Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/174

 i6 2 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES was in effect a province in the dominion of the Duke of Normandy or of the Count of Anjou. It was not till they had been almost entirely bereft of their possessions in France that kings of England began the attempt to recover them as provinces of the English kingdom. In the eastern empire after the time of disturbance which followed when the Isaurian dynasty came to an end, the 5 The Emperor Basil established the Macedonian dynasty. Eastern In the second half of the tenth century and the Empire. early years of the eleventh, the Christian empire recovered ground in Asia and carried its frontiers as far as the Euphrates, taking advantage of the disorganisation which was coming over the eastern kaliphate. But Byzantium was threatened during these two centuries quite as much on its European frontier as in Asia. We have seen that the pure Slavs who crossed the Danube were admitted as settlers, and did not set up an independent state. The Bulgars, however, created a dominion of their own on the Lower Danube, which did develop into a Slavonic State, because the ruling Bulgars really became absorbed into the Slavonic population over whom they were at first masters ; in the same sort of way that the Norman conquerors of England afterwards became absorbed by the English. The overthrow and annexation of Bulgaria by Basil n,, early in the eleventh century, delivered the eastern empire from a neighbour that was becoming a serious danger. During these centuries also we hear in a dim confused way of the beginnings of Russia. Out of the north there came to Tne the Black Sea a people whom the Greeks called Beginnings Ros, Russians. Their names, however, and of Russia. customs were not Slavonic but Scandinavian. It is probable that Swedish adventurers established a lordship over the tribes in the neighbourhood of the Baltic, and led them south, seeking new lands to conquer after the Scandinavian fashion. The traditional founder of the Russian Empire was a hero named Rurik, and its headquarters were first at Novgorod in the north and then at Kiev on the river Dnieper. In the long-run the Scandinavian element disappeared, but in the early