In the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., when the old manvantara was closing, Europe was flung into the Cauldron of Regeneration.  Nations and fragments of nations were thrown in and tossing and seething; the broth of them was boiling over, and,—­just as the the Story of Taliesin, flooding the world with poison and destruction:  and all that a new order of ages might in due time come into being.  One result that a miscellany of racial heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island extremities of the continent.  In the British you had four Celtic and a Pictish remnant,—­not to mention Latins galore,—­pressed on by three or four sorts of Teutons.  In Spain, though it was less an extremity of Europe than a highway into Africa, you had a fine assortment of odds and ends:  Suevi, Vandals, Goths and what not; superimposed on a more or less homogenized collection of Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, and Italians;—­and in Italy you had Italians broken up into numberless fragments, and overrun by all manner of Lombards, Teutons, Slavs, and Huns.  Welded by cyclic stress, presently first England, then Spain, and lastly Italy, became nations; in all three varying degrees of homogeneity being attained.  But the next peninsula, the Balkan, has so far reached no unity at all; it remains to this day a curious museum of racial oddments, to the sorrow of European peace; and each of them represents some people strong in its day, and perhaps even cultured.

What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of Rome:  a job-lot of race-fragments driven into that extremity of Europe by the alarms and excursions of empires in dissolution whose history time has hidden.  The end of a manvantara, the break-up of a great civilization and the confusion that followed, made the Balkans what they are now, and Italy what she was in the Middle Ages.  The end of an earlier manvantara, the break-up of older and forgotten civilizations, made Italy what she was in the sixth century B.C.  Both peninsulas, by their mere physical geography, seem specially designed for the purpose.

Italy is divided into four by the Apennines, and is mostly Apennines.  Everyone goes there:  conquerors, lured by the dono fatale, and for the sake of the prizes to be gathered; the conquered, because it is the natural path of escape out of Central Europe.  The way in is easy enough; it is only the way out that is difficult.  The Alps slope up gently on the northern side; but sharply fall away in grand precipices on the southern.  There, too, they overlook a region that would always tempt invaders:  the great rich plain the Po waters; a land no refugees could well hope to hold.  It has been in turn Cisalpine Gaul, the Plain of the Lombards, and the main part of Austrian Italy; this thrice a possession of conquerors from the north.  It is the first of the four divisions.