Throughout mediaeval times the Empire and the
Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident.
With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western
life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the
whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it
from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders,
road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething
turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back
heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman
Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working
for a new uplift of civilization in Western Europe was round the
Karling House, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the
Great, the seat of whose Empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the
Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of
the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars,
wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented
dominion in Middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up
of the Karling Empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of
savagery: Vikings from the frozen North, and new hordes of outlandish
riders from Asia.
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