A history of Europe / by H.A.L. Fisher.

  • Herbert Fisher
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of Europe / by H.A.L. Fisher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/1328 page 4
    the whole Jewish race. It is thus that St. Mark, the earliest evangelist, appears to many Jews today as being, although with¬ out malice, the first of the line of anti-Semite authors. Here, then, in Christianity as sharply distinguished from Judaism, was a new test, a new principle of organization for European society. To be a Christian was to be admitted, as it were, into the fellowship of the European nations. To be a non- Christian was to be an outcast and an enemy. Much of European history consists in the secular conflict between east and west, which, beginning with the wars of Greece and Persia, was re¬ sumed in the form of the long duel between Christianity and Islam, the most recent phase of which was closed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. What famous names are connected with that secular struggle—Urban II and Godfrey de Bouillon, Saladin and Richard Cocur de Lion, St. Louis and the Cid, Soleyman the Magnificent and Prince Eugene, Mustapha Kemal and VenizelosI The action and interaction of the Moslem and Christian world is one of the great themes of European The acceptance of the Christian test as a mark of European fellowship has necessarily determined the relations between the old-established European races and those Asiatic peoples who at one time or another have effected a lodgment in the European continent. The Bulgars, the Hungarians, and the Finns accepted with varying degrees of readiness the European religion. The fact that in language and physical type they bore marks of an oriental and savage origin did not injure them. Religion atoned for an alien origin, and gave them the rights of the European confraternity. It was otherwise with the three oriental races, which continued to maintain upon European soil a non-Christian faith. The Jews were persecuted, the Arabs by degrees driven from Spain, and the Turks, after a long-drawn struggle, expelled from the Greek mainland and islands, and from all but a small frac¬ tion of the Balkan peninsula. Of these three sharply contrasted peoples only one has exercised a major and permanent influence on European life. The Turks have been barren of ideas, and retained until the present genera¬ tion the modes of thought and life appropriate to the nomads of the Asiatic highlands. From the Arab peoples mediaeval Europe learnt something of medicine, science, history, and philosophy,
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image