The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2 by Horace G. Hutchinson

Thus I have tried to give a picture in outline -- a cinematograph, or / moving picture -- of the world after the break up of Charlemagne's / Empire. We see the Turks pressing up against the Eastern Empire in / Asia Minor, with the result that the Emperor appeals to the West, and / that the first Crusade establishes, for nearly a hundred years, the / Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. African Mahommedans have possession of / the strip of North Africa running from Egypt -- Egypt itself being held / by the Turks -- till they meet another Mahommedan African people which / has possession of the southern part of Spain. That same power had / the whole of the Spanish peninsula in its grip a little earlier, but / its own divisions, of Arabs, Africans, and Syrians, made it weak, and / it was broken as soon as it came against any organised force. Then / in Italy we see that the Pope, aided by the Emperors and giving them / the aid of the growing power of the Church in return, is on the whole / establishing his temporal power in Rome more and more firmly. In the / south of Italy and in Sicily the enterprising Normans drive out the / Saracens and take possession. Northward, the great territory which, / together with Italy, had been Charlemagne's, has been split into the / two large divisions, the kingdoms of France and of Germany. But in / these so-called kingdoms the king was at this time only a little more / powerful than his lords, the barons and big {140} landowners.

The feudal system prevailed, and the king was constantly engaged with the / hard task of keeping his feudal lords in order. It was disorder, / rather than order, that was the rule all over the unhappy world. / England fared a little better, thanks to the Channel which cut it off / and made its conditions different from those of the Continent. But / now it has been conquered by the Norman, and we have to see how that / conquest had the result, for a very long while, of counteracting the / effect of the Channel as a separating barrier. England was soon / caught up into the continental turmoil.