arers of German culture to inroads
into territory inhabited by Slavonic races. The idea seemed to be that
as each Slavonic tribe, principality or kingdom adopted Christianity it
should come under German domination and be held in trust for Mother
Church by German princes as long as the Papacy conformed to their
conception of right and wrong. The Papacy itself seems to have had no
definite ideas of right and wrong at the time, or at least did not put
them into practice; had, in fact, become thoroughly corrupt and
ineffective for good. Christendom was in a parlous state, disunited and
assailed by hosts of barbarians, Danes, Saracens, Hungarians. The latter
had become especially dangerous to the Slavonic peoples. Before Arpad
arrived at Pressburg (now called Bratislava, please) in 829, the
territory inhabited by Slavonic tribes, mostly in principalities of
varying size and importance, had extended with fluctuating frontiers,
from Holstein south-eastward through Central Europe to the Adriatic and
the Balkan range. Arpad drove a wedge into this Slavonic mass and broke
it into two parts; Arpad's descendants still separate northern and
southern Slavs. We have seen how the Empire of Moravia went down before
the Magyars, and that the Bohemians, no longer able to count on support
from that side, were forced to turn to Germany. The intrusion of the
Magyars into Central Europe, by dividing the mass of Slavonic races,
also weakened the influence of the Eastern Church among the Bohemians
and forced those that were inclined towards Christianity into closer
communion with Rome via Germanism. German priests were beginning to gain
the ascendancy over those of the Eastern persuasion, they objected to
services in the Vulgate, and as they knew no language but their own and
only sufficient Latin for their clerical duties, their influence began
to threaten the Slavonic genius of the Bohemians with extinction. This
was undoubtedly their purpose, and it accounts for much of Bohemia's
sufferings during the thousand years following the imposition of a
German bishop on this country by the German King Arnulf to whom the
immediate predecessors of St. Wenceslaus, Spytihnev and Vratislav had
appealed for assistance.

Another social institution which was beginning to make its influence
felt at the time under discussion was the feudal system. Hitherto,
civilized Europe had depended for offensive and defensive operations on
large slow-moving armies of foo