The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2 by Horace G. Hutchinson

You will see now what the story told in the first few chapters of / this volume is, for the most part, about. It is about the efforts of / the Empire -- on the whole, the successful efforts of the Empire -- to / keep itself intact within its walls and to keep the barbarians out. / The pressure of those barbarians without, together with the weakened / state of the Empire itself, has led to the division of the Eastern / from the Western Empire. And that is the story up to close on the / year 400.

After that year 400, or a few years before, the story changes. It is / no longer about the efforts of the Empire to keep the barbarian out. / The barbarian is triumphantly breaking through; and it is with that / break through, and with all that happened to the Empire, as a / consequence, that the story has now to deal.

We shall think it curious, as we follow it, to note how the different / tribes of the barbarians seem as if they acted together, in concert / with each other, from the northern extremity of the Empire's boundary / right down to where we saw those Visigoths permitted to settle south / of the Danube. They seem to have pressed in from the east, within / the space of very few years, along the whole of that boundary.

Probably it was by no pre-concerted arrangement, that is to say not / following any already arranged {31} plan, that they pressed in along / that boundary nearly all at the same time. Probably what happened / was that all of them were feeling a pressure from the Huns, their / neighbours on the east: so that they were all ready to move. Then, / when one tribe heard of the success of another in moving west, the / tribe that heard this news would be encouraged to attempt a westward / push on its own account. That push would be all the more likely to / succeed because the Roman legions were busy trying to stop those that / had moved westward already.

[Sidenote: British legions re-called]

To what extent they acted together in order to help each other we do / not know -- probably with very little idea of giving each other this / help, for often when they encountered each other in the course of the / westward move, they actually fought amongst themselves. What we do / know -- and it is a fact that made a great difference to the story of / our own islands -- is that within a very short time the Empire found / its legions so hard beset on the Continent of Europe that it recalled / the three legions that had been holding Britain. This happened in / 407.

I have already, I think, mentioned the names of all those / Indo-European or Germanic tribes that occupy chief place in the story / with the exception of the Vandals. These Vandals had their home / somewhere between the Oder and the Vistula, in modern Prussia, and / they travelled further than any of the rest, actually going down / through Spain, across into Africa, turning eastward again and working / their way along the north coast of Africa, establishing themselves at / Carthage, equipping a great fleet there and crossing over and taking / Rome itself by assault from the sea -- a very wonderful story indeed.

But the first people to move in this great irruption, or break in, of / the barbarians into the Empire were those most southern, the / Visigoths. They pressed {32} along, not southward this time but / westward, into Gaul.

We always have to bear in mind that these movements of the tribes / westward were not like the marches of an army only, but rather like / the migrations of a whole people. It was land, land to settle on and / to live in without vexation from Huns and other enemies, that they / came to seek; and they brought with them their wives and children and / live stock, to settle them down on the newly won land. It seems to / have been the custom of all these tribes to take to themselves / one-third of the land that they conquered, leaving the conquered / people two-thirds -- a far more generous proceeding than we should have / expected from them. But we have seen something of their institutions / and courts of law. Although called "barbarians," they were far from / being what we should term savages. They had, however, very little / idea of learning or arts or science. The Greek thought had not / penetrated among them, although many of them had by this time become / Christian. They were not nearly so advanced in civilisation as the / Romans, and their conquest of all Western Europe checked the progress / of civilisation and threw all mankind backward into ways of life and / of thought that probably the Romans and Greeks never expected man to / return to.

It was under pressure of their own kinsmen, the Ostrogoths, acting / with their superior lords, the Huns, that the Visigoths at this time / invaded Gaul and pushed into the north of Italy and down into Greece. / They had become Christians. A large number of monks came with the / armies and, in their religious zeal, destroyed many beautiful temples / of the pagan gods in Greece and elsewhere.