Chapter IV: Part 4

Under the empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich land-owners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratae, the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle English, while a small body pushed farther southward, and under the name of "South Engle" occupied the ooelitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire.

But the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered; for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make a fresh and desperate stand.

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the West Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames made them masters in 571 of the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

Pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West Saxons penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously the death song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without light, without song," their stillness broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground. Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the English sword had drawn all was now purely English.

CHARLES KNIGHT

"They" [the Romans], says Bede, "resided within the rampart that Severus made across the island, on the south side of it; as the cities, temples, bridges, and paved ways do testify to this day." On the north of the wall were the nations that no severity had reduced to subjection, and no resistance could restrain from plunder. At the extreme west of England were the people of Cornwall, or little Wales, as it was called; having the most intimate relations with the people of Britannia Secunda, or Wales; and both connected with the colony of Armorica. The inhabitants of Cornwall and Wales, we may assume, were almost exclusively of the old British stock. The abandonment of the country by the Romans had affected them far less than that change affected the more cultivated country, that had been the earliest subdued, and for nearly four centuries had received the Roman institutions and adopted the Roman customs.

But in the chief portion of the island, from the southern and eastern coasts to the Tyne and the Solway, there was a mixed population, among whom it would be difficult to trace that common bond which would constitute nationality. The British families of the interior had become mingled with the settlers of Rome and its tributaries to whom grants of land had been assigned as the rewards of military service; and the coasts from the Humber to the Exe had been here and there peopled with northern settlers, who had gradually planted themselves among the Romanized British; and were, we may well believe, among the most active of those who carried forward the commercial intercourse of Britain with Gaul and Italy.

When, therefore, we approach the period of what is termed the Saxon invasion, and hear of the decay, the feebleness, the cowardice, and the misery of the Britons--all which attributes have been somewhat too readily bestowed upon the population which the Romans had left behind--it would be well to consider what these so-called Britons really were, to enable us properly to understand the transition state through which the country passed.

Our first native historian is Gildas, who lived in the middle of the sixth century. "From the early part of the fifth century, when the Greek and Roman writers cease to notice the affairs of Britain, his narrative, on whatever authority it may have been founded, has been adopted without question by Bede and succeeding authors, and accepted, notwithstanding its barrenness of facts and pompous obscurity, by all but general consent, as the basis of early English history." Gibbon has justly pointed out his inconsistencies, his florid descriptions of the flourishing condition of agriculture and commerce after the departure of the Romans, and his denunciations of the luxury of the people; when he, at the same time, describes a race who were ignorant of the arts, incapable of building walls of defence, or of arming themselves with proper weapons. When "this monk," as Gibbon calls him, "who, in the profound ignorance of human life, presumes to exercise the office of historian," tells us that the Romans, who were occasionally called in to aid against the Picts and Scots, "give energetic counsel to the timorous natives, and leave them patterns by which to manufacture arms," we seem to be reading an account of some remote tribe, to whom the Roman sword and buckler were as unfamiliar as the musket was to the Otaheitans when Cook first went among them.

When Gildas describes the soldiers on the wall as "equally slow to fight and ill-adapted to run away"; and tells the remarkable incident which forms part of every schoolboy's belief, that the defenders of the wall were pulled down by great hooked weapons and dashed against the ground, we feel a pity akin to contempt for a people so stupid and passive, and are not altogether sorry that the Picts and Scots, "differing one from another in manners, but inspired with the same avidity for blood," had come with their bushy beards and their half-clothed bodies, to supplant so effeminate a race. When he makes this feeble people send an embassy to a Roman in Gaul to say, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we are either slain or drowned," we must wonder at the very straitened limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.

Surely much of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical evidence. M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble supplications, so declared by Gildas, to Rome for aid, as evidences of the effeminacy of that nation, whose resistance to the Saxons has given a chapter to history at a time when history has few traces of Italians, Spaniards, and Gauls.

That the representations of Gildas could only be partially true, as applied to some particular districts, is sufficiently proved, by the undoubted fact that within little more than twenty years from the date of these cowardly demonstrations Anthemius, the Emperor, solicited the aid of the Britons against the Visigoths; and twelve thousand men from this island, under one of the native chieftains, Rhiothimus, sailed up the Loire, and fought under the Roman command. They are described by a contemporary Roman writer as quick, well-armed; turbulent and contumacious from their bravery, their numbers, and their common agreement. These were not the people who were likely to have stood upon a wall to be pulled down by hooked weapons. They might have been the people who had clung, more than the other inhabitants of the Roman provinces, to their original language and customs; but it is not improbable that they would have been of the mixed races with whom Rome had been in more intimate relations, and to whom she continued to render offices of friendship after the separation of the island province from her empire.

Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates. Britain, according to St. Jerome, was "a province fertile in tyrants." The Roman municipal government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing power. It fell to pieces here, as in Gaul, when that power was withdrawn. It resolved itself into a number of local governments without any principle of cohesion. The vicar of the municipium became an independent ruler and head of a little republic; and that his authority was contested by some who had partaken of his delegated dignity may be reasonably inferred.

The difference of races would also promote the contests for command. If East Anglia contained a preponderance of one race of settlers, and Kent and Sussex of another, they might well quarrel for supremacy. But when all the settlers on the Saxon shore had lost the control and protection of the Count who once governed them, it may also be imagined that the more exclusively British districts would not readily cooeperate for defence with those who were more strange to their kindred even than the Roman. All the European Continent was in a state of political dislocation; and we may safely conclude that when the great power was shattered that had so long held the government of the world, the more distant and subordinate branch of its empire would resolve itself into some of the separate elements of authority and of imperfect obedience by which a clan is distinguished from a nation.

Nor was the power of the Christian Church in Britain of a more united character than that of the civil rulers. No doubt a church had been formed and organized. There were bishops, so called, in the several cities; but their authority was little concentrated and their tenets were discordant. Pilgrimages were even made to the sacred places of Palestine; and at a very early period monasteries were founded. That of Bangor, or the Great Circle, seems to have had some relation to the ancient Druidical worship, upon which it was probably engrafted in that region where Druidism had long flourished. There were British versions of the Bible. But that the church had no sustaining power at the period when civil society was so wholly disorganized, may be inferred from circumstances which preceded the complete overthrow of Christian rites by Saxon heathendom.

Bede devotes several chapters of his _Ecclesiastical History_ to the actions of St. Germanus, who came expressly to Britain to put down the Pelagian heresy; and, amid the multitude of miraculous circumstances, records how "the authors of the perverse notions lay hid, and, like the evil spirits, grieved for the loss of the people that was rescued from them. At length, after mature deliberation, they had the boldness to enter the lists, and appeared, being conspicuous for riches, glittering in apparel, and supported by the flatteries of many." The people, according to Bede, were the judges of this great controversy, and gave their voices for the orthodox belief.

Whether the Pelagians were expelled from Britain by reason or by force, it is evident that, in the middle of the fifth century, there was a strong element of religious disunion very generally prevailing; and that at a period when the congregations were in a great degree independent of each other, and therefore difficult of subjection to a common authority, the rich and the powerful had adopted a creed which was opposed to the centralizing rule of the Roman Church, and were arguing about points of faith as strongly as they were contesting for worldly supremacy. Dr. Lappenberg justly points out this celebrated controversy in our country as "indicating the weakness of that religious connection which was so soon to be totally annihilated." We may, in some degree, account for the reception of the doctrine of Pelagius by knowing that he was a Briton, whose plain unlatinized name was Morgan.

Macaulay has startled many a reader of the most familiar histories of England, in saying, "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus." It is difficult to write of a period of which the same writer has said, "an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth." Yet no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that an age of fable and an age of truth cannot be distinguished with absolute precision. It is not that what is presented to us through the haze of tradition must necessarily be unreal, any more than that what comes to us in an age of literature must be absolutely true. An historical fact, a real personage, may be handed down from a remote age in the songs of bards; but it is not therefore to be inferred that these national lyrics are founded upon pure invention. It is curious to observe that, wandering amid these traces of events and persons that have been shaped into history, how ready we are to walk in the footsteps of some half-fabulous records, and wholly to turn away from others which seem as strongly impressed upon the shifting sands of national existence.

We derive Hengist and Horsa from the old Anglo-Saxon authorities; and modern history generally adopts them. Arthur and Mordred have a Celtic origin, and they are as generally rejected as "mythical persons." It appears to us that it is as precipitate wholly to renounce the one as the other, because they are both surrounded with an atmosphere of the fabulous. Hengist and Horsa come to us encompassed with Gothic traditions that belong to other nations. Arthur presents himself with his attributes of the magician Merlin, and the knights of the Round Table. But are we therefore to deny altogether their historical existence? In following the _ignis fatuus_ of tradition, the credulous annalists of the monastic age were lost in the treacherous ground over which it led them. The more patient research of a critical age sees in that doubtful light a friendly warning of what to avoid, and hence a guide to more stable pathways.

Hengist and Horsa--who, according to the Anglo-Saxon historians, landed in the year 449 on the shore which is called Ebbsfleet--were personages of more than common mark. "They were the sons of Wihtgils; Wihtgils son of Witta, Witta of Wecta, Wecta of Woden." So says the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, and adds, "From this Woden sprang all our royal families." These descendants, in the third generation from the great Saxon divinity, came over in three boats. They came by invitation of Wyrtgeone--Vortigern--King of the Britons. The King gave them land in the southeast of the country, on condition that they should fight against the Picts; and they did fight, and had the victory wheresoever they came. And then they sent for the Angles, and told them of the worthlessness of the people and the excellences of the land. This is the Saxon narrative. The seductive graces of Rowena, the daughter of Horsa, who corrupted the King of the Britons by love and wine, is an embellishment of the British traditions.

Then came the great battles for possession of the land. At Aylesford and Crayford the Kentish Britons were overthrown. Before the Angles the Welsh fled like fire. These events occupy a quarter of a century. While they are going on, the Roman Emperor, as we have mentioned upon indubitable authority, receives an auxiliary force of twelve thousand men from Britain. We cannot rely upon narratives that tell us of _the_ king of the Britons, when we learn from no suspicious sources that the land was governed by many separate chiefs; and which represent a petty band of fugitives as gaining mighty triumphs for a great ruler, and then subduing him themselves in a wonderfully short time.

The pretensions of Hengist and Horsa to be the immediate descendants of Woden would seem to imply their mythical origin. But many Saxon chiefs of undoubted reality rested their pretensions upon a similar genealogy. The myth was as flattering to the Anglo-Saxon pride of descent as the corresponding myth that the ancient inhabitants of the island were descended from the Trojan Brute was acceptable to the British race. But amid much of fable there is the undoubted fact that Germanic tribes were gradually possessing themselves of the fairest parts of Britain--a progressive usurpation, far different from a sudden conquest. Amid the wreck of the social institutions left by Rome, when all that remained of a governing power was centred in the towns, it may be readily conceived that the rich districts of the eastern and southern coasts would be eagerly peopled by new settlers, whose bond of society was founded upon the occupation of the land; and who, extending the area of their occupation, would eventually come into hostile conflict with the previous possessors.

For a century and a half a thick darkness seems to overspread the history of our country. In the Anglo-Saxon writers we can trace little, with any distinctness, beyond the brief and monotonous records of victories and slaughters. Hengist and AEsc slew four troops of Britons with the edge of the sword. Hengist then vanishes, and AElla comes with his three sons. In 491 they besieged Andres-cester, "and slew all that dwelt therein, so that not a single Briton was there left." Then come Cerdic and Cynric his son; then Port and his two sons, and land at Portsmouth; and so we reach the sixth century. Cerdic and Cynric now stand foremost among the slaughterers, and they establish the kingdom of the West Saxons and conquer the Isle of Wight.

In the middle of the century Ida begins to reign, from whom arose the royal race of North-humbria. In 565 Ethelbert succeeded to the kingdom of the Kentish-men, and held it fifty-three years. The war goes on in the south-midland counties, where Cuthwulf is fighting; and it reaches the districts of the Severn, where Cuthwine and Ceawlin slay great kings, and take Gloucester and Cirencester and Bath. One of these fierce brethren is killed at last, and Ceawlin, "having taken many spoils and towns innumerable, wrathful returned to his own." Where "his own" was we are not informed.

We reach, at length, the year 596, when "Pope Gregory sent Augustin to Britain, with a great many monks, who preached the word of God to the nation of the Angles." Bede very judiciously omits all such details. He tells us that "they carried on the conflagration from the eastern to the western sea, without any opposition, and almost covered all the superfices of the perishing island. Public as well as private structures were overturned; the priests were everywhere slain before the altars; the prelates and the people, without any respect of persons, were destroyed with fire and sword." There is little to add to these impressive words, which no doubt contain the general truth. But if we open the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, we find ourselves relieved from the thick darkness of the Anglo-Saxon records, by the blue lights and red lights of the most wondrous romance. Rowena comes with her golden wine-cup. Merlin instructs Vortigern how to discover the two sleeping dragons who hindered the foundation of his tower. Aurelius, the Christian King, burns Vortigern in his Cambrian city of refuge. Eldol fights a duel with Hengist, cuts off his head, and destroys the Saxons without mercy. Merlin the magician, and Uther Pendragon, with fifteen thousand men, bring over "the Giant's Dance" from Ireland, and set it up in Salisbury Plain. Uther Pendragon is made the Christian king over all Britain.

At length we arrive at Arthur, the son of Uther. To him the entire monarchy of Britain belonged by hereditary right. Hoel sends him fifteen thousand men from Armorica, and he makes the Saxons his tributaries; and with his own hand kills four hundred and seventy in one battle. He not only conquers the Saxons, but subdues Gaul, among other countries, and holds his court in Paris. His coronation at the City of the Legions (Caer-Leon) is gorgeous beyond all recorded magnificence; and the general state of the country, in these days of Arthur, before the middle of the sixth century, is thus described: "At that time, Britain had arrived at such a pitch of grandeur that in abundance of riches, luxury of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other kingdoms." Mordred, the wicked traitor, at length disturbs all this tranquillity and grandeur, and brings over barbarous people from different countries. Arthur falls in battle. The Saxons prevail, and the Britons retire into Cornwall and Wales.

Amid the bewildering mass of the obscure and the fabulous which our history presents of the first century and a half of the Saxon colonization, there are some well-established facts which are borne out by subsequent investigations. Such is Bede's account of the country of the invaders, and the parts in which they settled. This account, compared with other authorities, gives us the following results. They consisted of "the three most powerful nations of Germany--Saxons, Angles, and Jutes." The Saxons came from the parts which, in Bede's time, were called the country of the Old Saxons. That country is now known as the duchy of Holstein. These, under Ella, founded the kingdom of the South Saxons--our present Sussex. Later in the fifth century, the same people, under Cerdic, established themselves in the district extending from Sussex to Devonshire and Cornwall, which was the kingdom of the West Saxons.

Other Saxons settled in Essex and Middlesex. The Angles, says Bede, came from "the country called Angelland, and it is said from that time to remain desert to this day." There is a part of the duchy of Schleswig, to the north of Holstein, which still bears the name of Anglen. These people gave their name to the whole country, Engla-land, or Angla-land, from the greater extent of territory which they permanently occupied. As the Saxons possessed themselves of the southern coasts, the Angles established themselves on the northeastern. Their kingdom of East Anglia comprised Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as part of Cambridgeshire; and they extended themselves to the north of the Humber, forming the powerful state of Northumbria, and carrying their dominion even to the Forth and the Clyde.

The Jutes came from the country north of the Angles, which is in the upper part of the present Schleswig; and they occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, with that part of Hampshire which is opposite the island. Sir Francis Palgrave is of opinion that "the tribes by whom Britain was invaded appear principally to have proceeded from the country now called Friesland; for of all the continental dialects the ancient Frisick is the one which approaches most nearly to the Anglo-Saxon of our ancestors." Mr. Craik has pointed out that "the modern kingdom of Denmark comprehends all the districts from which issued, according to the old accounts, the several tribes who invaded Britain upon the fall of the Roman Empire. And the Danes proper (who may be considered to represent the Jutes); the Angles, who live between the Bight of Flensborg and the river Schley on the Baltic; the Frisons, who inhabit the islands along the west coast of Jutland, with a part of the bailiwick of Husum in Schleswig; and the Germans of Holstein (Bede's Old Saxons) are still all recognized by geographers and ethnographers as distinct races."

ATTILA INVADES WESTERN ROME

BATTLE OF CHALONS

A.D. 451

CREASY GIBBON

After Attila had conquered and laid waste the provinces of the
Eastern Empire south of the Danube and exacted heavy tribute from
Theodosius II, he turned his attention to the subjugation of the
Slavic and Germanic tribes who still remained independent. These,
with one exception, he overcame and placed under the sovereignty of
his son. He laid claim to one-half of the Western Empire, as the
betrothed husband of Valentinian's sister Honoria, from whom he had
years before received the offer of her hand in marriage.

In 451, with Genseric, King of the Vandals, for his ally, he
invaded Gaul. Before his advance the cities hastened to capitulate,
and so complete was his devastation of the country that it came to
be a saying that the grass never grew where his horses had trod.
But in Aetius, their commander-in-chief under Valentinian III, the
Romans had an able general, who was aided by the West Gothic king
Theodoric. The West Goths and the Franks, the former from the
South, the latter from the North of Gaul, joined him in large
numbers, and the allied forces drove the Huns from the walls of
Orleans, which he had besieged. From there he retreated to Chalons,
where his westward movement was to receive its final check. This
decisive event was, in the words of Herbert, "the discomfiture of
the mighty attempt of Attila to found a new anti-Christian dynasty
upon the wreck of the temporal power of Rome, at the end of the
term of twelve hundred years, to which its duration had been
limited by the forebodings of the heathen."

SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY

A broad expanse of plains, the Campi Catalaunici of the ancients, spreads far and wide around the city of Chalons, in the northeast of France. The long rows of poplars, through which the river Marne winds its way, and a few thinly scattered villages, are almost the only objects that vary the monotonous aspect of the greater part of this region. But about five miles from Chalons, near the little hamlets of Chape and Cuperly, the ground is indented and heaped up in ranges of grassy mounds and trenches, which attest the work of man's hands in ages past, and which, to the practised eye, demonstrate that this quiet spot has once been the fortified position of a huge military host.

Local tradition gives to these ancient earthworks the name of Attila's Camp. Nor is there any reason to question the correctness of the title, or to doubt that behind these very ramparts it was that fourteen hundred years ago the most powerful heathen king that ever ruled in Europe mustered the remnants of his vast army, which had striven on these plains against the Christian soldiery of Toulouse and Rome. Here it was that Attila prepared to resist to the death his victors in the field; and here he heaped up the treasures of his camp in one vast pile, which was to be his funeral pyre should his camp be stormed. It was here that the Gothic and Italian forces watched, but dared not assail their enemy in his despair, after that great and terrible day of battle when

"The sound
Of conflict was o'erpast, the shout of all
Whom earth could send from her remotest bounds,
Heathen or faithful; from thy hundred mouths,
That feed the Caspian with Riphean snows.
Huge Volga! from famed Hypanis, which once
Cradled the Hun; from all the countless realms
Between Imaus and that utmost strand
Where columns of Herculean rock confront
The blown Altantic; Roman, Goth, and Hun,
And Scythian strength of chivalry, that tread
The cold Codanian shore or what far lands
Inhospitable drink Cimmerian floods,
Franks, Saxons, Suevic, and Sarmatian chiefs,
And who from green Armorica or Spain
Flocked to the work of death."

The victory which the Roman general Aetius, with his Gothic allies, had then gained over the Huns, was the last victory of imperial Rome. But among the long fasti of her triumphs, few can be found that, for their importance and ultimate benefit to mankind, are comparable with this expiring effort of her arms. It did not, indeed, open to her any new career of conquest--it did not consolidate the relics of her power--it did not turn the rapid ebb of her fortunes. The mission of imperial Rome was, in truth, already accomplished. She had received and transmitted through her once ample dominion the civilization of Greece. She had broken up the barriers of narrow nationalities among the various states and tribes that dwelt around the coasts of the Mediterranean. She had fused these and many other races into one organized empire, bound together by a community of laws, of government and institutions. Under the shelter of her full power the true faith had arisen in the earth, and during the years of her decline it had been nourished to maturity, it had overspread all the provinces that ever obeyed her sway. For no beneficial purpose to mankind could the dominion of the seven-hilled city have been restored or prolonged. But it was all-important to mankind what nations should divide among them Rome's rich inheritance of empire. Whether the Germanic and Gothic warriors should form states and kingdoms out of the fragments of her dominions, and become the free members of the Commonwealth of Christian Europe, or whether pagan savages, from the wilds of central Asia, should crush the relics of classic civilization and the early institutions of the Christianized Germans in one hopeless chaos of barbaric conquest. The Christian Visigoths of King Theodoric fought and triumphed at Chalons side by side with the legions of Aetius. Their joint victory over the Hunnish host not only rescued for a time from destruction the old age of Rome, but preserved for centuries of power and glory the Germanic element in the civilization of modern Europe.

In order to estimate the full importance to mankind of the battle of Chalons we must keep steadily in mind who and what the Germans were, and the important distinctions between them and the numerous other races that assailed the Roman Empire; and it is to be understood that the Gothic and Scandinavian nations are included in the German race. Now, "in two remarkable traits the Germans differed from the Sarmatic as well as from the Slavic nations, and, indeed, from all those other races to whom the Greeks and Romans gave the designation of barbarians. I allude to their personal freedom and regard for the rights of men; secondly, to the respect paid by them to the female sex, and the chastity for which the latter were celebrated among the people of the North. These were the foundations of that probity of character, self-respect, and purity of manners which may be traced among the Germans and Goths even during pagan times, and which, when their sentiments were enlightened by Christianity, brought out those splendid traits of character which distinguish the age of chivalry and romance."

What the intermixture of the German stock with the classic, at the fall of the Western Empire, has done for mankind may be best felt by watching, with Arnold, over how large a portion of the earth the influence of the German element is now extended.

"It affects, more or less, the whole west of Europe, from the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to the most southern promontory of Sicily, from the Oder and the Adriatic to the Hebrides and to Lisbon. It is true that the language spoken over a large portion of this place is not predominantly German; but even in France and Italy, and Spain, the influence of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Lombards while it has colored even the language, has in blood and institutions left its mark legibly and indelibly. Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, for the most part Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and our own islands are all in language, in blood, and in institutions German most decidedly. But all South America is peopled with Spaniards and Portuguese; all North America and all Australia with Englishmen. I say nothing of the prospects and influence of the German race in Africa and in India; it is enough to say that half of Europe and all America and Australia are German, more or less completely, in race, in language, or in institutions, or in all."

By the middle of the fifth century Germanic nations had settled themselves in many of the fairest regions of the Roman Empire, had imposed their yoke on the provincials, and had undergone, to a considerable extent, that moral conquest which the arts and refinements of the vanquished in arms have so often achieved over the rough victor. The Visigoths held the North of Spain, and Gaul south of the Loire. Franks, Alemanni, Alans, and Burgundians had established themselves in other Gallic provinces, and the Suevi were masters of a large southern portion of the Spanish peninsula. A king of the Vandals reigned in North Africa; and the Ostrogoths had firmly planted themselves in the provinces north of Italy. Of these powers and principalities, that of the Visigoths, under their king Theodoric, son of Alaric, was by far the first in power and in civilization.

The pressure of the Huns upon Europe had first been felt in the fourth century of our era. They had long been formidable to the Chinese empire, but the ascendency in arms which another nomadic tribe of Central Asia, the Sienpi, gained over them, drove the Huns from their Chinese conquest westward; and this movement once being communicated to the whole chain of barbaric nations that dwelt northward of the Black Sea and the Roman Empire, tribe after tribe of savage warriors broke in upon the barriers of civilized Europe. The Huns crossed the Tanais into Europe in 375, and rapidly reduced to subjection the Alans, the Ostrogoths, and other tribes that were then dwelling along the course of the Danube. The armies of the Roman Emperor that tried to check their progress were cut to pieces by them, and Pannonia and other provinces south of the Danube were speedily occupied by the victorious cavalry of these new invaders. Not merely the degenerate Romans, but the bold and hardy warriors of Germany and Scandinavia, were appalled at the number, the ferocity, the ghastly appearance, and the lightning-like rapidity of the Huns. Strange and loathsome legends were coined and credited, which attributed their origin to the union of

"Secret, black, and midnight hags"

with the evil spirits of the wilderness.

Tribe after tribe and city after city fell before them. Then came a pause in their career of conquest in Southwestern Europe, caused probably by dissensions among their chiefs, and also by their arms being employed in attacks upon the Scandinavian nations. But when Attila--or Atzel, as he is called in the Hungarian language--became their ruler, the torrent of their arms was directed with augmented terrors upon the West and the South, and their myriads marched beneath the guidance of one master-mind to the overthrow both of the new and the old powers of the earth.

Recent events have thrown such a strong interest over everything connected with the Hungarian name that even the terrible renown of Attila now impresses us the more vividly through our sympathizing admiration of the exploits of those who claim to be descended from his warriors, and "ambitiously insert the name of Attila among their native kings." The authenticity of this martial genealogy is denied by some writers and questioned by more. But it is at least certain that the Magyars of Arpad, who are the immediate ancestors of the bulk of the modern Hungarians, and who conquered the country which bears the name of Hungary in A.D. 889, were of the same stock of mankind as were the Huns of Attila, even if they did not belong to the same subdivision of that stock. Nor is there any improbability in the tradition that after Attila's death many of his warriors remained in Hungary, and that their descendants afterward joined the Huns of Arpad in their career of conquest. It is certain that Attila made Hungary the seat of his empire. It seems also susceptible of clear proof that the territory was then called Hungvar, and Attila's soldiers Hungvari. Both the Huns of Attila and those of Arpad came from the family of nomadic nations whose primitive regions were those vast wildernesses of High Asia which are included between the Altaic and the Himalayan mountain chains.

The inroads of these tribes upon the lower regions of Asia and into Europe have caused many of the most remarkable revolutions in the history of the world. There is every reason to believe that swarms of these nations made their way into distant parts of the earth at periods long before the date of the Scythian invasion of Asia, which is the earliest inroad of the nomadic race that history records. The first, as far as we can conjecture, in respect to the time of their descent, were the Finnish and Ugrian tribes, who appear to have come down from the Altaic border of High Asia toward the northwest, in which direction they advanced to the Uralian Mountains. There they established themselves; and that mountain chain, with its valleys and pasture lands, became to them a new country, whence they sent out colonies on every side; but the Ugrian colony which under Arpad occupied Hungary and became the ancestors of the bulk of the present Hungarian nation did not quit their settlements on the Uralian Mountains till a very late period, and not until four centuries after the time when Attila led from the primary seats of the nomadic races in High Asia the host with which he advanced into the heart of France. That host was Turkish, but closely allied in origin, language, and habits with the Finno-Ugrian settlers on the Ural.

Attila's fame has not come down to us through the partial and suspicious medium of chroniclers and poets of his own race. It is not from Hunnish authorities that we learn the extent of his might: it is from his enemies, from the literature and the legends of the nations whom he afflicted with his arms, that we draw the unquestionable evidence of his greatness. Besides the express narratives of Byzantine, Latin, and Gothic writers, we have the strongest proof of the stern reality of Attila's conquests in the extent to which he and his Huns have been the themes of the earliest German and Scandinavian lays. Wild as many of those legends are, they bear concurrent and certain testimony to the awe with which the memory of Attila was regarded by the bold warriors who composed and delighted in them.

Attila's exploits, and the wonders of his unearthly steed and magic sword, repeatedly occur in the sagas of Norway and Iceland; and the celebrated _Nibelungenlied_, the most ancient of Germanic poetry, is full of them. There Etsel, or Attila, is described as the wearer of twelve mighty crowns, and as promising to his bride the lands of thirty kings whom his irresistible sword had subdued. He is, in fact, the hero of the latter part of this remarkable poem; and it is at his capital city, Etselenburg, which evidently corresponds to the modern Buda, that much of its action takes place.

When we turn from the legendary to the historic Attila, we see clearly that he was not one of the vulgar herd of barbaric conquerors. Consummate military skill may be traced in his campaigns; and he relied far less on the brute force of armies for the aggrandizement of his empire than on the unbounded influence over the affections of friends and the fears of foes which his genius enabled him to acquire. Austerely sober in his private life--severely just on the judgment seat--conspicuous among a nation of warriors for hardihood, strength, and skill in every martial exercise--grave and deliberate in counsel, but rapid and remorseless in execution, he gave safety and security to all who were under his dominion, while he waged a warfare of extermination against all who opposed or sought to escape from it. He watched the national passions, the prejudices, the creeds, and the superstitions of the varied nations over which he ruled and of those which he sought to reduce beneath his sway: all these feelings he had the skill to turn to his own account. His own warriors believed him to be the inspired favorite of their deities, and followed him with fanatic zeal; his enemies looked on him as the preappointed minister of heaven's wrath against themselves; and though they believed not in his creed, their own made them tremble before him.

In one of his early campaigns he appeared before his troops with an ancient iron sword in his grasp, which he told them was the god of war whom their ancestors had worshipped. It is certain that the nomadic tribes of Northern Asia, whom Herodotus described under the name of Scythians, from the earliest times worshipped as their god a bare sword. That sword-god was supposed, in Attila's time, to have disappeared from earth; but the Hunnish King now claimed to have received it by special revelation. It was said that a herdsman, who was tracking in the desert a wounded heifer by the drops of blood, found the mysterious sword standing fixed in the ground, as if it had darted down from heaven. The herdsman bore it to Attila, who thenceforth was believed by the Huns to wield the Spirit of Death in battle, and their seers prophesied that that sword was to destroy the world. A Roman, who was on an embassy to the Hunnish camp, recorded in his memoirs Attila's acquisition of this supernatural weapon, and the immense influence over the minds of the barbaric tribes which its possession gave him. In the title which he assumed we shall see the skill with which he availed himself of the legends and creeds of other nations as well as of his own. He designated himself "ATTILA, Descendant of the Great Nimrod. Nurtured in Engaddi. By the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, and the Medes. The Dread of the World."

Herbert states that Attila is represented on an old medallion with a teraph, or a head, on his breast; and the same writer adds: "We know, from the _Hamartigenea_ of Prudentius, that Nimrod, with a snaky-haired head, was the object of adoration of the heretical followers of Marcion; and the same head was the palladium set up by Antiochus Epiphanes over the gates of Antioch, though it has been called the visage of Charon. The memory of Nimrod was certainly regarded with mystic veneration by many; and by asserting himself to be the heir of that mighty hunter before the Lord, he vindicated to himself at least the whole Babylonian kingdom.

"The singular assertion in his style, that he was nurtured in Engaddi, where he certainly had never been, will be more easily understood on reference to the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation, concerning the woman clothed with the sun, who was to bring forth in the wilderness--'where she hath a place prepared of God'--a man-child, who was to contend with the dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and rule all nations with a rod of iron. This prophecy was at that time understood universally by the sincere Christians to refer to the birth of Constantine, who was to overwhelm the paganism of the city on the seven hills, and it is still so explained; but it is evident that the heathens must have looked on it in a different light, and have regarded it as a foretelling of the birth of that Great one who should master the temporal power of Rome. The assertion, therefore, that he was nurtured in Engaddi, is a claim to be looked upon as that man-child who was to be brought forth in a place prepared of God in the wilderness. Engaddi means a place of palms and vines in the desert; it was hard by Zoar, the city of refuge, which was saved in the Vale of Siddim, or Demons, when the rest were destroyed by fire and brimstone from the Lord in heaven, and might, therefore, be especially called a place prepared of God in the wilderness."

It is obvious enough why he styled himself "By the Grace of God, King of the Huns and Goths," and it seems far from difficult to see why he added the names of the Medes and the Danes. His armies had been engaged in warfare against the Persian kingdom of the Sassanidae, and it is certain that he meditated the invasion and overthrow of the Medo-Persian power. Probably some of the northern provinces of that kingdom had been compelled to pay him tribute; and this would account for his styling himself king of the Medes, they being his remotest subjects to the south. From a similar cause he may have called himself king of the Danes, as his power may well have extended northward as far as the nearest of the Scandinavian nations, and this mention of Medes and Danes as his subjects would serve at once to indicate the vast extent of his dominion.[24]

The immense territory north of the Danube and Black Sea and eastward of Caucasus, over which Attila ruled, first in conjunction with his brother Bleda, and afterward alone, cannot be very accurately defined, but it must have comprised within it, besides the Huns, many nations of Slavic, Gothic, Teutonic, and Finnish origin. South also of the Danube, the country, from the river Sau as far as Novi in Thrace, was a Hunnish province. Such was the empire of the Huns in A.D. 445; a memorable year, in which Attila founded Buda on the Danube as his capital city, and rid himself of his brother by a crime which seems to have been prompted not only by selfish ambition, but also by a desire of turning to his purpose the legends and forebodings which then were universally spread throughout the Roman Empire, and must have been well known to the watchful and ruthless Hun.

The year 445 of our era completed the twelfth century from the foundation of Rome, according to the best chronologers. It had always been believed among the Romans that the twelve vultures, which were said to have appeared to Romulus when he founded the city, signified the time during which the Roman power should endure. The twelve vultures denoted twelve centuries. This interpretation of the vision of the birds of destiny was current among learned Romans, even when there were yet many of the twelve centuries to run, and while the imperial city was at the zenith of its power. But as the allotted time drew nearer and nearer to its conclusion, and as Rome grew weaker and weaker beneath the blows of barbaric invaders, the terrible omen was more and more talked and thought of; and in Attila's time, men watched for the momentary extinction of the Roman State with the last beat of the last vulture's wing. Moreover, among the numerous legends connected with the foundation of the city, and the fratricidal death of Remus, there was one most terrible one, which told that Romulus did not put his brother to death in accident or in hasty quarrel, but that

"He slew his gallant twin
With inexpiable sin,"

deliberately and in compliance with the warnings of supernatural powers. The shedding of a brother's blood was believed to have been the price at which the founder of Rome had purchased from destiny her twelve centuries of existence.

We may imagine, therefore, with what terror in this the twelve hundredth year after the foundation of Rome the inhabitants of the Roman Empire must have heard the tidings that the royal brethren Attila and Bleda had founded a new capital on the Danube, which was designed to rule over the ancient capital on the Tiber; and that Attila, like Romulus, had consecrated the foundations of his new city by murdering his brother; so that for the new cycle of centuries then about to commence, dominion had been bought from the gloomy spirits of destiny in favor of the Hun by a sacrifice of equal awe and value with that which had formerly obtained it for the Roman.

It is to be remembered that not only the pagans but also the Christians of that age knew and believed in these legends and omens, however they might differ as to the nature of the superhuman agency by which such mysteries had been made known to mankind. And we may observe with Herbert, a modern learned dignitary of our Church, how remarkably this augury was fulfilled; for "if to the twelve centuries denoted by the twelve vultures that appeared to Romulus we add, for the six birds that appeared to Remus, six _lustra_ or periods of five years each, by which the Romans were wont to number their time, it brings us precisely to the year 476, in which the Roman Empire was finally extinguished by Odoacer."

An attempt to assassinate Attila, made, or supposed to have been made, at the instigation of Theodoric the Younger, the emperor of Constantinople, drew the Hunnish armies, in 445, upon the Eastern Empire, and delayed for a time the destined blow against Rome. Probably a more important cause of delay was the revolt of some of the Hunnish tribes to the north of the Black Sea against Attila, which broke out about this period, and is cursorily mentioned by the Byzantine writers. Attila quelled this revolt, and having thus consolidated his power, and having punished the presumption of the Eastern Roman Emperor by fearful ravages of his fairest provinces, Attila, in 450 A.D., prepared to set his vast forces in motion for the conquest of Western Europe. He sought unsuccessfully by diplomatic intrigues to detach the king of the Visigoths from his alliance with Rome, and he resolved first to crush the power of Theodoric, and then to advance with overwhelming power to trample out the last sparks of the doomed Roman Empire.

A strange invitation from a Roman princess gave him a pretext for the war, and threw an air of chivalric enterprise over his invasion. Honoria, sister of Valentinian III, the emperor of the West, had sent to Attila to offer him her hand and her supposed right to share in the imperial power. This had been discovered by the Romans, and Honoria had been forthwith closely imprisoned. Attila now pretended to take up arms in behalf of his self-promised bride, and proclaimed that he was about to march to Rome to redress Honoria's wrongs. Ambition and spite against her brother must have been the sole motives that led the lady to woo the royal Hun; for Attila's face and person had all the natural ugliness of his race, and the description given of him by a Byzantine ambassador must have been well known in the imperial courts. Herbert has well versified the portrait drawn by Priscus of the great enemy of both Byzantium and Rome:

"Terrific was his semblance, in no mould
Of beautiful proportion cast; his limbs
Nothing exalted, but with sinews braced
Of Chalybean temper, agile, lithe,
And swifter than the roe; his ample chest
Was overbrow'd by a gigantic head,
With eyes keen, deeply sunk, and small, that gleam'd
Strangely in wrath as though some spirit unclean
Within that corporal tenement install'd
Look'd from its windows, but with temper'd fire
Beam'd mildly on the unresisting. Thin
His beard and hoary; his flat nostrils crown'd
A cicatrized, swart visage; but, withal,
That questionable shape such glory wore
That mortals quail'd beneath him."