ng in almost every province of Trajan's empire, was in a
splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races. Our
story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a
thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the fifth
and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of those
conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all
this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope
Gregory the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge
of the world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have passed from
sight.

And in the decline of the old Empire, while Constantine and Justinian
are said to receive and exchange embassies with the Court of China,
there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook.
Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the
pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen,
then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion
of Europe. Into this folk-wandering of the Vikings, the first great
outward movement of our Europe in the Middle Ages, is absorbed the
reviving energy of trade, as well as the ever-growing impulse of
pilgrimage. The Vikings are the highest type of explorers; they do not
merely find out new lands and trade with them, but conquer and colonise
them. They extend not merely the knowledge, but the whole state and
being of Europe, to a New World.

Lastly, the partial activity of commerce and religion made universal and
"political" by the leading western race--for itself only--is taken up by
all Christendom in the Crusades, borrowed in idea from Spain, but
borrowed with the spirit of the Norse rovers, and made universal for the
Latin world, for the whole federation of Rome. In the eleventh, twelfth,
and thirteenth centuries we have the preparation for the discovery and
colonisation of the outside world by Europeans in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era.

From the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation the story of
Christendom is unbroken; the later Roman Empire is the Church-State of a
Christian Prince, as modern Europe is the Church-State of a nominally
Christian society. Mediaeval Europe thought of itself as nothing but the
old world-state under religion; from Spain to Russia men were living
under a Holy Roman Empire of an Italian, or Teutonic, or Byzantine,