ABSTRACT

The various Germanic hordes that trod down the ancient civilisation brought with them no qualities that could help to build a new one. The panegyrical twaddle that pervades our histories about “the young, virile Teutonic races regenerating the effete and decrepit Roman world” is a brazen effrontery of racial-historical mendacity. If any of the Teutonic chieftains rose at all the lowest barbaric level, it was owing to special contact with Graeco-Roman civilisation. The appalling condition of the Church and monasteries in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries was not due to the corruption of the Roman clergy so much as to the influx of barbarian priests and monks. The self-styled Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was in their eyes an absurd upstart accoutred in a title which made them laugh. He appeared to them much in the same light as we should regard a savage Emperor of Dahomey aping civilised man in a frock coat and silk hat.