antage and subsequently the
drawback of isolation. The energetic spirits who, at the end of the
ninth century, resented the centralization of political power in Norway
and escaped from the turmoil and oppression of the home country to the
remote asylum offered by Iceland, maintained there till 1262 the only
absolutely free republic in the world.[889] They had brought with them
various seeds of culture and progress, which grew and flowered richly in
this peaceful soil. Iceland became the center of brilliant maritime and
colonial achievements, the home of a native literature which surpassed
that of all its contemporaries except Dante's Italy.[890] But after the
decay of the Greenland colonies converted Iceland from a focal into a
remote terminal point, and after the progress of the world became based
upon complex and far-reaching commercial relations, the blight of
extreme isolation settled upon the island; peace became stagnation.

[Sidenote: Protection of an island environment.]

The concomitant of isolation is protection. Though this protection, if
the result of extreme isolation, may mean an early cessation of
development, history shows that in the lower stages of civilization,
when the social organism is small and weak, and its germs of progress
easily blighted, islands offer the sheltered environment in which
imported flowers of culture not only survive but improve; in less
protected fields they deteriorate or disappear. When learning and
Christianity had been almost wiped out on the continent of Europe by the
ravages of barbarian invasion between 450 and 800 A. D., in Ireland they
grew and flourished. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the high
scholarship of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning
for its own sake drew to their schools students of the noblest rank from
both England and France.[891] It was from Irish teachers that the Picts
of Scotland and the Angles of northern England received their first
lessons in Christianity. These fixed their mission stations again on
islands, on Iona off southwestern Scotland and on Lindisfarne or Holy
Isle near the east coast of Northumbria.[892] It was in the protected
environment of the medieval Iceland that Scandinavian literature reached
its highest development.

Insular protection was undoubtedly a factor in the brilliant cultural
development of Crete. The progress of the early civilization from the
late Stone Age through the Bronze Age was continu