Da Vinci, and virtually all of the leading men of the Renaissance were blond Nordics. Columbus himself, supposed to have come from Genoa, is described as having blue eyes and fair hair. In southern France, in the so-called Gothic Septimania and in the country around Toulouse, the home of the Troubadours, Gothic names abound.[6] A similar condition prevails throughout France. French names are Gothic, Frankish, or Burgundian today, though disguised by their spelling, as, for example, Joffre from Gotfrid. In the opinion of Count deLapouge, France as late as the settlement of America was more Nordic than is the Germany of today.
The main body of the Visigoths who survived the conquest by the Arabs took refuge in the northwestern part of Spain where they maintained some small kingdoms which ultimately coalesced and became the nucleus of a Christian Spain, which in the course of a seven-hundred-year crusade gradually reconquered the peninsula and finally expelled the Moors in 1492.
The Arabs who conquered Spain, and the Islamized Persians and Moors, had a wonderful period of intellectual expansion during the seventh and following centuries. This amazing outburst of genius, which preserved for us much of the science and learning of the Greeks, came to an end when the Mediterranean Mohammedans began mixing their blood with that of their Negro slaves. Mohammedanism has always appealed to the lower races, especially the Negro, because when they became followers of the Prophet they were admitted to social and racial equality with the superior race. This and the lure of the Negro women ruined the Arab race. Today, all through Africa and Egypt and in parts of Arabia, the so-called Arabs are often Negroid in appearance. In this case polygamy was a racial curse because the richer and abler men had the most slave women and left a larger progeny of half-breed children than did their poorer countrymen.
The exact reverse happened in the case of the Turks, who were originally Alpines from Central Asia strongly mixed with Mongol. They conquered Asia Minor and the nations of Southeast Europe up to and including Hungary. Everywhere they seized the most beautiful women and, being polygamists, the ablest Turks had the most children by the finest women of the subject countries. Thus the Turks bred up as the Arabs bred down. To this day the Turks are the superior race in Asia Minor and have eliminated, at least from the ruling classes, practically all the physical traces of their Asiatic origin.
The women of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians and Georgians, who retain some remnants of the Nordic Alans, have always been noted for their physical beauty. They were in great demand in Turkish Harems.
Incidentally the Kurds are, or rather were, Nordic and it is interesting to note that Saladin, of Crusading fame, was a Kurd.
Concerning other Teutonic Nordics, we need mention only those whose blood enters largely into modern nations. Of these, one of the most interesting peoples were the Burgundians, who settled on the western bank of the upper Rhine in what is now Alsace, and in Burgundian France and French-speaking Switzerland. They were a very promising and flourishing nation until their overthrow in the middle of the fifth century by Attila and his Huns, a tragedy which supplies the subject matter of the Niebelungenlied. Appollonius Sidonius refers to the Burgundians as being seven feet high; while this is an obvious exaggeration, it is interesting to note that in the old Burgundian provinces we find the tallest stature in France today.
When the Lombards first appear in history about 165 A.D. they were in northern Germany. They entered Italy in 568 A.D. and conquered the Peninsula even more thoroughly than had their predecessors, the Ostrogoths. They not only occupied Italy north of the Apennines for three hundred years, but also established several large duchies in the south. The valley of the Po, where they settled, had been for centuries Cisalpine Gaul, and this Lombard territory is today the backbone of modern Italy. The percentage of light-colored eyes around Milan is high, and blondness through this district is as common a characteristic of the peasantry as it is of the aristocracy throughout the rest of Italy.
The Lombards were Arians and were in constant conflict with the Popes and their Orthodox followers and were consequently generally maligned. Just as a similar situation facilitated the conquest of Spain by the Moors, so the destruction of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks was made the easier by this antagonism.
In passing, we need only remark that there were small bands of other Nordics, who entered Italy as Saxons, Alemanni, and Suevi, and who entered France as Alans and Saxons. These small bands differed in few respects from the larger Nordic peoples and were quickly absorbed in them. All these barbarian tribes were closely related racially.
Before we leave the Alemanni who occupied southwest Germany with Alsace and German-speaking Switzerland, we may note that their name, Alemanni, did not mean 'All Men' in the sense of a mixed company, but rather The Men "par excellence,"—the German "All" being the analogous of the Greek "Pan."
We come next to the Franks, who appear in history about the time of the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.D. in which they took an unimportant part, but in the following centuries they rapidly gained the ascendency throughout Gaul and western Germany. The conquests by the Franks were the most important and enduring of those of the Teutonic Nordics in Continental Europe. We know very little about the Franks from the Romans, although they may have been the Varini, who were located in northwestern Germany in classic times. As a result of the Crusades, Roman Orthodox, as contrasted with Greek Christians, are known as "Ferangi" to this day in the Levant. Being Orthodox Christians and not Arians, the Franks had the support of the Roman Church in all their conquests.
The Flemings of Belgium are remnants of the original Franks who retained their own language. Most of these invaders, like the Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, and Normans, adopted the Latin language of their subject peoples when they settled within the confines of the Roman Empire.
Except in eastern England and northern France the numbers of the conquering Nordics were not sufficient entirely to evict and replace the conquered populations, but they everywhere formed the upper classes and land-owning aristocracy and to this day these same classes in all European nations continue to show, in more or less purity, the physical characters of the Nordic race.
During the Middle Ages, the dominating and war-like Nordics paused long enough from fighting each other to carry on the Crusades and to beat back the onrush of the Saracens at Tours in 732 A.D. They saved Europe from the Mongols in 1241 A.D. at the Battle of Liegnitz (now Wahlstatt) in Silesia where the Duke of Liegnitz and the Nordic nobility, outnumbered five to one, lay dead upon the field of battle; but checked the advance of the Asiatic hordes and saved the budding civilization of Europe from the fate of Asia.
This race supplied the navigators of the expansion period, when the world was for the first time opened up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and since then they have formed the fighting men, soldiers, sailors, explorers, hunters, adventurers, and frontiersmen of Europe and her colonies.
After mastering the north of France, the Franks subjugated the remnants of the Burgundians and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom which still flourished in the south of Gaul. They also conquered the country on the east bank of the Rhine known as Franconia, and under Charlemagne seized northern Italy. In 800 A.D. Charlemagne revived the Western Roman Empire, which under various guises lasted down to 1807.
Charlemagne's greatest and most difficult conquest, however, was that of the Saxons, who were pure Nordics. They occupied the districts of northwest Germany, centering in Hanover, and even today this part of Germany is still the most Nordic portion of that country.
When Charlemagne reached the Elbe in his conquests he found beyond it the heathen Alpine Wends and from his day down to the World War, the history of Central Europe has been the pushing back of the frontier of Alpine Asia from the Elbe eastward toward the Urals.
These eastern lands were conquered and little by little Christianized and civilized from the west. This process went on as far as
