Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/53

 fallen away. The strength of feudalism had begun to wane; for a long time there was the name of empire without an imperial .head or bond. All that was not German, but only conventionally Roman, tended to separate from the solid core, whilst the true Germany and the Teutonic spirit remained, as they had always been, the chief rival and obstacle of the Papacy on the continent.

The kingdom of Castile, in which Leon had been absorbed, was steadily forcing the Moors of Granada upon the Mediterranean shore. But before the expulsion of Africa from Spain was completed, Asia had begun to overflow into the other extremity of southern Europe, and the Byzantine Empire became the mere shadow of its former greatness. The Crusaders had but irritated and provoked the vast nomadic fanaticism by which western Asia and northern Africa were penetrated and dominated. The Christians had gained some slight successes on the Syrian coast, but they could not long maintain their footing. The king of Jerusalem, the prince of Antioch, the counts of Jaffa, Nablous, and Edessa, with other petty local potentates, were brushed aside by sultans scarcely less petty than themselves, and the Mahomedan flood swept strongly and steadily onward until, at the close of the thirteenth century, Ottoman Turks had mastered almost the whole of Asia Minor. Half a century later they had crossed the Bosphorus into Europe.

This was a disturbing element, not to say an abiding cause of panic, for the nations of the south and west; and the fact must enter into every