s were at hand anything like systematic ocean navigation was
out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by
creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not
much was to be expected, after all.

[Sidenote: Europe in the year 1000.]

But even if the compass and other facilities for oceanic navigation had
been at hand, the state of Europe in the days of Eric the Red was not
such as to afford surplus energy for distant enterprise of this sort.
Let us for a moment recall what was going on in Europe in the year of
grace 1000, just enough to get a suggestive picture of the time. In
England the Danish invader, fork-bearded Swend, father of the great
Cnut, was wresting the kingship from the feeble grasp of Ethelred the
Redeless. In Gaul the little duchy of France, between the Somme and the
Loire, had lately become the kingdom of France, and its sovereign, Hugh
Capet, had succeeded to feudal rights of lordship over the great dukes
and counts whose territories surrounded him on every side; and now
Hugh's son, Robert the Debonair, better hymn-writer than warrior, was
waging a doubtful struggle with these unruly vassals. It was not yet in
any wise apparent what the kingdoms of England and France were going to
be. In Germany the youthful Otto III., the "wonder of the world," had
just made his weird visit to the tomb of his mighty predecessor at
Aachen, before starting on that last journey to Rome which was so soon
to cost him his life. Otto's teacher, Gerbert, most erudite of
popes,--too learned not to have had dealings with the Devil,--was
beginning to raise the papacy out of the abyss of infamy into which the
preceding age had seen it sink, and so to prepare the way for the
far-reaching reforms of Hildebrand. The boundaries of Christendom were
as yet narrow and insecure. With the overthrow of Olaf Tryggvesson in
this year 1000, and the temporary partition of Norway between Swedes and
Danes, the work of Christianizing the North seemed, for the moment, to
languish. Upon the eastern frontier the wild Hungarians had scarcely
ceased to be a terror to Europe, and in this year Stephen, their first
Christian king, began to reign. At the same time the power of heretical
Bulgaria, which had threatened to overwhelm the Eastern Empire, was
broken down by the sturdy blows of the Macedonian emperor Basil. In this
year the Christians of Spain met woful defeat at the hands of Almansor,
and there seemed