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They traversed Dacia, and crossed the Danube. They ravaged Moesia, and even made their way into Thrace. Decius was defeated by them in Moesia, and slain. The peril of the empire continually increased. The German tribes on the north, the Goths on the Lower Danube and the Euxine, and Persia in the east, arrayed themselves in hostility.
An Amazon came galloping along the bank on a red roan, and directed her bow against the drowning man in the middle of the stream. On the one bank he saw his troops, who had halted, signal with white flags as a sign of peace to the enemy on the opposite bank. When he saw that he was betrayed, he sank, and with him the whole kingdom of the West Goths.
There was no doubt on the matter the barbarians had determined on a blockade! There was even less uncertainty upon the results which would be produced by this unimaginable policy of the Goths the city would be saved!
The Goths were attacked in their intrenchments at Pollentia, and were obliged to retreat, leaving the spoils of Corinth and Argos, and even the wife of Alaric. The poet Claudian celebrated the victory as greater than even that achieved by Marius over the Cimbri and Teutones. The defeated Goth, however, rose superior to misfortune and danger.
He restored peace and order in all the provinces; he broke the power of the Sarmatians; he secured the alliance of the Goths; he drove the Isaurians to their strongholds among their inaccessible mountains; he chastised the rebellious cities of Egypt; he delivered Gaul from the Germanic barbarians; he drove the Franks to their morasses at the mouth of the Rhine; he vanquished the Burgundians who had wandered in quest of booty from the banks of the Oder; he defeated the Lygii, a fierce tribe on the borders of Silesia; he extended his victories to the Elbe, and erected a wall, two hundred miles in length, from the Danube to the Rhine; so that “there was not left,” says Gibbon, “in all the provinces, a hostile barbarian, or tyrant, or even a robber.” After having destroyed four hundred thousand of the barbarians, he returned to his capital to celebrate a triumph, which equaled in splendor that of Aurelian.
This assembly of persons stopped opposite Vetranio's palace; and then such members of the mob who watched them as were not yet entirely abandoned by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the Spaniard, Basilius, a governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief of the Imperial notaries appointed ambassadors to conclude a treaty with the Goths.
In the year 378 the Emperor Valens himself was slain, almost under the walls of his capital, with two-thirds of his army, some sixty thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, while the victorious Goths, gorged with spoils, advanced to take possession of the defeated and crumbling Empire.
But the influence of a great race will be felt; its greatness does not depend upon its numbers, otherwise the English would not have vanquished the Chinese, nor would the Aztecs have been overthrown by Cortez and a handful of Goths.
I saw what the Germans had left of the stately old Cathedral, and of the famous Cloth Hall one of the very finest examples of the guild halls of medieval times. Goths Vandals no, it is unfair to seek such names for the Germans. They have established themselves as the masters of all time in brutality and in destruction. There is no need to call them anything but Germans.
In their retreat they found themselves amidst the descendants of the Iberians, the earliest race which had inhabited Spain, who appeared to have shaken off little of the barbarism that had resisted alike the invasion of the Romans and of the Goths, and who retained the original Iberian or Basque tongue.
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