But beyond the Danube had arisen a new power, the independence of which, after the time of Aurelian, was never disputed by the Roman Emperors. The Goths were the first of the Germanic tribes to adopt a monarchical form of government, and to acquire some degree of civilization. They were numerous and well organized; and Constantine, who was more of a diplomatist than a general, found it better to preserve peace with them for forty years, by presents and payments, than to provoke them to war. His best soldiers were enlisted among them, and it was principally the valor of his Gothic troops which enabled him to defeat the rival emperor, Licinius, in 325. From that time, 40,000 Goths formed the main strength of his army.
350.
The important part which these people played in the history of Europe renders it necessary that we should now sketch their rise and growth as a nation. First, however, let us turn to Western and Northern Germany, where the development of the new nationalities was longer delayed, and describe the last of their struggles with the power of Rome, during the fourth century.
After the death of Constantine, in 337, the quarrels of his sons and brothers for the Imperial throne gave the Germans a new opportunity to repeat their invasions of Gaul. The Franks were the first to take advantage of it: they got possession of Belgium, which was not afterwards retaken. The Alemanni followed, and planted themselves on the western bank of the Rhine, which they held, although Strasburg and other fortified cities still belonged to the Romans. About the year 350, a Frank or Saxon, of the name of Magnentius, was proclaimed Emperor by a part of the Roman army. He was defeated by the true Emperor, Constantius II., but the victory seems to have exhausted the military resources of the latter, for immediately afterwards another German invasion occurred.
This time, the Franks took and pillaged Cologne, the Alemanni destroyed Strasburg and Mayence, and the Saxons, who had now become a sea-faring people, visited the northwestern coasts of Gaul. Constantius II. gave the command to his nephew, Julian (afterwards, as Emperor, called the Apostate), who first retook Cologne from the Franks, and then turned his forces against the Alemanni. The king of the latter, Chnodomar, had collected a large army, with which he encountered Julian on the banks of the Rhine, near Strasburg. The battle which ensued was fiercely contested; but Julian was completely victorious. Chnodomar was taken prisoner, and only a few of his troops escaped, like those of Ariovistus, 400 years before, by swimming across the Rhine. Although the season was far advanced, Julian followed them, crossed their territory to the Main, rebuilt the destroyed Roman fortresses, and finally accepted an armistice of ten months which they offered to him.
He made use of this time to intimidate the Franks and Saxons. Starting from Lutetia (now Paris) early in the summer of 358, he drove the Franks beyond the Schelde, received their submission, and then marched a second time against the Alemanni. He laid waste their well-settled and cultivated land between the Rhine, the Main and the Neckar, crossed their territory to the frontiers of the Burgundians (in what is now Franconia, or Northern Bavaria), liberated 20,000 Roman captives, and made the entire Alemannic people tributary to the Empire. His accession to the imperial throne, in 360, delivered the Germans from the most dangerous and dreaded enemy they had known since the time of Germanicus.
375. TERRITORY OF THE GOTHS.
Not many years elapsed before the Franks and Alemanni again overran the old boundaries, and the Saxons landed on the shores of England. The Emperor Valentinian employed both diplomacy and force, and succeeded in establishing a temporary peace; but after his death, in the year 375, the Roman Empire, the capital of which had been removed to Constantinople in 330, was never again in a condition to maintain its supremacy in Gaul, or to prevent the Germans from crossing the Rhine.
We now return to the Goths, who already occupied the broad territory included in Poland, Southern Russia, and Roumania. The river Dniester may be taken as the probable boundary between the two kingdoms into which they had separated. The Ostrogoths, under their aged king, Hermanric, extended from that river eastward nearly to the Caspian Sea: on the north they had no fixed boundary, but they must have reached to the latitude of Moscow. The Visigoths stretched westward from the Dniester to the Danube, and northward from Hungary to the Baltic Sea. The Vandals were for some generations allied with the latter, but war having arisen between them, the Emperor Constantine interposed. He succeeded in effecting a separation of the two, and in settling the Vandals in Hungary, where they remained for forty years under the protection of the Roman Empire.
From the time of their first encounter with the Romans, in Dacia, during the third century, the Goths appear to have made rapid advances in their political organization and the arts of civilized life. They were the first of the Germanic nations who accepted Christianity. On one of their piratical expeditions to the shores of Asia Minor, they brought away as captive a Christian boy. They named him Ulfila, and by that name he is still known to the world. He devoted his life to the overthrow of their pagan faith, and succeeded. He translated the Bible into their language, and, it is supposed, even invented a Gothic alphabet, since it is doubtful whether they already possessed one. A part of Ulfila's translation of the New Testament escaped destruction, and is now preserved in the library at Upsala, in Sweden. It is the only specimen, in existence of the Gothic language at that early day. From it we learn how rich and refined was that language, and how many of the elements of the German and English tongues it contained. The following are the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, as Ulfila wrote them between the years 350 and 370 of our era:
Gothic. Atta unsara, thu in himinam, veihnai namo thein. English. Father our, thou in heaven, be hallowed name thine. German. Vater unser, du im Himmel, geweiht werde Name dein. Gothic. quimai Thiudinassus Theins, vairthai vilja theins, English. come Kingdom thine, be done will thine, German. komme Herrschaft dein, werde Wille dein, Gothic. sve in himina, jah ana airthai. English. as in heaven, also on earth. German. wie im Himmel, auch auf Erden.
350.
Ulfila was born in 318, became a bishop of the Christian Church, spent his whole life in teaching the Goths, and died in Constantinople, in the year 378. There is no evidence that he, or any other of the Christian missionaries of his time, were persecuted, or even seriously hindered in the good work, by the Goths: the latter seem to have adopted the new faith readily, and the Arian creed which Ulfila taught, although rejected by the Church of Rome, was stubbornly held by their descendants for a period of nearly five hundred years.
Somewhere between 360 and 370, the long peace between the Romans and the Goths was disturbed; but the Emperor Valens and the Gothic king, Athanaric, had a conference on board a vessel on the Danube, and came to an understanding. Athanaric refused to cross the river, on account of a vow made on some former occasion. The Goths, it appears, were by this time learning the art of statesmanship, and they might have continued on good terms with the Romans, but for the sudden appearance on the scene of an entirely new race, coming, as they themselves had come so many centuries before, from the unknown regions of Central Asia.
375. COMING OF THE HUNS.
In 375, the year of Valentinian's death, a race of people up to that time unknown, and whose name—the Huns—had never before been heard, crossed the Volga and invaded the territory of the Ostrogoths. Later researches render it probable that they came from the steppes of Mongolia, and that they belonged to the Tartar family; but, in the course of their wanderings, before reaching Europe, they had not only lost all the traditions of their former history, but even their religious faith. Their very appearance struck terror into the Goths, who were so much further advanced in civilization. They were short, clumsy figures, with broad and hideously ugly faces, flat noses, oblique eyes and long black hair, and were clothed in skins which they wore until they dropped in rags from their bodies. But they were marvellous horsemen, and very skilful in using the bow and lance. The men were on their horses' backs from morning till night, while