of the Norse Vikings, from
the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the
sea of darkness round the little island of the known world that made up
Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the
only natural beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam,
Saracens controlled the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was
only on the West and North that the coast was clear--of all but natural
dangers.

In the Moslem Caliphate men were now busy in following up the old lines
of trade, the immemorial traditions of the East, or as in southern
Africa, extending the sphere of commercial activity and so of
civilisation; men of science were commenting on the ancient texts of
Greeks and Latins, or adapting them to enlarged knowledge.

But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical
activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals
of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred
and his House, the practical energy of Heathen enemies,--for the
Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity till about the end
of the first millennium,--was the first sign of lasting resurrection.
After the material came the spiritual revival; the whole life of the
Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the Northern nations and of
Hungary; but in the abundant and brilliant energy of the eleventh, the
twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognise the offspring of
the irrepressible Norsemen as well as of the Irish and Frank and English
missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the
empire of Innocent III.

In exploration, especially, it was true that theory followed
achievement. Flavio Gioja, of Amalphi, did not apply the magnet to
navigation--did not "give sailors the use of the magnet"--till
navigation itself had begun to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The
history of geographical advance in the earlier Middle Ages is thus
rather a chronicle of adventure than of science.

But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading
achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true Unknown,
between the time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of
European expansion in the Dark Ages (from the seventh to the eleventh
century) is the advance of the Vikings to the Arctic Continent and to
America about the year 1000. All that precedes this on the same line is
doubt