I. Britain II. The Camps of the Legions III. The Barbarian at the Walls IV. The Division of the Empire V. The Barbarian breaking through VI. How Britain became England VII. The Passing of the Barbarian VIII. The Pope IX. How England became Christian X. The Saracens XI. The Franks and the Feudal System XII. How the People Lived XIII. How the People Lived--_continued_ XIV. The Settlements Of The Sea-Rovers XV. The Crusades XVI. The Slavs in Eastern Europe XVII. Normans and Angevins XVIII. The Strength and the Weakness of Rome XIX. The Moslems in Spain XX. The Plantagenets in France and England XXI. England, France, and Burgundy XXII. The Teuton and the Slav XXIII. The Turks in Europe XXIV. The New Dawn Index {xiv} LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Hadrian's Wall To-Day .... _Frontispiece_ Stonehenge The Iron Crown of the Lombards Rome and St. Peter's Whitby Abbey Charlemagne's Sword Canterbury An Anglo-Saxon Mansion An Anglo-Saxon Dinner Party A Viking Ship Norman Gateway A Crusader A Knight Templar A Norman Household A Joust between Knights Cœur-de-Lion's Prison Knight in Chain Armour The Giralda, Seville Byzantine Architecture Gothic Architecture Constantinople Genoa Columbus Ship of Columbus' Time {1} THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD CHAPTER I BRITAIN In the first volume of this _Greatest Story in the World_ we saw how man lived upon the earth from the earliest times at which we know anything about him. We followed the story down to about the year A.D. 100 when the different threads of the story came together into one hand--the mighty hand of Rome and of the firmly established Roman Empire. The whole world, or what the people of that time regarded as the whole of the world that mattered, was controlled by the Roman hand. This second volume will be mainly the story of what happened when the grasp of that hand weakened, and allowed the threads to fall apart again. Rome had driven its fine roads, which you may imagine going out, from the imperial city as their centre, like the spokes of a great wheel, to the farthest ends of the Empire. And you should notice a peculiarity about those spokes--those roads--that they always went straight. It did not matter how high a hill they came to, nor how deep a {2} valley--unless the hill or the vale side were impossibly steep, the road never turned. It did not go round the hill: it went over the top of it and down the other side. I suggest to you that you should take notice of this straight going of the roads, partly because the fact of their straightness is interesting in itself and also because it is so like the way in which the Romans, who made those roads, acted in all their doings. They went straight ahead and would not be turned aside or stopped by any obstacles. Their roads, of which we are still able to trace portions, are signs of their character as a nation.