Beginnings of the American People | Page 4

VASCO DA GAMA.
Gold is excellent; gold is treasure, and he that possesses it does all that
he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
I
Contact with the Orient has always been an important factor in the
history of Europe. Centers of civilization and of political power have
shifted with every decisive change in the relations of East and West.
Opposition between Greek and barbarian may be regarded as the motif
of Greek history, as it is a persistent refrain in Greek literature. The
plunder of Asia made Rome an empire whose capital was on the
Bosphorus more centuries than it was on the Tiber. Mediæval
civilization rose to its height when the Italian cities wrested from
Constantinople the mastery of the Levantine trade; and in the sixteenth
century, when the main traveled roads to the Far East shifted to the
ocean, direction of European affairs passed from Church and Empire to

the rising national states on the Atlantic. The history of America is
inseparable from these wider relations. The discovery of the New
World was the direct result of European interest in the Far East, an
incident in the charting of new highways for the world's commerce. In
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Europeans first gained reliable
knowledge of Far Eastern countries, of the routes by which they might
be reached, above all of the hoarded-treasure which lay there awaiting
the first comer. Columbus, endeavoring to establish direct connections
with these countries for trade and exploitation, found America blocking
the way. The discovery of the New World was but the sequel to the
discovery of the Old.
From the ninth to the eleventh century the people of Western Europe
had lived in comparative isolation. With half the heritage of the Roman
Empire in infidel hands, the followers of the Cross and of the Crescent
faced each other, like hostile armies, across the sea. The temporary
expansion of the Frankish Empire ceased with the life of Charlemagne,
and under his successors formidable enemies closed it in on every hand.
Barbarian Slav and Saxon pressed upon the eastern frontier, while the
hated Moslem, from the vantage of Spain and Africa, infested the
Mediterranean and threatened the Holy City. Even the Greek Empire,
natural ally of Christendom, deserted it, going the way of heresy and
schism.
Danger from without was accompanied by disorganization within. In
the tenth century the political edifice so painfully constructed by
Charlemagne was in ruins. The organization of the Roman Empire and
the Gregorian ideal of a Catholic Church, now little more than a
lingering tradition, was replaced by the feudal system. Seigneurs, lay
and ecclesiastic, warring among themselves for the shadow of power,
had neither time nor inclination for the ways of peace or the life of the
spirit. Learning all but disappeared; the useful arts were little cultivated;
cities fell into decay and the roads that bound them together were left in
unrepair; the life of the time, barren alike in hovel and castle, was
supported by the crude labor of a servile class. To be complete within
itself, secure from military attack and economically self-supporting,
were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great

fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural
population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility and isolation
within each seigneury."
But the feudal régime, well suited to a period of confusion, could not
withstand the disintegrating effects of even the small measure of peace
and prosperity which it secured. Increase in population and the
necessities of life liberated those expansive social forces, in politics and
industry, in intellectual life, in religious and emotional experience,
which produced the civilization of the later Middle Ages; that
wonderful thirteenth century which saw the rise of industry and the
towns, the foundation of royal power in alliance with a moneyed class,
the revival of intellectual activity which created the universities and the
scholastic philosophy, the intensification of the religious spirit
manifesting itself in such varied and perfect forms,--in the simple life
of a St. Francis or the solemn splendor of a Gothic cathedral.
Of this new and expanding life, the most striking external expression
was embodied in the Crusades. Strangely compounded of religious
enthusiasm and political ambition, of the redeless spirit of the
knight-errant and the cool calculation of the commercial bandit, these
half-military and half-migratory movements of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries mark the beginning of that return of the West upon
the East which is so persistent a factor in all modern history.
Christendom, so long isolated, now first broke the barriers that had
closed it in, and once more extended its frontier into western Asia:
Norman nobles, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Latin
Empire, enabled the