The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2

The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2

Period 2 of Horace G. Hutchinson's "The Greatest Story in the World" traces the disintegration of the unified Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe between roughly A.D. 100 and 1150. It opens with Rome at its height, its straight roads and disciplined legions binding a world stretching from Britain to Egypt, and explains how Claudius's conquest brought the Celtic Brythons of Britain under Roman rule and Romanized influence while leaving the Picts of the north unsubdued behind Hadrian's and Antonine's walls. The narrative then shows the Empire's internal weakening: legions stationed permanently at frontier camps grew rooted to their localities, married locally, and became more loyal to their own commanders than to distant Rome. Meanwhile Germanic "barbarian" peoples—Franks, Goths, Vandals—pressed against the frontiers, themselves driven westward by the fierce, non-Indo-European Huns. Hutchinson describes barbarian society itself: free landowning farmers (ceorls) and their chieftains (eorls) governing through tribal assemblies and blood-compensation law, a system whose gradual erosion of common-man participation seeded the later feudal order. The book charts the great migrations chronologically: Visigoths sacking Rome in 410 and founding a Romanized kingdom at Toulouse and then in Spain; Vandals sweeping through Gaul and Spain into North Africa, seizing Carthage, and sacking Rome again in 455 before being crushed by Belisarius; Ostrogoths under Theodoric ruling Italy until likewise defeated by Belisarius; Attila's Huns checked at Chalons in 451; and the Franks, under Clovis and later Charles Martel (victor over the Saracens at Tours, 732) and Pepin, becoming the one Germanic power that endured and expanded rather than vanishing. The division of the Empire into Western and Eastern (Byzantine) halves under Diocletian and later Valentinian/Valens is explained as a response to simultaneous pressure on both frontiers, with the East proving the more durable and prosperous half. A parallel thread follows Britain: after Roman legions withdrew (407), Picts overran the walls, prompting Britons to invite Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who instead conquered and paganized much of the island, pushing Britons into the Celtic west. Christianity, initially destroyed in England, was reintroduced twice—via Augustine's Roman mission to Kent and via Irish monks through Iona and Lindisfarne—with the Synod of Whitby (664) settling English allegiance to Rome. England remained fragmented among Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex until Egbert's unification (827), after which Danish Viking raids intensified, resisted and partly negotiated by Alfred the Great, who divided the country along Watling Street, fostered learning, and Christianized the Danes. Later Danish kings (Canute) and finally the Norman Conquest of 1066—rooted in dynastic ties formed when Ethelred married a Norman duke's daughter—brought England into close connection with Continental Normandy, itself a Viking-founded duchy within France. Hutchinson devotes substantial attention to the rise of the Papacy: Rome's bishop gained primacy through the city's imperial prestige, its association with Peter and Paul, and the "Donation of Constantine," while Saracen conquests eliminated three of the five Church patriarchates (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria), leaving Rome and Constantinople as rival centers. The book explains how the Pope, needing military protection against Lombard aggression, allied with the Frankish kings Pepin and Charlemagne, culminating in Charlemagne's imperial coronation by the Pope in 800—symbolically transferring the mantle of Roman authority to a Germanic, Frankish ruler and cementing papal territorial power (the Papal States). A major section narrates the birth and explosive spread of Islam: Mahomet's preaching in Arabia, his caliphal successors' rapid conquest of Persia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, and the Moorish invasion of Visigothic Spain in 710, checked only at Tours in 732. The author draws a deliberate parallel between the Pope's spiritual authority over a politically fragmented Christian Europe and the caliph's loose religious sway over an equally decentralized Muslim world. The account of Charlemagne's Empire—spanning France, Germany, the Low Countries, northern Italy, and beyond—serves as the high-water mark before its rapid fragmentation among his grandsons, which Hutchinson identifies as the true seedbed of the feudal system: royal weakness forced ordinary people to seek protection from local lords, converting Roman-style "immunities" and the patron-client and precarium traditions into vassalage, fiefs, counts, and dukes. Only the Church, through its priesthood and the Pope's distant but pervasive authority, preserved a unifying thread across this politically shattered landscape. The volume closes by setting up the Crusades: chronic warfare, plague, and famine in eleventh-century Europe, combined with the Byzantine Emperor's appeals for help against the Seljuk Turks (who had displaced Arab control of the Holy Land) and the Church's promotion of pilgrimage and penance, culminated in the First Crusade (1097), which established a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the less successful Second Crusade (1146) following the fall of Edessa—episodes Hutchinson frames as the next great turning point in the ongoing story of Western civilization's formation from Rome's ruins.

By Horace G. Hutchinson · First published 1924 · Genre: History, Medieval History, World History · 24 chapters · 95,126 words

First lines

In the first volume of this _Greatest Story in the World_ we saw how / man lived upon the earth from the earliest times at which we know / anything about him. We followed the story down to about the year / A. D. 100 when the different threads of the story came together into / one hand -- the mighty hand of Rome and of the firmly established Roman / Empire. The whole world, or what the people of that time regarded as / the whole of the world that mattered, was controlled by the Roman / hand. This second volume will be mainly the story of what happened / when the grasp of that hand weakened, and allowed the threads to fall / apart again.

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