Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/462

434 lightest breath of civilisation absolutely ruins the mounted nomad. This enormous contrast shewed itself also in the kind of slavery. The mounted nomad treated the subjugated peoples like the beasts of the forest which are hunted and harried for amusement and mere delight in killing. Himself void of all capacity for civilisation, he stifles all germs of civilisation found among his subjects, outraging their sense of justice by his lawlessness and licence, and the race itself by the violation of their women. The German on the other hand treated his serf as a useful domestic animal which is destroyed only in anger and never wantonly. He enjoyed a certain autonomy, remaining unmolested after the performance of definite duties. Even the Scandinavian pirates, according to the Arabian geographer, handled their serfs "well" (from an Oriental point of view). It is then no wonder that the Slavs, incapable of resisting the terrible plundering raids and powerless to give themselves political organisation, preferred to submit voluntarily to the dominion of the pirates.

Concerning this the oldest Russian chronicler Pseudo-Nestor states (under the year 859): "[The Slavs] drove the Varangians over the sea, and ... began to govern themselves, and there was no justice among them, and clan rose against clan, and there was internal strife between them. ... And they said to each other: Let us seek for a prince who can reign over us and judge what is right. And they went over the sea to the Varangians, to Rus, for so were these Varangians called. ... [They] said to Russ: Our land is large and rich, but there is no order in it; come ye and rule and reign over us. And three brothers were with their whole clan, and they took with them all the Russ, and they came at first to the Sloviens and built the town of Ladoga, and the eldest Rurik settled in Ladoga. ... And the Russian land got its name from these Varangians."

The misery of the Slavs was the salvation of the West. The energy of the Altaians was exhausted in Eastern Europe, and Germany and France behind the Slavic breakwater were able freely to develop their civilisation. Had they possessed such steppes as Hungary or South Russia, there is no reason to suppose that they would have fared any better than the Slavs.

The compact Slav settlement of the countries east of the Elbe and south of the Danube took place between the sixth and seventh centuries. In their occupation of the German mother-countries between the Elbe and the Vistula two phases are to be distinguished — one pre-Avar and the