The importance of the result, to the future of our western civilization, of this battle in the West can hardly be overestimated. The future of European government, law, education, and civilization was settled on that Saturday afternoon in October, on the battle plains of Tours. [5] It was a struggle for mastery and dominion between the Aryan and Semitic races, between the Christian and Mohammedan religions, between the forces representing order on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions. [Illustration: FIG. 33. THE KNOWN WORLD IN 800 This map shows the great extent of the Mohammedan conquests. The part marked as "European Heathen" was added to Christianity within the next few centuries, and became a part of our Latin-Teutonic or western civilization.] Driven back across the Pyrenees by the Franks, these people settled in Spain; later developed there, for a short period, a for-the-time remarkable civilization, but one that only slightly influenced the current of European development; and then disappeared as a force in our western development and progress. We shall meet them again a little later, but only for a little while, and then they concern our western development no more. Our interest from now on lies with the Teutonic-Latin peoples of western Europe, for it is through them that our western civilization has been worked out and has come down to us. WHO THESE INVADERS WERE. A long-continued series of tribal migrations, unsurpassed before in history, had brought a large number of new peoples within the boundaries of the old Empire. They finally came so fast that they could not have been assimilated even in the best days of Rome, and now the assimilative and digestive powers of Rome were gone. Tall, huge of limb, white-skinned, flaxen-haired, with fierce blue eyes, and clad in skins and rude cloths, they seemed like giants to the short, small, dark- skinned people of the Italian peninsula. Quarrelsome; delighting in fighting and gambling; given to drunkenness and gluttonous eating; possessed of a rude polytheistic religion in which _Woden_, the war god, held the first place, and Valhalla was a heaven for those killed in battle; living in rude villages in the forest, and maintaining themselves by hunting and fishing--it is not to be wondered that Rome dreaded the coming of these forest barbarians (R. 46). [Illustration: FIG 34. A GERMAN WAR CHIEF Restored, and rather idealized (From the Musée d'Artillerie at Paris)]