: Dramas (1 de 2): Hernani; El Rey se divierte; Los Burgraves by Hugo Victor G Mez Soler Francesc Illustrator Obiols Delgado Mariano Illustrator Navarro Cecilio Translator - French drama Translations into Spanish

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GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 277

INDEX i

AREAS SETTLED BY 1660, AND BETWEEN 1660 AND 1700 134

GROWTH OF ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS, 1700-1760 178

AREA OF GERMAN SETTLEMENTS AND FRONTIER LINE IN 1775 180

AREA OF SETTLEMENT IN 1774; BOUNDARY PROPOSED BY SPAIN IN 1782; BOUNDARY SECURED BY TREATY OF 1783; AND SETTLEMENTS WEST OF ALLEGHANIES IN 1783 272

BEGINNINGS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

THE DISCOVERY OF THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

From the ninth to the eleventh century the people of Western Europe had lived in comparative isolation. With half the heritage of the Roman Empire in infidel hands, the followers of the Cross and of the Crescent faced each other, like hostile armies, across the sea. The temporary expansion of the Frankish Empire ceased with the life of Charlemagne, and under his successors formidable enemies closed it in on every hand. Barbarian Slav and Saxon pressed upon the eastern frontier, while the hated Moslem, from the vantage of Spain and Africa, infested the Mediterranean and threatened the Holy City. Even the Greek Empire, natural ally of Christendom, deserted it, going the way of heresy and schism.

Danger from without was accompanied by disorganization within. In the tenth century the political edifice so painfully constructed by Charlemagne was in ruins. The organization of the Roman Empire and the Gregorian ideal of a Catholic Church, now little more than a lingering tradition, was replaced by the feudal system. Seigneurs, lay and ecclesiastic, warring among themselves for the shadow of power, had neither time nor inclination for the ways of peace or the life of the spirit. Learning all but disappeared; the useful arts were little cultivated; cities fell into decay and the roads that bound them together were left in unrepair; the life of the time, barren alike in hovel and castle, was supported by the crude labor of a servile class. To be complete within itself, secure from military attack and economically self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility and isolation within each seigneury."

But the feudal r?gime, well suited to a period of confusion, could not withstand the disintegrating effects of even the small measure of peace and prosperity which it secured. Increase in population and the necessities of life liberated those expansive social forces, in politics and industry, in intellectual life, in religious and emotional experience, which produced the civilization of the later Middle Ages; that wonderful thirteenth century which saw the rise of industry and the towns, the foundation of royal power in alliance with a moneyed class, the revival of intellectual activity which created the universities and the scholastic philosophy, the intensification of the religious spirit manifesting itself in such varied and perfect forms,--in the simple life of a St. Francis or the solemn splendor of a Gothic cathedral.

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