Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/318

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
302
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

transplanted from the Libyan Desert to Syene in order to guard the frontier, and the next lowest the strange colony of Saracens whom the freethinking Frederick II planted in Apulia. Much higher were the colonies of vanquished Goths and Ostrogoths, Franks, Gepidæ, and Vandals whom the Roman emperors settled on the frontiers—in Spain and Britain, Africa and Illyria and Asia Minor, Greece and Palestine. Whether as legionaries or veterans, these soldiers seem to have been accompanied by their families, and where they did not drive away the indigenes (as they did at Camolodunum, in Britain) they were granted lands and supplied with the instruments of tillage. Some of these military settlements, like two of the Numidian colonies, became centers of Roman civilization; others, like Chester, Gloucester, and Colchester, grew into prosperous towns; still others—and these perhaps the majority—like the colony of veterans planted by Hadrian on the desolate site of Jerusalem, did not thrive. Higher yet than these were the towns settled with Greek soldiers by Alexander and the Alexandrids. Of the Macedonian, Thessalian, and Thracian, Thessalonica was alone important; some of those in Asia Minor were in later times flourishing. Military colonies are not unknown in mediseval and modern Europe. The Frank kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the principalities into which the Eastern Empire was partitioned, and Constantinople itself, where in the beginning of the thirteenth century there was a Frank colony of fifteen thousand souls, were all military colonies, though of brief existence. Under the Swabian emperors, small colonies of noble and peasant Germans were established in Davos and other Alpine districts in German interests. Spain conquered South America by planting a series of military colonies. France, always more conquering than colonizing, is but slowly converting Algeria from a military into an industrial colony. Even colonizing England has planted military colonies in Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Ohio, besides having temporary camps on her frontiers where towns grow up, as at Raglan and Otahuhu, in New Zealand; and the pensioner settlement of Onehunga may be taken as an image of an ancient Roman colony of veterans.

3. We seem to rise considerably in the scale as we leave behind us colonies founded on the lust of conquest, and arrive at colonies whose formation was governed by political motives. They are always more or less collective; they sometimes take place en masse; they are often directed and organized; and they are homogeneous. Involuntary migrations are among the earliest of them, as when the Achaians and Œnotrians, driven out of the Peloponnesus and Italy by the Dorians and wild tribes from the Apennines, emigrated to Sicily. The best known, and more voluntary, are those of the