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'We Lombards, says Bishop Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves, Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman; comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble, cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice. If this was as it very probably was the feeling of the whole Teutonic race; and if it was repaid as it certainly was on the part of the Roman, by contempt for the 'barbarism' and 'ignorance' of the Teuton; what must have been the feeling between Roman and Lombard?
His half-brother Wallia, after reducing the Alans and driving back the Sueves and Vandals, planted his seat in Toulouse, which became, in 415, the capital of his Aquitanean kingdom, Gothia or Septimania.
The West Goths held the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of Africa.
The operation itself lost its impressiveness by repetition, and the barrenness of practical results was more evident than before. The Sueves, who had gone home, were far away in the interior.
Mentz was destroyed; Worms fell, after an obstinate siege; Strasburg, Spires, Rheims, Tournay, Arras, and Amiens, all fell under the German yoke, and Gaul was finally separated from the empire. The Vandals, Sueves, and Alans, passed into Spain, while the Burgundians remained behind, masters of the mountainous regions of Eastern Gaul, to which was given the name of Burgundy, A.D. 409.
Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, was contending with Aetius; in Spain the Sueves were extending their ravages; Attila menaced the eastern provinces; the Emperor Valentinian was forced to hide in the marshes of Ravenna, and see the second sack of the imperial capital, now a prostrate power a corpse in a winding-sheet. The Vandals landed on the Italian coast. They advanced to the Tiber's banks.
It was only between 550 and 560 that the Gallician kingdom of the Sueves, under king Charrarich, became Catholic, when his son Ariamir or Theodemir was healed by the intercession of St. Martin of Tours, and converted by Martin, bishop of Duma. In 563 a synod was held by the metropolitan of Braga, which established the Catholic faith.
Cimbrians and Teutons, with as little success, had betaken themselves southwards, while under the empire the pressure of peoples had more and more increased, and Trajan could hardly maintain the northern frontier on the Danube. In the third century, Alemans and Sueves advanced to the Upper Rhine, and the Goths, from dwelling between the Don and Theiss, came to the Danube and the Black Sea.
So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all his children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen hoard; and with it the Nibelungen curse.
Gaul was in the hand of princes, mostly Arian, one pagan. Spain was dominated by Sueves and Visigoths, both Arian. In Africa Simplicius during forty years had been witness of the piracies of Genseric, making the Mediterranean insecure, and the cities on every coast liable to be sacked and burnt by his flying freebooters, while the great church of Africa, from the death of St.
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