[7] As allies, citizens, soldiers, colonists, and slaves the Germans had long been filtering into the Roman world, and the Roman world was in part Germanized before the barriers were broken. These German-Romans helped to assimilate the Germans who came later, much as Italian-Americans in the United States help to receive and assimilate new Italians when they come.
[8] "The historical importance of the mere fact that it was an organic unity which Rome established, and not simply a collection of fragments artificially held together by military force, that the civilized world was made, as it were, one nation, cannot be overstated…. It was a union, not in externals merely, but in every department of thought and action; and it was so thorough, and the Gaul became so completely a Roman, that when the Roman government disappeared he had no idea of being anything else than a Roman…. It was because of this that, despite the fall of Rome, Roman institutions were perpetual." (Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 30.)
[9] A Germanic king, when he feared no Roman general or emperor, could usually be made to stand in awe when a Christian priest or bishop appealed to Heaven and the saints, and threatened him with eternal hell-fire if he did not do his bidding.
[10] The Church, it must be remembered, maintained its separate system of government and kept up the old forms of the Roman law. It had also its courts and its exemptions for the clergy, and these it forced the barbarians to respect. During half a dozen centuries it was the chief force that made life tolerable for myriads of men and women, and almost the only force upholding any semblance of humane ideals.
[11] Clotilda, wife of the heathen Clovis, was a Burgundian princess and a devout Christian, who had long tried to persuade her husband to accept her faith. In 496, during a battle with the Alemanni, near the present city of Strassburg, Clovis vowed that if the God of Clotilda would give him victory, he would do as she desired. The Alemanni were crushed, and he and three thousand of his chiefs were at once baptized.
[12] Draper, John W., Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. II, pp. 145-46.
[13] The extent of the Benedictine order alone may be seen from the Benedictine statement that "Pope John XXII, who died in 1334, after an exact inquiry, found that, since the first rise of the order, there had been of it 24 popes, near 200 cardinals, 7000 archbishops, 15,000 bishops, 15,000 abbots of renown, above 4000 saints, and upwards of 37,000 monasteries. There had been likewise, of this order, 20 emperors, 10 empresses, 47 kings and above 50 queens, 20 sons of emperors and 48 sons of kings, about 100 princesses and daughters of kings and emperors, besides dukes, marquises, earls, countesses, etc., innumerable." From this it may be inferred how fully the Church was the State during the long period of the Middle Ages.
[14] Draper, John W., Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. I, p. 437.
CHAPTER VI
[1] From the sixth to the twelfth centuries.