The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7.s1.11

c7.s1.11

The processes by which during the seventh and eighth centuries Saracens³ made themselves masters of Sicily, Southern Italy, Spain and southwestern France and converted the Mediterranean Sea into an Asian lake do not by any means prove that the organizing ability of Christians, although they had no caste restrictions, was appreciably superior to that of Gurjara-Pratîhâras who fell equally before other inroads of Islam. Nor did East-Europeans exhibit extraordinary physical vigor and martial qualities because of the physiography of Russian snows when in the thirteenth century they had to capitulate to the avalanche of Buddhist-Shamanist Mongols¹ of Central Asia inch by inch as far to the interior of Europe as the Carpathian Mountains. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, again, Christians of the Balkans, Greece, Italy, and Spain persisted in their antagonistic relations² even in the face of Ottoman invasions. Certainly they did not appear to be more alive to the fact of the common danger, and failed not less ignominiously to present a united front against the peril from "Greater Asia" than did Hindus and Mohammedans in the eighteenth century while confronting the menace from the "expansion of Europe". What, then, are the counts on which the climatological or any other "monistic" interpretation of history seeks to base the alleged distinction between the West and the East?