We have to see how that came to pass. But there is still one side or corner of the picture which we have left rather blank, and we had best get that corner filled before we come to consider the part that England played in the continental trouble. It is that corner which is occupied by the large stretch of territory on the eastern fringe of Charlemagne's Empire, from the southern shores of the Baltic right down to Constantinople and the boundaries of the Eastern Empire. You may have noticed that in the accounts of the Crusades--the first and the second, which are all that have come into our story as yet--I mentioned two names which had not appeared before, Hungary and the Wends. The first was the name of a country through which the Crusaders went to reach Constantinople; the second was the name of a heathen tribe against which certain of the knights who had been enrolled for the second Crusade obtained the sanction of the Pope to go, instead of against the Saracen. These Wends were a tribe or branch of a race that appears to have increased in numbers very rapidly and, from a small territory to the north of the Carpathian mountains, to have spread over all that large tract just described from the Baltic to the neighbourhood of Constantinople. It was a race of people called Slavs, {141} and even to-day it is thought to number more than any other of the races of man. It is not the first time that it has been mentioned in this greatest of all stories. We saw, in the first volume, that a large number of the serfs under the Roman Empire, especially in the East, were of this people. So large were their numbers that it is from their Latin name servus that we get our word "slave," which we use as a translation of servus. These Slavonic "serfs" were members of the Slav race who had been taken prisoners in battle. [Sidenote: Military knights] The Slavonic people from the East were constantly, as their numbers grew, and perhaps as they too were pressed by Huns and Mongolians from further East again, pressing in upon the Gothic, the Germanic tribes; and now it was against one of the Slav tribes, these Wends, that the knights of Northern Germany received leave to go on Crusade. They took to themselves the name of Knights of the Sword. [Illustration: A KNIGHT TEMPLAR.] There were several of these bodies, or societies, at a later date than this, who bound themselves together by vows, like the vows which the monks took, and lived under one rule. They were formed, like the monkish orders, for the advancement of the Christian religion, but these Military Orders--the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller were perhaps the best known of them--enforced religion with the sword as well as with the gospel-preaching, and were always ready to fight on the Christian side against the pagans on the boundaries of Christendom. {142}