Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/163

 FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO HILDEBRAND 151 did settle down, for adapting themselves to their surroundings. In England they became English with a difference, a harder and more irrepressible type than the Saxons of the south and the west. In Normandy they became French with a difference, a sterner and more adventurous type of Frenchmen. Out of Normandy they issued at last to carve new kingdoms for themselves in southern lands, and to become the most vigorous representative of the Militant Christianity which for two centuries battled for the Holy Land against the Moslem. While the Northmen harried the northern coast and gradually planted themselves in northern provinces, the naval power of the Saracens was growing in the Mediterranean, i s iam and where they threatened to make conquest of Sicily *&« Turks, and of Southern Italy ; though their progress in the far west of the continent had been finally checked. But a change was taking place in the character of the Saracen power. The Arab supremacy was passing. Barbarian Turks were pushing their way into the Moslem Empire as the Teutons had pushed their way into the dominions of Rome. They came ; they accepted Islam and became its most fanatical adherents, but they gradually made themselves also the ruling race among the Mohammedans ; the race which provided the strongest governors, the most successful captains, the most indomitable soldiers. But the Turk was also more intolerant and more cruel than the Arab, and a fiercer hostility arose between the two creeds of Christ and of Mohammed. The close of the eleventh century marks the moment of the Norman expansion and the beginning of the Crusades. In the meantime, since the death of Charlemagne, his great empire had again broken up into many kingdoms, though there remained always one emperor whose supremacy Empire and was usually only nominal. And while the empire Church, went to pieces the papacy also degenerated, sinking even to a scandalous depth of degradation. The empire was the first to recover in the powerful hands of the Saxon dynasty of the Ottos. The Ottos intervened forcibly to rehabilitate the char- acter of the papacy, and before the end of the eleventh century