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Updated: May 16, 2025
The independent tribes were persuaded, or compelled, to acknowledge the king of the Ostrogoths as the sovereign of the Gothic nation: the chiefs of the Visigoths, or Thervingi, renounced the royal title, and assumed the more humble appellation of Judges; and, among those judges, Athanaric, Fritigern, and Alavivus, were the most illustrious, by their personal merit, as well as by their vicinity to the Roman provinces.
Let the reader take up Albert Duerer's delightful little engraving of the Hermit, and compare the background of a German walled town and castle on a height with La Cite, Carcassonne, and he will see how vast is the difference in quality of picturesqueness between the two. The Cite is actually enclosed within double ramparts, and a portion of these dates from the time of the Visigoths.
She looked upon the Stock Exchange coming down to dinner as she would on an invasion of the Visigoths, and endured the stiff observations or the cumbrous liveliness of the merchants and bank directors with gloomy grace. Something less material might be anticipated from the members of Parliament.
Theodoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the battlefield. The German Franks, under Clovis, established their kingdom in Gaul 481 A.D. The Angles and Saxons in 446 A.D. did the same in Britain. So, with the Visigoths ruling in Spain, the "northern deluge" had in the fifth century practically submerged the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber wreck of a Roman empire.
The Huns crossed the Volga, and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European empire up through Austria and Germany. The Ostrogoths, somewhat flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths; who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at Adianople in 378.
The roots no longer nourished the distant extremities in Britain and Gaul, and it was only a question of time when these, too, should succumb to the inflowing tide. The Ostro-Goths or East-Goths in Northern Italy, and the Visigoths or West-Goths in Gaul, were setting up kingdoms of their own, under a Roman protectorate. The long period of peace in Spain was broken.
The dowry was conceived as being ultimately for the children; only when there were no children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren did the woman have licence to dispose of the dowry as she wished: this was the law among the Visigoths.
Among the Visigoths the guilty party was usually bound over in servitude to the injured person to be disposed of as the latter wished.
At that unhappy period, the Saxons fiercely struggled with the natives for the possession of Britain: Gaul and Spain were divided between the powerful monarchies of the Franks and Visigoths, and the dependent kingdoms of the Suevi and Burgundians: Africa was exposed to the cruel persecution of the Vandals, and the savage insults of the Moors: Rome and Italy, as far as the banks of the Danube, were afflicted by an army of Barbarian mercenaries, whose lawless tyranny was succeeded by the reign of Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
In the Eastern empire the Goths had become permanently settled, having laws of their own, a magistracy of their own, paying no taxes, but contributing 40,000 men to the army. The Visigoths were spreading through Greece, Spain, Italy. In their devastations of the former country, they had spared Athens, for the sake of her souvenirs. The Eleusinian mysteries had ceased.
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