CHAPTER XVI

THE SLAVS IN EASTERN EUROPE

Thus I have tried to give a picture in outline--a cinematograph, or moving picture--of the world after the break up of Charlemagne's Empire. We see the Turks pressing up against the Eastern Empire in Asia Minor, with the result that the Emperor appeals to the West, and that the first Crusade establishes, for nearly a hundred years, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. African Mahommedans have possession of the strip of North Africa running from Egypt--Egypt itself being held by the Turks--till they meet another Mahommedan African people which has possession of the southern part of Spain. That same power had the whole of the Spanish peninsula in its grip a little earlier, but its own divisions, of Arabs, Africans, and Syrians, made it weak, and it was broken as soon as it came against any organised force. Then in Italy we see that the Pope, aided by the Emperors and giving them the aid of the growing power of the Church in return, is on the whole establishing his temporal power in Rome more and more firmly. In the south of Italy and in Sicily the enterprising Normans drive out the Saracens and take possession. Northward, the great territory which, together with Italy, had been Charlemagne's, has been split into the two large divisions, the kingdoms of France and of Germany. But in these so-called kingdoms the king was at this time only a little more powerful than his lords, the barons and big {140} landowners. The feudal system prevailed, and the king was constantly engaged with the hard task of keeping his feudal lords in order. It was disorder, rather than order, that was the rule all over the unhappy world. England fared a little better, thanks to the Channel which cut it off and made its conditions different from those of the Continent. But now it has been conquered by the Norman, and we have to see how that conquest had the result, for a very long while, of counteracting the effect of the Channel as a separating barrier. England was soon caught up into the continental turmoil.

We have to see how that came to pass. But there is still one side or corner of the picture which we have left rather blank, and we had best get that corner filled before we come to consider the part that England played in the continental trouble. It is that corner which is occupied by the large stretch of territory on the eastern fringe of Charlemagne's Empire, from the southern shores of the Baltic right down to Constantinople and the boundaries of the Eastern Empire.

You may have noticed that in the accounts of the Crusades--the first and the second, which are all that have come into our story as yet--I mentioned two names which had not appeared before, Hungary and the Wends. The first was the name of a country through which the Crusaders went to reach Constantinople; the second was the name of a heathen tribe against which certain of the knights who had been enrolled for the second Crusade obtained the sanction of the Pope to go, instead of against the Saracen.

These Wends were a tribe or branch of a race that appears to have increased in numbers very rapidly and, from a small territory to the north of the Carpathian mountains, to have spread over all that large tract just described from the Baltic to the neighbourhood of Constantinople. It was a race of people called Slavs, {141} and even to-day it is thought to number more than any other of the races of man. It is not the first time that it has been mentioned in this greatest of all stories. We saw, in the first volume, that a large number of the serfs under the Roman Empire, especially in the East, were of this people. So large were their numbers that it is from their Latin name servus that we get our word "slave," which we use as a translation of servus. These Slavonic "serfs" were members of the Slav race who had been taken prisoners in battle.

[Sidenote: Military knights]

The Slavonic people from the East were constantly, as their numbers grew, and perhaps as they too were pressed by Huns and Mongolians from further East again, pressing in upon the Gothic, the Germanic tribes; and now it was against one of the Slav tribes, these Wends, that the knights of Northern Germany received leave to go on Crusade. They took to themselves the name of Knights of the Sword.

[Illustration: A KNIGHT TEMPLAR.]

There were several of these bodies, or societies, at a later date than this, who bound themselves together by vows, like the vows which the monks took, and lived under one rule. They were formed, like the monkish orders, for the advancement of the Christian religion, but these Military Orders--the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller were perhaps the best known of them--enforced religion with the sword as well as with the gospel-preaching, and were always ready to fight on the Christian side against the pagans on the boundaries of Christendom.

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Just at this moment, then, these Knights of the Sword, who were afterwards amalgamated with the Knights of the Teutonic Order, went, not against the Saracen but against the Wends. Now Wends was the name that the Germans gave to all the Slavs, from this one tribe of the Slavs which was called Wends. In like manner the name of Teutons was, and sometimes still is, given to all Germans and even to all peoples derived from the Gothic tribes, though originally it was the name of one only of these tribes. And so now, with these Teutons and Slavs thus opposing and thrusting at each other, we come into touch with one of the great world struggles that has been going on ever since, and was one of the causes of the Great War--the opposition of Teuton and Slav. It is the opposition of German and Russian, for most of the great population of Russia is Slavonic--that is, made up of Slavs--and Russia became the name of most of the immense territory occupied by the Slavs. It is said that the name of Russia had its origin in three great leaders of men who came from a province called Rus, in Sweden. If that be so, it appears that they again were some of those masterful Northmen, or Normans, whom we have seen taking the lead whenever they came in any number.

[Sidenote: Men of Rus]

The name of the country may have come from these men of Rus. That is one story. But it is perhaps doubtful whether it may not be rather from "rothsmen," meaning "oarsmen," that is "seafarers"; which is a name likely to be given to any of those northern sea-rovers. It is not often easy to know whether this or the other body of sea-faring Northmen came from Sweden or Norway or Denmark; for these lands were at different times united under one government, or under two, or, again, separated, and each with its own government; and for a time, as at the very moment when Canute was King of England, {143} Denmark was united with the others and was the ruler in the union.

But there seems to be general agreement among historians that either the men of Rus, or the people called Rothsmen, who became rulers of Russia and gave the country its name, came from Sweden.

The Slavs, however, occupied territory outside what came to be called Russia. The Kingdom of Poland was theirs; and it is chiefly by their descendants that those various countries designated to-day by the name of the "Balkan States" are peopled. So the Slavs held a vast country reaching from the Baltic almost down to the Mediterranean along the Eastern boundary of the Western Empire.

But even as early as the sixth century there was a large slice cut out of this Slavonic territory, formed of that land which is now called Hungary. The first conquerors, who thus thrust in and divided the Slavs of the south from those in the north, were a people called Avars, and they, with a certain force of the Huns, together gave to the country the name of Hungary. In the next century we find that the Germans are turning against the Avars, and that Hungary itself is included in the Empire of Charlemagne. But after Charlemagne's death, when his great possessions fell into hands less able to hold them, Hungary is yet again invaded and conquered by a people from the north-east, called Magyars, and what makes that conquest so notable for us is that the Magyars are the dominating race in Hungary to-day. On every side, and in every corner, of the world picture, in fact, we are now beginning to see States and kingdoms and populations settling down into the places and conditions in which we are able to recognise them as we look at a modern map.

These Magyars, then, a people allied to the Finns, of Finland, and coming from the east of the Ural {144} mountains, conquered Hungary towards the close of the ninth century, and have been there ever since. They were pagans, but in the eleventh century they became Christians, and members of the Church of Rome. That is a point to notice, that they joined the Church of which the Pope was the head. The Slavs, that is to say all the peoples to the east of Germany, with the exception of the Magyars, as they accepted Christianity became members of the Greek Church, which had its chief bishop, called the Patriarch, in Constantinople, the capital city of the Eastern Empire.

And now, under the Western Empire, had come into power and been raised to the importance of a duchy the State called Austria. Austria means "Eastern." It was the eastern "mark," that is to say "march" or "boundary," of the Empire. It "marched with," that is, was next to, Hungary and some of the Slav country, and was therefore a kind of fortress State against the enemies of Germany. Thus its importance grew. It had its ancient city, now called Vienna, on the great river, the Danube, which brought much trade and commerce into the land. The valley of the Danube, moreover, was, as you may easily understand by looking at the map of Europe, the route which folk would be likely to follow between the centre of Germany and Constantinople, which was the meeting-place for the Crusaders.

Therefore you may now see how it was that Hungary had to be named as the country through which the Crusaders went, and also you may see how there come into the story the Wends (often an alternative name, as used by the Germans, for the Slavs) against whom went those Knights of the Sword who were at first enrolled with the idea that they should go to the Holy Places in Palestine.

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