ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages were not merely a gigantic irrelevance interposed into the course of history. Classical civilization, broken, was like a precious box of spikenard of which the contents were now spread abroad. Civilization, in the West, ceased to be Mediterranean and became European. Exception made of the separate Chinese sphere of influence and, in part, of India, all humanity outside Africa, south of the Sahara, was now brought under the Romano-Hellenic sway. Arabian civilization acknowledged the debt..The price paid for this involuntary diffusion of the civilization of the Walled Empires was six centuries of barbarism. When the process had been completed, with the Christianization of the Slavs and the rule in Russia of the successors of Rurik, there was no longer in the globe a barbarian outside the gates. Civilization finally ceased to be merely a matter of river bank and seaboard strips. The Dark Ages represent an advance, just as perhaps our own coming Dark Ages will do in building a World Sovereign.
