88 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



During the course of the fifth century, the Huns under Attila 

 had not only subdued all the Tartar nations of Central Asia, but 

 had also brought under the yoke the whole of the German tribes 

 between the Volga and the Rhine. The defeat of the great chief by 

 the allied armies of the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Romans at 

 the battle of the Catalaunic Fields (451), his death two years later, 

 stopped the tide of the Eastern invaders; as the victory of Charles 

 Martel at Poitiers (732) , three centuries later, set bounds to the throng 

 of Arabs, who, after having torn the north of Africa from the Roman 

 Empire, had crossed the sea, destroying the power of the Visigoths, 

 who, after a long migratory period throughout Europe, had appar- 

 ently found a permanent home in the Iberian Peninsula. 



The invasion of the barbarians, who flocked together to share 

 the spoils of the agonizing Roman Empire in the fifth century, will 

 continue later on with the Mongol raids and till 1453, the year of the 

 capture of Constantinople by the Turkish Osmanlis, which we may 

 consider to mark the climax of the Asiatic encroachments. 



We shall see the counterpart of these great movements when the 

 Western nations, after doubling the Cape of Good Hope, shall resume 

 the route of India in the course of the sixteenth century. 



Buddhism, the doctrine of the disciples of Shakyamnni, has no 

 doubt been one of the principal means of facilitating the intercourse 

 of the nations throughout Asia; it has been the sun at which the 

 civilization of many have lit their torch; indeed a writer could say 

 not without some good reason that the history of Buddhism 

 is in itself the history of Eastern Asia. 



The spread of Buddhism and its wider diffusion from India to the 

 remainder of Asia was greatly increased by the support received from 

 some princes and by the peregrinations of its devotees. 



After the death of Alexander the Great, whose campaign against 

 Porus brought India into contact with the great Hellenic civilization, 

 one of the lieutenants of the great conqueror, Seleucus, took as 

 his share of the inheritance the eastern part of the Empire, but as 

 early as 304 he was obliged to surrender the satrapy of India to a 

 man of low condition called Chandragupta by the Buddhists and 

 Sandracottos by the Greeks. Chandragupta was the founder in 

 Magadha of a dynasty of princes; his grandson Asoka, surnamed 

 Piyadasi (died 240 B. c.), in establishing a board of foreign missions, 

 Dharma Mahamatra, gave a considerable extension to Buddhism, 

 not only in his own dominions, but also in the surrounding countries 

 as far as Deccan. 



On the other hand, the tribes of Eastern Tartars known to the 

 Chinese as the Yue-chi, driven by force to the west by the Hiung-nu 

 (Huns), divided themselves into two branches; the Little Yue-chi 



