Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/196

 1 84 THE LATER MIDDLE AGES their name to the greatest of the German kingdoms which should more properly have retained its own name of Brandenburg. During the crusading period the districts on the south of the Baltic Sea were colonised, and to a great extent Germanised by The Teutonic the Saxons. The work was carried further along Knights. the eastern shores of the Baltic by the half-military, half-religious orders called the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, instituted after the model of the Knights Templars and Hospitallers. These realms, however, were never really brought under the sway of the empire; they were the last outposts of the heathen in Europe, and the Teutonic Knights were Christian outposts among them, offering an occasional alternative to Palestine and Spain for adventurous spirits who desired to do battle with the pagans. They passed eventually either to Brandenburg or to the Polish or the Russian kingdom. Poland advanced slowly. The progress of Russia, which with the Greek Empire was the buffer between Aryan Europe and The Mongols the Mongolian peoples of Asia, was stopped and in Russia. thrown back for centuries by a tremendous incur- sion of Tartar hordes in the thirteenth century. The Tartars or Mongols surged even further to the west j they poured into Poland, and won a great victory at Liegnitz; they turned into Hungary where they threatened to displace the Magyars. Then apparently for no more convincing reason than the death of their Khan they retired, contenting themselves with setting up a dominion on the Volga to which the Russians remained in subjection. This irruption was a part of the sudden and tremendous ex- pansion of the Mongols under the leadership of Timujin, better The Mongol known by his title of Genghis Khan. The Mongol Expansion. torrent swept through Western Asia as well as through Europe. It completed the disruption of the kaliphate of Bagdad, and in fact brought it to an end. The Seljuks were wise in time, and escaped annihilation by submission. But when the tide rolled down upon Egypt, the power which had shattered the crusade of St. Louis proved equal to the task of rolling back