Chapter VIII: Introduction: To the Fourth Revised Edition (5)

That portion of the Mediterranean race which inhabits southern France occupies most of the territory of ancient Languedoc and Provence and it was these Provençals who developed and preserved during the Middle Ages the romantic civilization of the Albigensians, a survival of classic culture which was drowned in blood by a crusade from the north in the thirteenth century.

In northern Italy only the coast of Liguria is occupied by the Mediterranean race. In the valley of the Po the Mediterraneans predominated during the early Neolithic but with the introduction of bronze the Alpines appear and round skulls to this day prevail north of the Apennines. About 1100 B. C. the Nordic Umbrians and Oscans swept over the Alps from the northeast, conquered northern Italy and introduced their Aryan speech, which gradually spread southward. The Umbrian state was afterward overwhelmed by the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, who were of Mediterranean race and who, by 800 B. C. had extended their empire northward to the Alps and temporarily checked the advance of the Nordics. In the sixth century B. C. new swarms of Nordics, coming this time from Gaul and speaking Celtic dialects, seized the valley of the Po and in 382 B. C. these Gauls, heavily reinforced from the north and under the leadership of Brennus, stormed Rome and completely destroyed the Etruscan power. From that time onward the valley of the Po became known as Cisalpine Gaul. Mixed with other Nordic elements, chiefly Gothic and Lombard, this population persists to this day, and is the backbone of modern Italy.

A continuation of this movement of these Gauls, or Galatians as the Greek world called them, starting from northern Italy occurred a century later when these Nordics suddenly appeared before Delphi in Greece in 279 B. C. and then crossed into Asia Minor and founded the state called Galatia, which endured until Christian times.

South Italy until its conquest by Rome was Magna Græcia and the population to-day retains many Pelasgian Greek elements. It is among these classic remnants that artists search for the handsomest specimens of the Mediterranean race. In Sicily also the race is purely Mediterranean in spite of the admixture of types coming from the neighboring coasts of Tunis. These intrusive elements, however, were all of kindred race. Traces of Alpines in these regions and on the adjoining African coast are very scarce and wherever found may be referred to the final wave of round skull invasion which introduced bronze into Europe.

In Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians speaking a Non-Aryan tongue were conquered by the Nordic Achæans, who entered from the northeast according to tradition prior to 1250 B. C. probably between 1400 and 1300 B. C. Doubtless there were still earlier waves of these same Nordic invaders as far back as 1700 B. C., which was a period of general unrest and migration throughout the ancient world.

The Nordic Achæans and Mediterranean Pelasgians as yet unmixed stand out in clear contrast in the Homeric account of the ten year siege of Troy, which is generally assigned to the date of 1194 to 1184 B. C.

The same invasion that brought the Achæans into Greece brought a related Nordic people to the coast of Asia Minor, known as Phrygians. Of this race were the Trojan leaders.

Both the Trojans and the Greeks were commanded by huge blond princes, the heroes of Homer—in fact, even the Gods were fair-haired—while the bulk of the armies on both sides was composed of little brunet Pelasgians, imperfectly armed and remorselessly butchered by the leaders on either side. The only common soldiers mentioned by Homer as of the same race as the heroes were the Myrmidons of Achilles.

About the time that the Achæans and the Pelasgians began to amalgamate, new hordes of Nordic barbarians collectively called Hellenes entered from the northern mountains and destroyed this old Homeric-Mycenæan civilization. This Dorian invasion took place a little before 1100 B. C. and brought in the three main Nordic strains of Greece, the Dorian, the Æolian and the Ionian groups, which remain more or less distinct and separate throughout Greek history. Among these Nordics the Dorians may have included some Alpine elements. It is more than probable that this invasion or swarming of Nordics into Greece was part of the same general racial upheaval that brought the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy.

Long years of intense and bitter conflict follow between the old population and the newcomers and when the turmoil of this revolution settled down classic Greece appears. What was left of the Achæans retired to the northern Peloponnesus and the survivors of the early Pelasgian population remained in Messenia serving as helots their Spartan masters. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were founded largely by refugees fleeing from these Dorian invaders.

The Pelasgian strain seems to have persisted best in Attica and the Ionian states. The Dorian Spartans appear to have retained more of the character of the northern barbarians than the Ionian Greeks but the splendid civilization of Hellas was due to a fusion of the two elements, the Achæan and Hellene of Nordic and the Pelasgian of Mediterranean race.

The contrast between Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens, between the military efficiency, thorough organization and sacrifice of the citizen for the welfare of the state, which constituted the basis of Lacedæmonian power, and the Attic brilliancy, instability and extreme development of individualism, is strikingly like the contrast between Prussia with its Spartan-like culture and France with its Athenian versatility.

To this mixture of races in classic Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians contributed their Mycenæan culture and the Nordic Achæans and Hellenes contributed their Aryan language, fighting efficiency and the European aspect of Greek life.

The first result of a crossing of two such contrasted subspecies as the Nordic and Mediterranean races has repeatedly been a new outburst of civilization. This occurs as soon as the older race has imparted to the conquerors its culture and before the victors have allowed their blood to be attenuated by mixture. This process seems to have happened several times in Greece.

Later, in 338 B. C., when the original Nordic blood had been hopelessly diluted by mixture with the ancient Mediterranean elements, Hellas fell an easy prey to Macedon. The troops of Philip and Alexander were Nordic and represented the uncultured but unmixed ancestral type of the Achæans and Hellenes. Their unimpaired fighting strength was irresistible as soon as it was organized into the Macedonian phalanx, whether directed against their degenerate brother Greeks or against the Persians, whose original Nordic elements had also by this time practically disappeared. When in its turn the pure Macedonian blood was impaired by intermixture with Asiatics, they, too, vanished and even the royal Macedonian dynasties in Asia and Egypt soon ceased to be Nordic or Greek except in language and customs.

It is interesting to note that the Greek states in which the Nordic element most predominated outlived the other states. Athens fell before Sparta and Thebes outlived them both. Macedon in classic times was considered quite the most barbarous state in Hellas and was scarcely recognized as forming part of Greece, but it was through the military power of its armies and the genius of Alexander that the Levant and western Asia became Hellenized. Alexander with his Nordic features, aquiline nose, fair skin, gently curling light hair and mixed eyes, the left blue and the right very black, typifies this Nordic conquest of the Near East.

It is scarcely possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.

To what extent any of the blood of the ancient Hellenes flows in the veins of the Greeks of to-day is difficult to determine but it should be found, if anywhere, in Crete and in the Ægean Islands. The modern Greek is trying to purify his language back to classic Ionian and to appropriate the traditions of the mighty Past, but to do this something more is needed than the naming of children after Agamemnon and Hecuba. Even in Roman times, the ancient Greek of the classic period was little more than a tradition and the term Græculus given to the contemporary Hellenes was one of contempt.

Concerning the physical type of classic in contrast to Homeric Greece, we know that the Greeks were predominantly long-headed and of relatively short stature in comparison with the northern barbarians. The modern Greeks are also relatively short in stature, but are moderately round-headed. As to color these modern Greeks are substantially all dark as to eye and hair, with a somewhat swarthy skin.

Among Albanians and such Greeks as show blond traits light eyes are more than ten times as numerous as light hair. The Albanians are members of the tall, round-headed Dinaric race and have distant relationship with the Nordics. They may possibly represent an ancient cross between Nordics and Alpines and they constitute to-day a marked subdivision of the latter. They resemble the Round Barrow brachycephs who entered Britain just before or at the opening of the Bronze Age and who are still scantily represented among the living English and Welsh. This type called the Beaker Maker or Borreby type is characterized by a moderately round head and great stature, strength and considerable intellectual force. The Albanian or Dinaric type was not, so far as we know, represented in ancient Greece although some modern archæologists have suggested that the Spartans were of this type. We have as yet no evidence of the color, size and skull shape of the Spartans, but we do know that their Dorian ancestors claimed to have come from or through the mountains of northern Epirus (Albania). The Dorian dialects are also said to be more closely related to modern Albanian—which is derived from the ancient Illyrian—than are the Ionian dialects. The Spartan character, if that be any test of race, was heavy, slow and steady, and would indicate northern rather than Mediterranean antecedents.

Concerning modern Europe north of the Alps, culture came from the south and not from the east and to the Mediterranean subspecies is due the foundation of our civilization. The ancient Mediterranean world was for the most part of this race; the long-sustained civilization of Egypt, which endured for thousands of years in almost uninterrupted sequence; the brilliant Minoan Empire of Crete, which flourished between 3000 and 1200 B. C. and was the ancestor of the Mycenæan cultures of Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Sardinia; the mysterious Empire of Etruria, the predecessor and teacher of Rome; the Hellenic states and colonies throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas; the maritime and mercantile power of Phœnicia and its mighty colony, imperial Carthage; all were the creation of this race. The sea empire of Crete, when its royal palace at Cnossos was burned by the ‘sea peoples’ of the north, passed to Tyre, Sidon and Carthage and from them to the Greeks. The early development of the art of navigation is to be attributed to this race and from them the North centuries later learned its maritime architecture.

Even though the Mediterranean race has no claim to the invention of the synthetic languages and though it played a relatively small part in the development of the civilization of the Middle Ages or of modern times, nevertheless to it belongs the chief credit of the classic civilization of Europe in the sciences, art, poetry, literature and philosophy, as well as the major part of the civilization of Greece and a very large share in the Empire of Rome.

In the Eastern Empire the Mediterraneans were the predominant factor under the guise of Byzantine Greeks. Owing to the fact that our histories have been written under the influence of Roman orthodoxy and because in the eyes of the Frankish Crusaders the Byzantine Greeks were heretics, they have been regarded by us as degenerate cowards.

But throughout the Middle Ages Byzantium represented in unbroken sequence the Empire of Rome in the East and as the capital of that Empire it held Mohammedan Asia in check for nearly a thousand years. When at last in 1453 the imperial city deserted by western Christendom was stormed by the Ottoman Turks and Constantine, last of Roman Emperors, fell sword in hand there was enacted one of the greatest tragedies of all time.

With the fall of Constantinople the Empire of Rome passes finally from the scene of history and the development of civilization is transferred from Mediterranean lands and from the Mediterranean race to the North Sea and to the Nordic race.

VI
THE NORDIC RACE

We have shown that the Mediterranean race entered Europe from the south and forms part of a great group of peoples extending into southern Asia, that the Alpine race came from the east through Asia Minor and the valley of the Danube and that its present European distribution is merely the westernmost point of an ethnic pyramid, the base of which rests solidly on the round skulled peoples of the great plateaux of central Asia. Both of these races are, therefore, western extensions of Asiatic subspecies and neither of them can be considered as exclusively European.

With the remaining race, the Nordic, however, the case is different. This is a purely European type, in the sense that it has developed its physical characters and its civilization within the confines of that continent. It is, therefore, the _Homo europæus_, the white man par excellence. It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair.

A composite picture of this Nordic race and remarkable examples of its best contemporary types can be found in the English illustrated weeklies, which are publishing during this great war the lists and portraits of their officers who have fallen in battle. No nation, not even England although richly endowed with a Nordic gentry, can stand the loss of so much good blood. Here is the evidence, if such be needed, of the actual Passing of the Great Race.

Abundance of hair is an ancient and generalized character which the Nordics share with the Alpines of both Europe and Asia, but the light colored eyes and light colored hair are characters of relatively recent specialization and consequently highly unstable.

The pure Nordic race is at present clustered around the shores of the Baltic and North Seas from which it has spread west and south and east fading off gradually into the two preceding races.

The centre of its greatest purity is now in Sweden and there is no doubt that at first the Scandinavian Peninsula and later, also, the immediately adjoining shores of the Baltic were the centres of radiation of the Teutonic or Scandinavian branch of this race.

The population of Scandinavia has been composed of this Nordic subspecies from the commencement of Neolithic times and Sweden to-day represents one of the few countries which has never been overwhelmed by foreign conquest and in which there has been but a single racial type from the beginning. This nation is unique in its unity of race, language, religion and social ideals.

Southern Scandinavia only became fit for human habitation on the retreat of the glaciers about twelve thousand years ago and apparently was immediately occupied by the Nordic race. This is one of the few geological dates which is absolute and not relative. It rests on a most interesting series of computations made by Baron DeGeer, based on an actual count of the laminated deposits of clay laid down annually by the retreating glaciers, each layer representing the summer deposit of the subglacial stream.

The Nordics first appear at the close of the Paleolithic along the coasts of the Baltic. The earliest industry discovered in this region, named the Maglemose and found in Denmark and elsewhere around the Baltic, is probably the culture of the Proto-Teutonic branch of the Nordic race. No human remains in connection therewith have been found.

The vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have been evolved in so restricted an area as southern Sweden although its Teutonic or Scandinavian section did develop there in comparative isolation. The Nordics must have had a larger field for their specialization and a longer period for their evolution than is afforded by the limited time which has elapsed since Sweden became habitable. For the development of so marked a type there is required a continental area isolated and protected for long ages from the intrusion of other races. The climatic conditions must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year’s food, clothing and shelter during the short summer. Such demands on energy if long continued would produce a strong, virile and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment.

An area conforming to these requirements is offered by the forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia. It was here that the Proto-Nordic type evolved and here their remnants are found. They were protected from Asia on the east by the then almost continuous water connections across eastern Russia between the White Sea and the old Caspian-Aral Sea.

During the last glacial advance (known as the Würm) which, like the preceding glaciations, is believed to have been a period of land depression, the White Sea extended far to the south of its present limits, while the enlarged Caspian Sea, then and long afterward connected with the Sea of Aral, extended northward to the great bend of the Volga. The intermediate area was studded with large lakes and morasses. Thus an almost complete water barrier of shallow sea located just west of the low Ural Mountains, separated Europe from Asia during the Würm glaciation and the following period of glacial retreat. The broken connection was restored just before the dawn of history by a slight elevation of the land and the shrinking of the Caspian-Aral Sea through the increasing desiccation which has left its present surface below sea level.

An important element in the maintenance of the isolation of this Nordic cradle on the south is the fact that from earliest times down to this day the pressure of population has been unchangeably from the bleak and sterile north, southward and eastward, into the sunny but enervating lands of France, Italy, Greece, Persia and India.

In these forests and steppes of the north, the Nordic race gradually evolved in isolation and at an early date spread north over the Scandinavian Peninsula together with much of the land now submerged under the Baltic and North Seas.

Nordic strains form everywhere a substratum of population throughout Russia and underlie the round skulled Slavs who first appear a little over a thousand years ago as coming not from the direction of Asia but from south Poland. Burial mounds called kurgans are widely scattered throughout Russia from the Carpathians to the Urals and contain numerous remains of a dolichocephalic race,—in fact, more than three-fourths of the skulls are of this type. Round skulls first become numerous in ancient Russian graveyards about 900 A. D. and soon increase to such an extent that in the Slavic period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries one-half of the skulls were brachycephalic, while in modern cemeteries the proportion of round skulls is still greater. The ancient Nordic element, however, still forms a very considerable portion of the population of northern Russia and contributes the blondness and the red-headedness so characteristic of the Russian of to-day. As we leave the Baltic coasts the Nordic characters fade out both toward the south and east. The blond element in the nobility of Russia is of later Scandinavian and Teutonic origin.

When the seas which separated Russia from Asia dried, when the isolation and exacting climate of the north had done their work and produced the vigorous Nordic type, and when in the fulness of time bronze for their weapons reached them these men burst upon the southern races, conquering east, south and west. They brought with them from the north the hardihood and vigor acquired under the rigorous selection of a long winter season and vanquished in battle the inhabitants of older and feebler civilizations, but only to succumb in their turn to the softening influences of a life of ease and plenty in their new homes.

The earliest recorded appearance of Aryan-speaking Nordics is our first dim vision of the Sacæ introducing Sanskrit into India, the Cimmerians pouring through the passes of the Caucasus from the grasslands of South Russia to invade the Empire of the Medes and the Achæans and Phrygians conquering Greece and the Ægean coast of Asia Minor. About 1100 B. C. Nordics enter Italy as Umbrians and Oscans and soon after other Nordics cross the Rhine into Gaul. The latter were the western vanguard of the Celtic-speaking tribes which had long occupied those districts in Germany which lay south and west of the Teutonic Nordics. These Teutons at this early date were confined probably to Scandinavia and the immediate shores of the Baltic and were just beginning to press southward.

This first Celtic wave of Nordics seems to have swept westward along the sandy plains of northern Europe, and entered France through the Low Countries. From this point as Goidels they spread north into Britain, reaching there about 800 B. C. As Gauls they conquered all France and pushed on southward and westward into Spain and over the Maritime Alps into northern Italy, where they encountered the kindred Nordic Umbrians, who at an earlier date had crossed the Alps from the northeast. Other Celtic-speaking Nordics apparently migrated up the Rhine and down the Danube and by the time the Romans came on the scene the Alpines of central Europe had been thoroughly Celticized. These tribes pushed eastward into southern Russia and reached the Crimea as early as the fourth century B. C. Mixed with the natives, they were called by the Greeks the Celto-Scyths. This swarming out of what is now called Germany of the first Nordics was during the closing phases of the Bronze Period and was contemporary with and probably caused by the first great expansion of the Teutons from Scandinavia by way both of Denmark and the Baltic coasts.

These invaders were succeeded by a second wave of Celtic-speaking peoples, the Cymry or Brythons, who drove their Goidelic predecessors still farther westward and exterminated and absorbed them over large areas. These Cymric invasions occurred about 300–100 B. C. and were probably the result of the growing development of the Teutons and their final expulsion of the Celtic-speaking tribes from Germany. These Cymry occupied northern France under the name of Belgæ and invaded England as Brythons in several waves, the last being the true Belgæ. The conquests of these Cymric tribes in both Gaul and Britain were only checked by the legions of Rome.

These migrations are exceedingly hard to trace because of the confusion caused by the fact that Celtic speech is now found on the lips of populations in nowise related to the Nordics who first introduced it. But one fact stands out clearly, all the original Celtic-speaking tribes were Nordic.

What were the special physical characters of these tribes in which they differed from their Teutonic successors is now impossible to say, beyond the possible suggestion that in the British Isles the Scottish and Irish populations in which red hair and gray or green eyes are abundant have rather more of this Celtic strain in them than have the flaxen haired Teutons, whose china-blue eyes are clearly not Celtic.

When the peoples called Gauls or Celts by the Romans and Galatians by the Greeks first appear in history they are described in exactly the same terms as were later the Teutons. They were all gigantic barbarians with fair and very often red hair, then more frequent than to-day, with gray or fiercely blue eyes and were thus clearly members of the Nordic subspecies.

The first Celtic-speaking nations with whom the Romans came in contact were Gaulish and had probably incorporated much Alpine blood by the time they crossed the mountains into the domain of classic history. The Nordic element had become still weaker by absorption from the conquered populations when at a later date the Romans broke through the ring of Celtic nations and came into contact with the Nordic Cymry and Teutons.

After these early expansions of Gauls and Cymry the Teutons appear upon the scene. Of the pure Teutons within the ken of history, it is not necessary to mention more than the most important of the long series of conquering tribes.

The greatest of them all were perhaps the Goths, who came originally from the south of Sweden and were long located on the opposite German coast at the mouth of the Vistula. From here they crossed Poland to the Crimea where they were known in the first century. Three hundred years later they were driven westward by the Huns and forced into the Dacian plain and over the Danube into the Roman Empire. There they split up; the Ostrogoths after a period of subjection to the Huns on the Danube, ravaged the European provinces of the Eastern Empire, conquered Italy and founded there a great but shortlived nation. The Visigoths occupied much of Gaul and then entered Spain driving the Nordic Vandals before them into Africa. The Teutons and Cimbri, destroyed by Marius in southern Gaul about 100 B. C., the Gepidæ, the Alans, the Suevi, the Vandals, the Alemanni of the upper Rhine, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Batavians, the Frisians, the Angles, the Jutes, the Lombards and the Heruli of Italy, the Burgundians of the east of France, the Franks of the lower Rhine, the Danes, and, latest of all, the Norse Vikings emerge from the northern forests and seas one after another and sweep through history. Less well known but of great importance are the Varangians, who coming from Sweden in the ninth and tenth centuries, conquered the coast of the Gulf of Finland and much of White Russia and left there a dynasty and aristocracy of Nordic blood. In the tenth and eleventh centuries they were the rulers of Russia.

The traditions of Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Burgundians all point to Sweden as their earliest homeland and probably all the pure Teutonic tribes came originally from Scandinavia and were closely related.

When these Teutonic tribes poured down from the Baltic coasts, their Celtic-speaking Nordic predecessors were already much mixed with the underlying populations, Mediterranean in the west and Alpine in the south. These “Celts” were not recognized by the Teutons as kin in any sense and were all called, Welsh, or foreigners. From this word are derived the names “Wales,” “Cornwales” or “Cornwall,” “Valais,” “Walloons,” and “Vlach” or “Wallachian.”

VII
TEUTONIC EUROPE

No proper understanding is possible of the meaning of the history of Christendom or full appreciation of the place in it of the Teutonic Nordics without a brief review of the events in Europe of the last two thousand years.

When Rome fell and changed trade conditions necessitated the transfer of power from its historic capital in Italy to a strategic situation on the Bosporus, western Europe was definitely and finally abandoned to its Teutonic invaders. These same barbarians swept up again and again to the Propontis, only to recoil before the organized strength of the Byzantine Empire and the walls of Mikklegard. The final line of cleavage between the western and eastern Empires corresponded closely to the boundaries of Latin and Greek speech and differences of language no doubt were the chief cause of the political and later of the religious divergence between them.

Until the coming of the Alpine Slavs the Eastern Empire still held in Europe the Balkan Peninsula and much of the eastern Mediterranean. The Western Empire, however, collapsed utterly under the impact of hordes of Nordic Teutons at a much earlier date. In the fourth and fifth centuries of our era north Africa, once the empire of Carthage, had become the seat of the kingdom of Nordic Vandals. Spain fell under the control of the Visigoths and Lusitania, now Portugal, under that of the Suevi. Gaul was Visigothic in the south and Burgundian in the east, while the Frankish kingdom dominated the north until it finally absorbed and incorporated all the territories of ancient Gaul and made it the land of the Franks. Strictly speaking, the northern half of France and the adjoining districts, the country of Langued’oil, is the true land of the Franks while the southern Languedoc was never Frankish except by conquest, and was never as thoroughly Nordicized as the north. Whatever Nordic elements are still to be found there are Gothic and Burgundian but not Frankish.

Italy fell under the control first of the Ostrogoths and then of the Lombards. The purely Nordic Saxons with kindred tribes conquered the British Isles and meanwhile the Norse and Danish Scandinavians contributed a large element to all the coast populations as far south as Spain and the Swedes organized in the eastern Baltic what is now Russia.

Thus when Rome passed all Europe had become superficially Teutonic. At first these Teutons were isolated and independent tribes bearing some shadowy relation to the one organized state they knew, the Empire of Rome. Then came the Mohammedan invasion, which reached western Europe from Africa and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom. The Moslems swept on unchecked until their light horsemen dashed themselves to pieces against the heavy armed cavalry of Charles Martel and his Franks at Tours in 732 A. D.

The destruction of the Vandal kingdom by the armies of the Byzantine Empire, the conquest of Spain by the Moors and finally the overthrow of the Lombards by the Franks were all greatly facilitated by the fact that these barbarians, Vandals, Goths, Suevi and Lombards, with the sole exception of the Franks, were originally Christians of the Arian or Unitarian confession and as such were regarded as heretics by their orthodox Christian subjects. The Franks alone were converted from heathenism directly to the Trinitarian faith to which the old populations of the Roman Empire adhered. From this orthodoxy of the Franks arose the close relation between France, “the eldest daughter of the church,” and the papacy, a connection which lasted for more than a thousand years—in fact nearly to our own day.

With the Goths eliminated western Christendom became Frankish. In the year 800 A. D. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome and re-established the Roman Empire in the west, which included all Christendom outside of the Byzantine Empire. In some form or shape this Roman Empire endured until the beginning of the nineteenth century and during all that time it formed the basis of the political concept of European man.

This same concept lies to-day at the root of the imperial idea. Kaiser, Tsar and Emperor each takes his name and in some way undertakes to trace his title from Cæsar and the Empire. Charlemagne and his successors claimed and often exercised overlordship as to all the other continental Christian nations and when the Crusades began it was the German Emperor who led the Frankish hosts against the Saracens. Charlemagne was a German Emperor, his capital was at Aachen within the present limits of the German Empire and the language of his court was German. For several centuries after the conquest of Gaul by the Franks their Teutonic tongue held its own against the Latin speech of the Romanized Gauls.

The history of all Christian Europe is in some degree interwoven with this Holy Roman Empire. Though the Empire was neither holy nor Roman but altogether secular and Teutonic, it was, nevertheless, the heart of Europe for ages. Holland and Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, Burgundy and Luxemburg, Lombardy and the Veneto, Switzerland and Austria, Bohemia and Styria are states which were originally component parts of the Empire although many of them have since been torn away by rival nations or have become independent, while much of northern Italy remained under the sway of Austria within the memory of living men.

The Empire wasted its strength in imperial ambitions and foreign conquests instead of consolidating, organizing and unifying its own territories and the fact that the imperial crown was elective for many generations before it became hereditary in the House of Hapsburg checked the unification of Germany during the Middle Ages.

A strong hereditary monarchy, such as arose in England and in France, would have anticipated the Germany of to-day by a thousand years and made it the predominant state in Christendom, but disruptive elements in the persons of great territorial dukes were successful throughout its history in preventing an effective concentration of power in the hands of the Emperor.

That the German Emperor was regarded, though vaguely, as the overlord of all Christian monarchs was clearly indicated when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France appeared as candidates for the imperial crown against Charles of Spain, afterward the Emperor Charles V.

Europe was the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire was Europe predominantly until the Thirty Years’ War. This war was perhaps the greatest catastrophe of all the ghastly crimes committed in the name of religion. It destroyed an entire generation, taking each year for thirty years the finest manhood of the nations.

Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Würtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact, from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause.

In addition, the Thirty Years’ War virtually destroyed the land owning yeomanry and lesser gentry formerly found in mediæval Germany as numerously as in France or in England. The religious wars of France, while not as devasting to the nation as a whole as was the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, nevertheless greatly weakened the French cavalier type, the “petite noblesse de province.” In Germany this class had flourished and throughout the Middle Ages contributed great numbers of knights, poets, thinkers, artists and artisans who gave charm and variety to the society of central Europe. But, as said, this section of the population was practically exterminated in the Thirty Years’ War and this class of gentlemen practically vanishes from German history from that time on.

When the Thirty Years’ War was over there remained in Germany nothing except the brutalized peasantry, largely of Alpine derivation in the south and east, and the high nobility which turned from the toils of endless warfare to mimic on a small scale the court of Versailles. After this long struggle the boundaries in central Europe between the Protestant North and the Catholic South follow in a marked degree the frontier between the northern plain inhabited chiefly by Nordics and the more mountainous countries in the south populated almost entirely by Alpines.

It has taken Germany two centuries to recover her vigor, her wealth and her aspirations to a place in the sun.

During these years Germany was a political nonentity, a mere congeries of petty states bickering and fighting with each other, claiming and owning only the Empire of the Air as Napoleon happily phrased it. Meantime France and England founded their colonial empires beyond the seas.

When in the last generation Germany became unified and organized, she found herself not only too late to share in these colonial enterprises, but also lacking in much of the racial element and still more lacking in the very classes which were her greatest strength and glory before the Thirty Years’ War. To-day the ghastly rarity in the German armies of chivalry and generosity toward women and of knightly protection and courtesy toward the prisoners or wounded can be largely attributed to this annihilation of the gentle classes. The Germans of to-day, whether they live on the farms or in the cities, are for the most part descendants of the peasants who survived, not of the brilliant knights and sturdy foot soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict. Knowledge of this great past when Europe was Teutonic and memories of the shadowy grandeur of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, who, generation after generation, led Teutonic armies over the Alps to assert their title to Italian provinces, have played no small part in modern German consciousness.

These traditions and the knowledge that their own religious dissensions swept them from the leadership of the European world lie at the base of the German imperial ideal of to-day and it is for this ideal that the German armies are dying, just as did their ancestors for a thousand years under their Fredericks, Henrys, Conrads and Ottos.

But the Empire of Rome and the Empire of Charlemagne are no more and the Teutonic type is divided almost equally between the contending forces in this world war. With the United States in the field the balance of pure Nordic blood will be heavily against the Central Powers, which pride themselves on being “the Teutonic powers.”

Germany is too late and is limited to a destiny fixed and ordained for her on the fatal day in 1618 when the Hapsburg Ferdinand forced the Protestants of Bohemia into revolt.

Although as a result of the Thirty Years’ War the German Empire is far less Nordic than in the Middle Ages, the north and northwest of Germany are still Teutonic throughout and in the east and south the Alpines have been thoroughly Germanized with an aristocracy and upper class very largely of pure Teutonic blood.

VIII
THE EXPANSION OF THE NORDICS

The men of Nordic blood to-day form practically all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. The Nordic realm includes nearly all the northern third of France with extensions into the fertile southwest; all the rich lowlands of Flanders; all Holland; the northern half of Germany with extensions up the Rhine and down the Danube; and the north of Poland and of Russia. Recent calculations indicate that there are about 90,000,000 of purely Nordic physical type in Europe out of a total population of 420,000,000.

Throughout southern Europe a Nordic nobility of Teutonic type everywhere forms the old aristocratic and military classes or what now remains of them. These aristocrats, by as much as their blood is pure, are taller and blonder than the native populations, whether these be Alpine in central Europe or Mediterranean in Spain or in the south of France and Italy.

The countries speaking Low German dialects are almost purely Nordic but the populations of High German speech are very largely Teutonized Alpines and occupy lands once Celtic-speaking. The main distinction between the two dialects is the presence of a large number of Celtic elements in High German.

In northern Italy there is a large amount of Nordic blood. In Lombardy, Venice and elsewhere throughout the country the aristocracy is blonder and taller than the peasantry, but the Nordic element in Italy has declined noticeably since the Middle Ages. From Roman times onward for a thousand years the Teutons swarmed into northern Italy, through the Alps and chiefly by way of the Brenner Pass. With the stoppage of these Nordic reinforcements this strain seems to have grown less all through Italy.[3]

Footnote 3:

Procopius tells a significant story which illustrates the contrast in
racial character between the natives and the barbarians. He relates
that, at the surrender of Ravenna in 540 A. D. by the Goths to the
army of the Byzantines, “when the Gothic women saw how swarthy, small
men of mean aspect had conquered their tall, robust, fair-skinned
barbarians, they were furious and spat in their husbands’ faces and
cursed them for cowards.”

In the Balkan Peninsula there is little to show for the floods of Nordic blood that have poured in for the last 3,500 years, beginning with the Achæans of Homer, who first appeared _en masse_ about 1400 B. C. and were followed successively by the Dorians, Cimmerians and Gauls, down to the Goths and the Varangians of Byzantine times.

The tall stature of the population along the Illyrian Alps from the Tyrol to Albania on the south is undoubtedly of Nordic origin and dates from some of these early invasions, but these Illyrians have been so crossed with Slavs that all other blond elements have been lost and the existing population is essentially of brachycephalic Alpine type. They are known as the Dinaric race. What few remnants of blondness occur in this district, more particularly in Albania, as well as the so-called Frankish elements in Bosnia, may probably be attributed to later infiltrations.

The Tyrolese seem to be largely Nordic except in respect to their round skull.

In Russia and in Poland the Nordic stature, blondness and long skull grow less and less pronounced as one proceeds south and east from the Gulf of Finland.

It would appear that in all those parts of Europe outside of its natural habitat, the Nordic blood is on the wane from England to Italy and that the ancient, acclimated and primitive populations of Alpine and Mediterranean race are subtly reasserting their long lost political power through a high breeding rate and democratic institutions.

In western Europe the first wave of the Nordic tribes appeared about three thousand years ago and was followed by other invasions with the Nordic element becoming stronger until after the fall of Rome whole tribes moved into its provinces, Teutonizing them more or less for varying lengths of time.

PROVISIONAL OUTLINE OF NORDIC INVASIONS AND METAL CULTURES