he kingdom of Poland, which was equally indefinite in shape,
and has equally formed a subject of dispute between the nations
of Eastern Europe. This, as is well known, only disappeared as
an independent state in 1795, when it finally ceased to act as a
buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. Roughly speaking,
after the settlement of the Germanic tribes within the confines of
the Empire, the history of Europe, and therefore its historical
geography, may be summed up as a struggle for the possession of
Burgundy and Poland.

But there was an important interlude in the south-west of Europe,
which must engage our attention as a symptom of a world-historic
change in the condition of civilisation. During the course of the
seventh and eighth centuries (roughly, between 622 and 750) the
inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula burst the seclusion which they
had held since the beginning, almost, of history, and, inspired
by the zeal of the newly-founded religion of Islam, spread their
influence from India to Spain, along the southern littoral of the
Mediterranean. When they had once settled down, they began to recover
the remnants of Graeco-Roman science that had been lost on the north
shores of the Mediterranean. The Christians of Syria used Greek
for their sacred language, and accordingly when the Sultans of
Bagdad desired to know something of the wisdom of the Greeks, they
got Syriac-speaking Christians to translate some of the scientific
works of the Greeks, first into Syriac, and thence into Arabic. In
this way they obtained a knowledge of the great works of Ptolemy,
both in astronomy--which they regarded as the more important, and
therefore the greatest, Almagest--and also in geography, though
one can easily understand the great modifications which the strange
names of Ptolemy must have undergone in being transcribed, first
into Syriac and then into Arabic. We shall see later on some of
the results of the Arabic Ptolemy.

The conquests of the Arabs affected the knowledge of geography
in a twofold way: by bringing about the Crusades, and by renewing
the acquaintance of the west with the east of Asia. The Arabs were
acquainted with South-Eastern Africa as far south as Zanzibar and
Sofala, though, following the views of Ptolemy as to the Great
Unknown South Land, they imagined that these spread out into the
Indian Ocean towards India. They seem even to have had some vague
knowledge of the sources of the Nile. They were al