Even before the rise of Islam, under Constantine or
Theodosius or Justinian, the Church-State of the Byzantine Caesars,
though then ruling in almost every province of Trajan's empire, was in a
splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races. Our
story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a
thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the fifth
and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of those
conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all
this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope
Gregory the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge
of the world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have passed from
sight.
And in the decline of the old Empire, while Constantine and Justinian
are said to receive and exchange embassies with the Court of China,
there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook.
Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the
pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen,
then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion
of Europe.
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