Quotes About Invasions

Khubilai's invasions of Japan had failed, but they left a tremendous impact on Japanese social and political life by pushing them toward cultural unification and militaristic government. The Mongols, meanwhile, turned away

L'Islam a rompu l'unité méditerranéenne que les invasions germaniques avaient laissé subsister. C'est là le fait le plus essentiel qui se soit passé dans l'histoire européenne depuis les guerres puniques. C'est la fin de la tradition antique. C'est le commencement du Moyen Age, au moment même où l'Europe était en voie de se byzantiniser.

Pirenne was quite right that the ancient trading economy continued after the first invasions and the establishment of the mixed Romano-barbarian successor kingdoms. Some kind of connectivity by sea endured continuously, even if at very low levels (Horden and Purcell 2000).

Such figures suggest that the property-owning classes had indeed been hit hard by repeated barbarian incursions.

Without the spread of oriental cults and without the Germanic invasions, Hellenistic civilization would have initiated, with Rome as its starting-point, the Americanization of the world.

From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee and the Durants, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted.