giants to the short, small, dark-skinned people of the Italian peninsula. Quarrelsome; delighting in fighting and gambling; given to drunkenness and gluttonous eating; possessed of a rude polytheistic religion in which Woden, the war god, held the first place, and Valhalla was a heaven for those killed in battle; living in rude villages in the forest, and maintaining themselves by hunting and fishing—it is not to be wondered that Rome dreaded the coming of these forest barbarians (R. 46).

[Illustration: FIG 34. A GERMAN WAR CHIEF

Restored, and rather idealized (From the Mus�e d’Artillerie at Paris)]

The tribes nearest the Rhine and the Danube had taken on a little civilization from long contact with the Romans, but those farther away were savage and unorganized (Rs. 46, 47). In general they represented a degree of civilization not particularly different from that of the better American Indians in our colonial period, [6] though possessing a much larger ability to learn. The “two terrible centuries” which brought these new peoples into the Empire were marked by unspeakable disorder and frightful destruction. It was the most complete catastrophe that had ever befallen civilized society.

[Illustration: FIG. 35. ROMANS DESTROYING A GERMAN VILLAGE

(From the Column of Marcus Aurelius, at Rome) Note the circular huts of reeds, without windows, and with but a single door.]

THEY SETTLE DOWN WITHIN THE EMPIRE. Finally, after a period of wandering and plundering, each of these new peoples settled down within the Empire as rulers over the numerically larger native Roman population, and slowly began to turn from hunting to a rude type of farming. For three or four centuries after the invasions ceased, though, Europe presented a dreary spectacle of ignorance, lawlessness, and violence. Force reigned where law and order had once been supreme. Work largely ceased, because there was no security for the results of labor. The Roman schools gradually died out, in part because of pagan hostility (all pagan schools were closed by imperial edict in 529 A.D.), and in part because they no longer ministered to any real need. The church and the monastery schools alone remained, the instruction in these was meager indeed, and they served almost entirely the special needs of the priestly and monastic classes. The Latin language was corrupted and modified into spoken dialects, and the written language died out except with the monks and the clergy. Even here it became greatly corrupted. Art perished, and science disappeared. The former Roman skill in handicrafts was largely lost. Roads and bridges were left without repair. Commerce and intercourse almost ceased. The cities decayed, and many were entirely destroyed (R. 49).

The new ruling class was ignorant—few could read or write their names—

and they cared little for the learning of Greece and Rome. Much of what was excellent in the ancient civilizations died out because these new peoples were as yet too ignorant to understand or use it, and what was preserved was due to the work of others than themselves. It was with such people and on such a basis that it was necessary for whatever constructive forces still remained to begin again the task of building up new foundations for a future European civilization. This was the work of centuries, and during the period the lamp of learning almost went out.

BARBARIAN AND ROMAN IN CONTACT. Civilization was saved from almost complete destruction chiefly by reason of the long and substantial work which Rome had done in organizing and governing and unifying the Empire; by the relatively slow and gradual coming of the different tribes; and by the thorough organization of the governing side of the Christian Church, which had been effected before the Empire was finally overrun and Roman government ceased. In unifying the government of the Empire and establishing a common law, language, and traditions, and in early beginning the process of receiving barbarians into the Empire and educating them in her ways and her schools, [7] Rome rendered the western world a service of inestimable importance and