WHY DO LAWS OF NATURE NOT ALWAYS WORK? 383
was accentuated by geographical circumstances that had perhaps also
been partly accountable for the launching of the ill-starred Crusades.
The homeland of the Western Christian Society happened to lie at the
tip of one of the peninsulas of the Great Eurasian Continent, and a
society so precariously situated must sooner or later be pushed into the
Ocean by the pressure of mightier forces thrusting outwards from the
heart of the Old World if this besieged society did not succeed in fore-
stalling disaster by breaking out of its West-European cul-de-sac into
some larger Lebensraum. By the fifteenth century of the Christian Era
the peine forte et dure of being crushed to death between the Devil and
the Deep Sea had already brought to their last gasp the surviving repre-
sentatives of an abortive Far Western Christian Civilization in 'the
Celtic Fringe* of the Old World; and a Latin Christendom likewise had
been exposed, since its birth, to this manifest destiny of all West
European societies by which a Celtic Christendom was eventually to be
overtaken. In the Crusades the Latin Christians—choosing the Mediter-
ranean Sea as their war-path and faring across it in vessels of the tradi-
tional Mediterranean builds—had been moved by a nostalgia for the
cradle of their Christian faith1 to defy Fate by breaking out of Western
Europe into the Levant; and the eventual failure of this enterprise had
not been followed by a return of the status quo ante. The retort to
Medieval Western aggression had been in Egypt the replacement of
effete 'Fatimids* by militarily efficient Mamluks,3 and in Orthodox
Christendom the replacement of an effete East Roman Empire by
'Osmanlis who were still more efficient and far more aggressive than
their Mamluk cousins.3

These local revolutions which the West's own aggression had pre-
cipitated had eclipsed the West's military and political prospects in the
Levant, and had made her commercial prospects there dependent on the
new Islamic Powers' goodwill. In what other direction was Western
Christendom to look for an outlet ? A once barbarian no-man's-land in
Northern Europe had been eliminated before the end of the fourteenth
century of the Christian Era by a parallel northward advance of Western
and of Russian Orthodox Christendom which had carried their common
frontier up to the shore of the Arctic Ocean;4 and, when Western Chris-
tendom had taken advantage of Russia's prostration by a tornado of
Mongol invasion from the Eurasian Steppe in order to trespass on her
Russian neighbour's domain in White Russia and the Ukraine, this east-
ward aggression overland had been halted, in its turn, by the rise of
Muscovy.5 Mid-way through the fifteenth century, when the sea-route
via the Mediterranean into the Levant and the land-route via Russia into
the heart of the Eurasian Continent had both been effectively closed
against any further Western expansion in either of these directions, the
Atlantic Ocean was the sole remaining frontier of Western Christendom
that was not beset by an impassable hostile human cordon; and the
Atlantic was thus uninfested by human adversaries of the West only

i See I. L 38; IX. viiL 346-63; and p. 100, above.

z See IV. iv. 447-50. * See III. Hi. 22-50.

* See II, ii. 168-9. s See II. ii. I74~7; IX. viii. 126 and 398-403.