THE MAKING OF WESTERN •• EUROPE.*

MR. C. R. L. FLETCHER gives us here the first volume of his attempt to trace the fortunes of the children of the Romani Empire. It is written in his highly individual, informal, and.

airy manner, which has already won a largo following of delighted readers. In his introductory history of England, • which has made many schoolboys aware for the first time that history may be jolly reading, Mr. Fletcher tried,

to knock down some of the accepted opinions of the Whig historians, who, as lie said in effect, had had the game too much in their own hands. For our part we are quite content with the Whig view of history, and bold that those who have had the beat of the • game

also deserved it. But in reading this delightful narrative of. the children of the Roman Empire between A.D. 300 and 1000 we have had no sense that we were being unnecessarily challenged in a rational and extremely defensible position. If ever there was a period which requires a process of simplification in order to make history intelligible or readable for ordinary brains that period is the dark ages in . Europe, The way in which Mr. Fletcher threads his way through the mazes of the divided and continually decaying and reviving. Roman Empire is masterly. A schoolboy might feel as though one of those new powerful filament electric lamps had suddenly been switched on in a dark intricate old room which he had formerly explored dimly, candle in hand., And Mr. Fletcher in dealing with the early history of the

Church is always the uubigoted layman who, in spite of reservations, keeps a lively faith and is uninfluenced—except to a dry contempt or an ironical impatience—by the claims of the unbalanced ecclesiastic. He-says :—

"One who firmly believes, as r do, in the literal truth of the essential facts of the gospel story, and yet cannot accept any, theory of inspiration in the writers of the Now Testament, still less of any continuous inspiration of the Church, must necessarily find great difficulties in dealing with Church History. I cannot help seeing how thickly, even from the earliest times, the Church.

" The Making of Wontorn Europe: being an Attempt to Trace the Fortunes of Ito Chiiclron of iho Roman Empire. Vol. " The Dark Agee, 300-1000 A.D.. By C. It. L. Fletcher. London : John Murray. [7s.13(1. net. J overlaid -the truth with masses . of legend. and ..superatition.;, and yet I feel both that her success in converting the world was largely owing to her use of superstition, and also that her con- version of the world was' the greatest and best fact in human history. Every one, or almost every one, will admit the truth of the last statement ; but there is a tendency at the present day, among a highly intellectual school of Churchmen, to lay more stress upon the accretions than upon the essence of Chris- tianity. One hears of divines who are ready to treat the Resur- rection of Christ as an allegory, while remaining quite sound on the Apostolical Succession of the Episcopate. To me this position seems somewhat illogical, and though I shall no doubt be scolded as anti-clerical, I shall comfort myself by remaining a Christian."

Mr. Fletcher shows in sufficient detail how splendidly the Church compensated the Latin world for the Roman barren- fleas of ideals. The Roman Empire was an empire of men of affairs, without the multifarious refinement and subtlety of the Greeks. As time went on more and more of the Greek art of life was borrowed, and it was the great advantage of the Church that it, too, rapidly became Greek, although exclusively Jewish

in origin. When the" barbarians" invaded the Roman Empire they came, in Mr. Fletcher's emphatic opinion, not to destroy civilization, but to share it. They were jealous of Roman superiority and they wished to imitate it. Moreover, the Empire, in the clutch of circumstances, was in absolute need of them as soldiers and colonists ; yet the Empire, unconscious of this fact, was profoundly disdainful. Alaric, before he

sacked Rome, made proposals again and again by which mere destruction might have been avoided. " Give me and mine lands in Rhtetia or in Illyricum, or sufficient lands any- where, and make me captain of your army as Stilicho was," was the burden of all his messages to Honorius. But Honorius steadily refused. The " barbarian " tide flowed on till it overflowed into Africa, and the Vandal kingdom was formed there. At length the reign of the last puppet Emperors in Italy came to an end, and all really imperial institutions in the West disappeared. Such semblances of them as survived were readily accepted by the amenable "barbarians."

From the extraordinarily confused elements of the fifth century rose Justinian in the Eastern Empire at Constanti- nople, lawgiver, builder of St. Sophia, statesman, and con- queror. His successors were wretched trustees of a consider- able legacy. But the epoch of Justinian and his amazing general I3elisarius was unmistakably fine. One would have liked Mr. Fletcher to let himself go about Belisarius—that indispensable soldier, loyal to a suspicious master, refusing the crown for himself, unable to make mistakes in war except when his orders were disregarded, and ultimately humbled and ruined by a vain, intriguing wife—but, of course, Mr. Fletcher is right; be had to observe proportion in his brief work as well as clearness. The destruction of the Vandal and Ostrogothic kingdoms by Belisarius was only an incident instead of serving as an example and incentive to the

Byzantine Empire. The nerveless hold of Constantinople on Italy, maintained through the Exarchs of Ravenna, relaxed, and under Pope Gregory the Papacy became practically inde- pendent. Meanwhile the Merovingian Franks had established a kingdom in France, the Visigoths a kingdom in Spain, and the Lombards a kingdom in Italy. The Merovingian Franks were to absorb the Burgundians, and themselves in the eighth century to yield to the Caroling Franks. The Gothic kings of Spain were firat Arian and then Catholic, and their obscure dynasty fell before the Moors. Italy became a battle ground of conflicts between weak popes and Lombard kings and dukes, complicated by the occasional outreaching of the "Roman " imperial hand from Constantinople. The last struggle between the Empire and Persia in the early years of the seventh century was the preparation for the rise of Mohammed. The Persian and Roman Empires became orientalized by the conquering Arabs. There was no longer any vital nexus between the orientalized empire at Constantinople and Italy. Italy was ready for Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, to master the situation, to be crowned

at Rome, and to found the "Holy Roman Empire." This empire may not, as the familiar gibe says, have been "holy," or " Roman," or "an empire," but it was Western in spirit, and, though .a noble failure in its attempt to graft Roman Christian culture on to Franks and Germans, it was com- paratively acceptable even to Italians, who were neither under- atood nor considered by the orientalized Byzantines. The Mohammedan world was already divided into two caliphates at Baghdad and-Cordova. Charlemagne's policy towards the East was backward and mild. Mr. Fletcher says :— "If anything could have tempted him to an Eastern policy, it would have been the sedulous friendship of Caliph Haroun al- Rashid. It was with Ifaroun's approval that the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 799 sent gifts to Charles, and sent in the next year the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. Alcuin, indeed, thought that this implied some actual Frankish sovereignty over the most sacred, of sites; and the terms in which an embassy from Haroun him- self spoke in 807 seemed to suggest the same idea. Haroun was. very careful to protect Frank pilgrims to Jerusalem, and it hospice was built for them there. The Moslem had nothing to fear from such persons, for the Greek and Latin monks already nourialied a. holy abhorrence of each other, and the few Latins who made the. difficult journey to Jerusalem were more ill-treated by their Greek follow-Christians than by the Arabs. Among the gifts which: Hamm sent to Charles (802) was an elephant, the first perhaps, which had been seen in the West since the fifth century, the only elephant, says Eginhard, which Haroun himself possessed. This. dear beast, whose name was Aboulabbas, had a keeper called Isaac, the Jew ; Charles was imprudent enough to take it with him campaigning against the Danes in 810, and it died in con- sequence."

As in the Eastern Empire the successors of Justinian lailed• in their trust, so did the successors of Charles the Great fail in the new Empire of the West. Italy was raided in the ninth century by Hungarians and Saracens, while the son an

grandsons of Charles fought among themselves. The result was the establishment of the separate kingdoms of France- and Germany. The Hungarian and Saracen raids of Italy ceased in due course ; and the Saxon dynasty—as though to' point the irony of Charlemagne's continual victories over the, Saxons—took possession of the almost inanimate Empire of the West and accepted the responsibility of checking the woeful corruption of the Papacy.

Mr. Fletcher writes little of the Eastern Empire in the and tenth centuries. Constantinople still professed to- be the bead city of the Roman Empire, but, as he says, after the Eastern Empire had become orientalized the points of

contact between the Greek rulers at Constantinople and their Western neighbours were few. Such an omission was probably, essential to the process of simplification and in the interests, of compression. We must repeat that what Mr. Fletcher haat actually done is a wonder of lucidity.