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 the Vistula, where it met the culture, and Greek Orthodox religion, of the Byzantine Empire, which had followed up the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and had given to Moscovia and to the Ukraine their religion, alphabet, and art.
The Northmen were the last of the Nordic barbarians to appear on the scene. In the ninth and tenth centuries they raided the coasts of Europe from England to Greece. They established themselves as permanent settlers on all the Scottish islands and on many parts of the Scottish coast. In Caithness, the northernmost corner of Scotland, Norse was spoken as late as the seventeenth century. They formed settlements and left place names all around the coasts of Wales and England. In the tenth century as Danes they subjugated northeastern England and imposed their rule east of the line of Watling Street, which runs from London to Chester. These Danes had barely been overcome by the Saxons when a new group of Nordics arrived as Normans from France and conquered England in 1066.
Ireland was attacked by the Norse who came in from the north and by the Danes who entered from the south. The island was overrun by these two peoples who have left many traces in the place names and in the blood of Ireland.
On the Continent the coasts of France and Germany were harried by the Northmen and the country since called Normandy was conquered by them in 911 A.D. The Danish conquest of England, referred to above, must have been largely Norse while, in France, Rollo's followers were probably to an overwhelming extent Danes.
The Norman element in England and to some extent in America down to this very day has supplied a very large proportion of the conquerors, seamen, explorers, and frontiersmen. This same ruling and restless strain showed itself in the individual adventurers who went to South Italy and Sicily, which they thoroughly conquered in the twelfth century. They even attacked the Byzantine Empire. To this day blue eyes in Sicily are called "Norman eyes" and are to some extent characteristic of the upper classes there.
It was in this period that the Norse rovers under Leif Ericson discovered the northeast mainland of America about 1000 A.D., nearly five hundred years before Columbus, who probably knew of their voyages, crossed the Atlantic.
At the time of this Norwegian and Danish expansion, there was a similar outpouring of Swedes who, as Varangians, crossed the Baltic into Russia, which they conquered and ruled for many centuries. The name Varangian is strongly suggestive of Varini or Franks and the name "Russian" means "rowers." The Varangians came across the seas precisely as their ancestors, the Goths, had done a thousand years earlier. After the expansion of this so-called Viking period, Scandinavian activities came to an end.
* * * * *
Man undoubtedly crossed back and forth on dry land from Europe to England in Neolithic and earlier times. In fact, some of the earliest records of man have been found in England and the recent discoveries in Norfolk of chipped implements and hearths show that man made tools and used fire in England before the appearance of the first glaciers—something over a million years ago.
These early species and genera of men largely died out or were exterminated and were succeeded at the beginning of Neolithic times by invasions of the small, dark, long-skulled Mediterranean race which for many thousands of years formed the basis of the population of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
About the beginning of the Bronze Age, some 1800 B.C., a tall, round-skulled type from the Continent called the Beaker Makers appeared on the scene in England. They resembled somewhat the present Dinaric race, a tall, round-skulled branch of the Alpines now found from the Tyrol southward to Albania on the east side of the Adriatic. It is clear that the Beaker Makers entered from the east across the narrow seas and their remains indicate a tall, masterful type which seems to have disappeared to a large extent, although some of the round-skulled, heavily built Englishmen, found numerously among the commercial classes, may be their representatives today.
The racial composition of the British Isles when the Nordic first appeared on the scene may be safely said to have been composed of small, brunet Mediterraneans interspersed with a small number of round-skulled types and including, very probably, remnants of still earlier races.
The Celtic-speaking Nordics appear to have crossed the Rhine into France and the countries to the southwest about 800 B.C. At about the same time they forced their way into the British Isles which they thoroughly conquered. These Nordics were called Goidels or "Q" Celts and their language is represented today by the remnants of Erse in Ireland, Gaelic in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man. These "Q" Celts, as contrasted with the later coming "P" Celts, are now represented by the Macs (meaning son) just as the later Cymric or Brythonic Celts are called "P" Celts because in their language Ap means son.
The aborigines were called Picts in Scotland. These Mediterranean Picts spoke a language related to Hamitic or Egyptian, and many place names of this origin are still to be found.
It is not definitely known whether the Gaelic speech of Scotland is a remnant of early Goidel invasion or whether it was reintroduced from Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The latter appears probable, because the second conquest by the Celts was nearly complete throughout Britain, although it did not reach Ireland. This second subjugation of Britain was by the "P" Celts or Brythons, speaking a Cymric form of Celtic. It occurred in the fourth century B.C. and was so thorough that it is not probable that remnants of the earlier Goidelic speech could have survived in Scotland.
These Brythons were represented on the continent by the Belgæ, who, in Cæsar's time, occupied Gaul between the Rhine and the Seine. A remnant of their speech survives in Brittany as Armorican.
The "P" Celts gave their speech to all England and remnants of it are found in the recently extinct Cornish in Cornwall and in the Cymric of Wales. Both the "Q" Celts and the "P" Celts were, on their arrival in Britain, pure Nordics, but in many cases they soon merged with the aboriginal population. They were everywhere the ruling military class, in Britain as well as in Gaul.
Having imposed their language on the conquered people, they died out almost completely, leaving, as in Wales, their speech on the lips of the little Mediterranean native. Whatever truth there is in the legends of King Arthur and his resistance to the Saxons they clearly indicate a blond, Celtic aristocracy ruling over an underclass
