Chapter 7
TEUTONIC EUROPE

No proper understanding is possible of the meaning of the history of Christendom, or full appreciation of the place in it of the Teutonic Nordics, without a brief review of the events in Europe of the last two thousand years. When Rome fell and changed trade conditions neces-sitated the transfer of power from its historic capital in Italy to a strategic situation on the Bosporus, western Europe was definitely and finally abandoned to its Germanic invaders. These same barbarians swept up again and again to the Propontis, only to recoil before the organized strength of the Byzantine Empire, and the walls of Mikklegard. Until the coming of the Alpine Slavs the Eastern Empire still held in Europe the Balkan Peninsula and much of the eastern Mediterranean. The Western Empire, however, collapsed utterly under the impact of hordes of Nordic Teutons at a much earlier date. In the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, north Africa, once the empire of Carthage, had become the seat of the kingdom of Teutonic Vandals. Spain fell under the control of the Visigoths, and Lusitania, now Portugal, under that of the Suevi. Gaul was Visigothic in the south and Burgundian in the east, while the Frankish kingdom dominated the north until it finally absorbed and incorporated all the territories of ancient Gaul and made it the land of the Franks. Italy fell under the control first of the Ostrogoths and then of the Lombards. The purely Teutonic Saxons, with kindred tribes, conquered the British Isles, and mean-while the Norse and Danish Scandinavians contributed large elements to all the coast populations as far south as Spain, and the Swedes organized in the eastern Baltic what is now Russia. Thus when Rome passed, all Europe had become superficially Teutonic. At first these Teutons were isolated and independent tribes, bearing some shadowy relation to the one organized state they knew, the Empire of Rome. Then came the Mohammedan invasion, which reached western Europe from Africa and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom. The Moslems swept on un-checked until their light horsemen dashed themselves to pieces against the heavy armed cavalry of Charles Martel and his Franks at Tours in 732 A.D. The destruction of the Vandal kingdom by the armies of the Byzantine Empire; the conquest of Spain by the Moors, and finally the overthrow of the Lombards by the Franks were all greatly facilitated by the fact that these barbarians, Vandals, Goths, Suevi, and Lombards, with the sole exception of the Franks, were originally Christians of the Arian or Unitarian confession, and as such were regarded as heretics by their Orthodox Christian subjects. The Franks alone were converted from heathenism directly into the Trinitarian faith to which the old populations of the Roman Empire adhered. From this orthodoxy of the Franks arose the close relation between France, "the eldest daughter of the church," and the papacy, a connection which lasted for more than a thousand years-in fact nearly to our own day. With the Goths eliminated, western Christendom became Frankish. In the year 800 A.D. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome and re-established the Roman Empire in the west, which included all Christendom outside of the Byzantine Empire. In some form or shape this Roman Empire endured until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and during all that time it formed the basis of the political concept of European man. This same concept lies today at the root of the imperial idea. The Kaiser, Tsar, and Emperor all take their name, and in some way trace their title, from Cesar and the Empire. Charlemagne and his successors claimed, and often exercised, over-lordship as to all the other conti-nental Christian nations, and when the Crusades began it was the German Emperor who led the Frankish hosts against the Saracens. Charlemagne was a German Emperor, his capital was at Aachen, within the present limits of the German Empire, and the language of his court was German. For several centuries after the conquest of Gaul by the Franks, their Teutonic tongue held its own against the Latin speech of the Romanized Gauls. The history of all Christian Europe is in some degree interwoven with this Holy Roman Empire. Though the Empire was neither holy nor Roman, but altogether secular and Teutonic, it was, nevertheless, the central core of Europe for ages. Holland and Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, Burgundy and Luxemberg, Lombardy and Venezia, Switzerland and Austria, Bohemia and Styria are states which were originally component parts of the Empire, although many of them have since been torn away by rival nations or have become independent, while much of northern Italy remained under the sway of Austria within the memory of living men. The Empire wasted its strength in imperial ambitions and foreign conquests instead of consolidating, organizing, and unifying its own territories, and the fact that the imperial crown was elective for many generations before it became hereditary in the House of Hapsburg, checked the unification of Germany during the Middle Ages. A strong hereditary monarchy such as those which arose in England and in France would have anticipated the Germany of to-day by a thousand years and made it the predominant state in Christendom, but disruptive ele-ments, in the persons of great territorial dukes, were successful throughout its history in preventing an effective concentration of power in the hands of the Emperor. That the German Emperor was regarded, though vague-ly, as the overlord of all Christian monarchs was clearly indicated when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France appeared as candidates for the imperial crown against Charles of Spain, afterward the Emperor Charles V. Europe was Germany, and Germany was Europe, predominantly, until the Thirty Years' War. This war was perhaps the greatest catastrophe of all the ghastly crimes committed in the name of religion. It destroyed an entire generation, taking each year for thirty years the finest manhood of the nations. Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Wurtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man, and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south, and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature, and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause. In addition, the Thirty Years' War virtually destroyed the land owning yeomanry and lesser gentry formerly found in mediaeval Germany as numerously as in France or in England. The religious wars of France, while not as devastating to the nation as a whole as was the Thirty Years' War in Germany, nevertheless greatly weakened the French cavalier type, the "petite noblesse de province." In Germany this class had flourished, and throughout the Middle Ages contributed great numbers of knights, poets, thinkers, great artists and artisans who gave charm and variety to European society. But as said, this section of the population was practically extermi-nated in the Thirty Years' War, and the class of gentle-men practically vanishes from German history from that time on. When the Thirty Years' War was over there remained in Germany nothing except the brutalized peasantry, largely of Alpine derivation in the south and east, and the high nobility which turned from the toils of endless warfare to mimic on a small scale the court of Versailles. It has taken Germany two centuries to recover her vigor, her wealth, and her aspirations to a place in the sun. During these years Germany was a political nonentity, a mere congery of petty states bickering and fighting with each other, claiming and owning only the Empire of the Air as Napoleon happily phrased it, and meantime France and England founded their colonial empires beyond the seas. When, in the last generation, Germany became unified and organized, she found herself not only too late to share in these colonial enterprises, but also lacking in much of the racial element, and still more lacking in the very classes which were her greatest strength and glory before the Thirty Years' War. To-day the ghastly rarity in the German armies of chivalry and generosity toward women, and of knightly protection and courtesy toward the prisoners or wounded, can be largely attributed to this annihilation of the gentle classes. The Germans of to-day, whether they live on the farms or in the cities, are for the most part, descendants of the peasants who survived, not of the brilliant knights and sturdy foot soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict. Knowledge of this great past when Europe was Teutonic, and memories of the shadowy grandeur of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, who, generation after generation, led Teut-onic armies over the Alps to assert their title to Italian provinces, have played no small part in modern German consciousness. These traditions and the knowledge that their own religious dissensions swept them from the leadership of the European world, lie at the base of the German imperial ideal of to-day, and it is for this ideal that the German armies are dying, just as did their ancestors for a thousand years under their Fredericks, Henrys, Con-rads, and Ottos. But the Empire of Rome and the Empire of Charlemagne are no more, and the Teutonic type is divided almost equally between the contending forces in this world war. Germany is too late, and is limited to a destiny fixed and ordained for her on the fatal day in 1618 when the Hapsburg Ferdinand forced the Protestants of Bohemia into revolt. Although as a result of the Thirty Years' War the German Empire is far less Nordic than in the Middle Ages, the north of Germany is still Teutonic throughout, and in the east and south the Alpines have been thoroughly Germanized with an aristocracy and upper class of pure Teutonic blood.