These two conquests, wrought in the great island of the ocean and in the great island of the Mediterranean, were the main works of the Normans after they had fully put on the character of a Christian and French-speaking people, in other words, after they had changed from Northmen into Normans. The English and the Sicilian settlements form the main Norman history of the eleventh century. The tenth century is the time of the settlement of the Northmen in Gaul, and of the change in religion and language of which the softening of the name is the outward sign. By the end of it, any traces of heathen faith, and even of Scandinavian speech, must have been mere survivals. The new creed, the new speech, the new social system, had taken such deep root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbours from whom they had borrowed their new possessions. With the zeal of new converts they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. If Britain and Sicily were the greatest fields of their enterprise, they were very far from being the only fields. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world.[c] We may for the present leave the ethnology and early history of the Northmen to the later history of Scandinavia, and fuller details of their invasions of France and England to the histories of those countries, giving here only a brief résumé of their wanderings, and a fuller account of their career in the powerful little kingdom in Sicily where they meddled busily with the affairs of all Europe, and much of Asia and Africa. This was, as Freeman[c] says, “the most brilliant time for Sicily as a power in the world.” Even under the Greeks it was not so prominent. But before reaching this period, some mention of their first appearances in continental European history is necessary.[a] Evils still more terrible than political abuses were the lot of those nations who had been subject to Charlemagne. They, indeed, may appear to us little better than ferocious barbarians: but they were exposed to the assaults of tribes, in comparison with whom they must be deemed humane and polished. Each frontier of the empire had to dread the attack of an enemy. The Saracens of Africa possessed themselves of Sicily and Sardinia, and became masters of the Mediterranean Sea. [Sidenote: [787-870 A.D.]]