Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/374

 3i6 O 21 times of European History The unity or continuity of history General changes do not occur on fixed dates Meaning of the term " Middle Ages " The Germans belonged to the Indo- European peoples So a change in government affects the habits of a people but slowly in any case, and it may leave them quite unaltered. This tendency of mankind to do, in general, this year what it did last, in spite of changes in some one department of life, — such as substituting a president for a king, traveling by rail in- stead of on horseback, or getting the news from a newspaper instead of from a neighbor, — results in what is called the unity or co7itinuity of histofy. The truth that no sudden change has ever taken place in all the customs of a people, and that it can- not, in the nature of things, take place, is perhaps the most fundamental lesson that history teaches. Historians sometimes seem to forget this principle, when they undertake to begin and end their books at precise dates. We find histories of Europe from 476 to 918, from 1270 to 1492, as if the accession of a capable German king in 918, or the death of a famous French king in 1270, or the discovery of America in 1492, marked 2l general change in European affairs. In reality, however, no general change took place at these dates or in any other single year. We cannot, therefore, hope to fix any year or event which may properly be taken as the beginning of that long period which followed the break-up of the Roman Empire in western Europe and which is commonly called the Middle Ages. Beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Roman Empire, which embraced the whole civilized world from the Euphrates to Britain, mysterious peoples moved about whose history before they came into occasional contact with the Romans is practically unknown. These Germans, or " Barbarians " as the Romans called them, belonged to the same great group of peoples to which the Per- sians, Greeks, and Romans belonged — the Indo-European race (see above, pp. 86 ff.). They were destined, as their relatives had earlier done, to take possession of the lands of others and help build up a different civilization from that they found. They had first begun to make trouble about a hundred years before Christ, when a great army of them was defeated by the Roman