I have sometimes wondered if every one realizes how startlingly independent and isolated a historical fact is to the young reader. It has happened before his remembrance, and that alone is enough to put it into another world. It is outside of his own experience. It has appeared to him by no familiar road, but from unknown regions of space.

The object of this book is to bring together stories of the most important movements in the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, and to make familiar the names of the most important figures in those scenes. I have endeavored to weave a tapestry in which, with due color, may be traced the history of the rise and fall of the various nationalities and the circumstances and mode of life of each—in short, to give the young reader an approximation to the background for the study of his country's history which a wide reading gives to a man.

From the Preface