Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China, central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in Khorasan, the "Garden of Asia," the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the consequence that progress was retarded for centuries. Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics went down in rout. On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east collapsed under the invasions. Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the Nordics came to bay--the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe. One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never before known even in the days of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire world under European domination. * * * * * While in the mediæval conflicts between Europe and Asia the latter was the aggressor, the case was otherwise in the early wars between the Nordic and the Mediterranean peoples. Here for three thousand years the Nordics were the aggressors, and, although these wars were terribly destructive to their numbers, they were the medium through which classic civilization was introduced into Nordic lands. As to the ethnic consequences, northern barbarians poured over the passes of the Balkans, Alpines, and Pyrenees into the sunny lands of the south only to slowly vanish in the languid environment which lacked the stimulus of fierce strife with hostile nature and savage rivals.