At the end of the third century of our era the Teutonic race is already, though indistinctly, consolidated into four large nationalities, or tribe leagues, with two inferior, though independent, branches. Where Tacitus, in the angle between the Rhine and the Main, had seen Sigambri, Bructeri, Chamavi, Tencteri, Chatti, there is now one great, though loose, confederation: the Franks. Between the North Sea, the Rhine, and the Elbe are the Saxons with the Angli in the north, and the Thuringians in the south. In the angle between the Rhine and the Danube, the beehive of all tribes (all man), is the confederation of the Alemanni, mixed with Suevi (Schwaben); behind them, pressing toward and beyond the Rhine, are the Burgundians; and following closely are the Langobards, who appear on the middle Danube. Near the Baltic, which derives its name from the Gothic dynasty of the Balti, we have the Turcilingi, the Rugii, the Sciri, and the Heruli who were tattooed blue. Between the upper Elbe and the Oder Rivers, the Quadi (in Moravia) and Marcomanni (Bohemia) seem to disappear gradually, and are probably merged into the Suevi.
The Gothic or Scandinavian race is agitated by the same movements, disputing with Finnish tribes (related to the Turks and the Hungarians) the Danish and Scandinavian peninsulas and the isles of the Baltic: Gothia, Ostrogothia, Westrogothia, and the Isle of Gothland. At the same time they spread over the plains of eastern Europe. The Visigoths under the dynasty of the Balti and the Ostrogoths under the Amali occupy the steppes of Russia; behind them are the Gepidas. The Jutes (from whom is derived the name of Danish Jutland) and the Vandals, perhaps mixed with the Slavic Wends, occupy the Baltic for two centuries. The race of the Slavs, as yet existing in almost complete historical darkness, is known to Tacitus but dimly by the name of Wends.
When brought in contact with the Romans, the purely Germanic individuality ceases, the tribes become Romanized; their gods change, their habits, their religion: a new world, undreamed in its southern radiance and sunny luxury, opens before their eyes, accustomed to the dreary north; victory itself carries with it corruption. In the third century Rome is no longer feared, in the fourth it is already considered a German prey. The infiltration goes on through the engagement of Teutons for Roman military service. The German soldiers, with their barbarous strength of body, soon reappear as Roman comites, duces, patricti, counts, dukes, patricians, i. e., supreme civil and military officers at the court; they enter also in masses as laborers, servants, fcederati, or auxiliaries. From such or from simple legionaries they rise to be dignitaries of a rank but a shade under imperial, like the Vandals Stilicho and Rufmus, who for a time uphold the existence of the Roman Empire.
It is true, then, that in those centuries of upheaval the Teutons lost many of their racial characteristics, of their stock of primeval sagas, but they also gained immensely from the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural influence of the southern nations that furnished them with a stupendous stock of basic material for their future progress. Christianization and amalgamation instilled into their Teutonic spirit the germs of that Romanticism which we are wont to consider as purely Germanic, while in reality it is an elixir of the Christian-Roman fountain assimilated by the Teutonic soul. The Roman Catholic Church working upon the soul through the senses the only possible way to reach and penetrate the soul of primitive man, who is unfit for abstract thought, created the "divine arts" poetry, music, architecture, in the progressive sequence of the centuries of German history.
In religious symbolism lies the root of Romanticism, the blossom of mediæval life: Romanticism, a Romance word in sound, is German in spirit. Its soul is the romantic ideal of love: woman is its centre. It radiates first from a fervent soul with an ecstatic, passionate devotion to the Christian Allmutter, the mother of God, the Holy Virgin, Saint Mary, who was from the first deeply revered by the Teutons, owing to their inherent veneration for woman. Among the Germans of all times, even the most corrupted and dissolute, this spark of veneration is not entirely extinct. Love is surrounded with a halo in contrast with the severe Oriental treatment of women by the Church Fathers. The harsh words of the Gospels, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!" is transformed into: "Pure woman, and mother mine!"
Thus the picture drawn by the Edda truly called the Norse Bible of the Teutonic race of the doomsday of the world, the Gotterdammerung, is nothing if not a representation of the whirl of the immigration. Yet all that is valuable, culturally speaking, rises like a phoenix from the ashes. As, in the ingenious words of the poet, "Conquered Greece conquered, on her part, the fierce Roman conqueror and carried her (intellectual) arms into Latium," so conquered Rome transformed the fierce Germanic conqueror into a new man. The unity of the Roman Empire had furthered Christianity, and the complete German conquest mightily influenced the entire Germanic race in the direction of Romanization and Christianization, though the latter for long remained crude and was affected by the cult of the gods of Olympus as well as of those of Asenheim and Niflheim, and, even where not so affected, Christianity was divided between Arianism and the Orthodox Romanism. With the political conquest, however, a new order was by no means assured. The Empire was destroyed, it is true, but nothing firm, solid, or steady took its place. The wavering new political aggregates put in its stead were no longer purely Teutonic. They succumbed too easily to the treacherous and manifold, if silent, influences that on every side assailed them. The majority of such political groups, whether in Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, or in North Africa, lost their nationality and even the German language: they became Roman mongrels and some even turned against their old mother, Germania.
Even at home, the Roman Christian foreign culture seemed for a time destined to overwhelm Germanism, but the Alemanni in the south and the Saxons in the north and west proved too strong for denationalization and carried Teutonic principles triumphantly through all the phases of the struggle.
Having thus described the tribal existence of the Teutons in Germania proper, in order to give to our study of the cultural history of German womanhood full point, a word must be said about German colonization abroad.
The Burgundians, after a checkered career of adventurous wanderings from North Germany to the Alpine mountains of Savoy, conquered southeast Gaul in the fifth century. In the southwest, or ancient Aquitaine, the Visigoths settled, and, crossing the Pyrenees, conquered a large part of Spain.
When Odoacer, the German king of the wandering hosts, had dethroned the last shadow Emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus an ill-starred, diminutive reminiscence of Rome's glorious inception as kingdom and empire the Heruli were the dominant race. Their rule lasted but thirteen ominous years. The Ostrogoths, under the great Theodoric, Dietrich von Bern, the paramount hero of Germanic saga and song, replaced them and founded a more permanent government. In northern Italy, the Langobards succeeded the Ostrogoths and gradually extended their rule southward, and pressing upon the Italian domain of the Bishops of Rome, who, by this time, had asserted their supremacy and headship of the ruling church of the world, brought about that cataclysm which finally submerged the power of Rome under the flood of the Prankish universal empire. The Salian Franks had, in the fifth century, conquered northern Gaul from the Batavian coast to the Somme River; the Ripuarian Franks formed a state along the Rhine, the Maas, and the Moselle, with Cologne as a capital. Chlodwig, the Salian Frank, one of the most cunning and unscrupulous kings in history, began, in A. D. 480, the unification of the Franks and the adjacent German tribes into one nation. After the subjugation of the Alemanni, the principal role, the hegemony within the Teutonic race, belongs to the Franks. Christianity becomes a political lever by which they extend their sway from north and east and finally create that Carlovingian-Prankish Empire which inaugurated the Middle Ages proper and founded therewith a stable Germanic civilization.