The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America. Grant Madison
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 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