pe. The Crusades had introduced Asian culture
traits into the European backwoods. Hardy European and Asian mariners
were penetrating the Americas. Dark ages of ignorance and superstition
which had held sway in Europe for centuries were coming to an end.
Western civilization was beginning to draw the breath of a new life.

The vast structure of Roman civilization had split West from East. The
Eastern Empire retained its form and continued its culture for centuries
after its break with the West. Meanwhile the West fragmented into
smaller and smaller units, increasingly self-contained and increasingly
isolated. Cities raised and manned their own walls. The countryside
broke up into smaller and smaller divisions over which the Holy Roman
Empire exercised little more than a shadowy authority. Each landed
estate had its stronghold or castle. Each locality looked after its own
interests. The massive Roman Universal State, stretching for centuries
across parts of three continents, had broken up into a multitude of tiny
semi-sovereign, semi-independent fragments. Some of the fragments as
leagues, alliances and coalitions were reaching nationhood.

New dawn was illuminating the Dark Ages. Western man was sorting and
re-assembling some of the scattered fragments of the defunct and
dismembered Roman civilization. The task was colossal. Rome's "one
authority, one law, one language" hegemony had been replaced by an all
pervading diversity. The closely knit Greco-Roman Empire had been
superseded in Europe by a sparsely inhabited, roadless wilderness,
largely bereft of trade, using waterways as the easiest means of
communication and transport. The economy was built around wood cutting,
charcoal burning, backward animal husbandry, hand-tool agriculture,
hand-craft industry, the rudiments of commerce and finance centered in
trading cities. The great houses of the aristocracy and the gentry,
scattered villages, towns and walled cities were preoccupied and
disrupted by endless feuding and between-seasons warfare.

Adding to the chaos of this dismembered society were the controversies
over dynastic succession. Intermittent incursions of migrating hordes
from central Asia pushed their way into central and southern Europe.
Covert and open conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular authority
added to the general lethargy, confusion and chaos.

Europe struggled for centuries to free itself from Asian invasion and
occupation. At the same ti