Bavaria. They were an Asiatic people, from the northern slopes of the
Ural Mountains, who had been moving westward since the commencement of
the century. Contemporaries identified them with the Huns of Attila, and
the resemblance was more than superficial. The Hungarians were of the
Tartar race--nomads who lived by hunting and war, skilled in
horsemanship and archery, utterly barbarous and a byeword for cruelty.
The rapidity of their movements, and the distances to which their raids
extended, are almost incredible. In 899 they swept through the Ostmark
and reached the Lombard plain; in 915 they sacked Bremen; in 919 they
harried the whole of Saxony and penetrated the old Middle Kingdom; in
926 they went into Tuscany and appeared in the neighbourhood of Rome; in
937 they even reached the walls of Capua. In fact, until the great
victory of Otto I upon the Lech (955), they were the terror of
two-thirds of Christian Europe. Italy, the most disunited of the new
kingdoms, was further vexed by the Saracen pirates who roamed the
Western Mediterranean. The only sea-power capable of dealing with them
was that of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek fleet protected the
southeast of Italy, but was powerless to save Sicily, which was
conquered piecemeal for the Crescent (827-965). Farther north the
seaports of Amalfi, Gaeta, Naples and Salerno paid tribute or admitted
Saracen garrisons; in 846 Ostia and the Leonine quarter of Rome
(including the basilica of St. Peter) were pillaged. Robber colonies
established themselves on the river Garigliano, and at Garde-Frainet,
the meeting-point of Italy and Provence.

The effect which these disasters produced on the minds of the sufferers
is nowhere more clearly visible than in England. Here the House of
Alfred was able, within a century of the partition made at Wedmore
between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danes (878), to establish a
kingdom of imperial pretensions, loosely knit together but more durable