Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Start |||
The
Philosophical Europe ||| The Political Progress ||| European Witness ||| EU News
Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield |
|
From Hutton Webster's, Early European History (1917); edited for this on-line publication, by ELLOPOS
XIV. THE NORTHMEN AND THE NORMANS TO 1066 A.D.
» Contents of this Chapter
Scandinavia and the Northmen * The Viking Age * Scandinavian Heathenism * The Northmen in the West * The Northmen in the East * Conquest of England by the Danes; Alfred the Great * Norman Conquest of England; William the Conqueror * Results of the Norman Conquest * Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily * The Normans in European HistorySCANDINAVIA AND THE NORTHMEN
A NEW SERIES OF MIGRATIONS
From the East we return once more to the West, from Asia to Europe, from Arabia to Scandinavia. We have now to deal with the raids and settlements of the Norsemen or Northmen. Like the Arabs the Northmen quitted a sterile peninsula and went forth to find better homes in distant lands. Their invasions, beginning toward the close of the eighth century, lasted about three hundred years.
A TEUTONIC MOVEMENT
The Northmen belonged to the Teutonic family of peoples. They were kinsmen of the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Dutch. Their migrations may be regarded, therefore, as the last wave of that great Teutonic movement which in earlier times had inundated western Europe and overwhelmed the Roman Empire.
SCANDINAVIA
The Northmen lived, as their descendants still live, in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The name Scandinavia is sometimes applied to all three countries, but more commonly it is restricted to the peninsula comprising Sweden and Norway.
SWEDEN
Sweden, with the exception of the northern highlands, is mostly a level region, watered by copious streams, dotted with many lakes, and sinking down gradually to the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia. The fact that Sweden faces these inland waters determined the course of her development as a nation. She never has had any aspirations to become a great oceanic power. Her whole historic life has centered about the Baltic.
THE MAKING OF EUROPE / EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY: Table of Contents
url: www.ellopos.net/politics/european-history/default.asp
Cf. The Ancient Greece * The Ancient Rome
Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) * Western Medieval Europe * Renaissance in Italy
